However, it's worth mentioning that Runescape now officially offers a "classic" version of the game alongside (and separate from) the modern version, which should be an interesting experiment to watch.

I've always thought that level caps in MMOs, particularly the WoW variety slash-and-burn where you basically make a new theme park every two years and throw the last one in the dumpster in terms of player viability, is a destructive cycle not conductive to building real living worlds.

It's pretty simple to avoid the problem of having players scattered across multiple content sets and levelcaps: stop bleeding your players dry. What are subscription fees paying for if not ongoing development of additional content?

IMO you should either charge for expansions or charge subscription fees - but not both.

WoW was, from the outset, designed to railroad players through content theme parks and give a hit of dopamine just often enough to keep them playing.

The Blizzard Warcraft Store: https://us.battle.net/shop/en/product/game/wow

Information on the "WoW Token" mechanism for turning $ into gold: http://www.tentonhammer.com/guides/guide-to-buying-and-selli...

If existing players who are willing to buy new expansions whenever they are available migrate to vanilla servers, they might as well opt out of buying the expansions, since adding new content in the vanilla servers will make them non-vanilla.

Huh.

Theme Park/Resort Casino. Basically dazzle your senses while getting you to play a rigged game to massage you with variable schedule of reward. A real, living world is spoiler-proof.

I do not see how they would be splitting the userbase, when many of the players of this server wouldn't even consider returning to Blizzard's current product.

The problem I see is old versions would be unlikely to get updates like new content or dungeons so even those hoping to play long term would get bored eventually.

Games age and taste change too. Blizzard has done an amazing job to see so many millions of players interested. The one surprise to me is how low of level their free play is limited to.

Otherwise, I do see your point. As much as I'd enjoy it if they offered new players/characters the option of playing revised post-Cataclysm content for leveling or "classic" content instead, it might pull away enough of the existing population to make early group quests painful. (Although, that could be mitigated somewhat in the same manner their cross-realm stuff currently works.)

You may be right about the nostalgic effects, although it is a pretty powerful effect and certainly got one particular company's side venture off to a good start [1]. In the times I've toyed around with TrinityCore, I find I'd play it at least 2-3 times a week if I had friends who weren't absolutely terrified of the potential for permanent bans--the old content was that enjoyable to me. Nevertheless, I recently re-subscribed to retail this February, and I enjoy it, but it feels like it's missing something. It doesn't have the same charm, but I do appreciate a few of the improvements (the "spell crunch" is miserable, however).

I'm a sample size of one, though, and that's certainly not enough to make any time investment worthwhile on Blizzard's behalf.

[1] http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/21/5913763/gog-com-back-catalo...

I don't know exactly how well it's working out for them. Now they have two games to support and promote, with about the same number of users. This number might (likely?) be higher than if they had stuck to providing a single game, but I'm not sure. It's hard to tell.

There seems to be some business risk to doing this. Apart from possibly cannibalizing your main product, it also requires two teams to support and run the two games. If you actually want the experience on the old-style server to be at all stable or compelling, you'll have to put some time and energy into them—it's more than just running the server.

Honestly, I have no idea if what RuneScape did was the right move, but it's a really interesting case study.

More importantly, the resources they have are better used developing new things for their existing properties which is what statistically all their paying customers actually want. The most persistent and universal complaint about Blizzard is that they don't produce content as quickly as their audience demands and consumes it. They'd be foolish and negligent to waste their time on anything else.

There are some pretty obvious downsides to that plan but it's an option.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/4droz4/we_are_nostalri...

The biggest concern I've had against investing emotions into any MMO's content, is the complete lack of a guarantee that it'll always be officially available. So many quests and such get old pretty fast and eventually forgotten. There's just no way to relive that content.

Maybe a paradigm shift is needed, away from how MMO content has been traditionally designed.

That said, I'm sure maintaining different versions of the servers would actually be a huge pain. The live ops was most likely not a solved problem at the end of an expansion.

It would take a lot of back porting security patches as well as bringing certain things forward like connecting to the current bnet.

Just imagining this small aspect of the overall challenge makes it clear to me that this type of server just would never happen on an official basis - so many cross-linked considerations and it's really hard to make a business case for almost any of them, even if it would be a lot of fun from a player point of view. Which means that allowing a volunteer community like Nostalrius is really the ideal, outside of the reality of the law which requires protecting intellectual property in all cases in order preserve it in the cases where you really want to. Could some kind of official license be made available specifically for Nostalrius?

It's worth noting that Wildstar launched targeting the hardcore WoW raider experience.

It failed miserably since targeting only a single-digit percentage of WoW's playerbase is not a profitable business decision.

I played both Nostalrius and Wildstar extensively and the two were nowhere close in terms of scale, depth of world, community, lore, or any other metric you can think of really. The boss mechanics, housing, and soundtrack were great but the game was incredibly lackluster otherwise. Lore had some potential with the Drusera arc being interesting.

As for the bad: PvP balance was a trainwreck. Quests were meaningless as you'd get 30 at once and blow through each on in a couple minutes. Rep grind rewards were poorly balanced. Instances offered little reason to run them repeatedly and relied too much on the interrupt mechanic. The world was much less atmospheric barring some neat zones like Farside that you had no reason to return to after leveling through. Itemization was dull with no interesting items or stats. No secondary professions. No cosmetic pets. Instanced zones. I could go on and on but that touches on most of the major issues.

Oh, and while I love addons they needed to be more careful with just how powerful they could be within their poorly planned economy. I coded an autocrafter for the Architect profession in the first couple days and basically botted (legally) $1500 worth of currency @CREDD rates in a single week. Fun for me but rather unhealthy for the economy itself.

The problem with Wildstar is rather like the problem with trying to get your highschool band back together. The drummer moved to another country, the lead singer has two kids, the bass player works shift work. Everyone grew up and no-one has the time (or inclination) to raid any more.

I think a lot of people (myself included) loved the idea of Wildstar but just weren't in a position to make the investment of time and effort required to really enjoy a game like that.

Ulduar was the game at its peak. All downhill from there. I still hate how they crippled the hard modes afterwards.

Plenty of people think BC was the peak and LK ruined everything. I personally think ICC was amazing and the peak, because that's when I played.

MMO experiences are always the best when they are novel, there is something really special about the first time you beat a raid boss. Also later expansions will never recapture the innocence of the first time discovering a world. Then you learn how to "beat" the game and minimax your experience. Then an expansion comes out and you just can't view the content without a minimax hat on, and that ruins it.

People often long for the glory of days past, but remember that everyone also has their own frames of reference. For new players WoW is probably still as good now as it has ever been, it's just impossible for you or I to see that when we saw we had it so much better.

The only place I see it failing is figuring out a way to keep communities together over the years. Most people's main experience with the game is social, and if your group can't stay cohesive, and few can for 12 years, you're going to get a diminished experience. It's simply an impossible task to figure out a way to keep gamers together for that long.

Other people will complain about parts of the game being too easy, but I always dismiss those out of hand. The high end parts are more challenging than ever, and the existence of diverse content is nothing against the game design. I love that I can log on for a few minutes here and there and even only play Pokemon if that's what I want in the moment. As an old-school MMO person who never saw WoW through the eyes of novelty, my perspective is that no game has managed to maintain such high quality and consistency while continually reinventing itself over such a long time. The fact that it's still the number one MMO by far and maintains a subscription model while everyone else is going free-to-play is testament to its quality. I think it's a piece of software that any developer should look at for inspiration on how to keep people engaged for a very long time.

By your logic I should be a hardcore "Vanilla was the best" player, but actually, I'd argue that most of the game peaked in TBC (the first expansion) and raiding peaked in Wrath.

I've had enough in Cataclysm, but I can't really say if vanilla, tbc or lk was the best (ignoring my personal achievements in each of those, tbc was the peak of my raiding). All of those bring good memories.