As the world is changing the calls of classic realms are back. So let’s look at the arguments.
- Blizzard are made of money
True, they make a lot of money from the sales, but a chunk of that goes to support the kit, dev team, support etc etc. A chunk of the ‘spare’ cash is going to develop Cataclysm, Diablo3, Starcraft2, the next MMO etc etc and some of it is going to investors and the like. - It wouldn’t cost much to support just one classic realm
Let’s look at this one for a moment, it’s so simple isn’t it. Just one realm, the code is there, the client is there. Except it isn’t. The realm code would need pulled from the software archive, rebuilt and hopefully it would fire first time. A completely separate backend DB would need to be built and fired up. Auth system, well it wouldn’t work with battle.net (you may consider that to be a good thing), but either way it means more kit, and more kit means more things to go wrong and more maintenance.The client, things have moved on a fair way since TBC launched (let’s take our ‘classic’ point as just before TBC), so the client is likely to have problems with the current generation of home hardware. Either way there are going to be support calls, demands for Blizzard to fix bugs with the code etc etc.
- The original devs did a far better job
Rose coloured glasses, nuff said.
- Extra load on the system as a whole
If they did implement then immediately there has to be additional support capability to handle multiple versions of the client (currently Blizz know exactly what version of the server and client everyone globally is using, this is a hell of an advantage in support, trust me on this). They know what features are enabled, what isn’t. The tooling which we as the users never see is developed for the current code, much of this would probably not work on a classic realm.All of which adds up to extra costs above and beyond. - Balance
So, do you really think the balance in Classic on the classes was better than now? Or will there be a demand for nerfs / buffs to be made on the classic realm as well. Add some more money to that pile. - “Wouldn’t it be nice”
Anyone want to bet on how long before someone on the classic realms asks “Can’t we have $feature, you’ve written the code already it wouldn’t cost anything to put it on the classic realm!?” - Never say “Never”
My opinion, if you hadn’t guessed already, is that they’ll never do this, but there are many other things which people have said they’ll never do. However I can’t see a commerical gain for Blizz making the classic realms available, so guys suck it up and accept that WoW is a changing universe. This is one of the features which has kept it going for more than five years.