WoW Classic BlizzCon Ponderings

The other day Google sent me an email to let me know that my most popular post recently has been the one about whether Warlords of Draenor Classic will be happening or not. Most people may not be that keen on the idea of playing WoD Classic, but a lot of them are at least curious to find out whether it's happening or not. 

I've also been thinking about this again recently, and as I've said previously, I expect to get some pretty big Classic news at BlizzCon in September. However, until then I think it's fun to speculate a bit about what else will happen. You see, at this point I'm actually not even that curious about the details of the next big Classic thing. It'll be whatever it'll be.

What I'm personally more interested in is Blizzard's general direction with Classic, by which I mean more or less the rest of it. If they do indeed release a "Classic Plus", will they want to funnel everyone into it? I'm sure there are plenty of players who would approve of this approach, especially as the modern mega server model has fostered a community that is very anxious to be where everyone else is, which is naturally easiest if people simply have nowhere else to go (if they want to play some flavour of WoW Classic on official servers).

If Blizzard were to go for this sort of focused or consolidation approach, I could see them shutting down basically every other version of Classic that isn't the new hotness or Classic era. Characters from MoP Classic and Season of Discovery would be transferred to Classic era or retail. Anniversary... actually, I can't see them shutting down the anniversary servers without at least letting people have another run at Wrath of the Lich King first, so I guess that would also be allowed to stick around (for a while at least).

The other option though would be to go in completely the opposite direction. More versions of Classic, more!

In this scenario, a Classic+ would be purely additive, with all previous versions of Classic also hanging around. MoP Classic would continue into WoD and then Legion. (I don't know why it took me so long to realise that an easy way to make a WoD Classic announcement more palatable would be to announce WoD and the fact that Legion will come afterwards at the same time, even if the latter is still some time away.) Anniversary Classic would still continue into Wrath of the Lich King, but maybe they'd also split off a Burning Crusade era this time for good measure.

I watched an interview with Ghostcrawler the other week, and when he gets asked about WoW Classic (handily that section is available as its own, shorter clip) he said that the big obstacle to overcome at its inception was the fact that WoW simply didn't have a versioning/branching system and that this had to be built from the ground up.

I'm not an engineer, but I reckon that now that Bizzard have the ability to run different versions of WoW (and Classic even) and are already quite happily doing so, it's probably considerably less effort to add one more variant to the pile. It's still extra work and presumably there's some sort of minimum level of player engagement that's required to make each version viable, but they might very well consider it a way of expanding their base.

From a player perspective, the main downside here is that it looks very confusing from the outside and new players often don't know where to start. But I guess any time they spend trying to figure out which mode they like is still subscription time paid.

I suspect the reality is likely to be somewhere between the two extremes I outlined. Burning Crusade Classic era is probably nothing more than a pipe dream, and I can see them shutting down the SoD servers eventually, but every version that retains a good population will likely be kept rolling until it doesn't anymore. We just don't know for sure! And that suspense of whether one's preferred mode has a future or not is definitely a bit of a weight on people's minds right now I suspect.