I returned to Classic recently as I had to take a few months off and was disappointed but not too surprised in the huge drop in players in SoM.
While we can appreciate some of the changes Blizzard made such as eliminating boosting in SoM, I wonder what is the future of Classic WOW and can it attract the same player base as it did in 2019?
Like some or many of you, its the only WOW version I fully love and appreciate but can’t bring myself to play on any of the SoM servers due to the low player count and knowing in 6 months time, the servers will be deleted or be merged with Era?
Some players believe a ‘No Changes Server’ over 2 years would have performed better than SoM but I have my doubts whether this could have encouraged players to play again.
Many players got to clear so much content recently in classic and I believe they don’t have the energy to complete the same again and with some players continuing to TBC.
So what is the future?
Does anyone think SoM should have been a continuation of Classic with new content like raids and new gear like more legendaries perhaps?
or Should SoM be a revamp of Classic with class changes, allowing hybrids to be viable as DPS, more quests, faster levelling, an extra battleground and more raids and dungeons?
or simply, should blizzard dump SoM and have a repeatable timeline from classic to TBC to WoTLK over a 6 year period with no changes?
I think they need to do something new, and by new I mean new raids and dungeons and bgs, maybe even arena, new honor system and new rewards from dungeons and more playable hybrid specs, new quests and more quests while lvling while making no EXP boosts, new quests for specific unique items in phase 1 only (like preraid bis or even BIS), those items should be connected to lore of class and race maybe. New spells for races, keeping the old one, but I mean new races for each class of that race, different spell would be in warrior dwarf and in dwarf priest, like Kevin Jordan said, his philosophy of wow is to make everything as RPG as possible which I think is right way of designing the game. We would also need new routines to farm in open world and new rep, maybe even dailys. PVP secret vendor would be nice where you could trade essences or currency that you would get from killing someone in OPEN WORLD ONLY. make more variety of items like basics: flasks and pots and stuff (like flasks where you would be able to track humanoids on minimap) or more rare stuff like rare recipes that are good for PVP with extra stamina, or even PVE stuff too. And something extra rare would be some legendary material that you would trade for a lot of essences for new legendary, ofc legendary would be obtainable from needing to do raids + open world PVP + specific group quests and more, the usual vanilla way.
Edit: secret vendor in open world would need to have multiple spawn locations and would need to wander around zone like rexxar and then despawn in another zone where he would wander like that, slowly walking from spot A to spot B then dissapear. That would balance the way of people’s abusing PVP in open world and they could not farm kills on 1 spot only.
Edit nmb 2: this wandering vendor doesn’t sound like a fix but I think it should be fixed, or give players choice to do it however they want, that can work too, i think we all can agree and let others play the way they want to.
You can’t add more powerlevel to existing vanilla content due to power creep. Not without adding 10 more levels and using TBC design.
I expect that they will release TBC based season, possibly going into TBC as well later on. Class balance and alike was raised during first Season and they commented about it. So it’s the cheapest feature for next season.
There will be Classic beyond WoTLK. There is to large pserver MoP population + player sentiment not to milk it.
In the end each old expansion/vanilla will have like few thousand of active players plus few thousand here and there during some fresh. And if 10.X won’t deliver there may not be much of future for WoW in current form anyway…
The drop off in players from classic to TBC was a lot, I’m sure there are only 4 servers which are at High/full capacity. We can expect another drop in players from TBC to WoTLK
So I’m Not confident going beyond WoTLK would be sustainable idea. If they were, we could end up with multiple Era realms for each expansion which isn’t practical.
Don’t get me wrong, alot of people love/loved TBC/wotlk (to many this is in past-tense). Like myself, I had a TON of fun in retail TBC and in retail wotlk, 2007-2010. I tried TBC-classic and I did indeed have fun, but it wasnt as fun as it was back in the day. In the years 2012-2019 I’ve been playing on many vanilla private servers, and then classic and now SoM and I’ve come to the realisation that vanilla is my favourite iteration of the game period. I think alot of players have come to the same realiation now with TBC-classic, and it will hit even harder with wotlk.
tldr: I think we will see an up-swing in classic/SoM popularity after TBC-classic concludes. classic-Wotlk will likely be less popular than classic-tbc.
EDIT: And to anyone not enjoying SoM but who want a more “pure” vanilla, the classic-era server Firemaw still got a small- albeit active population playing. Currently 2-3 guilds on each side.
Players play specific expansion private server, going from expansion to expansion is new for Classic. In the end if given expansion will be “last” players will leave as soon as they are done with the content. They may go back to start but likely they will go play other games or new retail expansion if good. Blizzard goal for Classic is to kill each expansion private servers and get missing subs in a year in between retail releases.
Don’t expect each expansion classic era realm to have more than few thousand players. With good fresh cycle bit more. But the initial wave will not be replicated.
Pimp my vanilla is not viable. SoM and custom vanilla pservers are testaments to that, there just isn’t any major draw to them. Not sure why slapping WotLK ontop of vanilla content (which classic+ essentially is) will do anything but remove interesting aspects from the unique version that is original wow.
2019 Classic was a 1.12 copy paste, they need the well thought out Nost features to do fresh justice. There’s a reason why the classic movement started from the forced closure of Nost. Otherwise, have fun playing retail “project 60” that is Classic+, or cater to a miniscule 7.5k players on Season’s of X.
Era servers or era fresh will always be on the downside when there is a “current” expansion present. WoTLK, Cata, MoP… will always draw more players while they are “current”.
And as each player has a different vision of what alteration of Classic they want to play there will never be a universal “season” appealing to the “majority”. FRESH nochanges or FRESH manychanges will not be as popular as well. After WoTLK some may want to start again from start but I can’t see people agreeing on what and how in terms of Classic
many people won’t play cata and mop as you see in pservers, wotlk lordareon alone has around 15k people, while tauri the most populated mop server has barely 500-1000 active players, trust me man, there is a reason why people like classic more then anything, and that is pure adventure like RPG game with good balance in open world and competitive content.
Only do not choose the RP-PvE Hydraxian Waterlords That’s my solo-server 