What do you think will happen to retail after classic launches?

Community General Discussion
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There is a lot of of excitement for classic atm. Do you think that all these players will stick to classic once it launches? Kinda worried on what will happen to que times on dungeons and battlegrounds when leveling.

Edit: mostly worries about the bg ques. The brackets are already split in such a way that it takes quite a while to find a que.

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On the release days a lot of people will probably be testing classic, que times should return to normal on retail soon enough.

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People will finally appreciate the quality of life improvements we’ve had over the years.

Also obligatory threads about how class design isnt as deep as all those youtubers hyped it to be and how shadow bolt spam is boring.

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Seeing that you need a Subscription for retail to play Classic, I can see the numbers in Retail rising. Simply put, the people who subbed for Classic and find that it isn’t really not what they expected, would feel aggrieved that they now have this sub sitting there not being used, so they may well return to Classic?

In short nobody knows, but I think Classic is going to be a very short sharp shock for the uninformed.

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It will die down after the initial launch to a steady number that plays classic and retail will be as it was. There probably won’t be a huge change.

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Retail players will flock to Classic, some will stay others will run back to retail when they realise they cant live without their easy mode QoL free for no effort loots.
Hopefully Classic will have a steady population of more mature less whiney ‘gieff me evewyfink for fwee Bwizz’ babies. Of course there will be the odd Retail troll but everyone has an Ignore function.

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Patch in retail - more people play retail. Next patch still not here yet - more people try Classic. Those that will play both versions will move back and forth. Also during expansions transition there will be less “content drought” as more will just go Classic for the time before 9.0 hits, which also could give Blizzard more time to work on 9.0.

Not everyone. There are people that want the RP or RPG aspect of the game. They won’t rank in PvP nor be raid parser.

At least I could have a perfect DPS rotation. Imagine WoWanalyzer summary :smiley: But my “vanilla” shaman usually spam chain heals rank 1 and 2, sometimes 3 plus few ranks of healing wave and like one emergency lesser healing wave. Plus totems.

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There’s a number of factors that make classic seem like the best thing ever and basically “if you play retail, you’re mentally impaired”.

It’s just fanboys being loud and streamers being streamers, we all know what that means. :ok_hand:

From what my friends told me, nobody’s really in it for some serious commitment, more like “yeah, I will maybe check it out”, which I think would be the majority of players.
Yeah, we will see a surge of popularity, like with any new (lol) thing, some will stick some will not.

In a perfect world, that would mean everyone would play what they like and there wouldn’t be as many complaints, but in reality, retail players will cry about absence of -noclip mode otherwise known as flying, and those rabid classic fans will attack whatever retail-related at any given opportunity, as ever.

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I will still play it.

Sure i might try classic but i highly doubt i play it more than hour or two.

Classic to me is just like the games i used to love when i was a kid in 80’s and 90’s i do still love the games i played back then but most of them are just too dated for me to enjoy them anymore.

I do have problems with current day wow but i still like the game and i like that the story and game goes forward i do like some nostalgia and i do like to play games that i have played before but generally i would not like to just stay and play a stagnant version of game.

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Judging from the hardcore “vanilla” fans that have been militant about classic on the forums and don’t want to hear anything negative about their precious “vanilla” wow i highly doubt that classic will be any more mature than what we have now.

I personally just love how some of the people who are almost fanatic classic hypers tell the stories about how vanilla was so much nice from the community side and in a same sentence the same “nice” people are some of the most toxic people that you ever see.

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People might think it’s fun at the start, but may quickly get tired off it. I don’t think many will go through the leveling process once they realize how timeconsuming it is, I remember it taking a few months to reach level 60. People complain that leveling is slow on today’s WoW, how will you cope with classic I wonder? And that is not accounting for the reputation grind at max level (Scarab Lord questline, Cenarion Circle etc for example).

People may expect an exact copy of vanilla, but that will probably not be the case. Blizzard aren’t just copy-pasting old client code, they are using a client build from Legion which they reverse engineer to simulate vanilla. So it may be purely up to chance if it will resemble it or not and if people stay or leave.

Finally, at some point in classic players will run out of stuff to do once they’ve done all the content, that is how the game works and why we get new expansions every few years. I’ve heard in an interview with Blizzard that they are considering releasing both The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King servers if classic is successful, and if so there are a few issues. The first one is: Where will it end, will it eventually be a reboot of WoW with all expansions, eventually released for a second time? Secondly it’s the WoW population, there aren’t unlimited amount of players. If players are scattered across unconnected legacy servers I don’t see any healthy population on any server, nor on retail WoW if legacy servers are successful.

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:joy: :joy:

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I don’t think all the players will stick to Classic. It would be a miracle if even half do. And retail will probably go on as if nothing changed for a while, and then depending on Classic popularity, some Classic inspired designs might even be implemented to retail, those deemed successful. Win-win.

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They will go to classic, realize it’s a way bigger grind fest and timegate, and go back to live. :man_shrugging:

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Well the most toxic comment is coming from a classic fan who is asking for a mature environment on classic realm… wow ok

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It’ll be a constant cycle of jumping between the 2. Like now in BfA, loads of people are 410 and bored. They’d jump on classic till 8.2 lands. Play 8.2 till they’ve basically completed it, then back on to classic.

How its being released, if they do expansions, every 2 year’s. It’s exactly 1 year after BfA, so alternating year. 2018 bfa, 2019 classic, 2020 what ever after bfa, 2021 TBC etc

It’ll have a huge start. I’d be very suprised if it had less then 5 million players the first week. It’s the number 4 most viewed thing on youtube for this week. There’s a huge amount of hype for it.

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Heh nope.

It’ll lose it’s fun for the majority rather quickly I believe. The die-hards will prob stay (although they already complain endlessly…so far for the great community ^^), but I think the more casuals will prob miss some (QoL) changes we have had over the last 14 years.

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I think Classic will have a core of players that will be decent.
On top of that there will be people that’ll hop on and off between Classic and Retail to cycle through the contents and not be burned off.
And a third layer of people trying it but noticing it doesn’t suit them and will go back to retail or another game.

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The real mature population does not have time to play classic

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People will play and with the time realise that vanilla is not so easy as they claim.