Comment by paride5745 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paride5745 | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree about the drain from retail to private.

7 millions+ people are not paying Blizzard already (me included) because the game they sell now it's not the one I subscribed years ago. It is not an MMO nowadays, you just hang around in your personal space, click to get in instances, click to get a selfie, click to buy some gold. I miss the community and the sense of exploration, and private servers, especially those on Vanilla or TBC, are the only ones giving me that feeling.

It's years the community ask Blizzard to give us Vanilla/TBC servers, and let us play the game we love. Most of us will pay an higher sub if required, so it's not being cheap.

Closing Nostalrius will not bring more people in retail, but the opposite. Most of the people I know are dropping their subscriptions BECAUSE of the action Blizzard has taken. Instead of solving the cause, they are sticking they head in the sands, telling us we don't know what we want, that they know better. Well, numbers don't lie, and the game is empty.

So yeah, good work Blizzard, you managed to kill the biggest game in history. And they could make a lot of money with a couple of legacy servers. Those have no costs, except for limited maintenance, and the game development has paid itself years ago. So it is virtually pure profit.

A sort of assumed this was sour grapes and Blizard probably know what they're doing, but then I checked the subscriber history for WoW. They're back to 5.5m, the same as 2005 a year after launch and down from a high of 12m. Ouch!

The downward momentum looks crushing. The few big temporary peaks over the last few years vanished immediately and it reverted back to decline as though they'd never happened. So people jump in for a look when there's something big happening, but _none_ of them (statistically speaking) stay afterwards. No wonder they're hammering down hard on anything that might draw away subscribers.

http://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-world-of...

Edit: It just occurred to me that even given this, perhaps Blizzard is doing the commercially adept thing. Suppose decline for a game like this is inevitable. In which case switching to a model that extracts maximum revenue from players at the cost of long term viability might be the best way to capture value. Cynical? Me?

>Those have no costs, except for limited maintenance, and the game development has paid itself years ago. So it is virtually pure profit.

Sorry for nitpicking, but ancient versions of the game client don't really work so well on modern hardware. Also, we don't know how much the server infrastructure has changed since then. It's not that easy.

It is that easy, Nost did it. The WoW clients run perfectly fine on modern machines.

> Those have no costs, except for limited maintenance, and the game development has paid itself years ago. So it is virtually pure profit.

In the years since WoW came out Blizzard came out with a centralized authentication, billing, and support system known as Battle.Net. It took them quite a few patches over 2-3 expansions to integrate that system fully into WoW and a not insignificant effort would be required to port that over to the old game client, especially if they wanted to give it the same level of polish in integration that they're known for applying to their games.

Second, patch 2.0.1 (the Burning Crusade pre-patch) brought in a massive amount of changes designed solely to combat a growing player trend at the time - the use of addons to automate playing the game (no not bots, actual addons like Healbot) - through the concept of protected functions. And this was just a small portion of their overall effort in combating automation/bots. The player base would cry foul if they brought out legacy servers and didn't keep the anti-bot measures, Warden included, up-to-date. They tried for years to fight those problems head-on only and are only barely keeping up in the fight against Glider and its brethren. Log onto retail WoW nowadays and run non-100 dungeons and you'll easily run into quite a few sophisticated bots that'll run the dungeon with you, fully programmed to handle all the dungeon mechanics [1]. There's also plenty of people running bots with level 90 (from the character boost) druids farming dungeons like Stonecore, Gundrak, and the like. It's kind of hilariously sad seeing a chain of them all following the same pre-programmed path in the world, especially when they take advantage of how client movement works in the game to fly straight through obstructing terrain as if it weren't there.

Third, running a game, especially an MMO, also requires providing dedicated support staff. A very large effort would have to be made to recover/remember the issues and workarounds the GM staff would use back when the server was live and then train the new staff with this knowledge. There would probably be a rather significant engineering effort involved in this as well as the old GM ticketing system used to be done entirely in-client while nowadays it's some web-based thing (the former made it rather easy for players to impersonate GMs). Improvements like those and other GM tools like better insight/control over a player character and logged events that were made over the years would have to be back-ported in order to maintain the high expectation of quality Blizzard support has fought hard to maintain.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsaE4pM9-cw

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