The even bigger problem is that it appears a lot of the people left playing the current iteration of WoW are utterly fixated on the current version and dislike anyone that puts up a negative comment or compares the current game to another. Many returning players who actually post negatively on the official forums are getting thumbs downed like mad even when their posts aren't that aggressive or composed of vitriol.
Like I said in another post, the current group of WOW forum people are Blizzard kool aid drinkers who would say. That it was a great thing if blizzard completely deleted everyone's account and forced them to buy the game and all expansions again. Thing is, that comment it not that far from the truth.
Complaints. That it isn't a BC or WotLK or Cat server. That there are queues - failure to open enough servers. That the servers are in Chinese and not in their language. Complaints from people who don't want to transfer that their servers are deserted and that transfers are needed. Complaints from people returning to the existing servers that the community they left (abandoned!) no longer exists. Complaints about tedious boring mechanics, or the lack of x, y and z; that add-ons don't work.
Resulting in complaints that Blizzard doesn't respond, doesn't listen and more.
The even bigger problem is that it appears a lot of the people left playing the current iteration of WoW are utterly fixated on the current version and dislike anyone that puts up a negative comment or compares the current game to another. Many returning players who actually post negatively on the official forums are getting thumbs downed like mad even when their posts aren't that aggressive or composed of vitriol.
Like I said in another post, the current group of WOW forum people are Blizzard kool aid drinkers who would say. That it was a great thing if blizzard completely deleted everyone's account and forced them to buy the game and all expansions again. Thing is, that comment it not that far from the truth.
Normally I'd take a statement like that as hyperbole, but the proof is literally right on their forum pages. I think the only ones left are the ones that aren't bothered by the facebook antics and enjoy being spread out across multiple servers all playing in relative isolation.
The game needs to get back to at least Wrath of the Lich King on gameplay style to be called an MMO RPG anymore. Anyone who is playing FFXIV ARR right now and jumps into WoW is going to be wondering what the world Blizzard Activision was thinking going the direction they have with a game system that forces people to play apart and takes players out of active quest zones just to do the garrison grind. Yes they can warp in every 20 minutes, but they still have to take the nearest flight path back to where they were and then navigate back to where the quests they left off are. It's a complete mess.
It is a rather complicated question. Now, if opening up a vanilla server actually would get them 800K players then they would actually earn in if half the cuttent players didn't buy the expansion rather fast anyways.
800K players al'a $15 a month is £12 000K each month. Last time I hear had Wow 5.8M players but more comes back to expansions so lets pretend it is 4M x £45 = $180M. So in 1 1/2 years they would get those money back and that is assuming half the players don't bother getting the expansion to only play on the legacy server which is pretty unlike, more likely is that half of those players would have a few character on the legacy server while still at least playing through the new expansion with their regular characters still selling the expansion to them.
And 800K is a pretty low number considering an illegal server mainly living on word to mouth and some talk on certain forums even if they are free. An official server would most likely pull in more players then that.
But in worst case scenario it would take then 1 1/2 years to get back those money, and each expansion releases about every second year. So I think they would earn profits on it, and if Wow besides everything start to rise in sub numbers again that weill most likely pull in some new players as well.
I think that the real problem is what OP hinted at: That Blizzard want players to think that Wow is just getting better and better and this could eventually lead to them closing down the regular servers (even though it is unlikely, I said could) which would mean they failed to move the game in the right expansion.
Personally do I think all MMOs who made a number of expansions and raised their levelcap a few times actually become worse then the game was at vanilla, and that goes for more games then Wow (EQ comes to mind). There are exceptions, the first Guildwars game made their campaigns really good and made the game better if you had all of them.
But I think Blizzard really should open up a vanilla server or 2, and not just because that would earn them more money but also since so many players want it. It isn't really that expensive.
The even bigger problem is that it appears a lot of the people left playing the current iteration of WoW are utterly fixated on the current version and dislike anyone that puts up a negative comment or compares the current game to another. Many returning players who actually post negatively on the official forums are getting thumbs downed like mad even when their posts aren't that aggressive or composed of vitriol.
Like I said in another post, the current group of WOW forum people are Blizzard kool aid drinkers who would say. That it was a great thing if blizzard completely deleted everyone's account and forced them to buy the game and all expansions again. Thing is, that comment it not that far from the truth.
Normally I'd take a statement like that as hyperbole, but the proof is literally right on their forum pages. I think the only ones left are the ones that aren't bothered by the facebook antics and enjoy being spread out across multiple servers all playing in relative isolation.
I agree. The game is no longer an MMORPG, it really looks more like a Facebook game now when you figure that when my wife logged in a few weeks ago to see if anyone was still playing, the 10 people in the guild were all in garrisons and dont talk anymore. She could tell that thats all these people did was play after a few times logging in and trying to talk to them. It's a sad state the game has become.
Fun fact : 800K registered account, 150K active account yet the petition still can't reach 150K sign and they have to advertise the petition on every single gaming website; spin the story to make blizzard look like an evil corporate hat to get current 100K sign. Tells a lot about these people who want to play vanilla server, doesn't it?
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
The analysis of why Blizzard is doing what they do sound likely enough, and that is the reason we wont see progression or classic servers anytime soon .. and those would probably not produce a profit when all is taken into account of maintaining a second codebase complete with quality control and bug fixes that are expected from a commercial Blizzard product.
The numbers mentioned I am more skeptical about. 800k accounts do not translate to active players in any way - The majority of those accounts are people checking it out for a few levels and never come back.
I have been messing around a little on another popular wow emu server (no names) that claims to have 100k+ accounts, but if you count concurrent logins or daily logins the number is much lower. In fact in boards discussions, people mention that the server hits it's limit at around 5k logins.
Nostalrius had 18k logins at peaks, and we don't have any numbers on active players, but I would take a guess at a number under 30k who plays regularly.
You can do the same numbers with project 1999 eq emulator which peaks at around 2500 (5k if you count all emu servers) but the number of eqemulator accounts are in the hundred of thousands (not a confirmed number).
Just saying, accounts are never removed (because there is no reason to), so the count on inactive accounts build up during the years.
The argument that people just want to play WoW for free falls flat at the fact that a classic server, devoid of any extra content the earlier expansions contain, was the most popular version of the private server. You have an option between a vanilla server for free or a TBC or WotLK or MoP or any other combination of expac server for free.. And the largest majority picked the vanilla server. It's being willfully ignorant not to recognize what that says.
The argument that Everquest official legacy servers are an indicator that a Wow vanilla server would be empty after a few months falls flat right about the time you realize how bone-headed DBG was for trying to force players to abandon their months of progress on P99 to start all over again on their servers.
The distraction from the current version of WoW and Blizzard's desire to push the next expansion pack is probably the most legitimate argument against private servers. And it isn't an argument against Blizzard; companies exist to make a profit for those who own and work for them. People need to get paid for the company to continue to exist. I can get on board with the argument that Blizzard wants to focus on moving forward. It makes sense.
I had never heard of Nostalrius before Blizzard shut them down... Nor am I a WoW subscriber. From the outside looking in, this article seems to nail the largest and most pertinent reason behind Blizzard's move against such a popular private server.
Someone in this post said that people currently playing WoW want to, and not because they have to, which is something I can disagree with based on experience. I don't really want to be playing WoD, but they made it easy to maintain my subscription without paying anything but in-game currency, and I suppose the RP community is pretty large. But, ultimately, do I want to be playing or RP'ing in this iteration of the world/expansions? No, not really. Someone buying tokens is paying for my sub, though, and 40k every four weeks is pretty easy to muster. Vanilla through WotLK was great, and I've gone back to bask in the vanilla experience on emulated servers before, to determine if it was actually enjoyable or if I remembered it differently. It's very tedious in some areas that they've refined, and far more challenging in areas they've faltered with design choices. It's a mixed bag, but you can't deny the increased difficulty. If you're one of those people who believe WoW is too easy now (I'm one of them), I can completely understand why you would rather play Vanilla than WoD.
But I'd rather see an expansion progression server than an expansion locked server. Give players a deadline to raid progress before releasing the next tier. Rinse, repeat. When you reach the end, start over. Create an official leader boarding system for guilds and fashion a new meta. Seems completely reasonable to me, probably well within their budget, and the game is certainly old enough to start toying around with varying server types (EQ is a great example, the alignment based PvP server was dope). I can also understand that they believe, as developers, that they haven't finished making the game yet, which probably seems ridiculous to consumers, what with the product being a decade old. But hey, I don't design games, I just play them. If they think they can create more viable expansions before being forced into this sort of thing, you can't really blame them for trying.
So, where do I stand? I really believe this site doesn't spend enough time talking about emulated MMO's (the topic is taboo and against the user agreement), because there's a vast portion of individuals still playing these games on private servers and developing for them. I'm glad we can finally talk about this in some capacity without threat of account warnings or suspensions, because it's important to examine and investigate. Why are emulated servers popular? What do they have to offer that can't be found elsewhere? What can we learn from them? Is it more cost productive to work with emulations than to combat them? That's more interesting to me than whether or not Blizzard is going to make an official Vanilla server.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
The assumption is always made that the 4-5M players currently involved in WoW are somehow less significant than those who might like to see vanilla servers. That's simply not so. People don't play live versions of WoW because they have to, but because, believe it or not, they want to. Not everyone was enamored of vanilla either.
Also often dismissed are some of the other amazing moments in WoW's history including what many others (see what I did there?) feel is the best expansion ever, Wrath of the Lich King.
The bottom line is that the expansions since vanilla and up through Cata have been very successful and even through WoD, players continue to play and not because they "don't know better" or never experienced vanilla, which is an elitist line of thought. Many people today play WoW because it's fun an enjoyable to them. Who's to say that vanilla is better or worse, for that matter. They are two different states of the same game, much as raw cookie dough is a different state than the baked thing. Both have good flavor but don't appeal to everyone.
With Legion's launch less than 6 months away, it's unlikely that anything will come out of all of this for at least another year.
Wrath of the Lich King is spelled The Burning Crusade.
The assumption is always made that the 4-5M players currently involved in WoW are somehow less significant than those who might like to see vanilla servers. That's simply not so. People don't play live versions of WoW because they have to, but because, believe it or not, they want to. Not everyone was enamored of vanilla either.
Also often dismissed are some of the other amazing moments in WoW's history including what many others (see what I did there?) feel is the best expansion ever, Wrath of the Lich King.
The bottom line is that the expansions since vanilla and up through Cata have been very successful and even through WoD, players continue to play and not because they "don't know better" or never experienced vanilla, which is an elitist line of thought. Many people today play WoW because it's fun an enjoyable to them. Who's to say that vanilla is better or worse, for that matter. They are two different states of the same game, much as raw cookie dough is a different state than the baked thing. Both have good flavor but don't appeal to everyone.
With Legion's launch less than 6 months away, it's unlikely that anything will come out of all of this for at least another year.
Wrath of the Lich King is spelled The Burning Crusade.
Wrong WoW hit it's high point with WotLK not BC.
Actually WoW hit its peak during Cataclysm as evidenced by the subscription data collected here:
Vanilla, released in 2004 The Burning Crusade, January 2007 Wrath of the Lich King, November 2008 Cataclysm, December 2010 Mists of Pandaria, September 2012 Warlords of Draenor, November 2014.
This is, of course, not speaking to the emotionalism that any given expansion embodies for certain players. And therein lies the problem, the never ending requests for vanilla pure, vanilla with improved UI etc., Burning Crusade pure, BC with improvements, WotLK...well, point made. Blizzard could never keep up with everyone's demands. Pretty soon, they'd just sell a single player WoW and call it a day.
I think the way it works is that companies are required to defend their licenses and copyrights or anyone can use them and list the private server as an example of WoW relinquishing ownership of those copyrights. So even if they really didn't care about private servers they must do something about it.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Vanilla, released in 2004 The Burning Crusade, January 2007 Wrath of the Lich King, November 2008 Cataclysm, December 2010 Mists of Pandaria, September 2012 Warlords of Draenor, November 2014.
This is, of course, not speaking to the emotionalism that any given expansion embodies for certain players. And therein lies the problem, the never ending requests for vanilla pure, vanilla with improved UI etc., Burning Crusade pure, BC with improvements, WotLK...well, point made. Blizzard could never keep up with everyone's demands. Pretty soon, they'd just sell a single player WoW and call it a day.
I agree Cata contained the highest number of subscribers at any given point in the game's lifetime... But it was a pretty negligent increase in subscribers compared to right before Cata. Cata released in Q4 2010... The graph shows no noticeable increase in the number of subscribers from Q3 to Q4 2010. In fact, it shows a decline in the very next quarter following Cata's release. I'd attribute the subscriber numbers at Cata's release more to the prior success than what Cata brought to the table. However, that's merely my interpretation of the data cited.
The last expansion to provide a noticeable uptick in subscribers (without a steep decline shortly after its release) was WotLK. I find that significant, even if technically the subscribers hit an all-time high in Q4 2010.
My favourite expansions were TBC and then Wrath. TBC felt very new frontier which was great.
Offering legacy servers though would enable players old and current to dive into the Vanilla when they felt like it.
I for one am looking forward to legion (Demon Hunters Wooo) and the dumping of the awful Garrison concept, why did blizzard have to invent housing "their way"!
I do believe they should provide vanilla servers if they are going to aggressively pursue and shutdown private ones. Afterall that would be the mature thing to do?
How many people were playing on Nostalrius because they wanted a vanilla experience, and how many people were playing because they wanted a free game?
Reference SBFord's graph: if the majority of folks on private servers were merely concerned with playing for free, a server that included TBC and WotLK would, far and away, be more popular than a vanilla server. It simply wouldn't make sense to withhold all that extra content that was so popular at release if you simply wanted to play without a subscription.
EverQuest 1 (especially this one) and EverQuest 2 disagree with you and have proven the success of Classic / Progression servers!
It's not just about Nostalgia, it's about everyone starting out from ZERO and have bursting starter and low Level zones full of People playing and leveling up again!
This Magic is gone from all these MMO's as they have become too old With the entire playerbase hanging out in one or few top Level zones and the rest of the game world being a barren Waste land!
This is the biggest FLAW in Themepark MMO's. Always has been and always will be! All that wonderful content becomes obsolete and much too quickly!
With each expansion pack driving the playerbase further and further away from New players joining in (and giving up soon after out of boredom and inability to Connect / Catch up).
That's why Blizzard should open up new Vanilla WoW servers! Don't Call them Vanilla, but Call them Progression Servers! Like with EQ1 and EQ2.
I would love to start over again in the Vanilla WoW world With thousands of others, leveling up through lively zones, experience the old Level Dungeons again.
It's what makes MMO's shine! It's where the Magic is!
It's all in the marketing. Call it WoW Legacy and launch a series of progression servers. Use the byline: Who says you can't go home again?
I think the game can support current servers and Vanilla servers concurrently. It's not either or nor is it admitting that one is better than the other. It's about giving the players options. And options are always good for the bottom line.
How many people were playing on Nostalrius because they wanted a vanilla experience, and how many people were playing because they wanted a free game?
Reference SBFord's graph: if the majority of folks on private servers were merely concerned with playing for free, a server that included TBC and WotLK would, far and away, be more popular than a vanilla server. It simply wouldn't make sense to withhold all that extra content that was so popular at release if you simply wanted to play without a subscription.
Only if the other servers are as populated and well running... Nossy was according to people the smoothest and well populated of the servers, that usually weighs very heavy for the more casual players. Especially population.
So while you make i good point, it is very much flawed.
For the sake of argument, lets say there are 2M western WoW subscribers. Maybe 20% of those would have interest in a Vanilla or progression server. So 400k for the server, 1,600k happy where they are. Blizzard would have to devote resources to please 400k people but take away resources from 1.6M.
Sure, its easy to say 'hire more people'. But then the 1.6M would still say 'hey, we could use those new devs to help develop the real product'
Something along Morheim's suggestion is reasonable, and would maybe only be a temporary disruption. But its not like WoW still isnt massively popular, and its not like a Vanilla server would bring them back anywhere close to BC era subscriber counts. EQ and EQ2 progression servers and P99 show that classic servers are a draw, but not a return to glory days.
Comments
https://www.change.org/p/mike-morhaime-legacy-server-among-world-of-warcraft-community/c/434305499
Complaints. That it isn't a BC or WotLK or Cat server. That there are queues - failure to open enough servers. That the servers are in Chinese and not in their language. Complaints from people who don't want to transfer that their servers are deserted and that transfers are needed. Complaints from people returning to the existing servers that the community they left (abandoned!) no longer exists. Complaints about tedious boring mechanics, or the lack of x, y and z; that add-ons don't work. Resulting in complaints that Blizzard doesn't respond, doesn't listen and more.
The game needs to get back to at least Wrath of the Lich King on gameplay style to be called an MMO RPG anymore. Anyone who is playing FFXIV ARR right now and jumps into WoW is going to be wondering what the world Blizzard Activision was thinking going the direction they have with a game system that forces people to play apart and takes players out of active quest zones just to do the garrison grind. Yes they can warp in every 20 minutes, but they still have to take the nearest flight path back to where they were and then navigate back to where the quests they left off are. It's a complete mess.
800K players al'a $15 a month is £12 000K each month. Last time I hear had Wow 5.8M players but more comes back to expansions so lets pretend it is 4M x £45 = $180M. So in 1 1/2 years they would get those money back and that is assuming half the players don't bother getting the expansion to only play on the legacy server which is pretty unlike, more likely is that half of those players would have a few character on the legacy server while still at least playing through the new expansion with their regular characters still selling the expansion to them.
And 800K is a pretty low number considering an illegal server mainly living on word to mouth and some talk on certain forums even if they are free. An official server would most likely pull in more players then that.
But in worst case scenario it would take then 1 1/2 years to get back those money, and each expansion releases about every second year. So I think they would earn profits on it, and if Wow besides everything start to rise in sub numbers again that weill most likely pull in some new players as well.
I think that the real problem is what OP hinted at: That Blizzard want players to think that Wow is just getting better and better and this could eventually lead to them closing down the regular servers (even though it is unlikely, I said could) which would mean they failed to move the game in the right expansion.
Personally do I think all MMOs who made a number of expansions and raised their levelcap a few times actually become worse then the game was at vanilla, and that goes for more games then Wow (EQ comes to mind). There are exceptions, the first Guildwars game made their campaigns really good and made the game better if you had all of them.
But I think Blizzard really should open up a vanilla server or 2, and not just because that would earn them more money but also since so many players want it. It isn't really that expensive.
If i were morheim, i would rather listen to an uneducated beggar than Mark Kern. And also we need to look forward, not backward.
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
The numbers mentioned I am more skeptical about. 800k accounts do not translate to active players in any way - The majority of those accounts are people checking it out for a few levels and never come back.
I have been messing around a little on another popular wow emu server (no names) that claims to have 100k+ accounts, but if you count concurrent logins or daily logins the number is much lower. In fact in boards discussions, people mention that the server hits it's limit at around 5k logins.
Nostalrius had 18k logins at peaks, and we don't have any numbers on active players, but I would take a guess at a number under 30k who plays regularly.
You can do the same numbers with project 1999 eq emulator which peaks at around 2500 (5k if you count all emu servers) but the number of eqemulator accounts are in the hundred of thousands (not a confirmed number).
Just saying, accounts are never removed (because there is no reason to), so the count on inactive accounts build up during the years.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
The argument that Everquest official legacy servers are an indicator that a Wow vanilla server would be empty after a few months falls flat right about the time you realize how bone-headed DBG was for trying to force players to abandon their months of progress on P99 to start all over again on their servers.
The distraction from the current version of WoW and Blizzard's desire to push the next expansion pack is probably the most legitimate argument against private servers. And it isn't an argument against Blizzard; companies exist to make a profit for those who own and work for them. People need to get paid for the company to continue to exist. I can get on board with the argument that Blizzard wants to focus on moving forward. It makes sense.
I had never heard of Nostalrius before Blizzard shut them down... Nor am I a WoW subscriber. From the outside looking in, this article seems to nail the largest and most pertinent reason behind Blizzard's move against such a popular private server.
But I'd rather see an expansion progression server than an expansion locked server. Give players a deadline to raid progress before releasing the next tier. Rinse, repeat. When you reach the end, start over. Create an official leader boarding system for guilds and fashion a new meta. Seems completely reasonable to me, probably well within their budget, and the game is certainly old enough to start toying around with varying server types (EQ is a great example, the alignment based PvP server was dope). I can also understand that they believe, as developers, that they haven't finished making the game yet, which probably seems ridiculous to consumers, what with the product being a decade old. But hey, I don't design games, I just play them. If they think they can create more viable expansions before being forced into this sort of thing, you can't really blame them for trying.
So, where do I stand? I really believe this site doesn't spend enough time talking about emulated MMO's (the topic is taboo and against the user agreement), because there's a vast portion of individuals still playing these games on private servers and developing for them. I'm glad we can finally talk about this in some capacity without threat of account warnings or suspensions, because it's important to examine and investigate. Why are emulated servers popular? What do they have to offer that can't be found elsewhere? What can we learn from them? Is it more cost productive to work with emulations than to combat them? That's more interesting to me than whether or not Blizzard is going to make an official Vanilla server.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
Wrong WoW hit it's high point with WotLK not BC.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-world-of-warcraft-subscribers-by-quarter/
For reference:
Vanilla, released in 2004
The Burning Crusade, January 2007
Wrath of the Lich King, November 2008
Cataclysm, December 2010
Mists of Pandaria, September 2012
Warlords of Draenor, November 2014.
This is, of course, not speaking to the emotionalism that any given expansion embodies for certain players. And therein lies the problem, the never ending requests for vanilla pure, vanilla with improved UI etc., Burning Crusade pure, BC with improvements, WotLK...well, point made. Blizzard could never keep up with everyone's demands. Pretty soon, they'd just sell a single player WoW and call it a day.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
The last expansion to provide a noticeable uptick in subscribers (without a steep decline shortly after its release) was WotLK. I find that significant, even if technically the subscribers hit an all-time high in Q4 2010.
Offering legacy servers though would enable players old and current to dive into the Vanilla when they felt like it.
I for one am looking forward to legion (Demon Hunters Wooo) and the dumping of the awful Garrison concept, why did blizzard have to invent housing "their way"! I do believe they should provide vanilla servers if they are going to aggressively pursue and shutdown private ones. Afterall that would be the mature thing to do?
Reference SBFord's graph: if the majority of folks on private servers were merely concerned with playing for free, a server that included TBC and WotLK would, far and away, be more popular than a vanilla server. It simply wouldn't make sense to withhold all that extra content that was so popular at release if you simply wanted to play without a subscription.
yea i have never seen (4) this many pieces from the staff on the same topic - must be an important topic
It's not just about Nostalgia, it's about everyone starting out from ZERO and have bursting starter and low Level zones full of People playing and leveling up again!
This Magic is gone from all these MMO's as they have become too old With the entire playerbase hanging out in one or few top Level zones and the rest of the game world being a barren Waste land!
This is the biggest FLAW in Themepark MMO's. Always has been and always will be! All that wonderful content becomes obsolete and much too quickly!
With each expansion pack driving the playerbase further and further away from New players joining in (and giving up soon after out of boredom and inability to Connect / Catch up).
That's why Blizzard should open up new Vanilla WoW servers! Don't Call them Vanilla, but Call them Progression Servers! Like with EQ1 and EQ2.
I would love to start over again in the Vanilla WoW world With thousands of others, leveling up through lively zones, experience the old Level Dungeons again.
It's what makes MMO's shine! It's where the Magic is!
I think the game can support current servers and Vanilla servers concurrently. It's not either or nor is it admitting that one is better than the other. It's about giving the players options. And options are always good for the bottom line.
This have been a good conversation
Sure, its easy to say 'hire more people'. But then the 1.6M would still say 'hey, we could use those new devs to help develop the real product'
Something along Morheim's suggestion is reasonable, and would maybe only be a temporary disruption. But its not like WoW still isnt massively popular, and its not like a Vanilla server would bring them back anywhere close to BC era subscriber counts. EQ and EQ2 progression servers and P99 show that classic servers are a draw, but not a return to glory days.