This is the most worrying sign I’ve seen about WoW’s downfall yet. When an MMO splits its player base like this, the death spiral is close at hand. It’ll take awhile to die though, at least.
That said, it does give me an idea for a possible LitRPG story— servers are going down because the game's just not popular anymore, the community that does still exist has become toxic and opposed to newcomers while simultaneously being overly nostalgic for the early days, and you're stuck in the game with the threat of dying once the servers finally shut off. I know there's a story like that, but it's not coming to me. Or maybe, a group of friends remember playing an MMO of some sort years ago and buy the property for a ridiculously low price, and then they go about trying to bring the game back to life, one server at a time, and they have to show off what the game offers to bring people in. The overarching conflict could be as simple as "We just wanna get some money and bring back the good ol' days" rather than anything trying to be moralistic. Kinda like Ghostbusters in that the whole story was kickstarted by Peter Venkman wanting to start a new business instead of being freelance, except that the business was catching ghosts. As for the story at hand, since I never played WoW but do have a very bad experience with broken fanbases, can anyone tell me what was going wrong? I can understand completely why people would want the vanilla game back, but was it getting to be that much of a demand?
You’re thinking of Overlord. MMOs in general have about a ten year lifespan. WoW is just past its sell-by date. Specifically, they created a divide between hardcore players and casuals, and everything they’ve tried to fix it has been poorly regarded by one or both of the communities. Add in the natural tendency for multiplayer games to go toxic as they age and a couple of poorly received expansions and it’s withering - slowly - on the vine. They’ve not had the numbers of new subscribers coming in that they need to replace the people who get bored and leave for quite some time. That’s why their subscriptions have fallen from 12M+ to about 4-5M or so over time. That’s because of the toxic community - people are just plain assholes to new players. Add in the vanilla server now. It wasn’t a huge demand, I think the most popular of the vanilla private servers was around 100k accounts, but there’s a lot of nostalgia for it and it’s going to split the player base even further. It’s taking a long time for it to die, but WoW is dying. Merging servers and putting out servers that are dedicated to specific expansions are just signs of the times.
