Or you could just not deprecate most of your content in the first place. I didn't pick up Guild Wars 1 until after Nightfall was out, but I was able to play through Prophecies and Factions just fine even after that without being stupidly overleveled for everything.
This was one of my favorite points about early Everquest - expansions were still pertinent for a long while. I hated when WoW came around and turned expansions into total game overhauls.
Agree
people get so upset about SWG and the NGE WOW has an NGE every expansion
As far as I recall, Blizzard have said its not so much that they wont, but that they cant go back with their code. I dunno how true that is, but there you go. For a company who have so often given in with their design decisions to the vocal minority, they have been VERY stubborn over this.
I doubt the problem is commercial at this stage, I think its either A resource management or B they really dont have the ability to do it.
The other thing is, for COH, for Vanilla wow and such, while hosting a server might be cheap, there is still a need for maintenance of said server. There is still a need for people to work on Account and billing problems at the very least (support). Most people would expect GM support for such a game and technical support too. The game would need to be updated to work on newer drivers as they come out and new OS builds.
Its not as simple as just sticking a server up and leaving it be, otherwise every MMO developer out there would have a Legacy server for each MMO at each expansion end state, because if it didnt cost anything and it brought money it, the ROI alone would be a no brainer.
Now, lets assume that the numbers for the recently closed wow server are accurate. They claimed I think 120,000-150,000 active accounts, ok, thats a good number. Lets not factor in Churn of players (which is what most MMOs actually base financial projections on, because with a player pool this size, the churn would likely be negative)
We have heard in the past that conversion rates on Free services to paying player are around the 8-10% mark, so lets be generous and say 10% thats 12,000 to 15,000 accounts.
Lets say these accounts were all willing to pay a full price subscription to a legacy server, so thats a decent chunk of change right?
225,000 American Dollars a month. So you need to pay for a few devs at the very least, some Account support, some in game support, IT and Network techs to keep the thing running, facilities staff those people need to eat, have the office cleaned and powered too etc. So this would rapidly eat up that budget with even just a maintenance team (Based on numbers from Glass Door and other employment sources) and pay for the hosting services for that game. Sure costs could be saved by using up hosting resources currently allocated for future proofing of other games, but that has an opportunity cost associated with it.
In order to keep the servers running they would need to market them, they would need to keep a player base that would be pretty quickly content starved amused. I mean look at how much wows subs drop after a years content gap. Never mind playing on a server you know is NEVER going to get new content.
Before long the player base dwindles, the cash flow dries up, in order to keep it going you either need to move it forward to the next expansion, or add new content, suddenly your maintenance costs spike upward and you need more cash to fund the operation.
Do you honestly think they would be able to meet the service expectations of todays gamers?
You obviously don't know the real numbers do you? 150K active players that have been playing solidly for 2 years. 800K registered accounts. So 150K solid subs is enough to run vanilla\tbc servers if they want. Add into that players like myself my wife and friends of mine who would come back to WOW for Vanilla TBC servers because we played and loved that time we just dont play on private WOW servers. So the numbers are there. You just dont get it.
And to sit there and go on about IT. Maybe you should take it from me. I am a Sr. Systems Engineer at a book publishing company the system side is cheap today, especially with VMs. Yes Development will cost money but with numbers reaching 200K active subs (because you need to take into account old players that will play Vanilla WOW that do not play on private servers) for 2 years, well that is more than most MMOs have today.
I will give you credit for doing some research but you need to go deeper, you only scratch the surface. Once you realize that 150K accounts are active 2 year accounts and how many people want to play vanilla\TBC who dont play on private servers, you are talking real money.
Denying players access to games they paid to play doesn't negate the desire to play said games. In this case, I believe the players are the ones being robbed, not the IP owner. They had 10 years to offer said version up to the masses, they chose to pass. It's time it went open source to the public.
I can't agree with this. Many players who play WOW today probably never even played Vanilla. Paying for an MMO is not the same as paying for a game like say Company of Heroes. MMOs by nature of the kind of game they are change. From day one in some cases. When you pay for an MMO you know that going into it. No MMO stays 'vanilla' so to expect a company to just look the other way when someone uses their assets illegally is just ridiculous. When I bought Company of Heroes I knew the game would be the same every time I logged in. When I buy an MMO I know things will change. It is a liquid medium. Anyone who says otherwise is being naive. So to use the excuse of "Well I paid for it, I should be able to play it as I see fit" does not apply to MMOs. The entire foundation of the genre is built on change and evolution. You paid for a version of it. That version changes. No one has a legal right to revert those changes as they see fit and invite thousands of players to play it except the owner of the IP.
As far as I recall, Blizzard have said its not so much that they wont, but that they cant go back with their code. I dunno how true that is, but there you go. For a company who have so often given in with their design decisions to the vocal minority, they have been VERY stubborn over this.
I doubt the problem is commercial at this stage, I think its either A resource management or B they really dont have the ability to do it.
The other thing is, for COH, for Vanilla wow and such, while hosting a server might be cheap, there is still a need for maintenance of said server. There is still a need for people to work on Account and billing problems at the very least (support). Most people would expect GM support for such a game and technical support too. The game would need to be updated to work on newer drivers as they come out and new OS builds.
Its not as simple as just sticking a server up and leaving it be, otherwise every MMO developer out there would have a Legacy server for each MMO at each expansion end state, because if it didnt cost anything and it brought money it, the ROI alone would be a no brainer.
Now, lets assume that the numbers for the recently closed wow server are accurate. They claimed I think 120,000-150,000 active accounts, ok, thats a good number. Lets not factor in Churn of players (which is what most MMOs actually base financial projections on, because with a player pool this size, the churn would likely be negative)
We have heard in the past that conversion rates on Free services to paying player are around the 8-10% mark, so lets be generous and say 10% thats 12,000 to 15,000 accounts.
Lets say these accounts were all willing to pay a full price subscription to a legacy server, so thats a decent chunk of change right?
225,000 American Dollars a month. So you need to pay for a few devs at the very least, some Account support, some in game support, IT and Network techs to keep the thing running, facilities staff those people need to eat, have the office cleaned and powered too etc. So this would rapidly eat up that budget with even just a maintenance team (Based on numbers from Glass Door and other employment sources) and pay for the hosting services for that game. Sure costs could be saved by using up hosting resources currently allocated for future proofing of other games, but that has an opportunity cost associated with it.
In order to keep the servers running they would need to market them, they would need to keep a player base that would be pretty quickly content starved amused. I mean look at how much wows subs drop after a years content gap. Never mind playing on a server you know is NEVER going to get new content.
Before long the player base dwindles, the cash flow dries up, in order to keep it going you either need to move it forward to the next expansion, or add new content, suddenly your maintenance costs spike upward and you need more cash to fund the operation.
Do you honestly think they would be able to meet the service expectations of todays gamers?
You obviously don't know the real numbers do you? 150K active players that have been playing solidly for 2 years. 800K registered accounts.
So all of those 150k players were paying 15$ a month to play in private server?
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.
It's one critical problem with MMO's, they have a limited lifespan. This was always obvious although in practice it sucks. As time goes on more and more of these great games with be lost forever never to be experienced again, which is just terrible. It is understandable that content development must cease at some point although when that happens the companies who made it have little incentive to keep them running. If anything they will be eager to shut them down just to poeple player whatever they are currently selling. You can never really forget or unlearn a game, I remember map layouts and secret rooms in wolfenstein 3d which i haven't played in 20 years and I will probably remember till the day I die. Unlike Wolf-3d we will never have a chance to hop onto one of our old favorites 50 years down the road. Such a limited lifespan is very dumb, games can last forever, look at chess 1500 years and still one of the most popular and important games ever. Even though WoW still exist that WoW of 10 years ago is dead and blizzard will continue to quash something that has had great significance to online gaming. Will people even care in another 20 years? MAybe not but blizzard is selling us and a part of their own legacy short by refusing to establish a long term classic server.
As far as I recall, Blizzard have said its not so much that they wont, but that they cant go back with their code. I dunno how true that is, but there you go. For a company who have so often given in with their design decisions to the vocal minority, they have been VERY stubborn over this.
I doubt the problem is commercial at this stage, I think its either A resource management or B they really dont have the ability to do it.
The other thing is, for COH, for Vanilla wow and such, while hosting a server might be cheap, there is still a need for maintenance of said server. There is still a need for people to work on Account and billing problems at the very least (support). Most people would expect GM support for such a game and technical support too. The game would need to be updated to work on newer drivers as they come out and new OS builds.
Its not as simple as just sticking a server up and leaving it be, otherwise every MMO developer out there would have a Legacy server for each MMO at each expansion end state, because if it didnt cost anything and it brought money it, the ROI alone would be a no brainer.
Now, lets assume that the numbers for the recently closed wow server are accurate. They claimed I think 120,000-150,000 active accounts, ok, thats a good number. Lets not factor in Churn of players (which is what most MMOs actually base financial projections on, because with a player pool this size, the churn would likely be negative)
We have heard in the past that conversion rates on Free services to paying player are around the 8-10% mark, so lets be generous and say 10% thats 12,000 to 15,000 accounts.
Lets say these accounts were all willing to pay a full price subscription to a legacy server, so thats a decent chunk of change right?
225,000 American Dollars a month. So you need to pay for a few devs at the very least, some Account support, some in game support, IT and Network techs to keep the thing running, facilities staff those people need to eat, have the office cleaned and powered too etc. So this would rapidly eat up that budget with even just a maintenance team (Based on numbers from Glass Door and other employment sources) and pay for the hosting services for that game. Sure costs could be saved by using up hosting resources currently allocated for future proofing of other games, but that has an opportunity cost associated with it.
In order to keep the servers running they would need to market them, they would need to keep a player base that would be pretty quickly content starved amused. I mean look at how much wows subs drop after a years content gap. Never mind playing on a server you know is NEVER going to get new content.
Before long the player base dwindles, the cash flow dries up, in order to keep it going you either need to move it forward to the next expansion, or add new content, suddenly your maintenance costs spike upward and you need more cash to fund the operation.
Do you honestly think they would be able to meet the service expectations of todays gamers?
You obviously don't know the real numbers do you? 150K active players that have been playing solidly for 2 years. 800K registered accounts. So 150K solid subs is enough to run vanilla\tbc servers if they want. Add into that players like myself my wife and friends of mine who would come back to WOW for Vanilla TBC servers because we played and loved that time we just dont play on private WOW servers. So the numbers are there. You just dont get it.
And to sit there and go on about IT. Maybe you should take it from me. I am a Sr. Systems Engineer at a book publishing company the system side is cheap today, especially with VMs. Yes Development will cost money but with numbers reaching 200K active subs (because you need to take into account old players that will play Vanilla WOW that do not play on private servers) for 2 years, well that is more than most MMOs have today.
I will give you credit for doing some research but you need to go deeper, you only scratch the surface. Once you realize that 150K accounts are active 2 year accounts and how many people want to play vanilla\TBC who dont play on private servers, you are talking real money.
Not going to get into a pissing contest over who has the more relevant job to discuss server hosting costs for an MMO because I never mix business with pleasure. While I do not doubt your skills and experience, there is a huge magnitude of difference between running a live service MMO environment (Which by its nature can not use a lot of virtualisation) and a Point of Sale webserver If you don't believe me, look at the tech CCP had to invest in to support Eves growth, they have literally advanced cloud computing to facilitate their game, I doubt Waterstones had to do that.
What is being missed is the biggest point I was making though, 150k FREE players DOES NOT equate to 150K subscribers. MMOS have a VERY poor conversion rate from free to play to paid players (most free to play games run at around 5-10% conversion rates, Freemium games a little higher). Thats why MMO fiscals are based around Churn and repeat purchases not first time ones. So the 150k Active accounts they quoted, would with "Industry standard" numbers equate to around 15,000 subscribers, and thats if we give them the upper end of the estimated numbers.
Heres another nugget, 90% of mmo purchases are repeat purchases, IE you are ten times more likely to get a player to spend money if they have already spent money than you are to convince a person to make their first transaction. Nearly every commercial MMO (Free to play or Pay to Play) has quoted this number in fiscal reports / investor reports.
All of the above are readily available from reading end of year financial reports from any and all of the big MMO studios.
So yes, I have done my research, more carefully than you think, what you need to get over is the 150k - 200k number, because that is indicative of how many would use a FREE service, you need to drill down into how many would PAY for said service.
Then look at the costs of maintaining said service, and you will find very quickly that the business decision based purely on the bottom line is not as simple as you think.
And thats before you get into maintaining two different sets of code and the work behind that. I am sorry but once you run these numbers, if you do even a little research into the behind the scenes costs of running a live MMO, you will see it just doesnt add up to anywhere near the demand required for a company the size of blizzard to consider it a positive Return On Investment.
Meanwhile, Blizzard has to juggle all these different server types with different states and different QA and CS needs because the average gamer had no idea what it takes to run an MMO server.
Blizzard will either do it and get legacy revenue at lower profitability due to high maintenance costs or won't get that revenue at all.
Those players don't give a &*$@ anymore about current WoW and won't give about future expansions because they know that Blizzard cannot cater to their expectations in future as it would alienate current WoW customers.
Your second paragraph is exactly right and what people need to look at from a business point of view ..
If you own a business , do you..
A.. Cater to 99.86% of your customers (that are currently paying all the bills mind you)
B.. or the .014 % pissing and moaning they want Vanilla product ...(that are paying nothing and trying to find ways to steal and misrepresent your product)
It seems the answer is quite obvious , if you want to stay in business.
Sure.
That is why situation will stay the same. Blizzard will close private server every now and then, and private servers with Vanilla, BC or WotLK will keep popping up.
What I've meant is those private server players are lost from Blizzard WoW anyway. They won't convert from private server running old expansion to newer official WoW, even if official WoW would be F2P or free.
What I've meant is those private server players are lost from Blizzard WoW anyway. They won't convert from private server running old expansion to newer official WoW, even if official WoW would be F2P or free.
I disagree. I feel that many of those private classic server players would welcome the chance to play on a Blizz server. I offer as proof all the posters in these forums and the petition that was signed by over 50,000. That 50,000 and the voices on the forums are just the tip of the iceberg of people who would play. One has to think about all the people who are not active forum goers which is the majority of players.
There was an interesting fair use case that was brought up not too long ago. I think this was being applied to a non-MMO Electronic Arts title. This may gave been the case but I'm not certain, I can't find the original article I thinking of (think it was from EFF)
The premise went like this: - You paid for the client software (this was a few years ago, when that was still pretty common) - The server was provided by the company as part of the software service (for subscription or otherwise) - The server has since been shut down, rendering the purchase useless
It may would be considered fair use if someone were able to reverse engineer a server, provided: - The server contained no stolen code or client assets - the server had to be 100% original. - You didn't sell access to or otherwise profit from the use of the server
I think it lost in court, as EA was able to successfully argue that older versions of their software still in use would hinder sales of newer versions, and that made the case fail the US definition of "Fair Use".
What I've meant is those private server players are lost from Blizzard WoW anyway. They won't convert from private server running old expansion to newer official WoW, even if official WoW would be F2P or free.
I disagree. I feel that many of those private classic server players would welcome the chance to play on a Blizz server. I offer as proof all the posters in these forums and the petition that was signed by over 50,000. That 50,000 and the voices on the forums are just the tip of the iceberg of people who would play. One has to think about all the people who are not active forum goers which is the majority of players.
I've meant they are lost from playing CUREENT&FUTURE official WoW. Meaning current and new expansions.
People from closed Vanilla server won't come to play Warlords of Draenor WoW.
Not going to get into a pissing contest over who has the more relevant job to discuss server hosting costs for an MMO because I never mix business with pleasure. While I do not doubt your skills and experience, there is a huge magnitude of difference between running a live service MMO environment (Which by its nature can not use a lot of virtualisation) and a Point of Sale webserver If you don't believe me, look at the tech CCP had to invest in to support Eves growth, they have literally advanced cloud computing to facilitate their game, I doubt Waterstones had to do that.
What is being missed is the biggest point I was making though, 150k FREE players DOES NOT equate to 150K subscribers. MMOS have a VERY poor conversion rate from free to play to paid players (most free to play games run at around 5-10% conversion rates, Freemium games a little higher). Thats why MMO fiscals are based around Churn and repeat purchases not first time ones. So the 150k Active accounts they quoted, would with "Industry standard" numbers equate to around 15,000 subscribers, and thats if we give them the upper end of the estimated numbers.
Heres another nugget, 90% of mmo purchases are repeat purchases, IE you are ten times more likely to get a player to spend money if they have already spent money than you are to convince a person to make their first transaction. Nearly every commercial MMO (Free to play or Pay to Play) has quoted this number in fiscal reports / investor reports.
All of the above are readily available from reading end of year financial reports from any and all of the big MMO studios.
So yes, I have done my research, more carefully than you think, what you need to get over is the 150k - 200k number, because that is indicative of how many would use a FREE service, you need to drill down into how many would PAY for said service.
Then look at the costs of maintaining said service, and you will find very quickly that the business decision based purely on the bottom line is not as simple as you think.
And thats before you get into maintaining two different sets of code and the work behind that. I am sorry but once you run these numbers, if you do even a little research into the behind the scenes costs of running a live MMO, you will see it just doesnt add up to anywhere near the demand required for a company the size of blizzard to consider it a positive Return On Investment.
Well you got your self into a pissing match because I know what it takes to run high end transnational systems which MMOs are. So I know EXACTLY what they need to do the only difference is they run on Unix systems not windows systems and I have countless friends who manage Unix.
As for you think for 1 bit the 150K people wouldnt pay for a Vanilla WOW server is you thinking you know something. The fact is many of these 150K people had active WOW subs during Vanilla WOW, and had active subs while playing on a Private version of a server which blizzard does not offer anymore. You are just flapping your gums because you think people will not show up to play a version of WOW they loved and be more than willing to pay for it. Hell many of these people had gone to Blizzcon and asked the question over and over for PAID VANILLA SERVERS. Yet you discount it because you THINK you know something. Yet All over the WOW forums people asked for this time and time again, on all different MMORPG forums people say they would come back for Vanilla WOW. Yet you think not. Guess what. I posted about the petition for classic servers and more than the 2 dozen friends that I talk to a few times a year and played vanilla WOW and TBC with signed and told me they too would return. Add to that others who I rarely talked to contacted me and said the same thing.
People wanting you just want to run your gums think you know something when there is a deep desire for it. The 150K only use a FREE service because there is no paid Vanilla/TBC server son. THAT IS A FACT and until you can come to that fact that there is no PAID Vanilla WOW Service. Here is a post on reddit talking about how Nostalrius would make the money to support the server, https://www.reddit.com/r/wowservers/comments/2wa6id/how_will_nostalrius_pay_for_itself/ Guess what enough people were donating that the developers didnt need to pay out of their pocket.
You can say all you want that it will not work. Yet its all over the internet of people wanting Classic servers and many are willing to donate to private servers why the hell wouldnt they pay for official when they are donating and most already have WOW Subs.
You need to screw your head on right because you lines here are nothing but an uneducated opinion because you are taking Welfare players who want Free MMOs and putting it up against classic MMO players who accept a sub.
I don't expect that existing games would be able to do this, but were I involved in making what I expected to be a multi-expansion game in the future, I would plan ahead and do it like this:
* Each expansion gets a server (set of servers, megaserver, whatever current technology allows to accommodate demand).
* Players are welcome to create new characters on the server of any expansion.
* At any time, a player may migrate a character from an earlier expansion to a later expansion, but not backward (too many issues with reverting levels, differences in mechanics, and overpowered gear).
Using WoW as an example, a player starting today could start at vanilla and play through the expansions as players who started in 2005 did, or he could start immediately in Legion. It might even be reasonable to have an optional level-boost to the initial level of each expansion to get new players/characters quickly into the action.
Additionally, however, a player could level through and keep max-level characters on each expansion server (a 60 on the vanilla server, a 70 on the TBC server, etc.) and do dungeons and raid content that are still challenging at-level and award appropriate level gear.
After so many years, many players play a dozen alts anyway, and this approach helps keep old content playable without needing to mess with level and difficulty scaling or solve the problem of appropriate rewards/incentives. Somebody smarter than me could figure out a way, I'm sure, to make friend, guild, and whisper chat cross-expansion, and allow the same guild to advertise and operate across expansions too.
Meanwhile, Blizzard has to juggle all these different server types with different states and different QA and CS needs because the average gamer had no idea what it takes to run an MMO server.
Blizzard will either do it and get legacy revenue at lower profitability due to high maintenance costs or won't get that revenue at all.
Those players don't give a &*$@ anymore about current WoW and won't give about future expansions because they know that Blizzard cannot cater to their expectations in future as it would alienate current WoW customers.
Your second paragraph is exactly right and what people need to look at from a business point of view ..
If you own a business , do you..
A.. Cater to 99.86% of your customers (that are currently paying all the bills mind you)
B.. or the .014 % pissing and moaning they want Vanilla product ...(that are paying nothing and trying to find ways to steal and misrepresent your product)
It seems the answer is quite obvious , if you want to stay in business.
Sure.
That is why situation will stay the same. Blizzard will close private server every now and then, and private servers with Vanilla, BC or WotLK will keep popping up.
What I've meant is those private server players are lost from Blizzard WoW anyway. They won't convert from private server running old expansion to newer official WoW, even if official WoW would be F2P or free.
I am never going back to the current WOW. Since WOTLK I have hated every expansion yet I spent nearly 4 years in the vanilla TBC time and had a sub nearly the entire time. I dont even play on a Private server yet if there was ever a TBC server I would be happy to come back and pay for it. So would many Classic players playing on private servers. The problem is people think they just want MMOs for free when many donate to keep their servers running.
While this is a smaller group than todays MMO gamers, if today blizzard said we are going to lunch a TBC server. But I had to pay 2 years up front at $200 a year. I would pay and would be sticking around. WHY? Because TBC content was content it would take you time to do you didnt hit max level in 14 day and have nothing left to do. I would take me 5 months or so to level. I am fine with that and would do that. I am a hell of a lot better MMO gamer and would be a loyal customer if they gave me a TBC WOW because it is not today's Fast Food Joint WOW which I hate. Blizzard would have a stable stream of money with people like me who want content that will take me time to chew through, fast food content makes me not play.
What I've meant is those private server players are lost from Blizzard WoW anyway. They won't convert from private server running old expansion to newer official WoW, even if official WoW would be F2P or free.
I disagree. I feel that many of those private classic server players would welcome the chance to play on a Blizz server. I offer as proof all the posters in these forums and the petition that was signed by over 50,000. That 50,000 and the voices on the forums are just the tip of the iceberg of people who would play. One has to think about all the people who are not active forum goers which is the majority of players.
I've meant they are lost from playing CUREENT&FUTURE official WoW. Meaning current and new expansions.
People from closed Vanilla server won't come to play Warlords of Draenor WoW.
Also I am not coming back from FFXIV to play WOD. I will come back for TBC.
Personally I think Star Wars Galaxies deserves a legacy server, and frankly it was better designed for the subscription /cash shop ethos than most mmos today. Too, it was the greatest crafting and resources gathering mmorpg of all-time.
Forget mmos like the matrix-online: it was just a trivial wash and repeat mmo, and Champions Online is vastly better than City of Heros was at its best.
Warhammer Online was an astonishing MMO with a lot to offer; on the other hand, after level 15 the level grind was a resistance to freeform pvp that lvl15 captured. If it could be revamped, making it more skill-based and omitting the level system...
IMO i think legacy servers are needed for the same reason you see the trend of all these remade movies. everything has been done before and the newer mmo's are nothing special, much like movies.
maybe it isn't as profitable for some game companies but when those companies refuse to allow the private servers even though they refuse to offer a similar service? i have a problem with that.
if people want that service and you refuse to give it, let private servers handle it, since it's supposedly not profitable to you anyways?
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.
That's the thing, there's no need to devote dev time to them. Server upkeep and that's it. People just want to play. Unless there are utterly game-breaking bugs afoot, the servers can just be left on auto-pilot. With the plummeting costs of hosting due to cloud computing options (I'm an AWS fan myself - stupidly scalable and very cheap), this seems to be like a very, very missed opportunity by Blizzard. Set up legacy servers, charge $15 for three months of playtime, and watch the profit roll in.
I don't think it's as easy as that. And as I've mentioned, eventually people are going to get tired of the same material. And what happens when they have had their fill? Now you have a server with a very small population no it. Is there $15 per month enough?
I don't think it's as easy as all that either. For one I've seen it completely fragment the EQ2 community. The game community itself is worse off for that.
On top of that the TLE (legacy) server players have a lot of requests and needs. They are completely understandable, but it does increase resource load and divide the resource pool up.
I would like to see options for shuttered games though like CoX, MxO, etc.
But like SBFord said, I would rather move forward than backwards. I think there are other good reasons not to get stuck in the past. Instead of trying to resurrect Asheron's Call, support games like Project Gorgon. Instead of trying to make some EQ snapshot, support Pantheon.
tell that to the countless reboot of movies you see lately. until something new arises this genre cannot move forward, it's just more of the same with a little twist.
people have been playing graphical mmo's for over 15 years now, you may not agree with the people that want to relive the glory years of the games they used to love but many others do want that.
i think its kind of selfish to deny mmo fans what they want simply because you personally do not want that. it's not like there is only a handful of mmo players that want "legacy servers", there are a lot of them that do.
also, as i showed you in another thread, the EQ and EQ2 progression servers are actually quite popular, especially EQ's. why do you think DBG keeps opening them? because they are not making them money?
EQ's most populated server is a progression server (Phinigel ) and those servers are not locked into vanilla, if they were they would probably last a lot longer because the people playing them start quiting once multiple expansions start coming out.
If a game has been discontinued, then it shouldn't be a problem, the thing with the WoW vanilla server was that it was stealing another companies IP, of a game currently still running, whether any of those players would end up going to play the 'real' WoW, is probably irrelevant, they didn't have the right to the IP so they were shut down, its a shame for those who were enjoying playing it, but, they knew going in, that what they were doing wasn't legal and it was only a matter of time before Blizzard shut them down, it happened, time to move on.
I don't condone them but Private Servers are a reality. They will exist no matter what.
Now if it is as many say and having legacy servers is not financially viable, then what is the harm in letting "Not for Profit" fan run legacy servers exist. High quality fan run servers like Nostralius would naturally counter attack the sleezball ones. As soon as money is involved its time to slam the hammer down.
Sorry but I believe that after a company has profited hundreds of millions and billions of dollars it is just good business to throw your fans and customers a bone every once in awhile.
In the end it is good business.
Good business is controlling your brand, products, IP's. If people do not like it go change the laws...till them pirate servers are wrong and should be shutdown.
Agreed. Any company that doesn't defend their IP is asking for a whole heap of problems down the road.
If Blizzard felt like any type of a legacy server was in their best interest they would have made one by now. Regardless of what people think or say, creating a separate rule server does divert resources from the main game. Additionally, how much is this really worth to the studio itself? So they open a vanilla server, thousands come back to play for awhile, but how long before the population drops? How many are truly just rose colored glasses people who will start to play and think to themselves, oh yeah...this is what it was like, and stop playing again. I would be surprised if the amount who would truly play a vanilla server for years would number more than a few hundred.
For games that are completely gone. Well that's potentially a different story. However, again, a team would need to go about things the right way and try to get permission from the owners of the IP. It's a long shot yes, but you never know, with the right presentation, someone might get lucky.
Finally, yup losing things that you love sucks. However, that's also just part of life. Learning to let go and holding on to memories is just part of the human experience. After all, nothing lasts forever.
i find it odd that none of these concerns were expressed when DBG endorsed the then illegal private server p99. their reasoning was because they cannot and/or will not offer a service like that.
even though they had their own progression servers that were in direct competition with p99, unlike current wow that is a completely different game experience from vanilla.
IMO that was the right thing for DBG to do and nobody trashed them for it, they were praised for it and nobody trashed p99 either like you see people doing here in blind support of blizz.
blizz has made billions of dollars off of people like you and me, i don't feel sorry for them one bit when they refuse to offer a similar service that i would gladly pay for.
then basically spit in the face of the fans that say they want a server like that and claim we actually don't want that, it's insulting.
I would deffo return to play on a vanilla server with the option to transfer off it (for free) and onto the next expansion package.
This of course would mean having some servers holding each expansion (and updates) e.g Vanilla wow server - Burning Crusade server. Dont need to have all differant servers running. But give players the option when they want to progress their character onwards.
As mentioned servers can hold more players thesedays, they dont cost as much as they used to, they are much more powerful than they were in 2003 etc.
While Blizzard is within their rights to shut it down, it would be nice if they left Nostalrius alone.
Blizzard is not offering WoW Vanilla and they said many times in the past that they have no intention of ever doing it. So, why not let volunteer fans like Nostalrius guys do as long as they do not turn it into a for profit business?
My guess is that Blizzard is afraid of the success of Nostalrius, which is why they have decided to go after it. Keep in mind that private legacy servers is nothing new. Many such servers have been around for years and Blizzard did nothing about them.
The difference is that Nostalrius has been wildly successful, and drew hundreds of thousands of people. As I mentioned before, my guess regarding why Blizzard may be afraid of a legacy server becoming so successful is that such success may serve to show that Blizzard screwed up with the direction they took WoW.
Think about how it would reflect on Blizzard if a legacy server like Nostalrius becomes insanely successful while the original game, supposedly more advanced with better graphics and better every other thing, has been losing players, and actually lost roughly 60% of its' player population. Not good...
I don't condone them but Private Servers are a reality. They will exist no matter what.
Now if it is as many say and having legacy servers is not financially viable, then what is the harm in letting "Not for Profit" fan run legacy servers exist. High quality fan run servers like Nostralius would naturally counter attack the sleezball ones. As soon as money is involved its time to slam the hammer down.
Sorry but I believe that after a company has profited hundreds of millions and billions of dollars it is just good business to throw your fans and customers a bone every once in awhile.
In the end it is good business.
Good business is controlling your brand, products, IP's. If people do not like it go change the laws...till them pirate servers are wrong and should be shutdown.
Agreed. Any company that doesn't defend their IP is asking for a whole heap of problems down the road.
If Blizzard felt like any type of a legacy server was in their best interest they would have made one by now. Regardless of what people think or say, creating a separate rule server does divert resources from the main game. Additionally, how much is this really worth to the studio itself? So they open a vanilla server, thousands come back to play for awhile, but how long before the population drops? How many are truly just rose colored glasses people who will start to play and think to themselves, oh yeah...this is what it was like, and stop playing again. I would be surprised if the amount who would truly play a vanilla server for years would number more than a few hundred.
For games that are completely gone. Well that's potentially a different story. However, again, a team would need to go about things the right way and try to get permission from the owners of the IP. It's a long shot yes, but you never know, with the right presentation, someone might get lucky.
Finally, yup losing things that you love sucks. However, that's also just part of life. Learning to let go and holding on to memories is just part of the human experience. After all, nothing lasts forever.
i find it odd that none of these concerns were expressed when DBG endorsed the then illegal private server p99. their reasoning was because they cannot and/or will not offer a service like that.
even though they had their own progression servers that were in direct competition with p99, unlike current wow that is a completely different game experience from vanilla.
IMO that was the right thing for DBG to do and nobody trashed them for it, they were praised for it and nobody trashed p99 either like you see people doing here in blind support of blizz.
blizz has made billions of dollars off of people like you and me, i don't feel sorry for them one bit when they refuse to offer a similar service that i would gladly pay for.
then basically spit in the face of the fans that say they want a server like that and claim we actually don't want that, it's insulting.
SOE/DBG really won a lot of respect in my book for endorsing p1999 as long as it remained not-for-profit. p1999 was regarded as an act of love for the IP and it really is a community of great people who just want to play the game as it was. It existed even as EQ was F2P which shows people want to play for the game for its content not it's payment model.
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people get so upset about SWG and the NGE WOW has an NGE every expansion
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
And to sit there and go on about IT. Maybe you should take it from me. I am a Sr. Systems Engineer at a book publishing company the system side is cheap today, especially with VMs. Yes Development will cost money but with numbers reaching 200K active subs (because you need to take into account old players that will play Vanilla WOW that do not play on private servers) for 2 years, well that is more than most MMOs have today.
I will give you credit for doing some research but you need to go deeper, you only scratch the surface. Once you realize that 150K accounts are active 2 year accounts and how many people want to play vanilla\TBC who dont play on private servers, you are talking real money.
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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.
Not going to get into a pissing contest over who has the more relevant job to discuss server hosting costs for an MMO because I never mix business with pleasure. While I do not doubt your skills and experience, there is a huge magnitude of difference between running a live service MMO environment (Which by its nature can not use a lot of virtualisation) and a Point of Sale webserver If you don't believe me, look at the tech CCP had to invest in to support Eves growth, they have literally advanced cloud computing to facilitate their game, I doubt Waterstones had to do that.
What is being missed is the biggest point I was making though, 150k FREE players DOES NOT equate to 150K subscribers. MMOS have a VERY poor conversion rate from free to play to paid players (most free to play games run at around 5-10% conversion rates, Freemium games a little higher). Thats why MMO fiscals are based around Churn and repeat purchases not first time ones. So the 150k Active accounts they quoted, would with "Industry standard" numbers equate to around 15,000 subscribers, and thats if we give them the upper end of the estimated numbers.
Heres another nugget, 90% of mmo purchases are repeat purchases, IE you are ten times more likely to get a player to spend money if they have already spent money than you are to convince a person to make their first transaction. Nearly every commercial MMO (Free to play or Pay to Play) has quoted this number in fiscal reports / investor reports.
All of the above are readily available from reading end of year financial reports from any and all of the big MMO studios.
So yes, I have done my research, more carefully than you think, what you need to get over is the 150k - 200k number, because that is indicative of how many would use a FREE service, you need to drill down into how many would PAY for said service.
Then look at the costs of maintaining said service, and you will find very quickly that the business decision based purely on the bottom line is not as simple as you think.
And thats before you get into maintaining two different sets of code and the work behind that. I am sorry but once you run these numbers, if you do even a little research into the behind the scenes costs of running a live MMO, you will see it just doesnt add up to anywhere near the demand required for a company the size of blizzard to consider it a positive Return On Investment.
That is why situation will stay the same. Blizzard will close private server every now and then, and private servers with Vanilla, BC or WotLK will keep popping up.
What I've meant is those private server players are lost from Blizzard WoW anyway. They won't convert from private server running old expansion to newer official WoW, even if official WoW would be F2P or free.
People from closed Vanilla server won't come to play Warlords of Draenor WoW.
https://www.change.org/p/michael-morhaime-legacy-server-among-world-of-warcraft-community
As for you think for 1 bit the 150K people wouldnt pay for a Vanilla WOW server is you thinking you know something. The fact is many of these 150K people had active WOW subs during Vanilla WOW, and had active subs while playing on a Private version of a server which blizzard does not offer anymore. You are just flapping your gums because you think people will not show up to play a version of WOW they loved and be more than willing to pay for it. Hell many of these people had gone to Blizzcon and asked the question over and over for PAID VANILLA SERVERS. Yet you discount it because you THINK you know something. Yet All over the WOW forums people asked for this time and time again, on all different MMORPG forums people say they would come back for Vanilla WOW. Yet you think not. Guess what. I posted about the petition for classic servers and more than the 2 dozen friends that I talk to a few times a year and played vanilla WOW and TBC with signed and told me they too would return. Add to that others who I rarely talked to contacted me and said the same thing.
People wanting you just want to run your gums think you know something when there is a deep desire for it. The 150K only use a FREE service because there is no paid Vanilla/TBC server son. THAT IS A FACT and until you can come to that fact that there is no PAID Vanilla WOW Service. Here is a post on reddit talking about how Nostalrius would make the money to support the server, https://www.reddit.com/r/wowservers/comments/2wa6id/how_will_nostalrius_pay_for_itself/ Guess what enough people were donating that the developers didnt need to pay out of their pocket.
Here is more about people donating to the server
https://forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3903
You can say all you want that it will not work. Yet its all over the internet of people wanting Classic servers and many are willing to donate to private servers why the hell wouldnt they pay for official when they are donating and most already have WOW Subs.
You need to screw your head on right because you lines here are nothing but an uneducated opinion because you are taking Welfare players who want Free MMOs and putting it up against classic MMO players who accept a sub.
* Each expansion gets a server (set of servers, megaserver, whatever current technology allows to accommodate demand).
* Players are welcome to create new characters on the server of any expansion.
* At any time, a player may migrate a character from an earlier expansion to a later expansion, but not backward (too many issues with reverting levels, differences in mechanics, and overpowered gear).
Using WoW as an example, a player starting today could start at vanilla and play through the expansions as players who started in 2005 did, or he could start immediately in Legion. It might even be reasonable to have an optional level-boost to the initial level of each expansion to get new players/characters quickly into the action.
Additionally, however, a player could level through and keep max-level characters on each expansion server (a 60 on the vanilla server, a 70 on the TBC server, etc.) and do dungeons and raid content that are still challenging at-level and award appropriate level gear.
After so many years, many players play a dozen alts anyway, and this approach helps keep old content playable without needing to mess with level and difficulty scaling or solve the problem of appropriate rewards/incentives. Somebody smarter than me could figure out a way, I'm sure, to make friend, guild, and whisper chat cross-expansion, and allow the same guild to advertise and operate across expansions too.
I am never going back to the current WOW. Since WOTLK I have hated every expansion yet I spent nearly 4 years in the vanilla TBC time and had a sub nearly the entire time. I dont even play on a Private server yet if there was ever a TBC server I would be happy to come back and pay for it. So would many Classic players playing on private servers. The problem is people think they just want MMOs for free when many donate to keep their servers running.
While this is a smaller group than todays MMO gamers, if today blizzard said we are going to lunch a TBC server. But I had to pay 2 years up front at $200 a year. I would pay and would be sticking around. WHY? Because TBC content was content it would take you time to do you didnt hit max level in 14 day and have nothing left to do. I would take me 5 months or so to level. I am fine with that and would do that. I am a hell of a lot better MMO gamer and would be a loyal customer if they gave me a TBC WOW because it is not today's Fast Food Joint WOW which I hate. Blizzard would have a stable stream of money with people like me who want content that will take me time to chew through, fast food content makes me not play.
Also I am not coming back from FFXIV to play WOD. I will come back for TBC.
Forget mmos like the matrix-online: it was just a trivial wash and repeat mmo, and Champions Online is vastly better than City of Heros was at its best.
Warhammer Online was an astonishing MMO with a lot to offer; on the other hand, after level 15 the level grind was a resistance to freeform pvp that lvl15 captured. If it could be revamped, making it more skill-based and omitting the level system...
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maybe it isn't as profitable for some game companies but when those companies refuse to allow the private servers even though they refuse to offer a similar service? i have a problem with that.
if people want that service and you refuse to give it, let private servers handle it, since it's supposedly not profitable to you anyways?
tell that to the countless reboot of movies you see lately. until something new arises this genre cannot move forward, it's just more of the same with a little twist.
people have been playing graphical mmo's for over 15 years now, you may not agree with the people that want to relive the glory years of the games they used to love but many others do want that.
i think its kind of selfish to deny mmo fans what they want simply because you personally do not want that. it's not like there is only a handful of mmo players that want "legacy servers", there are a lot of them that do.
also, as i showed you in another thread, the EQ and EQ2 progression servers are actually quite popular, especially EQ's. why do you think DBG keeps opening them? because they are not making them money?
EQ's most populated server is a progression server (Phinigel ) and those servers are not locked into vanilla, if they were they would probably last a lot longer because the people playing them start quiting once multiple expansions start coming out.
i find it odd that none of these concerns were expressed when DBG endorsed the then illegal private server p99. their reasoning was because they cannot and/or will not offer a service like that.
even though they had their own progression servers that were in direct competition with p99, unlike current wow that is a completely different game experience from vanilla.
IMO that was the right thing for DBG to do and nobody trashed them for it, they were praised for it and nobody trashed p99 either like you see people doing here in blind support of blizz.
blizz has made billions of dollars off of people like you and me, i don't feel sorry for them one bit when they refuse to offer a similar service that i would gladly pay for.
then basically spit in the face of the fans that say they want a server like that and claim we actually don't want that, it's insulting.
This of course would mean having some servers holding each expansion (and updates) e.g Vanilla wow server - Burning Crusade server. Dont need to have all differant servers running. But give players the option when they want to progress their character onwards.
As mentioned servers can hold more players thesedays, they dont cost as much as they used to, they are much more powerful than they were in 2003 etc.
Blizzard is not offering WoW Vanilla and they said many times in the past that they have no intention of ever doing it. So, why not let volunteer fans like Nostalrius guys do as long as they do not turn it into a for profit business?
My guess is that Blizzard is afraid of the success of Nostalrius, which is why they have decided to go after it. Keep in mind that private legacy servers is nothing new. Many such servers have been around for years and Blizzard did nothing about them.
The difference is that Nostalrius has been wildly successful, and drew hundreds of thousands of people. As I mentioned before, my guess regarding why Blizzard may be afraid of a legacy server becoming so successful is that such success may serve to show that Blizzard screwed up with the direction they took WoW.
Think about how it would reflect on Blizzard if a legacy server like Nostalrius becomes insanely successful while the original game, supposedly more advanced with better graphics and better every other thing, has been losing players, and actually lost roughly 60% of its' player population. Not good...
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