Rose-tinted Goggles wrote on Oct 4
th, 2018 at 8:54pm:
The key to all of this are the whales. Im curious at what point is the game deemed worthy of shutting down. I dont think Asherons Call 2 had a cash shop so it was only subs? Was it 500 subs, 1000? Would be interesting to know.
AC 1 & 2 had gone into "buy the account for a one-time fee, play forever" mode by the time of the shutdown. They'd also closed down the ability to buy accounts well before then, so for the last 6-12 months the games were generating 0 revenue. They were just beloved by both the turbine team and the remaining playerbase. Its hard to get round figures, but I recall reading somewhere that there were only around 3,000 active players by the end, minus the thousands more who re-installed and logged in just to be there at the end. I never got to be a part of it, but AC was really something special; keep in mind this was a game with a 500 square mile seamless world...
in 1999.
Most MODERN mmos dont even try to match that, and this was made for the era of dialup, and yet was fast enough to support twitch gameplay(not the streaming service, think reaction-based combat with split-second timing). It was a remarkable achievement both technologically and historically, so it was being kept alive for that reason, not because it was making money.
Rose-tinted Goggles wrote on Oct 4
th, 2018 at 8:54pm:
Very valid point. Personally I think it would be fun starting over from scratch with everyone else. Especially under the premise that its a classic server. I can definitely see the majority of people being too attached to their current account.
I think with the piss-poor state of the game community, even trying to make a "classic-like" server where all they did was turn off the epic content and reaper would cost them more than it would ever earn. Honestly, looking at it as a revenue-generator, its just never going to pay for itself,
AND its going to hurt the game by further fracturing the playerbase.
Consider: we currently have endgamers, heroic/racial TR grinders, epic tr grinders, iconic tr grinders, multiple levels of reaper players, perma deathers, tight-knit guilds, and just plain antisocial people who log in but only solo. Combine all that with low server populations, and its damn hard to find a group these days.
ADDING another server with yet another play-mode would result in fewer LFMs over all, which leads to more players quitting because there's no one to play with.
Basically, it would cost too much to make, probably loose more paying customers than it would bring in, and not make as much money as the current game since there's so much less to monetize(fewer adventure packs, no store tomes, no bypass timers, not ottos boxes, etc, etc, etc).
The only reasonable hope for a classic server is through an emulator project. As a labor of love its absolutely possible, but as a money-making venture its a non-starter.
Keep in mind, I'm not saying all this to be mean. I'd love to see a classic server as much as you would, just realistically I can't imagine it happening.