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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

One could argue that the Lich King was the last "good" patch for WoW. What I've never understood though was there is clearly some residual demand for "down rev" versions of the game where the mechanics favored a more engaged play style, why not facilitate it? How much does it really cost to run a single realm at the Vanilla, TBC, and LK levels? So many new players where their first experience with Onxyia was soloing her with a Paladin. Just not the same as 40 people trying to bring her down without falling to the whelp adds.

Sure I don't think you could get $15/month for it but certainly $5/month or $10 a month. And they already let you "play for free up to level 20" why not just let you play for free on a vanilla server up to level 60?

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My personal intuition is that splitting your userbase like this is disastrous for a game in the long-term (to say nothing of my intuition that 90% of people longing for "the old days" are just looking for a quick hit of nostalgia, with no intent to pay long-term).

However, it's worth mentioning that Runescape now officially offers a "classic" version of the game alongside (and separate from) the modern version, which should be an interesting experiment to watch.

I think the first concern could be countered somewhat by 1) the nature of Battle.net's integration with WoW and 2) either doing it via their phasing mechanics or having a means to copy a character over at the expansion's level cap. This way, you could see what friends are playing, which expansion level, and opt to join them.

Otherwise, I do see your point. As much as I'd enjoy it if they offered new players/characters the option of playing revised post-Cataclysm content for leveling or "classic" content instead, it might pull away enough of the existing population to make early group quests painful. (Although, that could be mitigated somewhat in the same manner their cross-realm stuff currently works.)

You may be right about the nostalgic effects, although it is a pretty powerful effect and certainly got one particular company's side venture off to a good start [1]. In the times I've toyed around with TrinityCore, I find I'd play it at least 2-3 times a week if I had friends who weren't absolutely terrified of the potential for permanent bans--the old content was that enjoyable to me. Nevertheless, I recently re-subscribed to retail this February, and I enjoy it, but it feels like it's missing something. It doesn't have the same charm, but I do appreciate a few of the improvements (the "spell crunch" is miserable, however).

I'm a sample size of one, though, and that's certainly not enough to make any time investment worthwhile on Blizzard's behalf.

[1] http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/21/5913763/gog-com-back-catalo...

If done at least semi-officially it could equally be a way to bring back lapsed players as much as any splitting of user base. Many leave in major updates or exciting new releases. WoW lost loads since LK. In other games LotRO horse riding update lost 30% of the users. GW2 redesigned for the intellectually challenged. I'm sure some would want to come back to the game before it was wrecked. Maybe not so much GW2 - it was always too easy to hold interest for long.

The problem I see is old versions would be unlikely to get updates like new content or dungeons so even those hoping to play long term would get bored eventually.

Still to put WOW in perspective with other games you list, WOW's population loss and gains around expansions tends to be higher in number than other games ever achieve.

Games age and taste change too. Blizzard has done an amazing job to see so many millions of players interested. The one surprise to me is how low of level their free play is limited to.

Oh very true. Somehow they made it achieve the same as most of the rest of the MMO space together. Never quite saw why as, well, I never got hooked on it, so left early. One of the kids is still hooked on WOW and won't let us kill the sub even now!

Personally, I'd play a lot of Mabinogi Classic if they released that.

You know that is an argument about expansions in the first place? Significant player dropoffs in WoW happen in the last patches before new expansions. The userbase usually spikes up on new releases, but almost always drops lower every time, predominately because new releases gate players who were on old versions against those on the new one. Friends stop being interested, unsub, and never come back because the player base is fragmented across every level cap WoW has had.

I've always thought that level caps in MMOs, particularly the WoW variety slash-and-burn where you basically make a new theme park every two years and throw the last one in the dumpster in terms of player viability, is a destructive cycle not conductive to building real living worlds.

This brings up another point in favor of "why not".

If existing players who are willing to buy new expansions whenever they are available migrate to vanilla servers, they might as well opt out of buying the expansions, since adding new content in the vanilla servers will make them non-vanilla.

Huh.

A prudent developer might make the expansions a mandatory purchase that adds the new content in cosmetic ways.

Blizzard isn't interested in "building a living world" and never has been. From its inception the purpose of WoW has been to farm the likes of you for gold.

If you look hard enough, you'll realise "a living world" is used as a synonym to "a market".

And how do they continue to "farm" you for gold if you unsubscribe because you no longer feel a part of the world?

That is exactly why subscriptions had dropped sharply after the release of Warlords of Draenor. (the endgame was designed around the antisocial garrisons, a mistake which they have scaled back in the upcoming expansion)

By getting a small subset of players to buy premium cosmetic content and in-game gold. Blizzard came up with a clever mechanism involving game time and other players for the latter, both in order to obfuscate what they were doing somewhat and to give them a little more control over their economy.

The Blizzard Warcraft Store: https://us.battle.net/shop/en/product/game/wow

Information on the "WoW Token" mechanism for turning $ into gold: http://www.tentonhammer.com/guides/guide-to-buying-and-selli...

Ultimately, you don't matter to them. For every subscriber like you they lose because of a change, if they get two more, more casual players to sign up, they're in the black and sacrificing your membership is rational from a financial perspective.

On the flip side, you've got the EVE Online model. Expansions are released every 6-8 months as "super-patches". Like every MMO it's mandatory to be playing on the latest version, but everyone gets it for "free".

It's pretty simple to avoid the problem of having players scattered across multiple content sets and levelcaps: stop bleeding your players dry. What are subscription fees paying for if not ongoing development of additional content?

IMO you should either charge for expansions or charge subscription fees - but not both.

Blizzard releases paid expansions because people will pay for them.

Yeah, it's hard to make the business case for leaving money on the table - with every expansion comes change and change much more than the expansion cost is really what is causing the gating effect.

Treating your customers as customers rather than cash cows engenders positive feelings toward your company, and ensures continued subscription. There's your business case.

Positive feelings don't always maximize profits.

Blizzard isn't and never has been trying to create a "living world". That dream died when Ultima Online showed us exactly what players will do in an unscripted world that's as close to living as the tech of the time would permit.

WoW was, from the outset, designed to railroad players through content theme parks and give a hit of dopamine just often enough to keep them playing.

Wow was far more free in the early days. After about Burning Crusade they were under increasing pressure to allow players of all play styles and skill levels the ability to "see the content", which lead eventually to Raid Finder and gated progression. This ripped the last shreds of immersion away from the world and left the bare, creaking treadmill of "get tier X, farm tier X+1 tokens, get tier X+1, farm tier X+2 tokens..." exposed, which (for me) is what finally killed the game.

Theme Park/Resort Casino. Basically dazzle your senses while getting you to play a rigged game to massage you with variable schedule of reward. A real, living world is spoiler-proof.

I really question this logic though. As someone who played with a large group of friends from Beta to TBC, none of us would even consider picking up WoW in its current state. Obviously this is a very small sample size, but I talked to many people when playing on Nost that felt the same way.

I do not see how they would be splitting the userbase, when many of the players of this server wouldn't even consider returning to Blizzard's current product.

Everquest started doing this long ago (~2006 I believe?), where people could progress starting at the first expansion. They would slowly move a server through the expansions. EQ2 looks to have it now as well. It's pretty successful in context, if I remember right, though naturally much of the original Everquest magic wasn't quite there

As an interesting illustration of this idea, RuneScape (a popular freemium MMORPG) has done just this: they split up into the modern game and "Old School" (OSRS) which is based on the game in 2007. Some people heavily prefer one or the other, and by now the communities feel very distinct.

I don't know exactly how well it's working out for them. Now they have two games to support and promote, with about the same number of users. This number might (likely?) be higher than if they had stuck to providing a single game, but I'm not sure. It's hard to tell.

There seems to be some business risk to doing this. Apart from possibly cannibalizing your main product, it also requires two teams to support and run the two games. If you actually want the experience on the old-style server to be at all stable or compelling, you'll have to put some time and energy into them—it's more than just running the server.

Honestly, I have no idea if what RuneScape did was the right move, but it's a really interesting case study.

Runescape has enough grinding to provide near perpetual play. WoW you get the best end-game raid gear and there's a lot less left to do.

RuneScape did this in the past, they've got previous experience here. RS Classic ran alongside RS2007 for absolutely ages, and it seemed to work pretty well.

They've answered this directly numerous times. Compared to their user base, the demand is essentially zero while the development, maintenance and support costs are massive.

More importantly, the resources they have are better used developing new things for their existing properties which is what statistically all their paying customers actually want. The most persistent and universal complaint about Blizzard is that they don't produce content as quickly as their audience demands and consumes it. They'd be foolish and negligent to waste their time on anything else.

They could still outsource running old versions to a third party (with some sort of revenue share). They could have let these guys continue to run, sanction it but demand they charge X$ and pay y% of that to Blizzard.

There are some pretty obvious downsides to that plan but it's an option.

It amounts to the same thing - 'they can do some deeply convoluted, labourious thing for a few thousand nostalgic players' or 'they can focus on meeting the needs and collecting the payments of their millions of existing customers'. It's hard to see how the former makes the slightest bit of sense for them.

I actually question how much interest there would be. Nostalrius reported 150k active players, with over 800k accounts. That is much higher than I would have thought.

Where did they report this? It seems like it had a few thousand players online at a time on a single server.

I originally saw those numbers stated in one of the first articles covering this topic, but I do not remember which site it was on. However, I did see they also mentioned it on their AMA.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/4droz4/we_are_nostalri...

I'm mostly a fan of single-player games and don't feel that massively-multiplayer games can come close to offering the same level of engagement or fulfillment, apart from the social fix.

The biggest concern I've had against investing emotions into any MMO's content, is the complete lack of a guarantee that it'll always be officially available. So many quests and such get old pretty fast and eventually forgotten. There's just no way to relive that content.

Maybe a paradigm shift is needed, away from how MMO content has been traditionally designed.

Not a terrible idea. Maybe a "seasonal" server that runs through the expansions every 6 months.

That said, I'm sure maintaining different versions of the servers would actually be a huge pain. The live ops was most likely not a solved problem at the end of an expansion.

It would take a lot of back porting security patches as well as bringing certain things forward like connecting to the current bnet.

And the customer service concerns are an interesting consideration as well - Game Masters use ever evolving tools (which evolve with the game client) to be able to more effectively help players. Changing the client will break the tools which will require new tools to be developed, new policies to be developed around those tools, new (or really, old but forgotten) types of solutions for game issues that have been obsoleted.

Just imagining this small aspect of the overall challenge makes it clear to me that this type of server just would never happen on an official basis - so many cross-linked considerations and it's really hard to make a business case for almost any of them, even if it would be a lot of fun from a player point of view. Which means that allowing a volunteer community like Nostalrius is really the ideal, outside of the reality of the law which requires protecting intellectual property in all cases in order preserve it in the cases where you really want to. Could some kind of official license be made available specifically for Nostalrius?

> Just not the same as 40 people trying to bring her down without falling to the whelp adds.

It's worth noting that Wildstar launched targeting the hardcore WoW raider experience.

It failed miserably since targeting only a single-digit percentage of WoW's playerbase is not a profitable business decision.

The comparison between Wildstar and Vanilla WoW is a complete misnomer.

I played both Nostalrius and Wildstar extensively and the two were nowhere close in terms of scale, depth of world, community, lore, or any other metric you can think of really. The boss mechanics, housing, and soundtrack were great but the game was incredibly lackluster otherwise. Lore had some potential with the Drusera arc being interesting.

As for the bad: PvP balance was a trainwreck. Quests were meaningless as you'd get 30 at once and blow through each on in a couple minutes. Rep grind rewards were poorly balanced. Instances offered little reason to run them repeatedly and relied too much on the interrupt mechanic. The world was much less atmospheric barring some neat zones like Farside that you had no reason to return to after leveling through. Itemization was dull with no interesting items or stats. No secondary professions. No cosmetic pets. Instanced zones. I could go on and on but that touches on most of the major issues.

Oh, and while I love addons they needed to be more careful with just how powerful they could be within their poorly planned economy. I coded an autocrafter for the Architect profession in the first couple days and basically botted (legally) $1500 worth of currency @CREDD rates in a single week. Fun for me but rather unhealthy for the economy itself.

I played Wildstar for a couple of months after launch, and very sporadically since it went free-to-play. They basically built the game for people who loved early WoW, and (IMO) they did a rather good job of it.

The problem with Wildstar is rather like the problem with trying to get your highschool band back together. The drummer moved to another country, the lead singer has two kids, the bass player works shift work. Everyone grew up and no-one has the time (or inclination) to raid any more.

I think a lot of people (myself included) loved the idea of Wildstar but just weren't in a position to make the investment of time and effort required to really enjoy a game like that.

The last good patch was Ulduar for me. ICC was big disappointment.

Ulduar was the game at its peak. All downhill from there. I still hate how they crippled the hard modes afterwards.

Everyone has a patch they loved and was a peak for them. There are people who joined during cataclysm and think that was the best before "Panda" ruined the game.

Plenty of people think BC was the peak and LK ruined everything. I personally think ICC was amazing and the peak, because that's when I played.

MMO experiences are always the best when they are novel, there is something really special about the first time you beat a raid boss. Also later expansions will never recapture the innocence of the first time discovering a world. Then you learn how to "beat" the game and minimax your experience. Then an expansion comes out and you just can't view the content without a minimax hat on, and that ruins it.

People often long for the glory of days past, but remember that everyone also has their own frames of reference. For new players WoW is probably still as good now as it has ever been, it's just impossible for you or I to see that when we saw we had it so much better.

Counterpoint: I played since a month after Vanilla launched until about half-way through WoD.

By your logic I should be a hardcore "Vanilla was the best" player, but actually, I'd argue that most of the game peaked in TBC (the first expansion) and raiding peaked in Wrath.

MMORPGs was always about grind-to-win, ideally forcing a group play along the way - that built communities. Blizzard kinda killed that turning the game into a solo adventure - most people just logged in for a raid and be gone for the rest of the week and those casual pug raids was the last nail into the coffin of social bit, that actually kept me playing.

I've had enough in Cataclysm, but I can't really say if vanilla, tbc or lk was the best (ignoring my personal achievements in each of those, tbc was the peak of my raiding). All of those bring good memories.

I still remember entering Horde territory on a PvP server for the first time trying to complete the baby Alliance warlock quests. It was a huge thrill, and I felt completely immersed. I had many other fun times in the game and seeing the other beautifully crafted zones, however, the time commitment I wanted to sink into the game to fully enjoy it couldn't be sustained. I had to quit for personal well being reasons.

Maybe it's because my first MMO was Neverwinter Nights, a 1991 game that took the Gold Box DnD experience online, but I think WoW has only gotten better with every expansion. When it came out, most people I knew disliked it for being too simple but agreed that it had better atmosphere and polish than any other MMO. It felt like MMO Disneyland. The initial mechanics for raids and PvP were limited, but as the designers gained experience, they kept coming up with new and interesting mechanics, and the art and atmosphere maintained their high standards throughout the years. I haven't had time in the last few years to spend on high-end raiding, but I've heard nothing but praise for the raids from the top players.

The only place I see it failing is figuring out a way to keep communities together over the years. Most people's main experience with the game is social, and if your group can't stay cohesive, and few can for 12 years, you're going to get a diminished experience. It's simply an impossible task to figure out a way to keep gamers together for that long.

Other people will complain about parts of the game being too easy, but I always dismiss those out of hand. The high end parts are more challenging than ever, and the existence of diverse content is nothing against the game design. I love that I can log on for a few minutes here and there and even only play Pokemon if that's what I want in the moment. As an old-school MMO person who never saw WoW through the eyes of novelty, my perspective is that no game has managed to maintain such high quality and consistency while continually reinventing itself over such a long time. The fact that it's still the number one MMO by far and maintains a subscription model while everyone else is going free-to-play is testament to its quality. I think it's a piece of software that any developer should look at for inspiration on how to keep people engaged for a very long time.

Once Jeff Kaplan left the designer team (Post-WoLK), WoW just never left the same for me.

I think this is the reason EVE online just gives everyone each expansion free. Everybody's playing the same game, and it's included in your subscription.

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