- The Bounced – We saw them the first weekend but more recently they have returned to the fold of the retail client. Various folks arrive at this point for various reasons, but given that I am Battle.net or Real ID Friends with a lot of folks I can see them over on the modern side of the house.
- Cheating Loyalists – These are folks who are playing Classic but still very much still playing the Retail client. They may be spending a lot of time in Classic but are still logging over for raid nights and the occasional round of dailies.
- Honeymooner/Content Locust – I couldn’t think of a great term for this, but this is the group I fall into. We go hard and heavy with a new World of Warcraft expansion until we hit the cap and then at some point we fade away. Often times we revisit a few times during an expansion life cycle, usually when new content is released but similarly gobble it all up and disappear again. We love it while we love it and then we get disillusioned.
- Embittered Veteran – These folks played the game and loved it at some past point in time but had a break from the game at one point or another and never really returned to the fold. They were seemingly gone permanently until Classic happened.
The Success of Classic
I am woefully behind on my blog post reading, and as a result I did not read this excellent post from Bhagpuss on Inventory Full until yesterday. If you have already read that post and my comment on it, you are going to get a bit of a sense of deja vu since more or less I figure this will be a remix of some of the ideas contained therein. The post in question is in itself a bit of a remix of a bunch of OTHER excellent posts, so I highly suggest digging down into each of the posts that spawned that one as well.
This is largely going to be about my own experiences with retail versus classic players. I am going to comment again that I really think it is weird that we landed on the term retail to describe the live modern game, but that is coming from Blizzard ultimately. I’m seeing a lot of interesting patterns when it comes to the players in House Kraken. At this point we have 103 members in the guild with a smaller percentage of that total accounting for various alts. It is a smattering of people that I have known from lots of different places but for the sake of this discussion I am going to break them down based on their relationship to the live retail World of Warcraft Client.