Warcraft Forever

[Staffan]

I'm not sure how your numbers square up when Blizzard has announced that Midnight had their highest subscriber count ever, which one would assume beats Lich King, and again their numbers surged to a new high with the Forever beta.

Really? I haven't been able to find anything official about current sub numbers, though I have seen reports that the Forever Beta is doing wild numbers. Though I do think the pages I found about current estimates are pre-BlizzCon.

 

[FrogReaver]

I'm astounded that WoW subscriptions would only serve to keep the servers going, considering their numbers. If we figure WoW has 10 million players (that's somewhat conservative based on their posted numbers), that's 150mil/month. I guess I have no idea what server maintenance overhead is lol

Servers don’t cost nearly that much.

 

[Distracted DM]

Servers don’t cost nearly that much.

A little research reveals some old data, that while their operating costs are very high, they're a fraction of their gross, even accounting for ALL operating costs. Subscriptions hardly "only keep the lights on."

 

[Staffan]

From Blizzard's perspective, though, adding new healers or tank specs doesn't ever create a significant number of new healers or tanks -- it mostly just moves existing healers and tanks around to new classes. So it may not be worth a lot of design time.

I don't have any data to back this up, but my instinct tells me that adding a new class with a healer/tank spec probably doesn't do much to add healers and tanks to the pool. But adding a healer/tank spec to an existing class that doesn't have one might, because it might entice someone playing e.g. mage into trying out healing.

That said, I think one way of getting more healers and tanks would be to bring in dual-spec from Wrath. Yeah, it didn't exist in Classic, but enabling people to easily solo on a DPS spec and swap to a tank/healer spec for dungeons and raids would definitely help.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I would just personally prefer a little more variety from a class with at least two roles than a class that just has one. It's one thing that kept me from really enjoying classes like hunters, warlocks, and mages.

One of my fondest WoW memories is the early days of TBC, when my hunter main could use his bear to tank the first few dungeons. It wouldn't even take much effort to create tank specs for hunters and warlocks -- the pets need just a touch more survivability and another on-demand taunt to hold aggro. (I have all of my damaging shots macroed to put aggro on the focus target if I'm grouped with a tank or onto my pet otherwise, which makes the bear very sticky as-is.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

A little research reveals some old data, that while their operating costs are very high, they're a fraction of their gross, even accounting for ALL operating costs. Subscriptions hardly "only keep the lights on."

I was told that about subscriptions vs. box sales by folks at three different MMOs, but it isn't exactly current info.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That said, I think one way of getting more healers and tanks would be to bring in dual-spec from Wrath. Yeah, it didn't exist in Classic, but enabling people to easily solo on a DPS spec and swap to a tank/healer spec for dungeons and raids would definitely help.

Blizzard is pretty schizophrenic on how faithful Forever is going to be to Classic -- transmog and the modern screen customization tools are hardly how the game worked in 2004 -- so I could definitely see them loosening up how specs work.

In retail, you can switch between all of them any time you're outside of combat and the world hasn't ended. I was in a raid the other day where a healer kept going LD and one of the ret paladins switched over to healing to get us across the finish line.

 

[Distracted DM]

Blizzard is pretty schizophrenic on how faithful Forever is going to be to Classic

Yeah I'm not sure if this is because they're still honing in on where they want the experience to land, or if it's because different developers on the team have different opinions, or if they're just trying to say what will please the most people. I also wonder how much extra attention they're going to get from on-high now that they exploded with popularity, way more than expected, and how that'll affect the game (apparently they did not expect the amount of enthusiasm they've gotten). I'm reminded of how Mearls and Co had to fight for 5e to even get made, and then later on when it became very popular Hasbro ended up taking much tighter control of the reins.

But as it is they say they want to cleave a lot closer to Classic than Retail, while making their own separate experience... so IDK what it'll be by release, or if that'll change drastically as time goes on. They SAY all the right things when it comes to appealing to Classic players. "If you make the game for everyone then you make it for no one," "we're not making the game for retail players," etc.

 

[Campbell]

I think there are a fair amount of people returning to game who believe that Wrath of the Lich King was peak Warcraft. They likely want more friction (and a less competitive endgame environment) than the modern game provides but also more of the modern conveniences and more dynamic gameplay than Classic. It will be interesting to see how the returning Wrath babies mix with Classic players.

Could be wrong, but I am seeing a lot of have not played since Wrath and/or Cataclysm people returning anecdotally.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

This does kinda make me want to return to WoW after....like...15 years?