#Blizzard Confirms WoW Subscriber Base Doubled After Classic Launched

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Blizzard Confirms WoW Subscriber Base Doubled After Classic Launched

I’m still working on my WoW leveling comparison between Retail and Classic (I know, I know, I KNOW), but there’s now hard evidence that a substantial group of people are logging into WoW to play a version of the game they enjoyed 15 years ago. One of the most common arguments I saw people making before Classic launched — an argument I had a lot of fun discussing with friends, though I didn’t necessarily put a lot of stock in it — was the idea that people would roll Classic characters, immediately encounter the difficulty and pace of the game, and promptly quit again.

Turns out, nobody should’ve worried. Classic is popular enough to have doubled the number of people paying for an active WoW subscription. That’s according to data in Blizzard’s Q4 2019 report, which stated that the number of players paying for a month or more of service has doubled since Classic launched in mid-2019. Hat tip to Overclock3D, which initially broke the story.

The funny thing about the Classic / Retail debate was the players on the Retail side of the community who were certain Classic would be filled with people doing nothing but complaining about how difficult the game was. I’d lie if I said I hadn’t seen complaints. I’ve done some of the complaining, in point of fact. The game is sometimes infuriating. It can be difficult to find enough quests to level easily. Some of the shortcomings of Blizzard’s original design are apparent above Lvl 30 in ways they weren’t in the original game.

With that said, I’m still playing, even if a lot of CPU and GPU review coverage from November – February basically sidetracked my testing. There’s a lot of good game in WoW Classic, which really isn’t surprising, considering it’s the game that got millions of people to play World of Warcraft. At the same time, though, I probably shouldn’t lean too hard on the strength of that argument. Just because a game has strong elements doesn’t mean it aged particularly well, or even that people are hungry to return once again to its content. The slideshow from our WoW leveling comparison (1-20) is embedded below:

The real question for WoW Classic, to me, is how the project can evolve from here. Blizzard will continue to roll out content updates for WoW Classic, but eventually all good things come to an end. Naxxramas is the last endgame raid, and while that’ll challenge mid-tier players who advanced into endgame content at a slower pace cough, it won’t keep everybody happy.

I can see a few different ways for Blizzard to handle this. One is not to handle it, and to offer Classic as exactly what it is — Classic WoW, no more, no less, with all of the content and limitations that implies. Another option is to develop “classic” implementations of previous WoW expansions and offer Classic players the option to clone an existing hero on a BC server, move a hero from one to the other (with no option to transfer back), or roll fresh and face leveling from 1-70 under TBC rules. I suspect we’d get the first or second option, not the third, but they’re all possible.

But there’s another path that Blizz might take: Further content development for vanilla WoW.

Remember — original WoW had a lot of content visible on the map that was never used. The entire zone of Mount Hyjal is one example. We knew Gilneas existed behind the Graymane Wall, even if we didn’t get to visit the land. We’d been to Tol Barad and Grim Batol in Warcraft 2. Karazhan may not be an instance in Classic, but it exists in Classic. Even if Blizzard confined itself to the lore of Warcraft as it existed in 2004, there are a great many locations we never explored or visited. There’s no reason why new 5-man or raid content couldn’t be added to the existing game.

There’s a specific reason why I can imagine Blizzard going this route — it would allow the company to revisit “What if” scenarios in a timeline where the Dark Portal never re-opened, and the world of Azeroth went on much as it had before. Even if the Draenei never crashed on Azeroth, Arthas would still have eventually reappeared. The Twilight’s Hammer cult was very much present in the later events of vanilla WoW. There are ways and places where Blizzard could expand the lore of Classic with new 5-man dungeons and content adapted to a universe in which things happened very differently (and, presumably, we remain locked at Lvl 60 and with whatever patch version Blizzard stops with).

I’m a lot more interested in Classic’s evolution than one can typically say about a 15 year-old title, even if my playtime has been a bit lacking.

Now Read:

World of Warcraft Classic vs. Retail, Part 1: Which Early Game Plays Better?

Warcraft 3: Reforged Is So Unpopular, Blizzard Is Giving Instant Refunds

Blizzard Lowers Penalty on Hong Kong Streamer, Says China Uninvolved in Censorship

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/306104-blizzard-confirms-wow-subscriber-base-doubled-after-classic-launched from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/02/blizzard-confirms-wow-subscriber-base.html

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Blizzard Confirms WoW Subscriber Base Doubled After Classic Launched

Blizzard Confirms WoW Subscriber Base Doubled After Classic Launched

I’m still working on my WoW leveling comparison between Retail and Classic (I know, I know, I KNOW), but there’s now hard evidence that a substantial group of people are logging into WoW to play a version of the game they enjoyed 15 years ago. One of the most common arguments I saw people making before Classic launched — an argument I had a lot of fun discussing with friends, though I…

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Researchers Are Dusting Off WoW’s Corrupted Blood Plague to Understand Coronavirus Infections

Fifteen years ago, World of Warcraft was rocked by an unexpected event known as Corrupted Blood. The boss of the Zul’Gurub raid instance, Hakkar the Soulflayer, had a debuff he could apply to nearby players that caused damage every few seconds. The debuff was designed to kill players quickly enough that anyone without healer support would die fairly quickly.

Unfortunately, Blizzard made a mistake. Hunter pets, if put away while the debuff was applied, would still have it when they were pulled back out again — like, say, in a populated area. That was the first problem. The second problem was that Corrupted Blood was infectious, and spread to people nearby. The third problem? NPCs could catch it. When they did, they didn’t die. They just transmitted it to everyone within range, indefinitely.

Combine ingredients with player ingenuity. Add one penchant for mischief. Distribute thoroughly and you’ve got the recipe for a virtual pandemic. But that’s where, from an epidemiological perspective, things got interesting. It turns out that players responded to these events similarly to how people do in real life.

The event was heavily studied, along with another deliberate outbreak of Undead plague that occurred in 2008, known as the Scourge Invasion / Great Zombie Plague of 2008. The latter was described as being more true-to-life (and remains my personally favorite event World of Warcraft ever held), but the former was more widely studied. And now, 15 years after WoW shipped, that work is actively informing our coronavirus response. PCGamer interviewed Dr. Eric Lofgren, who co-authored the original paper.

“One of the things we are finding, if we look at both Wuhan and Italy, is there’s a huge demand on the healthcare system, and that’s a genuinely serious concern here in the United States,” Dr. Lofgren told PCGamer. “So essentially validating what a bunch of hospitals are doing right now, preparing, and a little bit bracing for the worst.”

It might seem like a stretch — or like the sort of link that WoW-loving journalists might concoct to make an MMO seem important. Lofgren was quick to stress this was not the case.

“For me, it was a good illustration of how important it is to understand people’s behaviors,” he says. “When people react to public health emergencies, how those reactions really shape the course of things. We often view epidemics as these things that sort of happen to people. There’s a virus and it’s doing things. But really it’s a virus that’s spreading between people, and how people interact and behave and comply with authority figures, or don’t, those are all very important things. And also that these things are very chaotic. You can’t really predict ‘oh yeah, everyone will quarantine. It’ll be fine.’ No, they won’t.”

Lofgren is right. I had a serious argument with someone in my own social circle over the weekend, who was declaring that everyone should be going out and socializing as much as possible. According to this individual, the important thing to do is “Show this flu we are not scared.”

Beyond the questionable efficacy of attempting to behaviorally intimidate a virus, this individual was not alone. Ranking GOP Member of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes has declared that people should ignore the quarantine and go about their daily lives:

“If you’re healthy, you and your family, it’s a great time to go out and go to a local restaurant, likely you can get in easily,” Nunes said during an interview on Fox News as many cities announced new restrictions on bars and restaurants to limit gatherings. ‘Let’s not hurt the working people in this country … go to your local pub,’ he added.”

The net effect of listening to Devin Nunes. Also an amusing example of how people used Warlock pets to create their own havoc.

Devin Nunes is wrong. The best way to help the workers of America is for the government to pass laws suspending mortgage payments and other bills, mandating paid sick leave, and providing funding to pay the cost of treating Covid-19 for everyone in the United States. The worst way to help workers in America, particularly restaurant workers who often lack both paid sick leave and insurance in states that refused to expand Medicaid following the passage of the ACA, is to stay away from them. But studying the contradictory way that people act during a pandemic is quite analogous, it turns out, to studying how people trolled each other on purpose in World of Warcraft back in 2005.

The positive responses people take in response to a pandemic also have in-game analogs. During Corrupted Blood and the Scourge Invasion, people would practice social distancing by avoiding capital cities. In the case of the Scourge Invasion, your chance of getting the infection when someone near you died (and thereby becoming Undead yourself) was a low-chance event in the beginning, with a long timer (several minutes) before you died and plenty of time to find a nearby Spirit Healer to remove the Plague.

As the event wore on, however, both the chance of catching the disease when someone died and the amount of time before you died yourself gradually shrank, while the strategically placed healers that could remove the debuff didn’t get any faster at curing it. The result? Players who clustered at a Spirit Healer hoping to catch a cure (which happened every 30s, IIRC) would die, en masse, before the heal was cast. Attempting to go to the “hospital,” in this case, meant being at Ground Zero as a new wave of Undead ghouls spawned into the world.

But the Scourge Invasion had one interesting twist that Corrupted Blood didn’t. Corrupted Blood was a dimensionless debuff. It had no “type,” which means that virtually no player ability could remove it.

Scourge Invasion 2008: Ghouls were their own faction, hostile to both Alliance and Horde. NOM!

In 2005, the only class that could remove a typeless debuff was Paladins, and only for the length of time that Divine Shield lasted. Once it expired, you had to be out-of-range from reinfection. In 2008, however, the zombie plague was actually a disease — and several player classes could remove diseases.

Thus, even as the plague worsened and the bodies mounted, there were players who would take up station near the overwhelmed NPC Spirit Healers, adding their own removal abilities to the periodic cure that would hit all characters within a certain radius. This, too, mirrors how altruistic people behave during pandemics. Of course, those valiant healers could themselves become disease vectors — if you’re standing near the Spirit Healer when 15 people become Zombies, they’re probably going to eat you, too.

Both of the epidemiologists who studied Corrupted Blood in WoW echoed urgent calls for people to practice social distancing. Stay close to home, wash your hands, and stay safe.

Feature image by WoWHead Classic; in-line image by WoWWiki.

Now Read:

World of Warcraft Classic vs. Retail, Part 2: Leveling Comparison, 20-40

World of Warcraft Classic vs. Retail, Part 1: Which Early Game Plays Better?

Blizzard Confirms WoW Subscriber Base Doubled After Classic Launched

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/307717-researchers-wow-corrupted-blood-plague-to-understand-coronavirus-infections from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/03/researchers-are-dusting-off-wows.html