Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[wombinator04]

A Vanilla and TBC legacy server should be fairly non problematic to implement, providing people don't expect any modern improvements WoW has currently.

But from Wotlk on, that's when the problems arise. LFD is almost certainly much different than it was back in WotLK/Cata/Mop, Blizzard will have to find some way to implement the current version of LFD, or somehow implement LFD the way it was those expansions without fucking up something.

It gets even more complicated with the account bound systems and transmog. People will want those in their current state.

These are big reasons why Blizzard is not too sure about legacy servers. There's a lot of huge technical challenges and compromises that have to be solved first.

[Tuesdays]

You can't charge a sub and then not provide a decent customer service. It would essentially blow a massive hole in the company's reputation and create even more drama.
That's why they aren't going to step in this quicksand trap idea of legacy servers. Their customer service can barely handle live WoW, they aren't suicidal to be piling even more shit on top of it.

I agree, but I want to see legacy crash and burn.

[Kyanion]

ya.. considering everyone who i talked with about it while on the nost server said they would.. i would be inclined to say that if not everyone.. atleast 98% of the playerbase of nost would pay

So out of the 150k players that were supposedly on in a given week you spoke with how many of them? 30? 50?

[Lorianus]

ya.. considering everyone who i talked with about it while on the nost server said they would.. i would be inclined to say that if not everyone.. atleast 98% of the playerbase of nost would pay

Why werent your playerbase up in arms for playing it legaly 2 weeks ago as vocal as now then ?.

[Krom2040]

I'm sure I have nothing to contribute that hasn't already been said in a thread that's this long, but I'm going throw in my $0.02 anyway.

First of all, I think it's impossible to not see where Blizzard is coming from; it's their stuff, they own the IP, it's within their prerogative to request that somebody not leverage that IP for their own thing. I would probably take the same approach if I were them.

But that said, I really hope they're taking the right lesson out of this. People are *really* frustrated with the direction they've taken WoW. They're annoyed and bored and just not engaged, to the point where they're willing to suffer through the legitimately crappy game mechanics of Vanilla just to try to experience that sort of game again.

Not that anything else needs to be said about garrisons, but they're terrible and have a really cynical Facebook-gamey kind of odor, which permeated every profession as well as the entire max-level questing structure for 6.0-6.1 (with Tanaan feeling like too little too late). But I think the more looming problem is just how *flimsy* everything feels in the outdoor world. The game doesn't have to be a chore, but there's no danger in a game where everything dies in three seconds and can't kill you.

Blizzard needs to think hard about world-building. The entire outdoor experience feels like a really long, really boring theme park. Not to say that some of the quests aren't entertaining, because a few of them really are, but by and large it just feels utterly shallow compared to the quests in Vanilla/BC that took you all over the world and into dungeons and everything.

I guess in the back of my mind, it just screams of game designers no longer making games that they would want to play, but rather sitting around a conference table brainstorming ways to suck in non-gamers and in the process transforming the game into something that gamers don't give a shit about.

[xhisors]

A Vanilla and TBC legacy server should be fairly non problematic to implement, providing people don't expect any modern improvements WoW has currently.

But from Wotlk on, that's when the problems arise. LFD is almost certainly much different than it was back in WotLK/Cata/Mop, Blizzard will have to find some way to implement the current version of LFD, or somehow implement LFD the way it was those expansions without fucking up something.

It gets even more complicated with the account bound systems and transmog. People will want those in their current state.

These are big reasons why Blizzard is not too sure about legacy servers. There's a lot of huge technical challenges and compromises that have to be solved first.

You forgot the biggest reason, How much it costs..

[Tuesdays]

ya.. considering everyone who i talked with about it while on the nost server said they would.. i would be inclined to say that if not everyone.. atleast 98% of the playerbase of nost would pay

You talked to 147k people and they all said yes?

[Holtzmann]

You forgot the biggest reason, How much it costs..

To be honest, the underlying thread with all those things he listed is that they'd take effort. And effort equals cost in software development.

[Karamaru]

Why werent your playerbase up in arms for playing it legaly 2 weeks ago as vocal as now then ?.

because back then their free game wasnt about to be taken away thats all there is to it to be honest and people are lying through their teeth if they say otherwise vanilla was a buggy mess and the Nos Server was even buggier.

[urasim]

ya.. considering everyone who i talked with about it while on the nost server said they would.. i would be inclined to say that if not everyone.. atleast 98% of the playerbase of nost would pay

You talked with 150,000+ active users?

I can say the same thing and say that everyone I talked to on those servers said they wouldn't pay for it. There are even polls that prove what I am saying. All we have is your word which isn't worth anything whatsoever.

[Deleted]

Why werent your playerbase up in arms for playing it legaly 2 weeks ago as vocal as now then ?.

Because what is a single man to Blizzard? This was a unifying event to get the community together.

[Deleted]

You forgot the biggest reason, Cost.

Given the amount of players currently on live retail, I'm sure they can spare a few dozen server blades :')

The cost comes in the form of them having to re-engineer their serverside code, not simply hosting the server. And the former is only an issue because they purportedly refused to back up their code in the first place.

[corebit]

Just like people made *DEMANDS* with nostralius? Nobody demanded anything.. most people were just happy to be able to play vanilla as most people have been requesting blizzard support for quite some time.[/I]

People didn't demand from Nostalrius guys because they're just individual volunteers and the server is free to play.

As soon as it becomes a Blizzard service, it's a whole new ballgame.

[orderschvank]

of course i didnt talk to 150k people. but all the people i did talk to said they would pay for it. which would suggest that a majority of the 150k would pay for it as well.. you know that is how studies work..

if a study interviewed 6000 people and found that 98% of people interviewed preferred shaking hands to grabbing each others genitals as a formal greeting. would you disagree with the study?

and of course there are people who wouldnt pay for vanilla, but they are most likely not apart of the nost community. i am speaking for the nost community not everyone

[Sfr528]

A less direct reason is that walking up to the guys who were running your game illegally and offering them a job is terrible precedent. It validates the efforts of people setting up private servers, because "hey, if Nostalrius did it, why shouldn't I try it myself?!". Private servers stop being seen as illegal enterprises and start getting the image of being pools of possible talent to be hired by Blizzard, which I'm 100% is the last thing Blizzard wants them to be.

This happens all the time though. The government of the USA employs intelligent hackers that were able to outsmart their staff and break into secure files. They employ frauds that were able to get by the FBI to train their FBI on how they were able to pull it off. This type of behavior is already precedent.

[urasim]

Given the amount of players currently on live retail, I'm sure they can spare a few dozen server blades :')

The cost comes in the form of them having to re-engineer their serverside code, not simply hosting the server. And the former is only an issue because they purportedly refused to back up their code in the first place.

You don't know shit about the cost to running a game, yet you feel like you have the authority to say they can do it? GTFO!

[Dasffion]

ya.. considering everyone who i talked with about it while on the nost server said they would.. i would be inclined to say that if not everyone.. atleast 98% of the playerbase of nost would pay

For how long? I've seen a lot of "They had 150k active players" but they had 800k accounts made in a year. Just a year, on a free server. This doesn't strike me as staying power.

[Sickjen]

I'm sure I have nothing to contribute that hasn't already been said in a thread that's this long, but I'm going throw in my $0.02 anyway.

First of all, I think it's impossible to not see where Blizzard is coming from; it's their stuff, they own the IP, it's within their prerogative to request that somebody not leverage that IP for their own thing. I would probably take the same approach if I were them.

But that said, I really hope they're taking the right lesson out of this. People are *really* frustrated with the direction they've taken WoW. They're annoyed and bored and just not engaged, to the point where they're willing to suffer through the legitimately crappy game mechanics of Vanilla just to try to experience that sort of game again.

Not that anything else needs to be said about garrisons, but they're terrible and have a really cynical Facebook-gamey kind of odor, which permeated every profession as well as the entire max-level questing structure for 6.0-6.1 (with Tanaan feeling like too little too late). But I think the more looming problem is just how *flimsy* everything feels in the outdoor world. The game doesn't have to be a chore, but there's no danger in a game where everything dies in three seconds and can't kill you.

Blizzard needs to think hard about world-building. The entire outdoor experience feels like a really long, really boring theme park. Not to say that some of the quests aren't entertaining, because a few of them really are, but by and large it just feels utterly shallow compared to the quests in Vanilla/BC that took you all over the world and into dungeons and everything.

I guess in the back of my mind, it just screams of game designers no longer making games that they would want to play, but rather sitting around a conference table brainstorming ways to suck in non-gamers and in the process transforming the game into something that gamers don't give a shit about.

I feel like this hits the nail on the head. I mentioned this a little bit before, If people weren't upset with the abysmal product that is WOD then this discussion wouldn't be as big as it is. Most people are not happy with the state of the game. It really speaks volumes of blizzards design choices & what they decide to do with their time.

[xhisors]

To be honest, the underlying thread with all those things he listed is that they'd take effort. And effort equals cost in software development.

Technical challenges doesn't even start to touch the surface of costs. People are thinking that it just needs 3-5 people to get it up and running. Paying developers, paying engineers to run the servers, paying additional people to support the players on the servers.

Thats on top of the technical issues and limitations of merging it into the current game - because idk about you, but I don't want to have a separate game client just for vanilla and another client for BC.

Talk about a programming and engineering nightmare.

[Deleted]

If community is destroyed because the game is improved... that community wasn't much of a community to begin with.

Obviously this is a fact as the game has never been better. /s
It's not like some QoL changes were bad or anything...