Unfortunately this would be a nightmare for Blizzard to manage, I just don't see it happening. Either they will support vanilla servers including bug fixes and enhancements, or they will just turn them on and leave them as is. Let's look at both scenarios:
They support them - Why stop at just Vanilla? That's your preference, but what about players that preferred the BC expansion? How about WotLK? Cataclysm (shudder...)? Then not to mention all the requests from players for all of those quality of life improvements that came with later expansions. "Why can't I fly in old Azeroth? You already fixed it in Cataclysm, why can't you just apply that fix to the Vanilla world?". Or "Hey, Alliance keep killing our faction leaders because you put back doors into every major Horde city with no guards. Patch please?". One game will all of a sudden turn into 6 games that require a full dev team to support, with their playerbase spread across all of them.
They don't support them - This seems like it would be easy...until a player finds an exploit or bug that ruins it for everyone. Doom Lord Kazzak reckoning bug, seed of corruption bug, wall exploit bugs on bosses, etc etc. Players will abuse these mechanics unless there is moderation and exploit patches, which requires a dev team and a GM team. Not to mention class imbalance in older expansions (windfury shaman, only one tanking class in Vanilla, PoM mages, etc). Players would min/max and you would only have 3-4 viable classes that you could play, because there is no expectation of Blizzard fixing the under-performing classes.
This then brings up a third party supporting it. Why not just lease out the license and let somebody else manage it? It's not a financially viable monetization strategy for Blizzard. If a single player leaves Blizzard for this third party company, that's $15 a month they lose in subscription, on top of potential lost income from future expansions and store purchases like mounts and pets. Blizzard would at least charge this company $15/month per player, and that company would have their own overhead costs of supporting the game that would get passed on to the player. You would be paying $20-30/month for this vanilla server experience. Sure some people would pay it, but others would flip out that the older game actually costs more than the current expansion. Until Blizzard finds a way to get a more beneficial pricing structure on it sadly we won't ever see these things outside of fan supported copyright infringement.
Unfortunately this would be a nightmare for Blizzard to manage, I just don't see it happening. Either they will support vanilla servers including bug fixes and enhancements, or they will just turn them on and leave them as is. Let's look at both scenarios:
They support them - Why stop at just Vanilla? That's your preference, but what about players that preferred the BC expansion? How about WotLK? Cataclysm (shudder...)? Then not to mention all the requests from players for all of those quality of life improvements that came with later expansions. "Why can't I fly in old Azeroth? You already fixed it in Cataclysm, why can't you just apply that fix to the Vanilla world?". Or "Hey, Alliance keep killing our faction leaders because you put back doors into every major Horde city with no guards. Patch please?". One game will all of a sudden turn into 6 games that require a full dev team to support, with their playerbase spread across all of them.
They don't support them - This seems like it would be easy...until a player finds an exploit or bug that ruins it for everyone. Doom Lord Kazzak reckoning bug, seed of corruption bug, wall exploit bugs on bosses, etc etc. Players will abuse these mechanics unless there is moderation and exploit patches, which requires a dev team and a GM team. Not to mention class imbalance in older expansions (windfury shaman, only one tanking class in Vanilla, PoM mages, etc). Players would min/max and you would only have 3-4 viable classes that you could play, because there is no expectation of Blizzard fixing the under-performing classes.
This then brings up a third party supporting it. Why not just lease out the license and let somebody else manage it? It's not a financially viable monetization strategy for Blizzard. If a single player leaves Blizzard for this third party company, that's $15 a month they lose in subscription, on top of potential lost income from future expansions and store purchases like mounts and pets. Blizzard would at least charge this company $15/month per player, and that company would have their own overhead costs of supporting the game that would get passed on to the player. You would be paying $20-30/month for this vanilla server experience. Sure some people would pay it, but others would flip out that the older game actually costs more than the current expansion. Until Blizzard finds a way to get a more beneficial pricing structure on it sadly we won't ever see these things outside of fan supported copyright infringement.
If they get more players (revenue) it will be worth the added manpower. If you look at some of these private servers, they do not take a lot of manpower to run. Nostralius, with 800,000 accounts created, 150,000 active
accounts and 18,000 concurrent player peak only has a staff of 30 volunteers that develop and maintain the severs. They were also developing TBC servers. That seems a lot less expensive than adding on a whole expansion just to get more people.
I was speaking to @BillMurphy and said that I found it interesting that we have this article literally wanting to recapture the past and his review about Black Desert and "moving the genre forward". His response was that "BDO is a step back to the past of MMOs". He's right, though I would argue that what players should be clamoring for are new games with "old fashioned" features like EQ or VanWoW had. To me, that's true progress -- just look at some of the games in development for those trying to both move things forward and bring back favorite features from the past (Pantheon, Elyria, to name two).
You mean features like spamming LFG in Ironforge for hours, waiting weeks for rare spawns only to have them killed by somebody else while you took a bathroom break, running in circles for hours at a time farming the same mobs over and over again because there's no content, dying and losing that level you just spent two weeks grinding out because the server connection dropped, bite sized zones full of featureless terrain, the need to form a group just to go to the outhouse and wipe your ass... those kind of features? Because you can have those features.
BDO has actual content, systems, and things to do, as do many modern games. Games like EQ or vanilla WoW didn't. How somebody could confuse a lack of features for features is quite beyond me, especially somebody who writes for an MMO site.
It's not a 'step back to the past'. Quite frankly, that's an incredibly stupid thing to say, and just positively reeks of historical revisionism fueled by nostalgia.
I don't think its possible to know less about first gen MMOs without literally being born yesterday.
Mythic tried this with DAoC and "Classic" servers. It did cause a spike in subscriptions, but the hype quickly settled down and many of those who had quit prior to the classic servers just re-quit or stayed quit. In the end it split up a shrinking player base and the servers had to be shut down and refolded into the regular rule set servers.
The worry for a company is that if they accede to the demands for a "vanilla" server then they are going to get requests for other servers, such as a "Vanilla plus BC" server and so on. Also it dampens the release of new content on the regular servers.
Eventually a company has to say, "This is our game. Have fun playing it or don't." There are simply too many people playing the game with too many different opinions as to what period was the "most fun" and so rather than try to satisfy everyone's requests you simply put out the game and let them decide to play it or not play it.
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
100,000 people signing a petition on the internet isn't going to move a company like Blizzard. If they have 5 million subscriptions that's 2% of their current paying subscribers. And those are people who are still paying and playing, unlike most of those who were on the free shard. Those are whispers in the dark. Who should Blizzard listen to? 5,000,000 paying customers or 100,000 people who have mostly quit WoW and, technically, stolen Blizzard's product and then, only after Blizzard blew up their options to play for free, promised to come back to Blizzard's pay servers if Blizzard will present them with what amounts to a specialty product?
Maybe if 100,000 people pulled out their credit cards and sent Blizzard a year's subscription fee contingent on there being a Legacy Server then maybe Blizzard would be moved to action. Short of that Blizzard isn't going for it. They've said they wouldn't.
Just because someone says they'll come back doesn't guarantee they'll come back, or that they'll like what they find when they come back and stay. People who have quit move on and find other games and/or other things to do with their time.
Based on my experience with Mythic's Classic Servers I think at best this would be a temporary romance kind of thing with an initial surge and then a quick drop. Everyone was telling Mythic "I know 10 people who would immediately resubscribe if Mythic a Classic Server". I'm willing to bet less than 50% of the people who said that actually resubbed and stayed more than a month. I'm willing to bet Blizzard has looked at this dozens of different ways and ruled it out as a monetary sink hole. That's how businesses work. Sad, but true.
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
The petition hit 200,000 signatures! - which means Mark Kern
(former Team Lead of vanilla WoW) will attempt to personally deliver it to Mike
Morhaime (Blizz).
100,000 people signing a petition on the internet isn't going to move a company like Blizzard. If they have 5 million subscriptions that's 2% of their current paying subscribers. And those are people who are still paying and playing, unlike most of those who were on the free shard. Those are whispers in the dark. Who should Blizzard listen to? 5,000,000 paying customers or 100,000 people who have mostly quit WoW and, technically, stolen Blizzard's product and then, only after Blizzard blew up their options to play for free, promised to come back to Blizzard's pay servers if Blizzard will present them with what amounts to a specialty product?
Maybe if 100,000 people pulled out their credit cards and sent Blizzard a year's subscription fee contingent on there being a Legacy Server then maybe Blizzard would be moved to action. Short of that Blizzard isn't going for it. They've said they wouldn't.
Just because someone says they'll come back doesn't guarantee they'll come back, or that they'll like what they find when they come back and stay. People who have quit move on and find other games and/or other things to do with their time.
Based on my experience with Mythic's Classic Servers I think at best this would be a temporary romance kind of thing with an initial surge and then a quick drop. Everyone was telling Mythic "I know 10 people who would immediately resubscribe if Mythic a Classic Server". I'm willing to bet less than 50% of the people who said that actually resubbed and stayed more than a month. I'm willing to bet Blizzard has looked at this dozens of different ways and ruled it out as a monetary sink hole. That's how businesses work. Sad, but true.
As for 200,000 sigs on a pettion not being enough - I disagree - I feel it is just the tip of the iceberg. Mark Kern, the former Team lead for classic WoW says it better than I could: "Let’s put that in perspective. When we planned World of Warcraft,
we only expected 1M sold and 500k active. And yet..and yet that was
enough to bet the whole company on making WoW. It was the most expensive
game Blizzard had ever made, and a huge risk. And yet, we would have
been happy with 1M accounts back then. So I don’t understand this talk
about 850k account not being worthwhile. That’s bunk. And you know what?
With Blizzard officially behind legacy servers, you would see far more
than 1M account re-activations. If a relatively unknown private server
can reach 850k, then think what putting the Blizzard name behind it
could do…far, far more.
As for 150k active, my understanding is
that was measured over a 10 day window. The industry standard for
measuring active is 30 days. I bet the 30 day number is higher, but even
at 150k, during vanilla WoW we only expected around 450k active
subscribers, and it would have been a huge success. Nostalrius is not
that far off from what would have been a home run for us at the time. Of
course, we ended up doing much, much more than that, but I’m talking
about what we would have been thrilled with in the beginning and been
very profitable." http://www.pcinvasion.com/ex-world-of-warcraft-dev-explains-blizzard-vanilla
The importance for players - maybe, but is there enough money in it that's worth the effort for the dev studios?
That's the real question for legacy servers.
If money > effort of cost doing it = maybe
Old code has exploits and bugs that get fixed with patches so it's a pain in the ass to do legacy servers properly - I know most devs don't want to look at fixing code thats 10 years old.
Again IMO it's simply not worth if for most studios.
I think this is the crux of it.
Garret seems to think that it's just as easy as firing up a server, putting an old version of the software on it and opening up the credit card lines.
While running a server might be less expensive it still costs money. Additionally, any company worth its salt is going to want to at least have someone responsible for answering support tickets. That additional work for the CS teams. Or maybe a gm.
And you're an "insightful" poster here on MMORPG? Sounds to me you really believe everything you're told what Blizzard tells you in their PR politically correct rhedorict. Instead of actually doing your own research. You and other corporate fanbois here make it sound like this is some kind of huge obstacle for Blizzard/Activision too do. It's not. Blizzard/Activision is a multi-billion dollar company. Do you have any clue how much you can buy private servers now? They are not expensive. Players and fans of the game (Which I might add are borderline poor themselves) have already created popular private servers for over 10+ years with hardly any funding of their own. Kronos only has a few people on their team and are even adding more servers as well speak. That post you read by J allan brack's in the forums was total Bull. Any mention of legacy Wow has been censored. I remember mentioning it in the official WoW forums back in 2008 and I had my thread deleted. This guy proves it right in this video about Blizzard making the claim they have been talking about it for years and that this is all some extra "hard" thing too do. None of that is true. And your claim this would be near impossible for them is total nonsense. -->
i think the problem with "legacy" and "vanila" servers is rose tinted goggles syndrome, you remember back on the older games (for me DAOC) where you would sit around and it was a glorified chat room with down time and exploration. But you forget the real pain the arse aspect of those games, dark age of camelot (still going) before shrowded isles and trials of atlantis 1-50 took a long time in comparison with todays games. IF you messed up your character for example i know of a palladin who had put points into charisma at build because he thought it would get him money off buying from merchants. That was it you were stuck with that mistake there were no respecs, my bard messed up his final end game spec choices and it was 2 years till i could get him fixed when they brough in dragon resepc stones.
Large raids you spent looking down at your feet mashing group heal, you were asked to remove cloaks in combat to increase fps. The game was fun but old mmo's required far more investment than todays generation of mmos where you can log on get somthing acomplished and log off.
City of Heros i do miss i enjoyed my mastermind a lot , (ok city of villains) but that game had issues with people wanting fire tanks for grinding quickly. standing around spamming for groups constantly.
I think it is hard to roll back a server to bring out vannila because at what level do you class a game vanila . Dark age of camelots release i remember if you got a damage add buff from a passing char OR druid buffs you could litterally run around as a low level character killing anything, likewise animist mushrooms at release would fire through walls same with necromancer pets.
Where do you draw the line as a Vanilla experence or not ?
When it comes to sunseted games, legacy servers would be a brilliant idea, and could even reboot the game itself. On the other hand, I'm not quite sold on existing games. There are two big problems I see:
First one is content locusts. The majority of the gamer base these days chew through content like nothing, and bringing back legacy servers once they have chewed through that content they will want more stuff to do. There could be the argument that stuff was harder back then, but in a few years those who are starting off their mmo experience with the current content will say the same of that. On the other hand there is already years of experience for a good deal of players under their belt so what seemed harder back then is easier now even taking into account scaling back levels. So pretty much, the companies would have to put in new content for those servers, or the population is going to drop off out of boredom.
The second is the nostalgia factor. At the moment we view older content through rose coloured glasses because we can no longer access it. It reminds us of certain times of our lives and in game experiences, etc. that we can no longer experience. We always remember the good things, and tend to forget about the bad ones. The problem is after a while of experiencing those old things the nostalgia wears off. Sure you could come and go (done that millions of times with my old PS and PS2 along with other PC games) but you will get periods where it will wear off, and sometimes even tarnish that memory. If this happens with enough players, it becomes questionable if it is worth continuing with the legacy version of the game, especially in the instance of sub-based games.
Comments
They support them - Why stop at just Vanilla? That's your preference, but what about players that preferred the BC expansion? How about WotLK? Cataclysm (shudder...)? Then not to mention all the requests from players for all of those quality of life improvements that came with later expansions. "Why can't I fly in old Azeroth? You already fixed it in Cataclysm, why can't you just apply that fix to the Vanilla world?". Or "Hey, Alliance keep killing our faction leaders because you put back doors into every major Horde city with no guards. Patch please?". One game will all of a sudden turn into 6 games that require a full dev team to support, with their playerbase spread across all of them.
They don't support them - This seems like it would be easy...until a player finds an exploit or bug that ruins it for everyone. Doom Lord Kazzak reckoning bug, seed of corruption bug, wall exploit bugs on bosses, etc etc. Players will abuse these mechanics unless there is moderation and exploit patches, which requires a dev team and a GM team. Not to mention class imbalance in older expansions (windfury shaman, only one tanking class in Vanilla, PoM mages, etc). Players would min/max and you would only have 3-4 viable classes that you could play, because there is no expectation of Blizzard fixing the under-performing classes.
This then brings up a third party supporting it. Why not just lease out the license and let somebody else manage it? It's not a financially viable monetization strategy for Blizzard. If a single player leaves Blizzard for this third party company, that's $15 a month they lose in subscription, on top of potential lost income from future expansions and store purchases like mounts and pets. Blizzard would at least charge this company $15/month per player, and that company would have their own overhead costs of supporting the game that would get passed on to the player. You would be paying $20-30/month for this vanilla server experience. Sure some people would pay it, but others would flip out that the older game actually costs more than the current expansion. Until Blizzard finds a way to get a more beneficial pricing structure on it sadly we won't ever see these things outside of fan supported copyright infringement.
I don't think its possible to know less about first gen MMOs without literally being born yesterday.
The worry for a company is that if they accede to the demands for a "vanilla" server then they are going to get requests for other servers, such as a "Vanilla plus BC" server and so on. Also it dampens the release of new content on the regular servers.
Eventually a company has to say, "This is our game. Have fun playing it or don't." There are simply too many people playing the game with too many different opinions as to what period was the "most fun" and so rather than try to satisfy everyone's requests you simply put out the game and let them decide to play it or not play it.
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
Maybe if 100,000 people pulled out their credit cards and sent Blizzard a year's subscription fee contingent on there being a Legacy Server then maybe Blizzard would be moved to action. Short of that Blizzard isn't going for it. They've said they wouldn't.
Just because someone says they'll come back doesn't guarantee they'll come back, or that they'll like what they find when they come back and stay. People who have quit move on and find other games and/or other things to do with their time.
Based on my experience with Mythic's Classic Servers I think at best this would be a temporary romance kind of thing with an initial surge and then a quick drop. Everyone was telling Mythic "I know 10 people who would immediately resubscribe if Mythic a Classic Server". I'm willing to bet less than 50% of the people who said that actually resubbed and stayed more than a month. I'm willing to bet Blizzard has looked at this dozens of different ways and ruled it out as a monetary sink hole. That's how businesses work. Sad, but true.
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
The petition hit 200,000 signatures! - which means Mark Kern (former Team Lead of vanilla WoW) will attempt to personally deliver it to Mike Morhaime (Blizz).
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1soj9dk
As for 200,000 sigs on a pettion not being enough - I disagree - I feel it is just the tip of the iceberg. Mark Kern, the former Team lead for classic WoW says it better than I could: "Let’s put that in perspective. When we planned World of Warcraft, we only expected 1M sold and 500k active. And yet..and yet that was enough to bet the whole company on making WoW. It was the most expensive game Blizzard had ever made, and a huge risk. And yet, we would have been happy with 1M accounts back then. So I don’t understand this talk about 850k account not being worthwhile. That’s bunk. And you know what? With Blizzard officially behind legacy servers, you would see far more than 1M account re-activations. If a relatively unknown private server can reach 850k, then think what putting the Blizzard name behind it could do…far, far more.
As for 150k active, my understanding is that was measured over a 10 day window. The industry standard for measuring active is 30 days. I bet the 30 day number is higher, but even at 150k, during vanilla WoW we only expected around 450k active subscribers, and it would have been a huge success. Nostalrius is not that far off from what would have been a home run for us at the time. Of course, we ended up doing much, much more than that, but I’m talking about what we would have been thrilled with in the beginning and been very profitable." http://www.pcinvasion.com/ex-world-of-warcraft-dev-explains-blizzard-vanilla
Large raids you spent looking down at your feet mashing group heal, you were asked to remove cloaks in combat to increase fps. The game was fun but old mmo's required far more investment than todays generation of mmos where you can log on get somthing acomplished and log off.
City of Heros i do miss i enjoyed my mastermind a lot , (ok city of villains) but that game had issues with people wanting fire tanks for grinding quickly. standing around spamming for groups constantly.
I think it is hard to roll back a server to bring out vannila because at what level do you class a game vanila . Dark age of camelots release i remember if you got a damage add buff from a passing char OR druid buffs you could litterally run around as a low level character killing anything, likewise animist mushrooms at release would fire through walls same with necromancer pets.
Where do you draw the line as a Vanilla experence or not ?
First one is content locusts. The majority of the gamer base these days chew through content like nothing, and bringing back legacy servers once they have chewed through that content they will want more stuff to do. There could be the argument that stuff was harder back then, but in a few years those who are starting off their mmo experience with the current content will say the same of that. On the other hand there is already years of experience for a good deal of players under their belt so what seemed harder back then is easier now even taking into account scaling back levels. So pretty much, the companies would have to put in new content for those servers, or the population is going to drop off out of boredom.
The second is the nostalgia factor. At the moment we view older content through rose coloured glasses because we can no longer access it. It reminds us of certain times of our lives and in game experiences, etc. that we can no longer experience. We always remember the good things, and tend to forget about the bad ones. The problem is after a while of experiencing those old things the nostalgia wears off. Sure you could come and go (done that millions of times with my old PS and PS2 along with other PC games) but you will get periods where it will wear off, and sometimes even tarnish that memory. If this happens with enough players, it becomes questionable if it is worth continuing with the legacy version of the game, especially in the instance of sub-based games.
MorBlade