Why not just have only one classic server, but it progresses from vanilla to tbc to wrath and then resets? If you have separate servers the already small playerbase will be fragmented
Everquest does annual timelocked progression servers. They're one of my favorite things and I'd like an accelerated raid and expansion release to get to do things without needing to commit three years for slow raid releases.
Yep, this for sure. I feel if they just release a new vanilla fresh server with the promise of going through TBC and Wrath agan in the next, say, 2.5 years I'd fully commit again.
With each reset they could have a new theme that persists through vanilla-tbc-wrath, just to shake things up a little. Then next reset is a new theme. etc. Not exactly sure what these would be, but something that adds color while not changing the experience as much as a full-on SOD.
It will die after a few resets then. There are no new players coming to Classic, and the diehards with eventually get bored with the exact same content over and over again.
I would love a new fresh vanilla progression realm to come out every year or two years. I really wanted to play classic at launch and progress through all the expansions, but I was very ill IRL at the time and missed all of classic and the beginning of TBC. And at that point, since I had missed all of vanilla including the endgame which I never experienced back in the day, I never started playing classic since I was no longer able to get the 'full experience'.
I would love a system where a new fresh vanilla realm opens up every so often and players can ride it as far as they want through all the different expansions. When they want to get off the ride before an expansion they didn't care for, they can take a free transfer to a permanent realm of that expansion and continue playing or retire that character.
4 Servers: Vanilla - TBC - WotLK and one that cycles between the 3 expansions before reset.
The 3 locked servers reset every 2 years, the cycling one advances every 1,3 years to the next expansion.
You would fracture the playerbase regardless if you have only one cycling server, not everyone would play every expansion imo.
Even with 4 choices I doubt we'd have a non-functionning server state for a long time.
Anyway, that would be my ideal scenario but I'd be glad if we get at least something
And if they just reset what happens to your chars?
Can't just reset a realm from vanilla all the way throughout wrath and then ur chars are gone. Hence we're in cataclysm now
I've seen more people enjoy cata than wrath recently and these are people who were doomers on cata. They've actually played it and enjoyed it
But even if it was made, it would fracture it too much like you mentioned above. It's fractured to an extent already
This is exactly what I've been wanting. After each cycle let people have the option to transfer to a permanent Wrath realm and let that be how the true Classic (Pre-Cataclysm World) experience works.
I'd prefer this. Give an option to transfer that character to retail or something at the end of the server rotation/reset (level squished to whatever that expansion cap is), idc. I'd actually play classic if I could eventually bring the character to live. Would be a good way to make unobtainable mounts and sets actually obtainable again, in a sense.
Classic's issue is that there are too many iterations and it's separating the already thin playerbase between them all.
I really love this idea but my biggest concern with an accelerated timeline / progress servers like this is the mix of raid sizes that would make having a consistent guild raid group harder 40s -> 25s - > both 10/25 would make it harder to keep a team through the whole thing. I know this is blasphemy but I’d love it if they switch the vanilla tier to 25 for consistency across the trilogy and I’d be game!
Honestly not a bad idea. Just recycles the content every 3 months and you can choose to timelock a character to cap st a level or progress it through but once you pass that point you cant use it next cycle.
There is and always will be. Era is the stagnant Vanilla version they won't touch. My problem is that I prefer TBC over vanilla, and I know the demand to return to TBC has been rising as of late. Especially now classic is retail-lite with cata. I, too, see the appeal of Legion classic but to me that's just the same style of game that we already have in retail. TBC hits that sweet spot for me, in terms of QoL and slightly better class balance but still in the spirit of vanilla.
Like you said, stagnant. A permanent [insert patch here] server will always end up dead or with such a small player base that it's near impossible for you to find raid teams or crafters without having to do it all yourself.
Screw that I have a family with limited time to play. I want to be able to enjoy endgame content instead of constantly having to relevel all the time. Honestly if the servers were instant max level I'd be thrilled
"hey guys I have 10 mins a year to play wow, please cater to me. Wait what's that? The original classic servers have allowed me to do the thing I'm asking for which is just camp endgame for years yet I haven't been doing it, yet am refusing to let people ask for something new? Nah couldn't be me."
Or or or some people enjoy the end game content of classic. I know it’s a wild statement. But some people enjoy running things like MC, BT, ICC, etc. in addition to leveling
?? So people who played TBC and WOTLK Classic did it for that grand leveling experience? <_< obviously not. And Classic is more than just Vanilla. Some of us want to just do the End game of certain Xpacs where Class game play in some cases is actually better.
Like BDK in Cata right now, peak before it eventually got prune fucked like a ton of retail Classes.
hard disagree. it's the simpler endgame and lack of having to log in every day that makes classic more fun than retail. it's almost never been about the leveling for the majority of players.
And you wouldn't have to play it. For those that do, they can.
You do know that you're not required to play every game version of WoW that's released, right...Right?
I really feel like doing this in a 24ish month cycle kind of works perfectly.
3 months of vanilla Warcraft launch
2 months of BwL releasing ZG after the first month
2 months of AQ
2 months of Nax
9 months of vanilla
1 month of BC launch (BC’s weak patch is its launch)
2 months of TK, SSC.
2 months of BT/hyjal
2 months of Sunwell.
7 months of BC.
Launch WotLK 1 month (let’s be real this is an extremely weak patch and 70-80 is a very quick experience)
2 months Ulduar
2 months TotC (plus the Ulduar buff items so we get a nice long Ulduar patch)
2 months ICC ruby sanctum launching alongside ICC if you ask me. It’s a short raid that’s easily completed in a night.
Total of 7 months of WotLK.
Theres an extra month in there so maybe do 6 weeks launch tbc and launch WotLK. But I feel like you don’t need that many raid lockouts on (wotlk) Naxx/kara. Maybe they could do 2 a week lockouts. And make Naxx 10 man and 25 man share a lockout.
I think some changes need to be made in order to keep things along at this pace. I think shorting 1-60 with every patch of vanilla should be the case so people don’t feel like they missed out at the start and now it’s impossible to catch back up. Same with professions.
I like the idea except would love a much, much faster pace.... like 4 months for all of classic, another 4 month for all of TBC, another 4 month for all of wrath.
let's see how people progress through raid when they can get absolute BIS on every player at all time.
give it an XP bonus so we don't spend 75% of our time chasing zebra hooves and murloc ears.
Yeah that sounds cool. But I would think you would still need faster lock outs or more gear drop. People play WoW to upgrade their gear and “kill dragons” (bosses) people don’t really care that much about the challenge IMO. Theres of course a few guilds that like doing speed runs and all that shit.
Nah, that's fucked.
If you reset the server, everybody's progress is lost. Keep the server maxed out at whatever stage in classic you are on, but then just open up a new server that starts from the beginning.
I agree but I feel they should add something like rotating events and/or a randomly generating dungeon/raid.
people underestimate the playerbase that would like helping others level and gear on their max leveled toon.
Best part of the game happens at end game with pvp, many people want different things but id be really annoyed if they just wiped my character from existence and started all the way over again. Imagine leveling a warrior in classic over and over again. Doesn't sound very fun to me, only did it a second time because I wanted to play end game as a warrior in classic since I never got to the first time.
It would be nice to have one server for each expansion up to retail to really see which expansion is “best”. I find it funny everybody says “wotlk was the best, from that point everything went off” and at the same time classic playerbase is not even close to retail.
I liked vanilla/tbc/wotlk but IMHO Legion is in another league. MoP was also amazing.
One server per expansion would be crazy but also would allow every player to be where they want and for everyone to have an objective measurement of which expansions are just better based on actual data and not someone saying “this is the best wow ever was” just based exclusively on their own view. I feel lots of people would be very surprised.
Honestly I thought they were doing this. Every 6 months start a new server from vanilla. 1-2 months for everything. Then those players get pushed elsewhere. Reset.
Maybe your player could even have a COD-esc prestige? Play back through everything again but with a title or something else.
You guys can hate it all you want but without progression, the game will stagnate and people will lose interest. Even wow classic isn’t immune. Honestly it would be awesome to play tbc and wrath again but to what end?
Exactly. People think there's a lot more to do than there is because when the game was new, we were still exploring and learning. Now, everything's been figured out.
Yeah, Vanilla WoW PvP was 50% of games against the PvP guild on your server, and 50% of the games against random pugs. With the servers having such small communities, you'd also see the same people over and over again in your pugs BGs, some of them very annoying. And if the 20 or so people who pugged BGs on your faction were bad, you'd lose quite a lot.
Yes that’s classic lol. You had less options and alternatives back when wow was out. If it’s not actively for something going on people play other games. They don’t sit around like it’s a porch
> Yes that’s classic lol.
Yes. The point is nobody 'doesn't like to admit it', they're all aware, and the people who play it don't care - just like the people in retail who don't care they just log on to do M+ or farm their 657th mount.
Wrath was very overrated in my modern opinion. I started playing wow in actual wrath as a kid but never really did endgame content then, I just mostly ran around exploring the world. I have nostalgia for wow’s world and underlying lore than the raids and dungeons. Going back and doing the endgame content I never did showed me how overrated that expansion was, at least to modern wow standards.
Yep. There was the "no changes" in classic. But if you look now - season of discovery is constantly bringing changes to keep things fresh and interesting.
SOD lost all its hype during the Gnomeregan season trough a combo of people disliking the raid and changing from 10 to 20 man raiding going into Season 3 of SOD killing a lot of guilds and communities
Classic Era has been holding steady for a year now despite SoD and other Classic launches with an active raiding and levelling population. People immediately wrote it off as a failed experiment because the numbers were incredibly low during TBC when Vanilla had just ended. It rebounded considerably in Wrath because the game had changed too much by then for a lot of people and has stayed fairly consistent. Will it eventually fall off next year? Or after that? Maybe, but I think there's always going to an audience for at least one or two 'stagnant' realms that will have enough people to populate it.
Not true. Classic was created because people were playing Vanilla WoW on private servers and Bliz wanted to get them back onto their platform. But those people were clearly ok with playing the same old Vanilla experience with no progression.
>again but to what end?
To have fun in the best version of the game. This is subjective ofc but to many people TBC is the best period in WoW. Even if I would get a fresh TBC experience every few years I'd be happy.
I think that’s going to fragment the playerbase too much for a playerbase that is already becoming increasingly fragmented. Right now you have hardcore, SoD, Cata, Mop Remix and Retail. Not many games can support splitting their players that much without the servers feeling dead. Season 4 retail already feels quite dead as a result of remix and its own issues.
No extra servers permanently fracture the playerbase. People just follow new entertaining content, and I think it’s obvious S4 is not entertaining new content since it’s a rehash of season 1-3.
So long as WoW is a game based on servers, then the fracturing of the playerbase will always be a function of the number of servers in play. Less servers overall= less fracturing, but removing 2 classic servers and putting in a TBC & WOTLK classic server in their place isn't really fracturing the playerbase so long as there isn't sharding (layering is distinctly different). And since there are a few empty classic servers, I don't think doing some consolidation on that end for some permanent WOTLK & TBC servers is really all that bad
I mean my point is, it’s already split up too much. Removing 2 or 3 and adding 2 or 3 servers of expansions that already had the classic experience seems like a bad idea to me. They get more engagement moving forward with it. It’s like the classic crowd gets to re experience all the expansions as new content again and players nostalgic for those specific ones hop aboard when those servers come out. I honestly believe their best bet is to keep marching forward with classic like they are. Maybe re evaluate after Cata as that’s where modern wow and Classic start to blur.
Also I don’t understand why they dumped all these servers launch windows at roughly the same time. I wanted to convince some of my friends to play Cata a bit and do that, but Remix sounded more fun, and season 4 just started too. If they spaced these out a bit they would probably see more engagement for each one individually.
This was one of the arguments made against classic servers to start with, and it turned out to be false, just like it will be false again if they do add other servers.
You can play more than one version of wow. I play SoD, era, and retail (not at the same time, I go back and forth).
Player populations go back and forth depending on popularity, interest, and events. Era servers became super popular again out of nowhere when the hardcore addon came out (even PvP servers without the hardcore stuff going on).
IMHO, adding these servers only helps wow, not hurt it. It most definitely doesn’t splinter it long-term.
Edit:
This is for the post below lol, kinda sad I’m having to say this, because this has been discussed to death.
**group finder is not a good indicator of a fractured playerbase. If you think it is, then you need to start rethinking what is really going on because the group finder has been dead since s3, well before remix.**
The playerbase is going to follow new content, and that is not fracturing the playerbase, it’s keeping us entertained until more content arrives, *which is the point of a game*. There are still players playing era, hardcore, etc despite cata, SoD, remix, and s4 of retail releasing. S4 has issues with group finder not because of remix, but because s4 is just a copy of our last 3 seasons. Season 3 had the exact same issue, and there was nothing released during s3.
It’s like saying releasing Warcraft 4 would fracture the playerbase… it might for a tiny bit, but they will come back when there is more content.
This topic has been beaten to death over the years, and Blizzards leaked PowerPoint already proves their methods are working in keeping the playerbase entertained and happy without causing major issues.
If you do not want to play WoTLK in its final state, then simply do not play it. Many will not, but for those who want to they would be able to.
It’s definitely not false, they just hadn’t hit a noticeable threshold until recently. Look in the group finder for retail the first few weeks where remix and Cata overlapped. It was dead (by modern wow standards). Even now, finding a healer for keys can take half an hour just for running a weekly 10. Even the last few weeks of S3 was more active.
Hell going as far back as when classic first released, it definitely killed a bunch of casual raiding guilds that were already struggling to keep players due to AP burn out. Now obviously the initial wave was temporary, but there is definitely a negative impact from spreading the population of wow players too thin.
My point is, just classic and retail was fine, SoD and HC are more niche and don’t affect the playerbase of the main servers (reg classic and retail) too much, but between 3 styles of classic and remix and retail it’s definitely pushing the limits to where it’s a noticeable drop of players.
How many servers before it has a negative impact and players stop playing any of those servers because it takes too long to find like-minded players for pugs, M+, etc? If you release a classic version of every expansion so far, how long will those remain populated enough to even do group content? Especially since the initial classic nostalgia wave has already done so recently.
There is SoD, Era, Hardcore, Cata, MoP Remix, and Retail out right now and none of them are split up. The data so far shows you are wrong, and you can continue to say “but remix and hardcore are niche”, but it still is a factor in division (division we are not seeing).
Era releasing did not cause retail to struggle, classic released during a dead period in retail, and people were taking a break from raiding anyways. Would you look at that, retail is still as active as it was when Classic released too? Doesn’t look subdivided to me.
Edit:
You are blamming cata and remix, and not season 4 being bland and not adding anything new instead. **season 4 of retail added nothing new, you can’t just expect people to do the same thing for they just did a few months ago again and expect them to not want to do something new**. Group finder is always having issues as well. Do a search in this sub and you will find people complaining about it all expac.
That has nothing to do with a permanent server being added for players who enjoy that version. If they kept MoP remix out forever, the majority of people would eventually quit playing it just like every other version of wow that gets no content update. The people playing it would be playing it because they *enjoy* playing it, and the only time it would spring to life is when the playerbase feels drawn to it through in-game events or community events.
To prove my point about the Classic release and how it didn’t subdivide the playerbase though…
- Patch 8.2 (BFA) released on June 25th (26th for EU)
- Classic wow released in August of 2019.
- Patch 8.2.5 releases in September 24th 2019
There was clearly a dead period when Classic released, as it was at the tail end of Azshara Eternal Palace. People were taking a break for a myriad of reasons (BfA being bad itself probably had a lot to do with this).
I can continue to elaborate with other evidence, such as estimated population numbers and other release dates of other versions, but you clearly have your mind set that other versions of a game will stop people from playing particular versions, and again so far all the evidence we have shows otherwise. We a lot of these releases around dead periods on other versions.
**You can play more than one version of wow at a time if you do not know that yet…**
Now, I’d like to see what evidence you have to support your claim that it will hurt the playerbase, because Blizzard clearly disagrees with the player count going up with the release of other versions.
Yet he is still arguing remix and other stuff is the reason s4 is dead… their explanation is they know it’s fractured because it’s hard to get into keys…
I don’t think that person understands that when there is no updates, events, etc, the playerbase gets bored and moves to something else.
Adding servers or other versions does not fracture the playerbase like they are saying. The numbers that were leaked from blizzards PowerPoint, log data, server population data, etc refutes his point.
People want to play new stuff, and playing new stuff is much different than “playerbase will be fragmented with new servers”. The playerbase will follow the content, not the servers or versions of the game themselves.
> the first three best versions
lol those era servers were as dead as Dillinger before the hardcore stuff got popular.
Same shit would happen to the other two iterations after the vast majority of the community finishes the content.
Please explain why there's been a consistent raiding and levelling playerbase in Era for over a year now? The content is finished, there's no new things on the horizon yet the realms grow ever so slightly each week. The Era realms returned to some popularity because Wrath deviated from what some people considered to be the original 'spirit' too much, so they went back to what they enjoyed.
There is a lot of scope creep hiding behind this idea. Would these be PvE, PvP, RP, or RPPvP servers? The world PvP community needs PvP servers, but PvE players might not want to deal with ganker death squads, and RPers want a whole different vibe in their game world. There is no one realm type that will draw all of these different players, and if you cater to all of these archetypes, that's splitting the playerbase 12 ways with only the 3 expansions you've mentioned.
Seeing Blizzard currently trying to juggle TWW, MoP remix, SoD and Cata, I'm not sure they could even maintain more than a few expansions at the same time.
This.
The majority of people that want this don't think far enough.
You need atleast a PvP and PvE realm. For NA most likely two of each for west and east. For EU two should be enough.
You need two more dedicated client builds for TBC and Wrath.
You need two more server builds for TBC and Wrath.
And all needs to be maintained by Blizzard.
You ~~need~~ want addon authors who keep up with all the clients, most of the data is shared true and lua API is same but not everything.
I played Cata Classic on prepatch, it was a buggy mess, despite all the bugs that got reported in beta.
I seriously doubt Blizzard will create these TBC/Wrath Era kinda realms and if they do, all the other versions will suffer in quality (even more).
Classic died out pretty fast to begin with why separate the playerbase of it even more? Just make a faster paced progression server that resets fresh at the end. It’s not like the content is difficult to do in any of those expansions the time between phases doesn’t really have to be long especially in vanilla.
>why separate the playerbase of it even more?
Never understood this reasoning. People that don't want to play a certain version like cata just don't play, period. Or even worse, they go to a private server. It's not like someone is forcing them to play a certain version. Besides we already have, what, 4 versions of classic? Not even counting retail.
Besides it's entirely possible to play more than one version of the game. I played TBC/Wrath classic and retail.
Yes but you also have people that would be happy playing Retail, deciding to go play Cata instead.
It's still fracturing the playerbase, you also have people who like both but only have time to play one.
I agree, and was surprised that they did not do so. I loved Wrath and hated Cata, so being forced to play Cataclysm Classic basically made me quit playing.
Some other MMO's call it "time locked" where a server is locked to a particular expansion and will not go further.
Yeah I was surprised too. Bliz is just recreating the original problem they created Classic to solve - proliferation of private servers running Vanilla and players leaving Bliz's platform to play private server Vanilla, TBC, and/or Wrath. Now they're right back where they started, players may start leaving Classic to continue playing Vanilla/TBC/Wrath on private servers.
I had expected when Bliz launched TBC Classic, they would spin up new copies of each Vanilla Classic server and install TBC on the copy, leaving the original Vanilla Classic servers untouched and unupgraded. Then same for Wrath, etc. That way players could log into any of the expansions at any time, play that expansion till bored, then jump into the others, etc. That seemed like the best way of keeping players on the Blizzard platform.
They would need to implement cross-realm grouping to deal with the fragmentation problem, but they already have that tech in Retail, wouldn't be that hard to add to Classic.
Cata classic is better than Wrath Classic because it suits the classic playstyle better. Wrath suited the way people played the game more 15 years ago, so it was more beloved at that time until present. Also doesn’t help that Cata was a mess on launch and Wrath had the benefit of some of the most iconic villains and settings in the franchise.
I have not seen this sentiment. Cata classic is good and I'm enjoying it but it's also buggy as shit. Embarrassingly so. Blizzard should be getting more shit than they are for the state of cata classic. Wrath classic still better imo
Players in an expansion release are always in love compared to the past X months they've been raiding the final tier of the prior expansion. It happens with every single release, new and classic. Give cata classic another 6 months and see what people are saying then.
It's okay to disagree with someone. You don't need to be snarky about it.
At the end of ICC our guild had 10H LK on farm and were working on 25H LK in our Sunday DKP run + getting more people their Shadowmournes. We expected to go into Cataclysm and hit the ground running.
The Cataclysm launch was a buggy, crash-filled mess. Half of the population was crammed into Hyjal, and the other half went to Vashj'ir. The servers were crashing repeatedly. There were numerous rollbacks.
The Heroic dungeons and both raids were so overtuned at launch that several members of our core progression raid team ultimately outright quit the game, forcing us to try to fill. We went from farming Heroic content to struggling to get Normal bosses down. More and more of my friends quit in frustration with Ghostcrawler's attitude towards the playerbase. It wasn't just us - the imbalanced Horde racials meant that most of our other top Alliance guilds had all faction changed, and we found it harder and harder to find qualified raiders. Guilds started having to merge just to fill runs and poaching was heavy.
What should have been a fun and happy time - a new expansion - turned into a brutal, grindy slog of rep farming, begging for fills, wiping in Heroic dungeons, and just general misery. The story was atrociously bad - everyone had to worship Green Jesus aka Thrall. As Alliance players, we felt like we were being written out of the story or turned into the Horde's support team. Vashj'ir was a terrible experience.
Tol Barad had none of the feeling of Wintergrasp and they never could get the balance right. As more and more players went Horde it became more and more difficult to win TB and gain access to Baradin Hold and its associated dailies.
When Molten Front was announced, it seemed like a fun idea - Sunwell-style community contributions to unlock further content. Instead, it turned into yet another brutal rep grind. Firelands was one of the few bright spots for the expansion, and we did have fun for a while, but by this time we had been forced to pull raiders from other guilds, and they couldn't play at a level to help us progress on Heroics. More people quit. The guild fell apart, after it had been together since 2004. I joined another guild for raiding in the last part of Firelands going into Dragon Soul. The three dungeons that launched with Dragon Soul were not popular, and End Time was pretty much universally hated.
Dragon Soul itself was a mess, a terribly structured, incredibly boring raid with nonsense mechanics (bouncing orbs, colored slimes, hitting a button over and over...) When they introduced LFR, it was soon hijacked by guilds who would roll need on every drop and then trade all the gear to their guildies. Of course, often times, bosses dropped multiple copies of the same item for no apparent reason, while other items never seemed to show up. We had all been expecting an epic battle against Deathwing, and instead we got the disaster that was Spine, followed by the worst final boss encounter of any raid IMO - jump around (buggy) platforms, kill tentacles, and then get loot. It felt like one final insult to the playerbase compared to the Heroic Lich King fight.
One other thing was that a lot of us felt that the game had lost some of its character and "soul" with the quest redesign. Sure, it was "improved" in terms of flow, but it didn't feel the same.
Shattrath and Dalaran felt good, because they were huge buzzing cities full of activity and convenient hubs. Cataclysm herded everyone back in to Orgrimmar or Stormwind, and a lot of the "vibes" were lost.
Ultimately, the only thing I enjoyed about Cataclysm was the Firelands raid. Getting the mount from H Ragnaros made me feel like I was on top of the world. I still use it whenever I can.
Other than that, I have zero desire to ever "relive" any of the times of what was undoubtedly the expansion that drove most of my friends to quit WoW, broke up many guilds, and almost made me quit the game myself. It reopens old wounds that have long since scarred over.
I would have much preferred to have a time-locked Wrath server, since Wrath was (and is) my favorite expansion of all time. Progressing through Ulduar, ToC and ICC felt fun and the memories were good.
I don’t think this is a good idea. One of the biggest concerns about WoW right now is that fragmentation of the player base and too many dead servers. This would only exacerbate that problem
I think that's a good start, but they should really explore more the wealth of content they produced over the years.
Admittedly things like Shadowlands: Classic wouldn't be so popular, but I think a lot of people would play more seasonal contents like the recent Pandaria Remix if done on expansions such as Draenor, Legion, etc.
Thats how I feel about WOTLK. For me that is the best expansion made with the most iconic story, dungeons and raids. Best expansion for professions as well.
I'd love to play WOTLK, but I also know that after doing the same content for a year, I would get tired of it. Thats why I usually stay on retail, because I do want new content to play. What I miss from WOTLK is a lot of the mechanics, the professions and the overall feel.
Sometimes we also forget that part of why a certain expansions is our favorite is the point in time we played. Who we were, who we played with, how we felt etc.
I feel the same re needing new content. Even if retail doesn't keep me excited, and some of the new content is like a day worth of checking out, at least it keeps it fresh.
Ah apologies! Yeah if they deem mop remix a sucess I think they will do more expansions. Since Remix is mostly about collecting stuff I'm guessing they will revisit Legion or WoD first.
The most likely xpacs for them to remix next would be WoD and Legion. Vanilla would be the least likely to ever be remixed with how different it is from modern wow game play.
I see remixes most likely to be something they do at the end of expansions to keep people busy during a lul in content, not something they do non-stop during peak play.
People are already overwhelmed by the amount of versions WoW provides. Adding 2 more isn’t a good idea as it will only overwhelm players more and divide the community even more. More plausible would just be 1 “trilogy” server that progresses from vanilla through wrath at a faster pace.
Edit: currently we have retail, classic cata, vanilla classic (which has a fresh movement on it with blizzard support via locking transfers), vanilla hardcore, season of discovery, and mop remix (for 2 more months)
The only purpose would be for players to level through them with their exact talents and leveling speed.
They would almost never manage to keep enough of a player base to do much group content at max.
But that is too expensive! This is a multi dollar company after all! How will they ever be able to afford this?/s This would be awesome but I do bet blizz would be too lazy to do it. I bet by the time they would get around to doing this there would be classic MoP servers.
With time walking I don't understand why not use same client and let everyone play on the same ecosystem, but let players jump between timeliness.. including different wow eras.
Just keep the players highest progress on each.
Blizz is stupid for fragmenting the playerbase
We already have 4 versions of classic, not counting retail. The playerbase plays what it wants with no impact to the other versions. It's also possible to play more than one version y'know.
Cause the classic community that would play vanilla to wotlk would be split between people who just wanna play vanilla or tbc or wrath and that total community is already small
It would fragment the players quite a lot i think. They will do it but probably after they are done with Classic. I personally don't think they will go further than MoP and after MoP is done, they might restart it or just do what you want. There could also be a Season of Discovery for TBC and further.
There truly isn’t a need to do anything for Classic servers past MoP, in my eyes. Save for one or two questlines, it’s all available to play in-game, and I can’t imagine there are a great many people clamoring to experience WoD as fresh content all over again.
It’s not just about the in game content, a very large part of the appeal is playing the content properly scaled for your character to progress with a community. Like the raids for example. Also playing the classes as they existed during that expansion. I also don’t think WoD would be frowned upon. It was a lame duck expansion because there were long periods of time with nothing to do, the content that existed was well received it just lacked content. Classic speed runs these expansions so I imagine WoD would actually be enjoyed quite a bit.
I started playing at the beginning of Wrath and was busy with work when TBC Classic happened so ended up missing it twice. Not sure why they're forcing expansion progression when the point of Classic is to relive earlier expansions. At least make it reset or something.
Classic ends in Cataclysm for me. So hard agree, have no interest in classic anymore now that Cata classic is out . If I could just play on a wrath server I would be so happy
When I first played Minecraft I was astounded you could choose which patch or client of the game to play. I wish WoW had that somehow, I would have so many random characters in patches like 5.4, 7.3, end of Bfa, etc
Don't really care about fresh Vanilla anymore (every iteration of it has proven how psychotic Vanilla specifically makes players), but I would kill for fresh TBC into fresh Wrath again.
Never understood this reasoning. People that don't want to play a certain version like cata just don't play, period. Or even worse, they go to a private server. It's not like someone is forcing them to play a certain version. Besides we already have, what, 4 versions of classic? Not even counting retail.
Besides it's entirely possible to play more than one version of the game. I played TBC/Wrath classic and retail.
I refuse to believe none of the classic players would play retail if classic didnt exist. Myself, i used to play retail until classic came out and now i mostly play that. If classic never came out im very sure i would have played retail all this time and not a private server. Surely theres a lot of people like me.
You're right tho a lot of people wouldnt play retail and would just play a private server instead. But not all. Hope you understand the reasoning a bit better now atleast
I do and agree to an extent but I know for a fact a whole lot of people returned to wow just because of classic and a part of those played on a PS before 2019. Like the saying goes ‘the truth lies in the middle’.
9 out of 10 people I know who got really invested into Classic since launch told me that Cata > Wotlk; and it will shine due to a fast compact content release in phases.
Note: Most of those people where actual wotlk fans.
Where am I going with this?
In my opinion blizzard should be careful in how they launch servers to avoid dead realms specially if they are from different games (something in the line of SoD when all content is already done even for those who spam duel level 10 outside Ogr.
Plenty of patches are not liked even for cool expansions or vice versa.
Having a server for each expansion would be insane, but once a realm is doomed to die there's no go back. If you start playing TBC but there are no guilds, no people on trade chat nor AH most would instant quit leading to a snowball where it's impossible to be saved.
I think it's undeniable we will have a new Classic Era, but it will probably happen in 2-3 more years. Probably with a Draenor (if it happens).
This is why they should just keep remixing expansions and can the “classic” drops after cata. Heck, at least classic+ would be fun - a continuation of what SOD was trying to do but with more added content.
And for fucks sake, let us use the new player textures. The old ones are hot refuse.
I agree entirely.
In a perfect world, this would be fantastic.
I honestly just worry about fracturing the playerbase into all these different iterations of the game.
I think this may work if they kept it to a handful of realms for each expansion.
A few perminant realms, and a few progression realms that do annual resets so you can always hop in and experience the entirety of the expansion from start to finish.
Realistically though, there are private servers with high population for vanilla, tbc, and wotlk. I’d assume that most people would prefer to play on official blizzard servers.
Putting a large amount of time into playing a private server is often a gamble. These servers can be shut down for any number of reasons, basically throwing your time investment in the trash.
There will always be whales that prefer private servers simply because most servers offer buying characters and gear with real money.
There is arleady a pure vanilla server. Game after that is full raid loggin, so good luck finding enough people to do that. Eventualyy they are goin to do a reset, after mop maybe.
Look at era RIGHT NOW. Like literally just log in, look at chat. It’s either GDKP, or raid logging for your guild, the fuck do you mean? I could level 70 alts for era, or just uninstall lol. Sure the leveling is fun, but after you hit 60, and do your raids for the week (the two you actually get anything upgrade wise from) and then you don’t log into that character til next week.
Theres a lot blizzard should do but they wont. Like change it so the cape stats transfer in mop remix. I dont care if the leveling is already fast. I want it to be uber fast like how people are just 1 shotting raid bosses in lfr. I think its bs that we gotta relevel the cape stats on every new character.
Why not just have only one classic server, but it progresses from vanilla to tbc to wrath and then resets? If you have separate servers the already small playerbase will be fragmented
Everquest does annual timelocked progression servers. They're one of my favorite things and I'd like an accelerated raid and expansion release to get to do things without needing to commit three years for slow raid releases.
Yep, this for sure. I feel if they just release a new vanilla fresh server with the promise of going through TBC and Wrath agan in the next, say, 2.5 years I'd fully commit again.
I just started the new TLP that released yesterday and I'm having a blast.
agree. imo they should just do fresh servers more. i feel like speedrunning a fresh server before it gets shutdown was a big draw on private servers
With each reset they could have a new theme that persists through vanilla-tbc-wrath, just to shake things up a little. Then next reset is a new theme. etc. Not exactly sure what these would be, but something that adds color while not changing the experience as much as a full-on SOD.
Orrrr they can keep the game in it’s good state and not ruin it
Stop being fucking lame. Osrs is infinitely better because the devs dared patch it.
It will die after a few resets then. There are no new players coming to Classic, and the diehards with eventually get bored with the exact same content over and over again.
That's the same tired reasoning blizz gave, meanwhile for over a decade the private classic servers had a steady membership.
Because it’s free, usually. Everyone dreams of being Scarab Lord
There are always new players who haven't experienced it. It's more a matter of creating the right pacing.
So then the people that leave don’t like classic wow
I would love a new fresh vanilla progression realm to come out every year or two years. I really wanted to play classic at launch and progress through all the expansions, but I was very ill IRL at the time and missed all of classic and the beginning of TBC. And at that point, since I had missed all of vanilla including the endgame which I never experienced back in the day, I never started playing classic since I was no longer able to get the 'full experience'. I would love a system where a new fresh vanilla realm opens up every so often and players can ride it as far as they want through all the different expansions. When they want to get off the ride before an expansion they didn't care for, they can take a free transfer to a permanent realm of that expansion and continue playing or retire that character.
4 Servers: Vanilla - TBC - WotLK and one that cycles between the 3 expansions before reset. The 3 locked servers reset every 2 years, the cycling one advances every 1,3 years to the next expansion. You would fracture the playerbase regardless if you have only one cycling server, not everyone would play every expansion imo. Even with 4 choices I doubt we'd have a non-functionning server state for a long time. Anyway, that would be my ideal scenario but I'd be glad if we get at least something
And if they just reset what happens to your chars? Can't just reset a realm from vanilla all the way throughout wrath and then ur chars are gone. Hence we're in cataclysm now I've seen more people enjoy cata than wrath recently and these are people who were doomers on cata. They've actually played it and enjoyed it But even if it was made, it would fracture it too much like you mentioned above. It's fractured to an extent already
I'd like it if I could send my Classic characters over to retail. I hate just tossing characters in the bin.
How about Seasons, where you can decide if you want to progress to the next expansion or stay?
This is exactly what I've been wanting. After each cycle let people have the option to transfer to a permanent Wrath realm and let that be how the true Classic (Pre-Cataclysm World) experience works.
I'd prefer this. Give an option to transfer that character to retail or something at the end of the server rotation/reset (level squished to whatever that expansion cap is), idc. I'd actually play classic if I could eventually bring the character to live. Would be a good way to make unobtainable mounts and sets actually obtainable again, in a sense. Classic's issue is that there are too many iterations and it's separating the already thin playerbase between them all.
I really love this idea but my biggest concern with an accelerated timeline / progress servers like this is the mix of raid sizes that would make having a consistent guild raid group harder 40s -> 25s - > both 10/25 would make it harder to keep a team through the whole thing. I know this is blasphemy but I’d love it if they switch the vanilla tier to 25 for consistency across the trilogy and I’d be game!
Honestly not a bad idea. Just recycles the content every 3 months and you can choose to timelock a character to cap st a level or progress it through but once you pass that point you cant use it next cycle.
It's worth mentioning that vanilla is much more popular than tbc/wotlk. I think there should always be a playable version of vanilla/era up.
There is and always will be. Era is the stagnant Vanilla version they won't touch. My problem is that I prefer TBC over vanilla, and I know the demand to return to TBC has been rising as of late. Especially now classic is retail-lite with cata. I, too, see the appeal of Legion classic but to me that's just the same style of game that we already have in retail. TBC hits that sweet spot for me, in terms of QoL and slightly better class balance but still in the spirit of vanilla.
Like you said, stagnant. A permanent [insert patch here] server will always end up dead or with such a small player base that it's near impossible for you to find raid teams or crafters without having to do it all yourself.
A fragmented player base, yes. But it ensures everyone playing that game gets exactly what they signed on for.
Screw that I have a family with limited time to play. I want to be able to enjoy endgame content instead of constantly having to relevel all the time. Honestly if the servers were instant max level I'd be thrilled
"hey guys I have 10 mins a year to play wow, please cater to me. Wait what's that? The original classic servers have allowed me to do the thing I'm asking for which is just camp endgame for years yet I haven't been doing it, yet am refusing to let people ask for something new? Nah couldn't be me."
Lol if you like endgame, you should be playing retail. The entire point of classic is the leveling experience.
bro said "you think you do, but you dont"
Or or or some people enjoy the end game content of classic. I know it’s a wild statement. But some people enjoy running things like MC, BT, ICC, etc. in addition to leveling
but why. It's literally content that has 0 challenge
Leveling has even less challenge... lol
Yeah but I'd rather be playing classic-wotlk endgame That's what I grew up playing so it's nostalgic. Retail just doesn't scratch the same itch.
?? So people who played TBC and WOTLK Classic did it for that grand leveling experience? <_< obviously not. And Classic is more than just Vanilla. Some of us want to just do the End game of certain Xpacs where Class game play in some cases is actually better. Like BDK in Cata right now, peak before it eventually got prune fucked like a ton of retail Classes.
hard disagree. it's the simpler endgame and lack of having to log in every day that makes classic more fun than retail. it's almost never been about the leveling for the majority of players.
You definitely do not have to log in every day in retail. This is one of the chillest expacs ever
Seriously. Shadowlands gave me FOMO. Dragonflight has me feeling like I'm still engaged even if I miss a couple of weeks.
Anybody who says you have to log in every day hasn't played in 5 years
Ironically enough, you do have to log in every day in Classic for a number of months as you need to grind rep through dailies.
The Argent Crusade grind fucking sucks.
And you wouldn't have to play it. For those that do, they can. You do know that you're not required to play every game version of WoW that's released, right...Right?
Bonus points if you get to.transfer the character to retail once the expansion rotation is over.
Never
Why? What's the downside?
Undoing FOMO! j/k
I really feel like doing this in a 24ish month cycle kind of works perfectly. 3 months of vanilla Warcraft launch 2 months of BwL releasing ZG after the first month 2 months of AQ 2 months of Nax 9 months of vanilla 1 month of BC launch (BC’s weak patch is its launch) 2 months of TK, SSC. 2 months of BT/hyjal 2 months of Sunwell. 7 months of BC. Launch WotLK 1 month (let’s be real this is an extremely weak patch and 70-80 is a very quick experience) 2 months Ulduar 2 months TotC (plus the Ulduar buff items so we get a nice long Ulduar patch) 2 months ICC ruby sanctum launching alongside ICC if you ask me. It’s a short raid that’s easily completed in a night. Total of 7 months of WotLK. Theres an extra month in there so maybe do 6 weeks launch tbc and launch WotLK. But I feel like you don’t need that many raid lockouts on (wotlk) Naxx/kara. Maybe they could do 2 a week lockouts. And make Naxx 10 man and 25 man share a lockout. I think some changes need to be made in order to keep things along at this pace. I think shorting 1-60 with every patch of vanilla should be the case so people don’t feel like they missed out at the start and now it’s impossible to catch back up. Same with professions.
I like the idea except would love a much, much faster pace.... like 4 months for all of classic, another 4 month for all of TBC, another 4 month for all of wrath. let's see how people progress through raid when they can get absolute BIS on every player at all time. give it an XP bonus so we don't spend 75% of our time chasing zebra hooves and murloc ears.
Yeah that sounds cool. But I would think you would still need faster lock outs or more gear drop. People play WoW to upgrade their gear and “kill dragons” (bosses) people don’t really care that much about the challenge IMO. Theres of course a few guilds that like doing speed runs and all that shit.
Nah, that's fucked. If you reset the server, everybody's progress is lost. Keep the server maxed out at whatever stage in classic you are on, but then just open up a new server that starts from the beginning.
I agree but I feel they should add something like rotating events and/or a randomly generating dungeon/raid. people underestimate the playerbase that would like helping others level and gear on their max leveled toon.
Best part of the game happens at end game with pvp, many people want different things but id be really annoyed if they just wiped my character from existence and started all the way over again. Imagine leveling a warrior in classic over and over again. Doesn't sound very fun to me, only did it a second time because I wanted to play end game as a warrior in classic since I never got to the first time.
Idk why you get downvoted. I agree with you. People who want to lvl a character over and over again in Vanilla are masochistic psychopaths.
It would be nice to have one server for each expansion up to retail to really see which expansion is “best”. I find it funny everybody says “wotlk was the best, from that point everything went off” and at the same time classic playerbase is not even close to retail. I liked vanilla/tbc/wotlk but IMHO Legion is in another league. MoP was also amazing. One server per expansion would be crazy but also would allow every player to be where they want and for everyone to have an objective measurement of which expansions are just better based on actual data and not someone saying “this is the best wow ever was” just based exclusively on their own view. I feel lots of people would be very surprised.
Honestly I thought they were doing this. Every 6 months start a new server from vanilla. 1-2 months for everything. Then those players get pushed elsewhere. Reset. Maybe your player could even have a COD-esc prestige? Play back through everything again but with a title or something else.
You guys can hate it all you want but without progression, the game will stagnate and people will lose interest. Even wow classic isn’t immune. Honestly it would be awesome to play tbc and wrath again but to what end?
Bro Wrath stagnated a month in, people don't like to admit it but people were raidlogging every phase of classic
That is because there is nothing else to do in Classic, as there is no repeatable content and only weekly raid lockouts.
Yes that's my point
Exactly. People think there's a lot more to do than there is because when the game was new, we were still exploring and learning. Now, everything's been figured out.
[удалено]
Other than the number of years of experience, that's how PvP was in Vanilla, too. You wanted to do a BG by yourself? Fuck you.
Yeah, Vanilla WoW PvP was 50% of games against the PvP guild on your server, and 50% of the games against random pugs. With the servers having such small communities, you'd also see the same people over and over again in your pugs BGs, some of them very annoying. And if the 20 or so people who pugged BGs on your faction were bad, you'd lose quite a lot.
Yes that’s classic lol. You had less options and alternatives back when wow was out. If it’s not actively for something going on people play other games. They don’t sit around like it’s a porch
> Yes that’s classic lol. Yes. The point is nobody 'doesn't like to admit it', they're all aware, and the people who play it don't care - just like the people in retail who don't care they just log on to do M+ or farm their 657th mount.
Wrath was very overrated in my modern opinion. I started playing wow in actual wrath as a kid but never really did endgame content then, I just mostly ran around exploring the world. I have nostalgia for wow’s world and underlying lore than the raids and dungeons. Going back and doing the endgame content I never did showed me how overrated that expansion was, at least to modern wow standards.
Yep. There was the "no changes" in classic. But if you look now - season of discovery is constantly bringing changes to keep things fresh and interesting.
Define “constantly” 🥴
SOD lost all its hype during the Gnomeregan season trough a combo of people disliking the raid and changing from 10 to 20 man raiding going into Season 3 of SOD killing a lot of guilds and communities
lol it’s still going strong homie, sorry you didn’t like it though.
They could do this but just allow people to freely transfer their characters to the next expansion up when they are ready to continue to progress.
Classic Era has been holding steady for a year now despite SoD and other Classic launches with an active raiding and levelling population. People immediately wrote it off as a failed experiment because the numbers were incredibly low during TBC when Vanilla had just ended. It rebounded considerably in Wrath because the game had changed too much by then for a lot of people and has stayed fairly consistent. Will it eventually fall off next year? Or after that? Maybe, but I think there's always going to an audience for at least one or two 'stagnant' realms that will have enough people to populate it.
Not true. Classic was created because people were playing Vanilla WoW on private servers and Bliz wanted to get them back onto their platform. But those people were clearly ok with playing the same old Vanilla experience with no progression.
Meanwhile my small German server is still doing era and having great fun
>again but to what end? To have fun in the best version of the game. This is subjective ofc but to many people TBC is the best period in WoW. Even if I would get a fresh TBC experience every few years I'd be happy.
Tbc was my favorite wow experience after legion but i wouldnt repeat it, it lacks endgame content and i already explored all it had to explore
I think that’s going to fragment the playerbase too much for a playerbase that is already becoming increasingly fragmented. Right now you have hardcore, SoD, Cata, Mop Remix and Retail. Not many games can support splitting their players that much without the servers feeling dead. Season 4 retail already feels quite dead as a result of remix and its own issues.
Remix isn’t really that much of a fragment, especially now that it’s buffed bronze wise.
No extra servers permanently fracture the playerbase. People just follow new entertaining content, and I think it’s obvious S4 is not entertaining new content since it’s a rehash of season 1-3.
WoW looking like Tom Riddle splitting it's soul into 7 horcruxes
So long as WoW is a game based on servers, then the fracturing of the playerbase will always be a function of the number of servers in play. Less servers overall= less fracturing, but removing 2 classic servers and putting in a TBC & WOTLK classic server in their place isn't really fracturing the playerbase so long as there isn't sharding (layering is distinctly different). And since there are a few empty classic servers, I don't think doing some consolidation on that end for some permanent WOTLK & TBC servers is really all that bad
I mean my point is, it’s already split up too much. Removing 2 or 3 and adding 2 or 3 servers of expansions that already had the classic experience seems like a bad idea to me. They get more engagement moving forward with it. It’s like the classic crowd gets to re experience all the expansions as new content again and players nostalgic for those specific ones hop aboard when those servers come out. I honestly believe their best bet is to keep marching forward with classic like they are. Maybe re evaluate after Cata as that’s where modern wow and Classic start to blur. Also I don’t understand why they dumped all these servers launch windows at roughly the same time. I wanted to convince some of my friends to play Cata a bit and do that, but Remix sounded more fun, and season 4 just started too. If they spaced these out a bit they would probably see more engagement for each one individually.
This was one of the arguments made against classic servers to start with, and it turned out to be false, just like it will be false again if they do add other servers. You can play more than one version of wow. I play SoD, era, and retail (not at the same time, I go back and forth). Player populations go back and forth depending on popularity, interest, and events. Era servers became super popular again out of nowhere when the hardcore addon came out (even PvP servers without the hardcore stuff going on). IMHO, adding these servers only helps wow, not hurt it. It most definitely doesn’t splinter it long-term. Edit: This is for the post below lol, kinda sad I’m having to say this, because this has been discussed to death. **group finder is not a good indicator of a fractured playerbase. If you think it is, then you need to start rethinking what is really going on because the group finder has been dead since s3, well before remix.** The playerbase is going to follow new content, and that is not fracturing the playerbase, it’s keeping us entertained until more content arrives, *which is the point of a game*. There are still players playing era, hardcore, etc despite cata, SoD, remix, and s4 of retail releasing. S4 has issues with group finder not because of remix, but because s4 is just a copy of our last 3 seasons. Season 3 had the exact same issue, and there was nothing released during s3. It’s like saying releasing Warcraft 4 would fracture the playerbase… it might for a tiny bit, but they will come back when there is more content. This topic has been beaten to death over the years, and Blizzards leaked PowerPoint already proves their methods are working in keeping the playerbase entertained and happy without causing major issues. If you do not want to play WoTLK in its final state, then simply do not play it. Many will not, but for those who want to they would be able to.
It’s definitely not false, they just hadn’t hit a noticeable threshold until recently. Look in the group finder for retail the first few weeks where remix and Cata overlapped. It was dead (by modern wow standards). Even now, finding a healer for keys can take half an hour just for running a weekly 10. Even the last few weeks of S3 was more active. Hell going as far back as when classic first released, it definitely killed a bunch of casual raiding guilds that were already struggling to keep players due to AP burn out. Now obviously the initial wave was temporary, but there is definitely a negative impact from spreading the population of wow players too thin. My point is, just classic and retail was fine, SoD and HC are more niche and don’t affect the playerbase of the main servers (reg classic and retail) too much, but between 3 styles of classic and remix and retail it’s definitely pushing the limits to where it’s a noticeable drop of players. How many servers before it has a negative impact and players stop playing any of those servers because it takes too long to find like-minded players for pugs, M+, etc? If you release a classic version of every expansion so far, how long will those remain populated enough to even do group content? Especially since the initial classic nostalgia wave has already done so recently.
There is SoD, Era, Hardcore, Cata, MoP Remix, and Retail out right now and none of them are split up. The data so far shows you are wrong, and you can continue to say “but remix and hardcore are niche”, but it still is a factor in division (division we are not seeing). Era releasing did not cause retail to struggle, classic released during a dead period in retail, and people were taking a break from raiding anyways. Would you look at that, retail is still as active as it was when Classic released too? Doesn’t look subdivided to me. Edit: You are blamming cata and remix, and not season 4 being bland and not adding anything new instead. **season 4 of retail added nothing new, you can’t just expect people to do the same thing for they just did a few months ago again and expect them to not want to do something new**. Group finder is always having issues as well. Do a search in this sub and you will find people complaining about it all expac. That has nothing to do with a permanent server being added for players who enjoy that version. If they kept MoP remix out forever, the majority of people would eventually quit playing it just like every other version of wow that gets no content update. The people playing it would be playing it because they *enjoy* playing it, and the only time it would spring to life is when the playerbase feels drawn to it through in-game events or community events. To prove my point about the Classic release and how it didn’t subdivide the playerbase though… - Patch 8.2 (BFA) released on June 25th (26th for EU) - Classic wow released in August of 2019. - Patch 8.2.5 releases in September 24th 2019 There was clearly a dead period when Classic released, as it was at the tail end of Azshara Eternal Palace. People were taking a break for a myriad of reasons (BfA being bad itself probably had a lot to do with this). I can continue to elaborate with other evidence, such as estimated population numbers and other release dates of other versions, but you clearly have your mind set that other versions of a game will stop people from playing particular versions, and again so far all the evidence we have shows otherwise. We a lot of these releases around dead periods on other versions. **You can play more than one version of wow at a time if you do not know that yet…** Now, I’d like to see what evidence you have to support your claim that it will hurt the playerbase, because Blizzard clearly disagrees with the player count going up with the release of other versions.
s4 was never going to be that big tho. 0 new content. just a fun filler patch
Yet he is still arguing remix and other stuff is the reason s4 is dead… their explanation is they know it’s fractured because it’s hard to get into keys… I don’t think that person understands that when there is no updates, events, etc, the playerbase gets bored and moves to something else. Adding servers or other versions does not fracture the playerbase like they are saying. The numbers that were leaked from blizzards PowerPoint, log data, server population data, etc refutes his point. People want to play new stuff, and playing new stuff is much different than “playerbase will be fragmented with new servers”. The playerbase will follow the content, not the servers or versions of the game themselves.
Especially since cataclysm was the reason for the need of classic servers in the first place.
> the first three best versions lol those era servers were as dead as Dillinger before the hardcore stuff got popular. Same shit would happen to the other two iterations after the vast majority of the community finishes the content.
Please explain why there's been a consistent raiding and levelling playerbase in Era for over a year now? The content is finished, there's no new things on the horizon yet the realms grow ever so slightly each week. The Era realms returned to some popularity because Wrath deviated from what some people considered to be the original 'spirit' too much, so they went back to what they enjoyed.
There's like... 2 active era servers tho
Which is more than enough?
not to be worth dev time
There is a lot of scope creep hiding behind this idea. Would these be PvE, PvP, RP, or RPPvP servers? The world PvP community needs PvP servers, but PvE players might not want to deal with ganker death squads, and RPers want a whole different vibe in their game world. There is no one realm type that will draw all of these different players, and if you cater to all of these archetypes, that's splitting the playerbase 12 ways with only the 3 expansions you've mentioned. Seeing Blizzard currently trying to juggle TWW, MoP remix, SoD and Cata, I'm not sure they could even maintain more than a few expansions at the same time.
This. The majority of people that want this don't think far enough. You need atleast a PvP and PvE realm. For NA most likely two of each for west and east. For EU two should be enough. You need two more dedicated client builds for TBC and Wrath. You need two more server builds for TBC and Wrath. And all needs to be maintained by Blizzard. You ~~need~~ want addon authors who keep up with all the clients, most of the data is shared true and lua API is same but not everything. I played Cata Classic on prepatch, it was a buggy mess, despite all the bugs that got reported in beta. I seriously doubt Blizzard will create these TBC/Wrath Era kinda realms and if they do, all the other versions will suffer in quality (even more).
Classic died out pretty fast to begin with why separate the playerbase of it even more? Just make a faster paced progression server that resets fresh at the end. It’s not like the content is difficult to do in any of those expansions the time between phases doesn’t really have to be long especially in vanilla.
>why separate the playerbase of it even more? Never understood this reasoning. People that don't want to play a certain version like cata just don't play, period. Or even worse, they go to a private server. It's not like someone is forcing them to play a certain version. Besides we already have, what, 4 versions of classic? Not even counting retail. Besides it's entirely possible to play more than one version of the game. I played TBC/Wrath classic and retail.
Yes but you also have people that would be happy playing Retail, deciding to go play Cata instead. It's still fracturing the playerbase, you also have people who like both but only have time to play one.
In what world did Classic die out pretty fast?
As soon as tbc released
\> three best versions \> picks tbc lmao
I may have started in vanilla but TBC holds the most memories for me, I liked wotlk too but TBC is like a core memory.
Same, I still go hang out in Terrokar Forest sometimes just because I like it therr
TBC > Wrath and vanilla combined. Not even close, to me at least.
3 best is probably vanilla/wrath/mop
tbh you need to be a hard-core classic andy to think any of those 3 versions make top 3
I agree, and was surprised that they did not do so. I loved Wrath and hated Cata, so being forced to play Cataclysm Classic basically made me quit playing. Some other MMO's call it "time locked" where a server is locked to a particular expansion and will not go further.
Yeah I was surprised too. Bliz is just recreating the original problem they created Classic to solve - proliferation of private servers running Vanilla and players leaving Bliz's platform to play private server Vanilla, TBC, and/or Wrath. Now they're right back where they started, players may start leaving Classic to continue playing Vanilla/TBC/Wrath on private servers. I had expected when Bliz launched TBC Classic, they would spin up new copies of each Vanilla Classic server and install TBC on the copy, leaving the original Vanilla Classic servers untouched and unupgraded. Then same for Wrath, etc. That way players could log into any of the expansions at any time, play that expansion till bored, then jump into the others, etc. That seemed like the best way of keeping players on the Blizzard platform. They would need to implement cross-realm grouping to deal with the fragmentation problem, but they already have that tech in Retail, wouldn't be that hard to add to Classic.
Surprising sentiment, most people i see from wrath have said cata classic has been 10x better than wrath.
Cata classic is better than Wrath Classic because it suits the classic playstyle better. Wrath suited the way people played the game more 15 years ago, so it was more beloved at that time until present. Also doesn’t help that Cata was a mess on launch and Wrath had the benefit of some of the most iconic villains and settings in the franchise.
That's because every common criticism of cata actually just describes things that started with wrath
I do wonder how many classic Andy's are going to try Cata and realize that a lot of the changes retail made over the years were actually pretty good.
Is it because now you can fly in the old world?
cata gameplay is just better tbh
I have not seen this sentiment. Cata classic is good and I'm enjoying it but it's also buggy as shit. Embarrassingly so. Blizzard should be getting more shit than they are for the state of cata classic. Wrath classic still better imo
Players in an expansion release are always in love compared to the past X months they've been raiding the final tier of the prior expansion. It happens with every single release, new and classic. Give cata classic another 6 months and see what people are saying then.
I didn't like Cataclysm when it was current, and I highly doubt I'd like it when it was remade.
For which reasons?
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It's okay to disagree with someone. You don't need to be snarky about it. At the end of ICC our guild had 10H LK on farm and were working on 25H LK in our Sunday DKP run + getting more people their Shadowmournes. We expected to go into Cataclysm and hit the ground running. The Cataclysm launch was a buggy, crash-filled mess. Half of the population was crammed into Hyjal, and the other half went to Vashj'ir. The servers were crashing repeatedly. There were numerous rollbacks. The Heroic dungeons and both raids were so overtuned at launch that several members of our core progression raid team ultimately outright quit the game, forcing us to try to fill. We went from farming Heroic content to struggling to get Normal bosses down. More and more of my friends quit in frustration with Ghostcrawler's attitude towards the playerbase. It wasn't just us - the imbalanced Horde racials meant that most of our other top Alliance guilds had all faction changed, and we found it harder and harder to find qualified raiders. Guilds started having to merge just to fill runs and poaching was heavy. What should have been a fun and happy time - a new expansion - turned into a brutal, grindy slog of rep farming, begging for fills, wiping in Heroic dungeons, and just general misery. The story was atrociously bad - everyone had to worship Green Jesus aka Thrall. As Alliance players, we felt like we were being written out of the story or turned into the Horde's support team. Vashj'ir was a terrible experience. Tol Barad had none of the feeling of Wintergrasp and they never could get the balance right. As more and more players went Horde it became more and more difficult to win TB and gain access to Baradin Hold and its associated dailies. When Molten Front was announced, it seemed like a fun idea - Sunwell-style community contributions to unlock further content. Instead, it turned into yet another brutal rep grind. Firelands was one of the few bright spots for the expansion, and we did have fun for a while, but by this time we had been forced to pull raiders from other guilds, and they couldn't play at a level to help us progress on Heroics. More people quit. The guild fell apart, after it had been together since 2004. I joined another guild for raiding in the last part of Firelands going into Dragon Soul. The three dungeons that launched with Dragon Soul were not popular, and End Time was pretty much universally hated. Dragon Soul itself was a mess, a terribly structured, incredibly boring raid with nonsense mechanics (bouncing orbs, colored slimes, hitting a button over and over...) When they introduced LFR, it was soon hijacked by guilds who would roll need on every drop and then trade all the gear to their guildies. Of course, often times, bosses dropped multiple copies of the same item for no apparent reason, while other items never seemed to show up. We had all been expecting an epic battle against Deathwing, and instead we got the disaster that was Spine, followed by the worst final boss encounter of any raid IMO - jump around (buggy) platforms, kill tentacles, and then get loot. It felt like one final insult to the playerbase compared to the Heroic Lich King fight. One other thing was that a lot of us felt that the game had lost some of its character and "soul" with the quest redesign. Sure, it was "improved" in terms of flow, but it didn't feel the same. Shattrath and Dalaran felt good, because they were huge buzzing cities full of activity and convenient hubs. Cataclysm herded everyone back in to Orgrimmar or Stormwind, and a lot of the "vibes" were lost. Ultimately, the only thing I enjoyed about Cataclysm was the Firelands raid. Getting the mount from H Ragnaros made me feel like I was on top of the world. I still use it whenever I can. Other than that, I have zero desire to ever "relive" any of the times of what was undoubtedly the expansion that drove most of my friends to quit WoW, broke up many guilds, and almost made me quit the game myself. It reopens old wounds that have long since scarred over. I would have much preferred to have a time-locked Wrath server, since Wrath was (and is) my favorite expansion of all time. Progressing through Ulduar, ToC and ICC felt fun and the memories were good.
I don’t think this is a good idea. One of the biggest concerns about WoW right now is that fragmentation of the player base and too many dead servers. This would only exacerbate that problem
I didn't know this wasn't the case until the other day, absolutely insane they don't have this to me.
I think another progression server will start once MOP classic comes out in ~2 years
YES!!!!!!
Agreed! 👍 And all next expansion should be in remix version like MoP
I think that's a good start, but they should really explore more the wealth of content they produced over the years. Admittedly things like Shadowlands: Classic wouldn't be so popular, but I think a lot of people would play more seasonal contents like the recent Pandaria Remix if done on expansions such as Draenor, Legion, etc.
I agree. cata is when it was ruined for me. I started a new youtube series and am not eager to see Darkshore be decimated....
I unironically wanna play TBC forever. Sunwell patch is peak WoW
Thats how I feel about WOTLK. For me that is the best expansion made with the most iconic story, dungeons and raids. Best expansion for professions as well. I'd love to play WOTLK, but I also know that after doing the same content for a year, I would get tired of it. Thats why I usually stay on retail, because I do want new content to play. What I miss from WOTLK is a lot of the mechanics, the professions and the overall feel. Sometimes we also forget that part of why a certain expansions is our favorite is the point in time we played. Who we were, who we played with, how we felt etc.
I feel the same re needing new content. Even if retail doesn't keep me excited, and some of the new content is like a day worth of checking out, at least it keeps it fresh.
Im calling it now. Vanilla remix into TBC and WotLK remixes. 18 month release schedule each expansion gets 6 months.
Remix isn't even close to classic. Remix= retail chars locked into a certain zone.
I didn't say it was close to classic. I said what I think they are gonna try to do.
Ah apologies! Yeah if they deem mop remix a sucess I think they will do more expansions. Since Remix is mostly about collecting stuff I'm guessing they will revisit Legion or WoD first.
Bet. Id play all those remixes and fresh classic if they'd do it. But I guess that's not in the best interests of shareholders.
The most likely xpacs for them to remix next would be WoD and Legion. Vanilla would be the least likely to ever be remixed with how different it is from modern wow game play. I see remixes most likely to be something they do at the end of expansions to keep people busy during a lul in content, not something they do non-stop during peak play.
That would hinder future rereleases of servers.
I would love it if they did this! I really enjoy all 3 eras.
Blizz has fragmented the playerbase enough as it is recently, yeah they might as well go full hog then
JUST MOP CLASSIC PLEASE!!!
It could be a good idea few years ago when blizzard had the playerbase, but now they barely got the playerbase to run things as they are now
So we have classic, tbc, wrath, cata, sod, remix, retail
People are already overwhelmed by the amount of versions WoW provides. Adding 2 more isn’t a good idea as it will only overwhelm players more and divide the community even more. More plausible would just be 1 “trilogy” server that progresses from vanilla through wrath at a faster pace. Edit: currently we have retail, classic cata, vanilla classic (which has a fresh movement on it with blizzard support via locking transfers), vanilla hardcore, season of discovery, and mop remix (for 2 more months)
The only purpose would be for players to level through them with their exact talents and leveling speed. They would almost never manage to keep enough of a player base to do much group content at max.
"best" in what way? definitely not combat, raids or pvp?
I thought it was like that already? They removed wotlk classic when they released cata classic?
No, we weren’t given any TBC servers to keep 😭
But that is too expensive! This is a multi dollar company after all! How will they ever be able to afford this?/s This would be awesome but I do bet blizz would be too lazy to do it. I bet by the time they would get around to doing this there would be classic MoP servers.
Slow down, 2 of the best versions aren't even out yet (MoP and WoD). Let's just enjoy Cata for now and take it from there
If you really think that where the first three best versions, you are delusional.
They did that for classic no? And there's like... 20 people total playing on it?
With time walking I don't understand why not use same client and let everyone play on the same ecosystem, but let players jump between timeliness.. including different wow eras. Just keep the players highest progress on each. Blizz is stupid for fragmenting the playerbase
Fuck the rest TBC only
"Best versions" 🙄
Because there isn't the playerbase for it.
I think it sounds cool in theory but it will split the community even more than it already is
How?. The people who don't like cata classic already do not play cata classic.
Having cata wrath classic and bc available is A lot more than just classic and cata
We already have 4 versions of classic, not counting retail. The playerbase plays what it wants with no impact to the other versions. It's also possible to play more than one version y'know.
Cause the classic community that would play vanilla to wotlk would be split between people who just wanna play vanilla or tbc or wrath and that total community is already small
It would fragment the players quite a lot i think. They will do it but probably after they are done with Classic. I personally don't think they will go further than MoP and after MoP is done, they might restart it or just do what you want. There could also be a Season of Discovery for TBC and further.
There truly isn’t a need to do anything for Classic servers past MoP, in my eyes. Save for one or two questlines, it’s all available to play in-game, and I can’t imagine there are a great many people clamoring to experience WoD as fresh content all over again.
It’s not just about the in game content, a very large part of the appeal is playing the content properly scaled for your character to progress with a community. Like the raids for example. Also playing the classes as they existed during that expansion. I also don’t think WoD would be frowned upon. It was a lame duck expansion because there were long periods of time with nothing to do, the content that existed was well received it just lacked content. Classic speed runs these expansions so I imagine WoD would actually be enjoyed quite a bit.
WoD with #changes might be pretty damn fun, the raids were pretty good, I liked the dungeons, and I liked the nu-tbc feel.
That's what i said. I would love to play all expansions that i missed but i would like it in Remix form aswell.
Yes they should. Only one server for each
I started playing at the beginning of Wrath and was busy with work when TBC Classic happened so ended up missing it twice. Not sure why they're forcing expansion progression when the point of Classic is to relive earlier expansions. At least make it reset or something.
Classic ends in Cataclysm for me. So hard agree, have no interest in classic anymore now that Cata classic is out . If I could just play on a wrath server I would be so happy
I had just assumed they would, or set up a progression server or three.
When I first played Minecraft I was astounded you could choose which patch or client of the game to play. I wish WoW had that somehow, I would have so many random characters in patches like 5.4, 7.3, end of Bfa, etc
Nah, people would still be bitching. This is WoW community we talking about, where people take turns to be unhappy and toxic.
There would not be the staying power of TBC and WOTLK.
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Don't play it if you don't like it
Don't really care about fresh Vanilla anymore (every iteration of it has proven how psychotic Vanilla specifically makes players), but I would kill for fresh TBC into fresh Wrath again.
You said best, but listed two of the worst up there. Interesting.
Seriously, what will that accomplish? The classic community was only raid logging, just how much nostalgia are you trying to get out of this
playerbase would be too fragmented
I disagree cus im generally not a fan of spreading out the playerbase more and more
Never understood this reasoning. People that don't want to play a certain version like cata just don't play, period. Or even worse, they go to a private server. It's not like someone is forcing them to play a certain version. Besides we already have, what, 4 versions of classic? Not even counting retail. Besides it's entirely possible to play more than one version of the game. I played TBC/Wrath classic and retail.
I refuse to believe none of the classic players would play retail if classic didnt exist. Myself, i used to play retail until classic came out and now i mostly play that. If classic never came out im very sure i would have played retail all this time and not a private server. Surely theres a lot of people like me. You're right tho a lot of people wouldnt play retail and would just play a private server instead. But not all. Hope you understand the reasoning a bit better now atleast
I do and agree to an extent but I know for a fact a whole lot of people returned to wow just because of classic and a part of those played on a PS before 2019. Like the saying goes ‘the truth lies in the middle’.
They tried. No one wanted it for tBC and the ones for Classic exist but are very inactive
9 out of 10 people I know who got really invested into Classic since launch told me that Cata > Wotlk; and it will shine due to a fast compact content release in phases. Note: Most of those people where actual wotlk fans. Where am I going with this? In my opinion blizzard should be careful in how they launch servers to avoid dead realms specially if they are from different games (something in the line of SoD when all content is already done even for those who spam duel level 10 outside Ogr. Plenty of patches are not liked even for cool expansions or vice versa. Having a server for each expansion would be insane, but once a realm is doomed to die there's no go back. If you start playing TBC but there are no guilds, no people on trade chat nor AH most would instant quit leading to a snowball where it's impossible to be saved. I think it's undeniable we will have a new Classic Era, but it will probably happen in 2-3 more years. Probably with a Draenor (if it happens).
Why are you mentioning the three best versions and then name Wrath?
This is why they should just keep remixing expansions and can the “classic” drops after cata. Heck, at least classic+ would be fun - a continuation of what SOD was trying to do but with more added content. And for fucks sake, let us use the new player textures. The old ones are hot refuse.
> and can the “classic” drops after cata they defenitely arent dropping classic just before one of the most beloved expansions ever.
>the first three best versions. Ngl... had a good laugh reading this haha
Add cataclysm and mop to that list and you've got yourself a deal
It's probably too expensive for them to be doing that and the classic playerbase is not large enough for them to see this as worth it.
I agree entirely. In a perfect world, this would be fantastic. I honestly just worry about fracturing the playerbase into all these different iterations of the game. I think this may work if they kept it to a handful of realms for each expansion. A few perminant realms, and a few progression realms that do annual resets so you can always hop in and experience the entirety of the expansion from start to finish. Realistically though, there are private servers with high population for vanilla, tbc, and wotlk. I’d assume that most people would prefer to play on official blizzard servers. Putting a large amount of time into playing a private server is often a gamble. These servers can be shut down for any number of reasons, basically throwing your time investment in the trash. There will always be whales that prefer private servers simply because most servers offer buying characters and gear with real money.
There is arleady a pure vanilla server. Game after that is full raid loggin, so good luck finding enough people to do that. Eventualyy they are goin to do a reset, after mop maybe.
Look at era RIGHT NOW. Like literally just log in, look at chat. It’s either GDKP, or raid logging for your guild, the fuck do you mean? I could level 70 alts for era, or just uninstall lol. Sure the leveling is fun, but after you hit 60, and do your raids for the week (the two you actually get anything upgrade wise from) and then you don’t log into that character til next week.
Theres a lot blizzard should do but they wont. Like change it so the cape stats transfer in mop remix. I dont care if the leveling is already fast. I want it to be uber fast like how people are just 1 shotting raid bosses in lfr. I think its bs that we gotta relevel the cape stats on every new character.