So realistically, what comes after WotLK classic? The fresh start...

Watch this move.
>Vanilla f2p

>Blizzard fans literally will excuse anything they do to play their games
you say that even though most classic players probably haven't touched retail for years, and if they did it was them trying out shadowlands because they were already on the sub but stopped pretty quick. most of them will go back to not touching WoW when wrath is done. it is naive to think people will care about things like "they support China" enough to stop playing a vidya. it's going to be very interesting seeing the state of blizz going forward I can't see a scenario where they don't lose a huge slice of their players

>There was nothing good about Cataclysm
Hello, I see you've gotten your opinions from this place, reddit, and the wow forums. I know you didn't play Cata at launch so you never got to experience the heroics and raids at the start, and I'm sorry for that.

That would be a good way to retain players, but Blizzard would never do it it is too antithetical to who they are as a company

>vanilla f2p
There'd be no point, people played classic, realized that they thought they did but actually didn't, and it died before naxx even released.

fucking this, the only issue cata had was LFR introduction in 4.3
>best pvp
>hardest raids
>reforge system
>bloodlust banned from arenas

I main tanked the first raid boss clear on my server and had uninstalled only a month. Cata was magical as fuck when it was fresh but the magic faded really fast and it wasn't long before my entire guild dissolved. It's very obvious to anyone who actually played at that time that Cata was on the wrong side of the bell curve of WoW subscriptions.

Nobody is ever able to articulate why this is the case. It's just popular opinion that is said without anything substantiating it. People cite dropping subs, but the subs dropped because the content was too difficult. WoW was already losing subs by the end of ICC and they pulled Ruby Sanctum out of their ass.

so did this flop or what
seems popular to me...ok not really

It seems like by every known measurement classic has been a huge success and has retained players way better than retail, there are like 8 hour queues and the population will die down but not enough for it to be anywhere close to a failure--it might even be the most popular MMO on the market somehow even though it's 15 years old

bbbbbbut sharding
bbbbbbbbbbut it wasn't an exact 1-to-1

DIE BLIZZARD DIE

It's really hard to pin down. Everyone I knew (and I mean everyone) found the difficulty to be an improvement. I think it was partially the restructuring of classic zones, which negated a lot of people's nostalgia and the feeling towards the game, I remember lots of complaints about classes becoming too homogeneous with the new buffing and stat systems (fuck you Mastery) and a thousand little things. Plus probably burnout just from how long it had been going at that point. The new dungeons and raids were really good, classes were pretty good, if not as unique, but for some reason so much was just lost in translation.

Literally only for the first week. And subs only doubled the amount of playing WoW, which means as many people playing classic was the amount of people playing retail during BFA. Was BFA highly successful?

Obviously, Cata classic.

Everything that you said is wrong, impressive.
Vanilla was great.

>dude we're gonna redo ALL the original zones you loved over the last 6 years!
>no you can't access the old zones their literally gone forever now!
>then we'll introduce timewalking for some zones 10 years later but they just reset to the original Cataclysm version HOORAY!
Cata can suck the deepest part of my sweaty taint.

hopefully them saying sorry for cata and trying again
i wrote this shit off completely in 2009 so it doesn’t really matter for me anymore