Assuming Classic is a success, what is the future of Classic servers? The most probable option is that Blizzard releases The Burning Crusade for Classic, following the same path as Classic.
But playing with Classic Beta has lead me to believe that TBC made several big mistakes, which weakened the setup of Classic WoW. In some ways, an alternate TBC, with several changes and essentially new content, would be a better future. Of course, Classic would have to be spectacularly successful for Blizzard to green-light something like this. And even then, they may not, believing that fidelity to what was released is more important.
The biggest mistake, in my opinion, was having the Blood Elves join the Horde.
In Classic, the Horde has a very strong identity. They are the monsters, banding together for survival. In the immortal words of Zangief from Wreck-It Ralph, "You are bad guy, but this does not mean you are bad guy."
The blood elves really weaken this. They're pretty elves. Blizzard tried their best to give them a dark backstory, but when you join a group where 4 of 5 characters are blood elves, it just doesn't feel like the Horde, not the way a Classic Horde group does. Now, maybe Blizzard did need a pretty race to balance the factions numerically, but that balance came at the cost of the Horde's identity.
What I would suggest is that the Alliance gets the Blood Elves, and the Horde gets the Worgen. Werewolves are classic monsters, and would fit in with the Horde. Of course, this would invalidate pretty much all of current WoW's story lines.
A later expansion could give the Horde goblins, and the Alliance draenei. Keeping the Horde's identity as the "monstrous" faction, and keeping the Alliance as the "normal RPG" faction would serve make the factions more distinct.
I think the biggest weakness of TBC was moving away from 40 man raids, and then doubling down on the bad design and going 10->25 man setups. Would be really interesting, but a ton of work, if they rebalanced all TBC raids into 40 man raids. That assumes of course that the plan is for people to move from Classic into TBC. If the plan (somehow) is to keep people in Classic, then non-issue I guess.
ReplyDeleteHmm. I'm not really sure I consider the move from 40 to 25 to be a mistake. However, I do consider the whole 10/25 split to be a mistake, so maybe you are right about the first.
DeleteMoving from 40 to 25 means every guild drops the lowest 15+ members from their roster, which is a direct hit to the social net of the game. And you don't make up that difference by weaker guilds suddenly being able to field a full 25 man raid, because even if they could, that smaller group is made up of weaker players (otherwise they would be in a functioning raid guild already), and those guilds collapse due to lack of progress.
DeleteBringing 40 means the 10 or so good players can carry a lot of others through the content. 25 slims that margin down. 10 was tuned to basically not allow those sub-par players on the roster to begin with.
I think you under-estimate just how much churn there is in the raiding guild sphere. Guilds die and guilds are born all the time. I remember Vanilla being a time of rampant poaching by higher guilds from lower guilds. Or guilds getting stuck at specific bosses, and then everyone leaving.
DeleteYour proposal to not just present The Burning Crusade, but to make changes to it, no matter how logical, are an interesting twist on the discussions. I can't think of a game company that has done progression servers and made changes to the game "history" while doing it. It could be done, but what a can of worms that opens. If any company would have the … I'm not sure what word I want...but they make changes as they go and are unmovable in the face of protest. Ever since Cross Realms, I think, they do what they want. So, if they did a Burning Crusade version and rewrote large parts of how it played out with the current development sensibilities...flames, flames everywhere.
ReplyDeleteI don't think this is likely. Just going with regular TBC is a lot less work, what the audience expects, and feeds the nostalgia of the audience.
DeleteAn alternate future would be expensive, and very likely to be received badly by the crowd that is most interested in Classic.
From my experience in Vanilla, on our server the same top 3 guilds on both Horde and Alliance existed from launch to Nax40 (we all had a shared message board), and while member churn did happen, guild churn did not, at least not at the top (I also know the few PvP focused guilds, once the ranking system came out, stayed active until late vanilla as well).
ReplyDeleteGranted that's only 6 guilds, but with a roster of about 60 people each, that's 360 real people on just one server all involved in top-end raiding, and many many of those 360 would have no chance of seeing that content and staying around if not for leadership/officers of those guilds pushing everyone else forward.
It's the same in any 'real' MMO; in EVE Corps of thousands consist of a small minority of leadership, and then countless cogs in the machine who, left alone, would have quit years ago. When you reduce how many cogs said leaders need, you reduce how many people they provide content for and keep active.
Does Alliance still get Draenei? I need my space goats!
ReplyDeleteWell, in my alternate future, Alliance would get Draenei in a couple of expansions, and Horde would get Goblins.
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