This, of course, is precisely what is happening. These are also players very likely to stick around in Classic for quite some time.
bro your talking to retail people who are delusional. Blizzard is delusional too. They think no one would want to play good wow lool.
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It’s simple.
Lots of people (WoW players) are going to try the game, as is usual for newly released games. Many will go back to BFA for a number of reasons. The “tourists” if you will.
What players on these forums like to ignore is that MMO design(as well as expectations) has evolved and moved forward since 2004. For this reason alone it’s not going to be for A LOT of people.
Of course, that’s not to say classic will die or won’t be popular. But proportionally, I’d expect a lot to not stay.
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There, fixed that for you.
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I agree with the people that say there will be a drop in numbers after launch, for alot of the reasons we see here, but I also know ALOT(me included) of former players are going to be at launch and steadily returning throughout the first year or so(by word of mouth or otherwise) so that should quell some of the loss.
I think because some pepole who played original have a gatekeeping syndrome and think/fear that if too many new players join they will convince the dev team to make changes to classic. I doubt that will happen.
I think the other thing this group of people fear is that they will find newcomers to classic actually enjoy it and don’t find it less enjoyable/harder than retail at all, and they lose some sort of nebulous “points” they have given themselves for playing classic, which they have built up in their minds to be much harder than it ever was. Was it grindier and slower? yes. Harder? In some ways, yes, in other ways, no.
As with all games there will be more people playing at release and then the new shiny will drop off and the number of people wil decline, but I don’t think it will be as steep as some people believe it will be. After all, Classic becomes more rewarding as you level up, and since it has an end point to leveling without constantly shifting goalposts as in retail, your character continues growing stronger and more able to blow through content - until, I guess, you have full AQ/Naxx gear and top PVP gear.
Then you can just reroll, so…
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I think people who are in their 20s now believe no one above their 20s plays WoW. Thus the reliance on things like “the reddit census”, which is by design overwhelmingly answered by the younger people who have a reddit account (people over 35 generally don’t use reddit). Most of my in game friends are 35 and above, but invisible to the younger generation because you can’t see who is behind the keyboard. We had jobs and families when wow came out and had to play after work and on weekends, and still do.
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No one knows what will happen to the Classic population. What we do know is that if the pop rapidly declines, layering is a good way to handle it. We also know that if the pop doesn’t decline, adding servers with free transfers is a manageable solution.
Relax and let’s see what happens.
nost was a long time ago, private servers have not been all that popular lately. i play on ND myself and a few thousand players isnt much in the big picture
even nost didnt have that many people compared to modern games
people seem to think a few thousands players on private servers means classic will hold millions for a long time. i dont see it
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Implying I would not pay 14.95 to escape euros.
Classic is not a new game, it’s a novelty now. I plan to play classic exclusively so I don’t mean that as an insult, but it is what it is.
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The biggest two reasons: 1) It’s just what happens with absolutely every game these days. People will run in, it won’t appeal to them, and they will do something else. Or the next shiny object comes along. 2) Lots of people are just going to make a character to take a peek, and that’s that. They don’t intend to try beyond that.
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I think this is simple arrogance. Similar to the whole “you think you do, but you don’t” comment.
Blizzard expected a massive fall off for the beta test, yeah that never happened.
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This keeps coming up like it’s the doom of WoW. Every time I log in on retail I see the same trolls talking trash and politics and garbage in trade. All the time. If THOSE people aren’t getting hit, then I feel like my odds are good.
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Because blizzard is naive - End thread.
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The way I see it.
Initial Launch players will flood the servers after a week or so, Post Burning Crusade clients will trickle away once they find out 20-40 may take them a month or playing 3 or 4 hours a day they will go back to insta zerk land.
Then as Blizzards starts their round of lawsuits and shutting down all illegal private servers. Subs will begin to pick up again for original player base, where it will level off around 1.5 million subs just for classic.
At least thats whats i’m thinking. so 1.5 million x $15 a month which will put a revenue stream of 22.5 million a month into blizzards coffers and should keep classic safe for 4 years then they will launch Burning Crusade again.
I don’t believe it will die off quickly, but I do believe that it will be sooner than people expect. There’s are some big issues with looking at old subscription charts and basing your judgement on them. The first is that they don’t show the number of people dropping the game as Vanilla, Burning Crusade, and Wrath went on. Make no mistake, World of Warcraft was gaining subscribers faster than they were losing them. This is why the subscriber numbers keep going up. But people were dropping the game left right and center during Vanilla. Some would come back to play whenever there was a patch. However, they were by and large peanuts compared to WoW’s brand new subscribers. Without an advertising blitz equal to their hayday, I don’t see Classic WoW gaining more subscribers than it loses. For all that it’s a good game, it’s also a time consuming one and ain’t nobody got time(or the patience) for this class of MMO these days.
Another thing is the timing. World of Warcraft was lightning in a bottle. It came out at the exact right time, when the interest in a casual, mainstream MMO was at its absolute peak. Back then you had Ultima Online, Everquest, Planetside, and a smattering of other impenetrable games. These games piqued interest in the genre, but weren’t accessible to the larger casual audience.
World of Warcraft had a lot of former Everquest players on the development team. They knew what they wanted, if not how exactly to do it, and worked to create a game that they would want to play. As such, a lot of it’s offerings run counter to the hardcore design of Everquest. Even something as simple as the tutorials that tell you how to walk and run bought a lot of goodwill for new players.
Interest in this genre is at an all time low these days. For all that there are more people playing games, not many of them are actually playing MMORPG’s. They’re playing looter shooters, survival games, and other-newer genre’s. Many of the conveniences of Classic WoW have become standard. In fact many are the point where Classic WoW seems almost primitive in comparison.
In fact, if one were to go onto the forums as a new player. What you’d see is a bunch of people telling you that you ‘have’ to play a certain way if you want to do anything. You ‘need’ to have x group composition or x cookie cutter talent spec while leveling. They talk about the difficulty of Classic in a way that reminds me of the archived Everquest forum posts dating back to WoW’s beta test.
History is not cyclical, and Classic World of Warcraft has no guarantee of financial success. It will draw in an audience. Players who started during cataclysm and want to see the old world will stop by. Players who are returning to Vanilla WoW after leaving because of the changes. Private Server players will be here. As will new players coming in to play with friends, etc. Classic will retain a good portion of them. However, the content drought, the issues that made people leave during vanilla. Those things are going to cause people to leave again. Without the advantage of being the most accessible game on the market in the hottest genre, World of Warcraft Classic may very well struggle to get new players to replace them.
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All of this. In addition, I’d add that Warcraft was already an established franchise at this point, helped in large part by how well WC3 and TFT did a scant two years before WoW went live. It was the right franchise to carry the MMO genre out of the niche and into it’s 15 minutes of pop culture fame.
Lightning in a bottle is exactly what it was.
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Just do not listen to them. It is all Doom & Glooming for the sake of it, and by now I consider it just trolling.
It would need good antropologists to analyse such phenomenons, I can only roll my eyes.
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I was going to edit this in, but since Derka replied to me, it’s probably best I just put it in a new post. Anyone who’s interested in learning about why World of Warcraft succeeded should read the IGN review from 2004. It gives a good, detailed look at what made the game so special back when it released. To quote one example:
" WoW has been described widely as a “newbie-friendly” game, but after playing since the closed beta phase that started back in Spring of this year, I can honestly say that WoW is friendly to everybody. Everything from the colorful art style to the endearing player animations, to the countless quirks of personality makes WoW an inviting experience. Blizzard’s passion for gaming joy is infectious, and its sense of humor disarming."
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