The Nostalrius team’s journey to Blizzard and back may be complete, but the details are still coming forth from the large player survey that the vanilla World of Warcraft group put out to its community.
Yesterday, the team released part of the survey results and its analysis of the data as a nine-page summary of the larger 80-page post-mortem document to come. Nostalrius apparently had around 220,000 active accounts at the time of its shutdown, and 30,000 survey responses were included in this report, of whom 30% played on the vanilla server.
One interesting detail that the team noted is that the largest age demographic was between the ages of 18 and 25, suggesting that a good number of those polled weren’t active during WoW’s vanilla era. Players were also polled about their favorite World of Warcraft expansions, with a majority pointing to pre-Cataclysm releases, as that expansion significantly changed the old-world experience.
“A legitimate question raised when speaking about legacy realms is the longevity,” the Nostalrius team acknowledged. “Setting up a different game version requires huge investments that would not be worth it if players are not truly engaged in this different game/content. Data from the survey shows that players are actually willing to play on legacy realms for more than a year in 70% of the cases. Answering a question of a survey is not something engaging, and these numbers could effectively change in the case of a real legacy server release. However, this trend is confirmed by the analysis of Nostalrius accounts created during the year it ran. An analysis of active accounts shows that after 7 months, 30% of the created accounts are still active, which is huge for an entirely free-to-play server.”
