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

i think a lot of people will try it, die of boredom in a day and all come flooding back and blizzard will have wasted a lot of man hours on nothing.

2 Likes

Classic will probably have a massive Burst early on. It’s afterall a free side game for everyone with a retail subscription. However It will die down rather quickly since pretty much every 2nd forum tread and streamer. Do a hyperbole about classic which is based upon the differences between BfA and Classic rather then how classic acctually was.

Already now during beta people are screeching because it don’t line up with their own imaginations and expectations. This will be even more visual once it goes live. Instead we will see tons of posts about QoL changes and boring class design etc.

I really loved Classic, but it haven’t aged well… Even if i could play it and enjoy it, I don’t think many others acctually will since It’s way to dated.

1 Like

I will probably do Tol Dagor +7 on my pally then maybe emissary or raid with guild idk

Classic will change nothing, better character progression won’t outweight vastly inferior 15 years old version of wow. Nostalgia will bring some people back for a short time, that is all. Retail will continue to lose players due deliberate turning wow from mmorpg into theme park (single player) adventure.

4 Likes

Imagine being this mad that nobody likes BfA and Classic gets all the attention.

“I-I-It w-will d-d-die… now repeat the daily mantra, BfA is good, BfA is good, BfA is good, BfA is good”

5 Likes

Classic can only help retail.
It will bring more subs, players and money into the game development. Also some Classic players may be inclined to try out Modern wow and keep playing that as well.
In my opinion in the long term it’s win/win.

4 Likes

first of all stop calling it retail this is a term to distinguish private servers from the original game. Classic is part of wow, which is sold off the shelve in retail stores or purchased digitally, unlike private servers.

If you compare the 2 version of the game to eachother you will find that current WoW has a lot more to offer with much better gameplay, mechanics, raids, graphics en renewing content. Whereas classic will be played purely for nostalgic reasons, or non vanilla players’ curiousity.

There will be a spike in player numbers which will decrease over time. Especially the players that didn’t play vanilla will probably find it too slow paced, elitist and grindy and won’t even reach 60.

Either way, it’s benificial for current wow since it requires a active sub to the game, adding the returning players to the total sub count.

1 Like

That’s like… your opinion mate.

Everything will slow down a bit whilst everyone goes to try Classic.
It’ll pick back up again when the people who try it realise that Vanilla really wasn’t as great or as complex as the rose-tinted glasses made it out to be and the no changes cult drives everyone else away.
I doubt it will last.

You do realise that most these fabled “more mature” players will not have the time to play Classic right? Not everyone has the time to play an MMO and seeing as Classic was 10x as grindy as BFA, had no catch-up system (fall behind everyone else? Good luck catching up) and slow-as-molasses levelling I don’t see a lot of these “mature players” getting to the point where they can take part in Classic’s endgame (or at least not for a good while).

1 Like

Classic was never the perfect game that classic fanatics make out it was.

Almost everything was a grind in classic.
At points in levelling you would run out of quests and would just end up grind killing mobs for XP
Gold was very hard to come by, want a mount at 60, then you would need to grind a lot of content to afford one, because you spent most of your quest/looted gold in repairs, new spells/abilities or reagents.

It was very time consuming, it took a long time to get to level 60, and when you did reach level 60 there was a limited amount of content to do, there was no raid finder or group finder, want a group expect to spend long amounts of time in chat looking for one, unless you happen to have a friends list as long as your arm.

Gearing up in raids took ages, Loot was all RNG and you would be competing with everyone else to get lucky on getting your next piece. There was no catch up mechanic, fall behind and you would likely stay behind, good luck getting a spot in a raid group.

Was classic better than retail wow, simple answer no it wasn`t, it was worse. Would I have any desire to play in classic again after having played in retail. No. During its day we knew no different, Classic was the game back then, you either played it or not, if you played it in the day you probably loved it and had a lot of fun as I did, but will it feel the same playing it 15 years on. No, it will feel like what it was, a game with lots wrong with it, lots of issues and not in any way perfect, back then its all we knew, now its not.

3 Likes

Things I’m pretty sure of:

  1. At the start, there will be HUGE hype. Massive. Bigger than an expansion launch. Half of the Retail population, at least, will log on - why not? it’s free, and its timing means that it hits as the 8.2 peak is falling off. Add to that the interest from the 100 million people who have played WoW over the years who are no longer in the game.
  2. That initial wave will refresh and dissipate over a couple of months. A lot of people won’t log in the first day, or the first week. They will wait for the craziness to subside a bit. So it won’t be like 2 million the first day, and 100K the second, it will be a stream of people coming, sightseeing, leaving over many weeks, while a dedicated core stays.
  3. As 8.2 wears on, some will take to Classic as a second game. Apart from the Classic-only crowd, more people will trickle in to Classic from Retail, spending more time there as their reasons to play BfA fade. This will bolster Classic guilds and economies, making entry to Classic easier.
  4. When 8.3 hits, there will be a short-lived surge back to Retail. Even the people who came back for Classic will be tempted to get in on the current action.
  5. Beyond that, Classic will grow slowly. Apart from the Classic enthusiasts, it will become easier and easier to get going in Classic as realms get richer and better geared, so more people will trickle in. Friends will join friends in Classic.

So apart from the true Classic diehards, I see Classic functioning as a surge pool for Retail, holding people subscribed when there are droughts.

After that, everything depends on what Blizzard do next. Whill they merge and cycle realms with Fresh? will they launch TBC realms?

1 Like

Another mature and not toxic poster. And he is a classic fan.

2 Likes

What will happen? Subs will increase. But retail won’t die. I can’t see people comapining about the grind now enjoy Classic. Also there are people that can enjoy both retail and classic.

And I don’t think it will be as big as people think it will. At first yeah, there will be huge amount of players but plenty of them will stop quite early on. Archaic mechanics of Classic might turn off some people.

I can’t wait to not cast rank 1 frost bolt on my mage to conserve mana.
No I clearly won’t be playing Classic again.

But many will enjoy aspects of what the game kinda was like back then.

I expect some to spend a lot of time in Classic while others will just leave it where it belongs, in our past.

Nah, clearly the mature thing to do is to come over and give your two cents about what other players will do in a game that you are supposedly not interested in.

1 Like

I believe that there will be an initial rush when people head to try out Classic, but some of them will return to BfA after a little while.

Personally I will try it out, perhaps even cap a toon or something, but I am not in a rush with it.

There has always been a question, that has been going in my mind;
People who want to just play Classic, what do you do, after you have “completed” the game?
Every raid done, BiS-gear, enough gold, that you do not need to worry 'bout (insert gems/enchants/pots/whatnots) at all.

Why would you log into the game at that point, if there is nothing new coming to the table?

And please, believe me, I don’t mean this in an offensive way, nor anything else like that, I’m just genuinely curious.

It will die out, 95% of everyone who said it would be great, and get the nostalgia back will realize that as I, and some have said from the very beginning you can’t get back the nostalgia, classic is going to be retail wow with the same toxicity, no social aspect since everybody has guilds now, its gonna be as empty and cold as retail, just without the easy to form group finders.

70% didn’t have Guilds back then, and that’s what made the social aspect so widespread, or 90%, now everyone signs up with their guilds and friends, so its going to be the same as retail.

Nothing will happen because plenty of people log on only twice a week for raids anyway in BFA.

Because of the way Classic is implemented, retail and vanilla do not cannibalize off of each other, in fact, they work in a symbiosis-like state. Because of the fact that you just need an active sub to play classic, this gives a lot of players a chance to try retail again as well, since they’re getting both in one package.

Same thing for retail players, they’re inclined to keep their subs active and not just drop them like what could happen if classic had it’s own sub etc. In fact, I’d go so far to say that the release of classic will keep more players playing retail, because it’s a lot harder to get burnt out from retail when you have an alternative as well.

1 Like

I’m going to play both. I imagine there will be a lot of interest in Classic when it first launches, then in a few months interest will trail off. Even the Devs are prepared for this with Layering. Which is pretty smart and will hopefully avoid dead servers.

4 Likes