My main reason for doubting that classic can topple retail is that modern MMOs vastly outnumber old-school MMOs. Wow, ESO, and FF14 are the big 3, and have somewhere around 3-6 million players combined, and are all qol heavy games. Compare that to games like ff11, EQ, lineage, etc, which only have maybe 100k or so. OSRS is the exception, but I feel like it is unique and hard to compare to modern or old school MMOs.
I get that mindset⌠It just doesnât really affect the answer of if server capacity will decrease when layering goes away.
Your mindset however, is exactly why Iâm in favor of layering as opposed to more servers.
QOL cannot turn bad gameplay into good gameplay. QOL can improve gameplay, but it doesnât define it, unless the design was simply that bad to start with.
The design for Classic WoW wasnât âthat badâ to start with, QOL could help, but itâs not going to be as detrimental to the gameplay for most players as many believe it will be.
A Classic+ iteration with QOL improvements would like smoke everything. But a Classic iteration like weâre getting is likely to demonstrate there is a large untapped market that exists in MMOâs because MMO Game Design âtook a left turnâ after TBC and went in the wrong direction.
Classic is going to tap into a player base that hasnât been getting served in over ten years. Itâs also probably going to show that there is a lot of cross-over for those people who are playing the modern designs once they experience the slower, âclunkierâ play of Classier.
The clunky play in some respects is a feature, not a design flaw. The people who donât get that are likely to get a bit of an eye-opener.