The self-entitlement rampaging in this thread is so sad and hilarious at the same time.
Ok, so first you need to get things straight.
They greenlighted classic with an expectation of it not being able to “hold on” to many players. Doubt they had any idea of how many that’d be, but you really don’t greenlight a project like this without expecting the “tourists” to go away.
The narrative they pushed said that they expected “population stability” and “most” of the tourists to be gone by phase 2, which is also why they took a risk to promise the removal of layers by phase 2.
But here’s the kicker: It didn’t work.
I’d argue layering itself prolonged the “tourism” in classic, because of its “convenience” (let’s just sweep the long-lasting consequences of it under the rug) which kept the superficial enjoyment somewhat gratified.
But as soon as they started to present people with the downsides such as the actual effects of overpopulation when they removed the layers, as well as the increased competition for quests, resources, and basically time spent alive on PvP servers, then many happy smiles got turned upside down because the superficial part of the enjoyment flew away.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think they should’ve just opted for more servers with the vanilla population caps instead of jamming as many players into the same servers as possible with layering.
But so I think this key part of what enabled the superficial enjoyment, the layers, which kept those effects of overpopulations within more tolerable levels, and its removal is what has now kickstarted the true end of tourism in classic.
Only the true classic players will remain after all of this drama has subsided with time.
And this may very well have been intentional by Blizzard. They do want people back to retail because that’s where they earn more money from the microtransactions after all.
Classic was only meant as a filler in otherwise a very poor fiscal year by Blizzard, due to their many releases being scheduled the years after this, with pretty much only CoD for this year by Activision.
Any1 seen Diablo Immortal yet?