Why bother making a “main product” at all

My guess is legally protecting themselves against potential new laws and regulations, so they have more time to make changes or continue making money if these practices get outlawed.

Why is this exclusive to the mobile market?

It’s not; it exists in computer and console gaming too, just to a lesser extent. As to why, my guess here is that mobile has a lower barrier to entry, and they’re always accessible where a computer or console might not be. There’s probably some sort of “cultural” aspect here too, where it’s already prevalent in mobile so people are more accepting of it, but computer/console gamers had their own culture where this didn’t exist for many decades and so won’t be as accepting.

Late to the party, but I’m mostly playing on Warmane’s servers. Currently switching between Icecrown for the population and quicker levelling, and Icecrown which is much harder and slower with 1x rates.

I started on WoW Hardcore for the permadeath, and Kronos for the full Vanilla experience, but they’re much less populated so they don’t “feel” as much like MMOs, but rather RPGs where you can talk to and join others if you organise to meet up… which is fine of course, and I enjoy them, but I’m preferring the MMO experience right now.

See if something went so far as to significantly change the questing, levelling, dungeons, raids, BGs, etc, I wouldn’t really consider it WoW any more; it’d be a different game in the WoW engine. I think that’s why some people say that WoW Retail and Classic are completely different games now; they feel so different that they kinda are.

But yeah, depends on interpretation and definitions of course. To me, if only the speed of levelling is different, then it’s still WoW, just not “Blizzlike” any more. Where’s the line there? I don’t know exactly, but the 7x exp/drop/rep rates in one of the private servers I’m playing on feels vastly different to the 1x. So 3x would probably still be non-Blizzlike to me, but the game would be close enough to Vanilla that I’d still call it “World of Warcraft”.

It’s funny though, one of my casual gamer friends will play multiple different games of the same genre (eg. Diablo 2, Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, and Torchlight 2), and say they’re all basically the same. I’m sure people who are more casual probably wouldn’t notice the difference between Whitemane and Blizz Classic.

Good follow up explainer, cheers.

Personally, I wouldn’t consider something Blizzlike if it has several factors that change the experience, but I guess the definition depends on the individual.

I haven’t played on Whitemane yet, as I’m currently after an experience closer to the original Vanilla -> TBC -> WotLK progression, but Whitemane does look pretty good as a Cataclysm+ prog server. It doesn’t look Blizzlike, which could be a pro or con depending on your personal preference, but it does look like it has a decent population. Quick clarification though; the highest XP rate is 3x, not 4.5x.

Might check this out sometime over the next few months, as I can’t seem to find any other Cataclysm servers with population higher than like 200 lol.