How Successful Will Classic Be?

As of today, WoW Classic is only a month away! I'm still excited, but I've been quiet on here because I honestly haven't had much to say. The open beta continued and there were several stress tests, but I didn't participate in either of those things. Commenting on what other people have been doing and saying only gets you so far when talking about games.

However, with launch being this close now, I thought it would be fun to "warm up" the blog again by writing one post a week speculating about different aspects of Classic. Not because I particularly expect to actually be predicting the future, but because I think it will be fun to look back on my own expectations later on and to compare them to how things actually played out.

First off, I wanted to tackle the question of how successful Classic is going to be. One of the biggest problems we run into right away when asking this question is that we still don't really know what made the original World of Warcraft so successful in the first place. Sure, it was a good game, but it would be highly dubious to claim that the degree to which it was better than its competition was directly proportional to the size of its success.

I think one aspect that undoubtedly played a large role is that - for whatever reason - the game managed to acquire a huge "newbie hose" as Eric Heimburg used to call it. We know that even pre-Cata, the majority of players who tried the game didn't stick with it for long. For it to have seen as meteoric a rise in players numbers as it did despite of that, the number of new players signing up on a daily basis must have been insane during those first few years.

One way or another, WoW achieved virality. Looking back at an old personal diary of mine, it doesn't seem like a coincidence that about two weeks before I started playing myself, I noted that a lot of my online friends had been talking about this thing called World of Warcraft lately, and the time stamp on that entry is the 6th of October 2006, two days after the release of the infamous South Park episode...

Anyway, lightning is unlikely to strike twice, but even if we were to assume that the game is bound to have much more limited appeal in this day and age (which I don't think is actually a given) and that most of the target audience are lapsed former players, that still leaves us with a potential audience of several tens of millions of players. How likely are they to show up again and stay?

Despite of their unique status, I actually think that private servers are the closest thing we have to a working prediction model. They've basically followed one of two paths:

First there's Nostalrius, which launched with a decent amount of fanfare for a private server and then continued to grow and grow, until Blizzard sent that fateful cease-and-desist letter.

All other private servers pretty much fall into the other group, whose fate has tended to play out like this: the server launches to a small to medium amount of fanfare (again, for a private server), maintains a healthy population for a while and then slowly slides into obscurity/inactivity as players drop off and aren't replaced by new ones.

I cannot for the life of me imagine WoW Classic sharing the fate of those latter servers, because from what I can tell the two main reasons they decline are 1) increased risk of some sort of drama or technical issue over time and 2) lack of marketing: It's one thing to produce a shiny launch trailer to attract a decent-sized crowd for launch day and quite another to continue to maintain a healthy influx of new players for years.

I'm certain that Classic is going to be safe on the stability side, as I have no doubt that Blizzard will stick to their word of maintaining it even if it doesn't turn out to be super popular in the long run, and while there has been a curious lack of marketing for Classic, the simple fact that it's going to be on the Blizzard launcher should guarantee a continuous influx of new players of at least moderate levels for a long time.

The question is: Will Classic be able to do a Nostalrius? It seems hard to come up with reasons why it shouldn't. It's certainly going to be the most faithful and stable recreation of Vanilla WoW available on the market, and easily accessible through the Blizzard launcher at that, without requiring any illegal download shenanigans.

The same people who were invading the YouTube comments of every WoW video throughout 2015 and '16 to tell everyone that they should ditch modern WoW and come play on Nost instead can go campaign for their friends to join them in Classic now. Hell, I've already done it by bugging my own friends from back in the day! One shouldn't underestimate the influence of passionately positive word of mouth, especially when professional marketing has been so curiously absent.

While gaming news have dutifully reported on every stage of the Classic development process, I have no doubt that a huge chunk of the aforementioned potential audience still doesn't even know that Classic is about to become a thing. Once it launches and their old friends urge them to come back, there's no telling how far that could go.

Oddly, I think that the biggest risk to things working out as I described is probably modern WoW. The barrier to entry for playing on Nostalrius was such that only people who were quite passionate about trying it even got a foot in the door... and if you went through all the effort of downloading an illegal copy of the client just to find out that you didn't actually like it, you probably weren't going to shout it from the rooftops.

Meanwhile Classic will share its subscriber base with current WoW players, which means that at its launch a sizeable number of those trying out Classic will come from the current game with its decidedly different sensibilities, and I strongly suspect that they won't be quiet about it if they don't like it. So any positive buzz will likely have to compete with comments along the lines of: "WTF Blizz, why did you waste money on making this instead of adding another raid tier?" instead of simply projecting a unified image of how great the game is.

Anyway, after all that waffling, what do I actually think will happen? I think that launch will attract a very large number of both current and lapsed players, and overall reception of the game will be mixed. I expect that those who don't like it will drop out quickly, causing the initial numbers to plummet again, but then, as the community of actually interested players starts to solidify, word of mouth will become more positive and Classic will actually start to see growth again as more and more former players become aware of it and get sucked in again. That's my theory at least.

Best Classic Video So Far

I just had to share this somewhere because I couldn't stop giggling throughout the entire thing.

Beta Hype

Just because I'm not playing the beta (and not planning to either) that doesn't mean that I'm not interested in hearing what other people have to say about their experiences with it. So far, reactions seem pretty positive. There are the ones who were super excited about it beforehand and are - unsurprisingly - super excited about it now, such as Nixxiom:



Then there are those who were vaguely optimistic about it beforehand and are now also super excited about it, such as Crendor:



(I also love how his first big beta adventure was to run his level 9 orc hunter halfway across the world just because he could, and because you don't get res sickness under level 10.)

And finally, there are those who figured that Classic probably wasn't going to be for them and were positively surprised, such as Jesse Cox:



I expect that we'll see a fair amount of grass roots hype building for Classic over the next few months. I don't think Blizzivision is going to invest much into marketing it beyond some basics such as social media shout-outs and inviting journalists to give it a try, but I think the success of Nostalrius has shown that there's a part of the Vanilla crowd that's both very loud and very passionate and basically willing to provide a lot of advertising for free.

And there's certainly interest too: Well-known streamer Asmongold hit over 100k live viewers streaming a Deadmines run for example. I expect the grousing of the "you think you do, but you don't" crowd will continue for a while, but I also suspect that a lot of people will still be curious enough to give the game a try at launch just because everyone's talking about it.

It's been about five years since we last had a major Western MMO launch (I'm thinking of ESO and Wildstar in 2014), and in these times of controversy about microtransactions and such, Classic is also going to stand out as launching with a pure subscription package with no add-ons. Could Blizzard be managing to capture the zeitgeist at just the right time a second time? I can't wait to find out.

We Have A Release Date!

27th of August... sort of, except that in the US it will still be the afternoon of the 26th.

I'm happy to say that this won't fall right into the middle of the family visit I was planning for summer - I have a bit of a bad track record of missing big MMO events that interest me due to being away, so I was a little worried that I might end up booking my flights just to find out that Classic launch would happen right in the middle of my trip, but fortunately I should now be back about a week beforehand.

In fact, I'll try to get at least a couple of days off for the launch as well. I hope that Blizzard has learned enough about organising this kind of launch for it to not be a disaster full of login queues and server crashes, but I'm willing to risk it in any case. The worst that can happen is that I end up having to play some other games while I wait for them to fix things, so it's a win either way!

I went right ahead and logged into my Battle.net account for the first time in years to tidy up my account info. Apparently the last time I gave them any money was in March 2010! (My brief visit during Mists of Pandaria took place with gifted game time.) I wonder how much of an uptick they are seeing in terms of old accounts being reactivated right now...

As an additional lure there is a chance that they'll let you join the Classic beta right away if you're a current subscriber, but I'm not falling for that one, marketing team! I'm not that keen on betas anyway, even if the thought of taking part in a starting zone stress test or something like that sounds somewhat entertaining. More importantly though, I don't want to give them any money until I can get my hands on the fully released game.

I've made some progress on the "what to play" front as well, as I've got two old friends committed to spending some time playing with me. They want to go Horde, and I thought we'd agreed to play a warrior/rogue/shaman trio, with me being the shaman, but now they are dithering again... I told them not to mess with the plan, but we'll see. If that Horde trio goes ahead with me filling the healer role, I might roll up a night elf hunter for some solo adventures on Alliance side, which would once again provide an interesting mix of old and new experiences.

Can You Play Classic Casually?

We still haven't got a launch date for Classic, though we have had some reassurance that they are still on track for the promised summer release. Seeing how we're already at the end of March, I figure it can't be that long now until we get a date. I'm pretty excited.

In the meantime, let's talk about something that I occasionally see get brought up when people talk about Classic. The comments I'm talking about usually come in the form of something like this: "Man, I used to love Vanilla; I played it 24/7! Too bad I won't be able to play Classic; I have a life now."

Now, far be it from me to judge any particular person's time management skills, but there does seem to be an underlying perception here that the only way to play Vanilla WoW/Classic is/was by "no-lifing" it. I can see where that comes from, because I'm sure that many of us did play the game like that back in the day, at least for a while, but it's far from the only way to enjoy classic World of Warcraft.

There are really only two things you have to keep in mind to be able to enjoy your time in Classic as a casual player: The first is that having more time is a considerable advantage in terms of competitiveness, seeing how there are few of the artificial time gates that are common in the genre today, such as daily quests or weekly caps. Someone who's got time to play all day, every day, will progress faster than you - it's just not something that should put you off, because there'll also be plenty of others who'll progress at a slower pace, and you won't have to worry about the next patch making all your progress obsolete.

The other thing to keep in mind is that everything takes more time. One major example of this are dungeons. What with having to manually put a group together, getting everyone to the instance and the much slower pace of combat, I wouldn't recommend logging into the game with the intent to do a dungeon if you've got less than two hours of free time at your disposal. I'm sure this is going to be a culture shock for many players who are used to twenty to thirty minute runs that you just queue up for via an interface, and for the average player it will mean that they'll do dungeons much more rarely than they would in a more modern MMO. While I was levelling a paladin on Kronos, dungeon runs were something that I managed to commit to maybe every other weekend - but that wasn't really a problem; it just caused every single run to be somewhat of an experience and often made them quite memorable. If you look back through the entries I made under the pugs tag over the last few years, you'll find quite some tales of adventure.

"But I rarely or never get to play for two whole hours at a time these days!" you might say. Even that doesn't have to be a reason not to play though. Classic absolutely does offer things to do in shorter burst of play time as well; they are just somewhat removed from what most modern MMOs offer you to fill those time slots.

One example is simple travel. With fast travel options being very limited and low in number in Classic, just going anywhere takes time. There are a fair few quests that simply ask you to deliver a letter from A to B, and while that may seem trivial it can easily make up a whole short play session on its own. Discovering new flight paths for the first time is always a bit of an adventure even when you know where you have to go - consider an Alliance player picking up the flight points in Ratchet and Gadgetzan for the first time for example.

There are of course also always quests that aren't that far away from the quest giver, and taking those on in fits and bursts is another thing you can do. But it doesn't all have to be about questing either. While playing on private servers, I would sometimes dedicate whole (short) play sessions to things like crafting or selling things on the auction house. You don't really appreciate how time-consuming even that can be until you've been reminded of just how long it takes to run back and forth between the Stormwind auction house and the blacksmithing area in the Dwarven District a couple of times.

I realise that a lot of this doesn't really sound particularly exciting. "It's all just walking around!" you might say, and technically speaking, you wouldn't be wrong. However, context matters and the beautiful thing about Vanilla was that it made all that walking around feel magical because you felt that you really were in that world, wielding magic and giant swords and going on adventures. Sure, given enough time, all of this is bound to become less exciting and more routine. My own experience in the past few years has been that it still holds up remarkably well though, and I very much look forward to re-experiencing that same feeling on official servers, even if I have a lot less time to play these days than I had back in 2005.

Preparing for Classic

What's wrong with you, woman? Classic is still at least six months away, what could there possibly be to prepare for?

Well, you're kind of right, but a) I'm excited and b) with how long it takes to level in a Vanilla environment, finding a class and role that you enjoy are not trivial things, as getting it wrong will result in a lot of lost time and potentially having to re-start from scratch.

Faction

Since I'm a goodie two-shoes at heart, it's only natural that I gravitated towards the Alliance when I first started playing WoW. However, in practical terms I actually spent much more time playing the game as Horde, simply because the social circle which I was a part of initially fell apart only a few months into the experience, at which point I ended up re-rolling to join another friend's established Horde raiding guild.

I'm thinking that Alliance will be my faction of choice if I end up levelling mostly on my own, but I guess if I end up in the company of friends who prefer Horde, it won't be any skin off my back.

Classes

I can group the nine Vanilla classes into three groups: definitely want to play, kind of want to play, and definitely don't want to play.

Definitely want to play:

Priest: It's the class that I most identify with, that I mained through pretty much my entire time in WoW (except for a short time raiding as a resto druid when holy priests were horribly broken at the end of Wrath), and it's the class that gave this blog its name. My only worry is that soloing as a priest kind of sucks and both of the priests that I rolled on private servers didn't get very far before I gave up on them. There's also a bit of a risk that me playing priest again might make the whole thing feel like I'm trying too hard to relive the past, which isn't actually what I'm striving for as it doesn't feel too good.

Druid: Druid has probably been my second favourite class in WoW for a long time, and I was having a pretty good time with the one I rolled on Elysium until my journey was unexpectedly cut short. I love both their versatility (even if things work a bit different in Classic) and the whole theme of the class.

Hunter: Hunter is another class that I have a close affinity with, despite of never taking one beyond alt status. I did love all the micromanagement involved with ammo and pets, and it's obviously a great choice for soloing. If I mostly end up playing on my own, hunter might be the way to go.

Kind of want to play:

Paladin: Like the druid, the classic paladin is a class that appeals to me both in terms of theme as well as in play style, but the thing that's honestly putting me off a bit is that I did go through the process of levelling one from one to sixty on Kronos already. Don't get me wrong, it was fun, but even though it was "only" on a private server, there's a certain feeling of "been there, done that" to it right now that makes me want to prioritise something else in Classic.

Mage: I levelled a mage in early Burning Crusade and quite enjoyed it. I generally like spell-casting, and I appreciate that for a pure dps class, mages bring a lot of utility to groups, what with their buffs, sheep, the ability to conjure food and water, and being able to send the whole party straight home with a portal at the end of a dungeon. I'm thinking that this one might be a good choice if I end up in a position where I'm not sure whether I'll be soloing a lot or doing more grouping, but then druid is even better for that.

Shaman: This is another hybrid class that I remember with a lot of fondness, but I didn't actually level one myself until Wrath of the Lich King, and I think soloing as a shammy was a lot clunkier in Vanilla than it was by the point I played one, so I'm a bit worried about overestimating just how much I'd enjoy the play style.

Definitely don't want to play:

Warrior, rogue or warlock. The first two are really popular and powerful in Vanilla, but I just never enjoyed the play style or their theme very much. Bashing/stabbing things just isn't really my cup of tea. And warlocks are basically evil mages.

Who to play with?

I've already alluded to it in some of the points above, but this question is going to be the real crux of the matter. I'm quite flexible both in terms of faction choice as well as which class/role to play, but it will be very much dependent on who keeps me company, if anyone.

Old friends? Part of me wants to just re-recruit the friends of old with whom I'm still in touch and go on a big nostalgia tour with the lot of them. However, if I'm being honest I don't expect that to succeed. Basically most of them either stopped playing without moving on to any other MMO (which to me indicates that it was probably just a phase in their lives rather than an true interest in the genre) or they are still happily living the (virtual) life in current WoW. I'm sure I could get some of them to roll up a character with me, but in all likelihood they would soon drift back to whatever they were doing before.

Bloggers? There's probably also going to be the option to play with some fellow bloggers. I'm sure there'll be a fair number of them interested in WoW Classic once it launches. And I imagine that it could be fun... for a while. However, without meaning any disrespect to anyone, my general experience with most of the multi-gaming bloggers I follow, the ones who'll be the most interested in Classic, is that they tend to jump into whatever's the new hotness for a week to a month, and then they get bored and move on. There's nothing inherently wrong with that; I'm just saying it's probably not the best option for someone like me who has the intention of sticking around for a while.

Others? My significant other, who actually played WoW in the past as well, is a Wrath baby and has told me that he has no interest in Classic (the early trauma of watching me play my pally on Kronos probably didn't help). There are a couple of people in my SWTOR guild whom I might be able to drag along as well... but do I even want to risk cannibalising my current online "home" just to have some more people to play with in Classic? Tough call.

I suspect things might become a bit clearer closer to the actual launch date, but I have to admit that a part of me worries that they won't.

The Power of Song

Just a little random story that I felt like writing down, and this blog seemed like the best place for it.

In my office at work we tend to have a random Spotify playlist playing in the background throughout the day, and it never ceases to amaze me how different songs coming up can instantly trigger all kinds of memories in me. One might remind me of an ex-boyfriend, another one of a place I used to work at, yet another one makes me think of a specific film.

Today a song came on that suddenly made me think of WoW, and for a rather silly reason at that. The song in question is Waterfalls by TLC.

Back in Burning Crusade I remember my guild working on Gurtogg Bloodboil in the Black Temple. I don't remember all the details of the fight, but I know that positioning was critical to it, and people had to make sure to stand in certain places and to move at certain times to make sure that the blood boil debuff would go on the right players. Also, the encounter was set in a room where there was water flowing down the sides of some walls for some reason.

One time after someone had caused us trouble by running too far away from his dedicated position, our main tank chided him: "#Name, don't go chasing waterfalls!" I'm sure it was nothing but a throwaway joke, but to me it was extremely hilarious at the time... so much so that just hearing the song now instantly takes me back to that moment even more than ten years later.

Funny how these things work.