Imho they should open fresh classic vanilla servers. Old ones have too much gold farmed by bots and AH is dead. Everything costs thousands of gold and almost nothing sells. I tried starting on biggest server and it was bad.
Cata was dead before it even opened. All people I knew back from Nostalrius and from Vanilla - WOTLK and maybe two of them wanted to play on Cata.
Played on a private servers in the past ( tbc and wotlk ones) and after few years got bored of.
Far from a mistake, have you seen the activity on cata realms? Im playing more retail than classic and good to see both are going good.
Because players wanted to progress. Why dont we just raid Molten Core over and over until end of time?
The thing is; how much more activity would it have been if they stopped at WotLK? The problem is that when Blizzard started going from Classic to BC to WotLK and then to Cataclysm they lost a lot of players on the way. So they made a new set of Classic servers, but it was too late, because those who didn’t want to play Cataclysm couldn’t drop over to servers that didn’t progress to Cataclysm, loosing hours upon hours of game play. Had they let the players decide if they would stay on Classic, BC, or WotLK I think there would have been a lot more players on them. But since they forced the users on to Cataclysm, those who didn’t quit stayed there. Because even Cataclysm is better than Retail.
Yeah the realms went from full pop in 2019 to mid pop in 2024. That’s a clear decline.
And, of course, that has nothing to do with the fact that they evolved the Classic servers to BC, then WotLK, and then, disaster over all disasters, to Cataclysm?
This is a complicated problem. Fundamentally people haven’t been able to find a clear way to delineate between “when is it classic” and “when is it retail”.
For me, they’ve already gone way too far. tBC has some additions to the old world but unfortunately also replaces it for max level content, but for me even WotLK moves into retail because it breaks a hilariously huge number of core design goals of the original game, which tBC does not.
In ant case, the issue with moving towards retail is you start competing with retail which is a better retail and has all our original characters.
I will simply refer to what was said by the original vanilla design team from 1999-2006: This was a chance to go in a different direction. Keep making vanilla for those that like vanilla. If you don’t add content, one of its core design pillars collapse, which is the constant stream of content, but if you change and modernize the gameplay, it’s also not Classic. The solution is Classic with additional content.
Oh and, for the record, SoD is not that. It has very limited additional content and mostly consists of gameplay systems changes where the main objective is to faff around with WoWHead because it’s impossible to solve on your own, which honestly nobody asked for. At all.
Imagine with wotlk raid gear trying to lvl in pandaria. You probably get 1 shot by everything. You then cant even one shot critters.
Retail is scaled because of chromie. But classic is the old way.
I agree, wotl is the last classic wow expansion.
cata marks the beginning of retail (modern) wow, so in my eyes there is basicly 2 retails where one is up to date and one got stuck in time.
I would much rather see a classic launcher with servers dedicated to vanilla, tbc and wotlk.
and any other expansion interests should be put into chromietime in retail. (and perhaps remixes)
Wotlk classic ahhh yeah where u just raid logged and did nothing like nothing else such a fun expansion
no that would just be waste u have vanilla already thats enough
“What I like is necessary, what other people like, and I don’t like, is a waste”… That’s how you sound
Because wotlk and Cata are very similar both.
But the decline comes from the fact that more we progress the more the endgame becomes challenging, classic strength was the fact that you could clear all content with relative ease, if you wanted a bigger challenge you could join a speed run guild.
But as expansions go on so the difficulty of the content increase making people leave or not finding worth to spend time progressing on a boss.
I loved Cata, it’s the Pandas that made me quit for a while
Pandas were the last good thing added to wow
if people wanted tbc/wrath server enough they would cry for it they clearly don
't so yeah a waste
WotLK and Cata similar? Maybe in gameplay, but they destroyed the geography of the world. THAT was what got to me the hardest.
The world was already destroyed with TBC when the focus was only on Outland.
There were still a lot of players in Stormwind (Ironforge and Darnassus has never been very popular). And you always found low level guildies and other players leveling up. But I guess you didn’t like BC much, neither did I, but I loved WotLK.