🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 12 Apr 2016 14:25:48 +0100, Catriona R wrote:
>  On 12 Apr 2016 11:49:18 GMT, Urbin <urbin@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> >On Tue, 12 Apr 2016 10:43:31 +0100, Catriona R wrote:
> >
> >>  Times change, and right now they're throwing away money by not offering a
> >>  service which would have interested a LOT of people
> >
> >... but I am not convinced that operating vanilla servers would be
> >economically viable for them.
> >
> > [snippage]
> >
> >So even considering people would be willing to pay a full subscription to
> >play on vanilla servers, I am not sure it would pay.
> 
>  It's open to debate

Certainly, but it will be a moot debate as long as it is only us debating
and Blizzard is not likely to debate this openly :-)

>  depending a lot on numbers, but the interest level is very much there, so
>  it's certainly something that they should be at least considering I
>  think.

Here are some of the numbers it would depend on:
- how many players would be interested
- how many of those interested would be intetested to pay for it
- how would that impact current subscriptions, i.e. how many would
  - leave the game for another game wihtout vanilla servers
  - change the "normal" subscription for a "vanilla" sub
  - pay for both a "normal" and a "vanilla" subscription

- how much effort would it be to re-create a running version of vanilla wow
- how much effort would be needed to patch that version to fit into their
  current, changed environment (authentication, hardware, infrastructure)
- how much effort would it be to deploy it to servers
- how much effort would it be to keep such servers running (both technically
  and support wise)
- how much manpower would it detract from other projects (that may or may
  not offer better return on investment)
- how might vanilla servers increase or decrease the number of people
  willing to come back for/prolong their subscription for the next expansion

We know very little about anything except some rough estimates for the first
point (you claim it was somewhere between 150k and 800k).

So the question remains whether it would be financially viable. And I very
much doubt that they will be willing to "give up" on their IP rights so some
independent entity could run the servers for them, unless that entity would
be willing to cough up some serious dough.

In addition to all that, we haven't even considered what their legal
department might have to say in the matter. Then add the fact that they have
a history of being fairly resistent to their player base's feedback.

> >- they might have feared that they were losing paying customers fed up with
> >  current content to those private servers (and I think they probably were;
> >  I just don't think those customers will come back as paying customers now
> >  that the private servers are gone)
> 
>  As with other forms of piracy, I doubt the removal of the illegal
>  option will make people pay for the legal one if they don't consider
>  it worth the money

I totally agree with this. However, they might see it differently (many
software companies - at least officially - don't see things your or my way).
Also, while it is unlikely that somebody who cancelled their subs to go play
vanilla, it might also be about people sitting on the fence no longer being
tempted to try out vanilla and then decide to cancel the sub.

Anyway, as I said above, it's really a moot discussion, knowing Blizzard,
it's unlikely to happen and if it did happen after all it's unlikely we'd
get a lot of advance warning.

Cheers
Urbin, who doesn't miss WoW any more but has a sudden yearning for a couple
of hours of vanilla play ;-)

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