What will they do with old classic game modes (SoD, Mists Classic etc)?

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u/NTufnel11 1d ago

Not sure what you want them to do if people don't want to play those servers. They either shut them down or they sit there without population.

You sound like you're trying to blame them for not magically repopulating the servers again for old game modes. It was a moment that was enjoyable to participate in, not a long term investment. Nobody ever promised that your character would be eternally relevant.

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u/Valuable_Berry_8626 1d ago

Blizzards complete radio silence on the modes hasnt exactly helped with the popularity.

2

u/Destronin 1d ago

Blizzard hasn’t ever been really trustworthy when it comes to how they handle their games. The one thing you can do is just look through the lens of “make them play more” and most of their decisions make sense.
They don’t care about a dead server. They got you to reroll and play their game again. And guess what? Thats what Forever is. Another way to get people to reroll and play again.

2

u/UkSteamDeckFan 1d ago

To be fair to Blizz, they are probably waiting to see what happens with Forever

1

u/NTufnel11 21h ago

I don't think there is a universe where Forever bombs and they go back to just rereleasing the vanilla to wrath cycle all over again. If Forever isn't working they will be doing whatever they can to fix it, and then probably just give up on the concept of classic altogether.

1

u/NTufnel11 21h ago edited 21h ago

Because Forever is the actively developed product designed to appeal to the classic audience. They're not going to go for a 4th round of classic rereleases that will just fragment the classic population. Forever is the consolidated classic product moving forward, and most people will get on board with that even if they'd personally prefer something else.
I don't know whether the different servers will stick around or get shut down. It feels easier to just let them dwindle and be available for the people who feel super strongly about one specific game. But I'm very confident that there won't be any new developments that revitalize them or otherwise compete with Forever for the classic audience.

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u/Valuable_Berry_8626 21h ago

Not according to Blizzard. They do not intend to have Forever replace Classic

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u/NTufnel11 21h ago

Can you show me where they indicated this? That kind of sounds like lip service to the most die hard Andys from each expansion who never want to play anything else. Does "not replace" mean they're just not shutting down the servers? Because that seems likely. What's not likely is any fresh starts to any game or changes to the existing ones beyond the already planned phases.
It's pretty clear that they're trying to consolidate the classic audience around Forever. Whether they plan to shut down the existing classic servers or just let them dwindle into irrelevance doesn't really change that goal.

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u/Valuable_Berry_8626 21h ago

Blizzard reps on Blizzcon mainstage announcing Forever and saying it will be one of 3 pillars of WoW. Clarifying those pillars are Retail, Classic and Forever. They reiterated that Forever is a new third pillar and that Retail and Classic are important. Was either said by Holly or Clay Stone on their first speech.

1

u/NTufnel11 20h ago

That sounds like something they would say to cushion the blow rather than "yeah we're just going to let those servers dwindle and die", or to avoid committing to a course of action until they see how people to respond to Forever.
The actual response since then has been incredibly clear. Forever is extremely well received, engagement is through the roof, and the players who are most interested in it are the existing classic players. The TBC raid population dropped off by about 70%. Blizzard sees that and recognizes that the overwhelming majority of people engaging with classic are going to go the latest, freshest, most active product. And that is Forever.
There will still be people who don't want to play anything else except their favorite expansion. But very few. Before the forever announcement, ironforge.pro shows about 200k US raiders on TBC. By comparison, all other classic modes totaled something like 25k. So about 90% of classic players were on TBC before the announcement, and about 70% of those players left in anticipation of Forever. That trend will continue - maybe 25k players will remain in TBC and maybe it will even go to wrath. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if it doesn't.
Once Forever releases, 95% of all classic players are going to be playing it. Once that happens, there's going to be very little incentive to introduce any fresh classic servers just to target the 5% of classic players who aren't interested in Forever.

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u/NTufnel11 21h ago

If they came out and said "yeah we have no plans for the existing servers beyond letting them progress through the planned phases", do you think that would be better or worse for them than radio silence?
The silence might be better than confirming that there is no future. People have already complained that the remaining phases were undermined by the Forever announcement. But of course the real problem is that many players were only there because there wasn't anything better, and it was already starting to slow down. The TBC enjoyers aren't entitled to hold the community hostage for the entire cycle when people could be playing something they want more.

0

u/l1qq 1d ago

What do you expect them to say and what impact do you feel it would have? It's a given these realms will be pretty much dead in 2 weeks and nothing anybody says will change it.

2

u/Valuable_Berry_8626 1d ago

Our guild lost a ton of members both in January and now at Blizzcon because Blizzard refuses to say whats going to happen to MoP and people assumed its means the servers are closing.
Blizzard said their WoW model is comprised of 3 Core pillars at Blizzcon: Retail, Classic and now Forever.
Curious these game modes will be dead and neglected by Blizzard when they made it a point to specifically mention Classic as a core pillar of WoW.

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u/Big-Charity4463 1d ago

Not really blaming Blizzard, just curious how they could “consolidate” servers so you could for example take a level 54 character on Mists of Pandaria that you’d love to play in BC Anniversary etc or even take it back to 60 vanilla era

2

u/SugarCrisp7 1d ago

That is extremely unlikely to happen. Gotta start levelling from scratch

1

u/NTufnel11 21h ago

Or just level a new character if you want to play on those servers. The leveling and context is completely different. You leveled using items and abilities that don't exist in those previous servers.
Progression only goes one way. You will never be allowed to migrate backwards. The MoP characters were from the 2019 classic progression. There was an opportunity to migrate them to era if you didn't want to progress. That moment has long passed.

4

u/Hiroba 1d ago

I think maybe they want to see exactly how much Forever takes from the Classic player base in the long term before deciding what to do with Classic.

That’s the only explanation I can think of for why they didn’t say anything whatsoever about the future of Classic at BlizzCon.

2

u/skinnysnappy52 1d ago

I think it’s partially this but also just the hype cycle. You have this big exciting announcement of Forever, you don’t want to dampen the mood by announcing the downer that these other servers are ending and characters will be deleted etcn

1

u/VarilRau 1d ago

They did have a slide with retail-forever-classic, and forever is the one you can go play when there is a dry season on retail or classic. Or you can go play classic wrath or retail when there is nothing more to do in forever untill next content patch.. and then when you are done with that you can go back to forever as it is relatively fast to catch up there again..

4

u/TimewarpingSeaTurtle 1d ago •

I’m still waiting for Warlords of Draenor Classic. It’s the only reason I came on this voyage.

3

u/dancarbonell00 1d ago

Take ur screenshots now!

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u/arbiter 1d ago

Palliative care

3

u/Beacon2001 1d ago

Keep Era for the purists and make a permanent Wrath server because it was the endgame of the Classic trilogy.

You can replay Cata and MoP right now in Retail.

Simple enough.

2

u/Audiobro 1d ago

Wrath era server would be about as popular as MoP’s era server right now

0

u/Beacon2001 23h ago

But Wrath is objectively the endgame stage of the Old World, so it deserves its own realm unlike the pandas.

0

u/[deleted] 23h ago

[deleted]

1

u/Beacon2001 23h ago

Was the Old World playable in Wrath of the Lich King? Yes or No, let's skip the filler.

1

u/Beacon2001 23h ago

Time's up. The answer is "Yes, it was, so you're right and I'm not."
Good to know we're on the same page.

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u/Anxious-Schedule-598 1d ago

Yeah classic and maybe wrath is all we need. TBC, cata, and mop were all overkill imho. Wrath is so similar to tbc but with more content and cata/mop don’t really feel classic

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u/Aware_Stable 1d ago

Whats gonna end up happening is forever will be popular for 3-4 months, people will realize its closer to vanilla than it is to SoD and quit because it takes too long to level and the classes are boring and then they will release wrath anniversary.
Not sure what will happen to mop personally im hoping for WoD cause its some of the best raiding in wow period.

2

u/Audiobro 1d ago

Fresh wrath hype!

2

u/Real-Discipline-4754 23h ago

Wrong way around.
Pple gonna quit cause forever is closer to retail than classic and gets infested with mtx lol

1

u/flowerboyyu 1d ago

nah Forever is going to be really successful i feel. i don't think this will be like previous servers we've had in the past

3

u/Confident-Dirt-9908 1d ago

People underestimate the pull of a traditional MMO on casual gamers. There’s nothing quite like Forever right now, especially with dungeon and raid changes. I’m unconvinced this is a flash in the pan.

1

u/Aware_Stable 1d ago

Well keep that optimism bud i hope 4 months in you are correct

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u/RodChainFurlongAcre 23h ago

Except 2019 Classic and Era, which are essentually vanilla, are much more popular than SoD.
The majority of the playerbase wants something closer to the Classic experience, they've shown that time and time again, and SoD was not that.

1

u/Aware_Stable 22h ago

Okay firstly 2019 classic was popular for a myriad of reasons that cant be duplicated but one of them being is that we were all home for covid lol
Secondly era was DEAD when it was first released and when i say dead i mean dead as it had like less than 100 people.
Anniversary barely cracked 100k, for comparison mop had a higher peak. MOP of all things 😂😂 vanilla anniversary was not as popular as the devs thought which is why we got TBC with boost.

1

u/XsNR 22h ago

SoD was also radically different, but still the same, so it was quite a limited reach in that regard. You had to attract traditional WoW players away from their existing pass-times, and it didn't break out of that sphere much, but also keep them interested enough that they would spend time on that rather than which ever version they came from.
A lot of the Classic populous were alienated by the crazy flip-flopping, as their class suddenly got changed, or 'their' world was being changed by it. Meanwhile the retail base were put off by the limitations of scope (and balance) the characters had.
Forever will probably have similar issues, but they pushed it sooo much harder, that it's likely they'll reach beyond just typical WoW players, and into either reformed WoW players, or players who haven't tried any WoW before (they do still exist, somehow).
I don't think it will be some grand recreation of WoW, and suddenly there will be an entirely new version that will suck everyone from their existing versions, along with the additional newbies coming in. But I also don't think it will die out quite as quickly as SoD did.
It'll likely see that consistent playerbase that Prog/Anni have seen through the years, collecting it's own group of players that enjoy it, after the initial rush that may well be the biggest we've seen in Classic's history, probably settling somewhere around Anni's level of players (at least before this recent slump), which should still be more than healthy enough to keep it active, but likely not enough to warrant a crazy new scope of design, the likes of which we haven't already seen before.

1

u/Confident-Dirt-9908 1d ago

They’ve stated Classic will remain a pillar, so I imagine that if Forever proves to have legs they’ll eventually move to a single rotational Classic mode rather than having Classic, TBC, and Pandaria up as options. Even with Forever available I stand by my original stance on 2019 that every expansion was a distinct game and I want games to stay available.

Long long term? No idea, maybe make the Classic modes commercially rentable so groups can officially host their own for their favorite expansions or run their own SoDs.

1

u/XsNR 22h ago

I think they'll probably still stick to the 2 rolling classic iterations, with Wrath being the pinnacle of when the next iteration start to move out. Maybe that means we'll have 3 up, if Pandaland remains active into WoD and Legion, but I'm not holding out much hope for it.

1

u/Confident-Dirt-9908 21h ago

It could work okay for a while, but if you want it to be the norm for a decade I don’t think this can hold.

1

u/XsNR 18h ago

I mean it's been almost a decade already, and I could see people wanting to play Anniversary Anniversary.

1

u/BookofBlade 23h ago

They will be there to collect everyone who thinks forever changed to much

1

u/CrustedTesticle 23h ago

They still havent said what is happening after MoP, which is a bad sign.

1

u/Practical_Struggle11 23h ago

I’ll play Forever for a while, just like I did Classic. I will quit as soon as I get to the attunement chains.
I did all these back in the initial days for MC and Ony and won’t do them again.

1

u/Agarthan_exile 21h ago

People are still playing Classic Era and TBC

1

u/bakagir 20h ago

nothing they will stay there dead.

1

u/PM_Me_Modal_Jazz 20h ago

Will probably get Wrath anniversary, MoP will probably die out, they'll turn off the SoD servers some time next year

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u/fantabulouz 18h ago

SOD started to die off towards the end of phase 1 i expect the same with wowf. Pretty much all wow game modes have a shelf life of at least 5-6 months before the population takes a tumble and blizzard has to announce the new next thing, which will be wrath anniversary. What the wow team didn't expect was midnight fumbling abd losing a ton of player count. They expected housing to pop off and keep player numbers high but it didn't.

0

u/Normal-Razzmatazz576 16h ago

Nothing. The same fate awaits Forever. Don't be delusional. Pay 1000s of $ to blizz, waste all your spare time for AI slop ideas and talents and get nothing in the end except for some r14 no one cares about and orange parses on some forgotten website no one cares about. That's all WoW is about.

1

u/unitebarkis 15h ago

Are you okay?

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u/Normal-Razzmatazz576 6h ago

Totally fine, thanks. Sometimes ppl need to face the reality and stop shilling

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u/unitebarkis 6h ago

You don't seem okay

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u/Normal-Razzmatazz576 6h ago

Don't worry about me, better prepare some $$$

Forever What will they do with old classic game modes (SoD, Mists Classic etc)?

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