Back in 2019, it was known that Classic would bring a proper Blizzard classic experience, which was delivered in the form of things that had been forgotten because private servers hadn’t implemented them, such as some scripted events in open-world quests.
Now, in the recent news, there is no information on the pre-patch event, it only says about how the world will be shattered and new races will be introduced with the pre-patch, which is coming in less than a week - quite short time to conduct an event that originally lasted 2 weeks. And yet, the event still hasn’t started in WotLK Classic. Also, the WotLK PTR has just updated to a state that resembles an original post-launch state for accounts that hadn’t purchased Cataclysm yet - everything is in the post-launch state (some things even in MoP state), but you can’t level past 80, start new quests or enter Cataclysm zones.
If that’s going the case, and all you want to reproduce is low-effort buggy private server experience from back in the day, then I suggest you make Cataclysm Classic completely free of charge, to serve as an advert of the retail version, or perhaps the Classic Era and the upcoming progressive Classic re-run (because you are planning that, aren’t you?). You can’t compete with current private servers anyway, because they not only run much smoothlier and have less technical issues, but also have more accurate reproduction of Blizzard content.
And then what? Create RMT shops where any items and characters would be printed? Don’t tell me private realms exist only on donations and visual appearances sales? Not my Warcraft.
The attitude is the biggest problem, will anyone buy it for 150 euros on a private? obviously, but the same people buy it here too. The difference is that here you do the same thing in a slightly different way.
You’re not wrong there. Players with P2W mentality would do it with or without WoW token either considering how open gold selling is. Hell I found advert on first guide regarding getting Shadowmourne. At least here it will take time since would be buyer still needs to complete the questline.
Well GDKP still have to make effort and be lucky with the drops. That a different kind of RMT rather when private server admin just enters command and adds something unavailable to others. I can farm gear and achievements with guild for same effort as GDKPs put into their runs, they are not getting those out of thin air.
I think this is not entirely true, for example, if the topic is a farm legendary like shadowmourne, in a guild where there are 1-2 raids per week you have to work for the rank to be the priority person who will receive the shards. In a gdkp you just have to buy gold, it’s not a problem if you’re worth almost nothing, they’ll boost you for it.
only from Cataclysm? It would cost them almost nothing because there are few people who will sub just for Cataclysm. Most people will either have sub and play other versions as well, or not have sub and not play.
While it could bring new players to retail and WOW in general
this will happen if Blizzard repeatedly fails to deliver decent quality experience.
So far:
TBC became unplayable on PvP realms quite early, and it wasn’t fixed until WotLK prepatch when they opened Thekal, which they killed shortly after
The WotLK prepatch event was cut off prematurely, making a weekend trip enough to miss the zombie apocalypse part, even though the prepatch continued for a few more weeks. What was even the point of that? Was it intentional to just troll UK people who were grieving for the Queen?
Now apparently they’re launching Cataclysm the private server style - they’re updating the server to Cataclysm, but locking the new content off, instead of making a prepatch with a prologue that opens up the expansion lore like official servers. I’m wondering if they’re also going to make dungeons require level 86 until they’re ready, like private servers did back then - looking at the PTR’s world map, seems like they are.
