The Future of WoW Classic

Recently a lot of wow classic players are discussing the future of wow classic: wow classic tbc beta, release and transfer methods.

Today we are going to share some predictions on the future of World of Warcraft classic. Welcome to MadSeasonShow’s video guide. An analysis, commentary and some predictions on the future of classic wow including The Burning Crusade Classic, Fresh Vanilla and Non-fresh Vanilla. All the content of this article is quoted from his video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otW6Ahn4MI0

 

Lots of news in the realm of classic recently starting off. We have some unconfirmed leaks regarding burning crusade. I wanted to mention this first because it's the most recent big news that most of you are probably interested in TBC Classic Beta in Mid-February, and Blizzcon is online this year on February 19th, so if the leaks are true, it's probably an announcement plus the launch shortly. After that 2.0.1 Prepatch will be released on Mid-April, this is when we got the new talents, new honor system and where everybody could buy any pvp gear class balance and all sorts of stuff, because it's unconfirmed, I don't go too crazy with that video by staysafe who originally broke the news along with Nano who worked on nostalrius.

I want to talk about here is the future of classic in general and how we'll transition to bc, because there are a ton of questions and no answers, but we can draw some logical conclusions. As you know we recently had some interesting surveys about not only tbc classic, but also even fresh vanilla classic.

Would you play fresh?

Would you play bc?

What's your interest in each of these?

We also had some surveys regarding the transfer methods from vanilla to bc, so in this video you can learn them. I'm also mimicking all survey questions, and use the community information to get an idea of what Blizzard will do, so share them with everyone.

Right now Naxxramas is out and there's no more new content. Once you kill Kel'thuzad, you've cleared the hardest raid in the game. What will happen to the player base is the game by itself enough to carry an active population to catch up.

Blizzard had started sending out some surveys for bc classic in March, 2020, and it was just a wait-and-see game. No one really knew what the future held, but those questions combined with some interviews all, and it confirms the recreation of the game's first expansion.

 

Fresh Vanilla

I want to talk about Fresh Vanilla firstly, since that's the new development in the background even back during phase one launch of classic. There's been talking about the fresh server from the community as the name implies new servers starting from phase one are launched, no transfers of any kind. Molten core & Onyxia are the only 40 man's unlocked raid, and the game goes through the same or similar phasing schedule that it went through from August 2019 to today. This is what we got for questions in the survey.  Not only players are interested in phase one, but also original server and classic burning crusade, so obviously here they're trying to gauge interest on how the community will split up. When all of this stuff is released, I'm pretty in touch with the community. These days I always have my ears to the ground again. I'll have these polls for you to vote on, but I think most people are leaning towards bc classic right now for a few reasons.

Reason 1

Although it's not really new obviously since it was released 14 years ago, it's new in the classic scene and a new expansion with updated balance, more raids and new features  such as arena, two new races, new zones professions. I think in general it's more appealing to somebody who's already played classic vanilla, even though both options are really appealing, especially if they fix a lot of the stuff in vanilla classic. I think overall there's more interest in bc and I can guess that's the way the poll is going to go.

Reason 2

Although there are a lot of people who want to start fresh, there's also a lot of people who want to continue their characters. People are worried that all of the hard work, they put into their characters will be for naught. What will happen for their guild and communities? Classic players don't really like change if you haven't noticed it yet, so there are a lot of people who want to keep their next gear, ranking 14 titles, classic wow gold and so on into the outland. 

Reason 3

Although I'm not too invested into the private server scene here, from my understanding the burning crusade is much less explored than vanilla, and the order of popularity follows the original expansion release, so tons of vanilla servers and a few bc servers are less wrath, including bfa for those who really loved island expeditions.

I guess no judgments, so I want to say bc is less salt than vanilla or at least not as many people have played bc original launch due to this increased scarcity. I think that both bc and fresh would be quite successful. Burning crusade is pretty obvious and doesn't really need an explanation. It's the natural progression of the future of classic. As for fresh servers, we have the private server seen as proof. It's been going on for over a decade and its longevity is based around perpetual fresh starts when the servers shut down woefully or get shut down by blizzard. There's always a new one to take their place and that's been going on since 2007 even when vanilla originally ended.

 

Although I think it really gained steam around the cataclysm era when blizzard removed the old world, so in summary I think bc classic will come out, and it'll be very successful. Fresh classic will come out, and it'll be very successful.

 

How to Transfer from Vanilla to BC

I want to talk about the transfer methods from vanilla to BC. If you remember that old survey back in March: they pulled people of four different ways into moving into the expansion.

1. Start a brand new character from Level 1 on a new Burning Crusade server

2. Start a brand new character from Level 58 on a new Burning Crusade server

3. All existing servers transfer to burning crusade, and you have the option of transferring off to permanent (non-fresh) 60 cap vanilla servers

4. All existing servers stay capped at 60 vanilla servers, and you have the option of transferring off to new servers that progress to the burning crusade.

 

Everybody can vote on this, so we can get an idea of what blizzard is looking at, but first let me cover them each and each method has their good sides and downsides.

 

Let's start with Option 1 which is fresh level 1 positives. That is a fresh start, the idea of starting fresh is appealing to a lot of people. Some people ask: is it too late to start classic, regardless of the game people don't like starting it when everybody else is way ahead of them, classic case fullness rammus gear, a ton of wow classic gold and so on. Sure they can get gear fast, my guild disenchants, and quite a lot of AQ gear at this point.

I think the major issue is that people don't necessarily want to be fast tracked unless they're a streamer.

The normal person just wants a fresh and even start day one with everyone else. That's the major poll of fresh one servers. The economies are in shambles due to blizzard's poor policing of botting and multi-boxing are reset specifically regarding multi-boxing. That's banned now, so fresh servers would have a better economy for that alone.

Now just how many people would actually go back remains to be seen that's the purpose of the survey questions but the door remains open with this method, and this leads me to the downsides.

 

The downside 1 is that although the door is open again, we don’t know how many people will go through it. The characters are still there on the server, but my prediction is that the average player is going to play on a fresh new bc server over a game. It's an additional server at some points, so having these fresh servers from one server, offering no solution to the threat of all of the servers.

The downside 2 is the yang to positive one starting from scratch can be as bad as it is good. I'm sure not everybody wants to start from level one, and they want to take their characters with all of their gear and items and gold pvp titles into bc, so this would be a forced restart for everyone which would definitely cause some controversy.

The downside 3 is subjective, that's the fact that this obviously isn't how we transferred to bc back in 07. The way it worked is that bc came out and every server forcibly progressed, so the idea is that this option goes against no changes.

If you're curious but moving on to Option 2: from Level 58. This shares all of the positives and negatives of method one instead an additional positive is that at least you don't have to level again, you wouldn't take your gear vanilla wow gold or other items but at least you don't need to level. The downside is that you don't need to level, and just completely kills the old world. Although it's not specified, I'm assuming it's only a one-time thing and you can't spam 58s. If that were the case, that would be super broken. Because you could spam transmute alts and make primal mites spell cloth, and other similar items completely worthless, but if it's just at level 58, there are plenty of people focus on one character, they have just one level 60 because that's all they have time for, so this method would result in 90% of the eastern kingdoms and kalimdor to be completely abandoned, which is just plain unhealthy the expansion. Of course you can focus on the outland but vanilla is still a huge part of the game. A big draw of MMOs is that online sprawling world and everywhere you go, there's something going on. I just think that 95% of the population being loaded directly into these seven zones into the outland would be plain wrong, because we're playing the world of warcraft, not the world of outland.

 

Option 3: the first positive point is that a lot of people don't think about. In my opinion because it's sort of hidden in plain sight, and this is the best option for combating against servers. With this method, the population of all of the servers we have right now maintains into bc, assuming that my prediction of most players moving forward to bc is correct. That's really important and blizzard can make an amount of permanent non-fresh 60 servers appropriate to the people who would play permanent non-fresh 60 servers and as long as they don't make too many, these servers would actually have enough people to support. The people could find guilds, run raids and all that good stuff, it wouldn't maintain the non-fresh communities but it wouldn't maintain the non-fresh population relative to the amount of servers they end up.

The second positive point is that this maintain established communities for those who want to move into bc again. Most people who want to play vanilla forever will do that through fresh servers where they just keep restarting over and over, and they always have something to work towards, so this option will be the most healthy and maintaining the current server communities, so you would see the same people and same guild that you see.

The third positive point is that you keep your actual character that you leveled and Geared pretty self-explanatory, and you no need to reset progress.

 

 

Option 4: we have all servers stay vanilla and you have the option to transfer to burning crusade. I think the only upside is that if people choose to stay non-fresh vanilla, your community remains intact but if people choose to play vanilla forever, they're going to roll in fresh anyways. One of the survey question asks for where players will spend their most time with non-fresh 60? It isn't even listed as an option. I think that all of these servers would be leached from both fresh and bc servers, so you're having all of these original servers that have a high potential of just dying as the population migrates away, so I think this is the best option.

People keep their characters communities remain relatively intact and most importantly as opposed to the other three options, this is the method that best combats servers dying.  We have now theoretically would remain relatively the same and for what I predict to be a small percentage of the people who want to play forever on the non-fresh 60 lock servers. Blizzard can make a few of those and retain a healthy population, this option I think would be the healthiest for bc, fresh and non-fresh. Personally I will vote for this and I also predict that's what blizzard will do, because I think it's the safest option and they usually go with the safe choice.

 

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