What I want to know (and still haven't had answered) is just how many/what kind of hiccups there were. I've heard a number of things through this thread and it sounds like there was a fair amount of things that didn't work properly and thus wouldn't be a true Vanilla experience for people that actually played during that time.
I'm not quite sure how that changes that it's still running and working. It would be like calling Nintendo out for having GBA games on the 3DS run through an emulator.
Doesn't change my point though that a small group of people can get it done, so Blizzard should be able to do it even better.
Honestly, I have no idea either.
I'm just assuming there, it doesn't seem uncommon for Private servers to have issues, but I've never played on one personally so I don't know.
Then again, I find it a bit funny to claim that people would forgive more if it's free, yet Vanilla had boats sailing through landmasses apparently during the opening of AQ.
"El Psy Kongroo!" Hearthstone Moderator
"El Psy Kongroo!" Hearthstone Moderator
I'm failing to see how archived patch data can be considered an emulator. It's literally snapshot of wow at the current patch.
Seen so many people since Cata launch? What is that supposed to be some sort of fucked up badge of honor. Wow grats you had a ton of people on the screen and lag ruled the day. Throw a party or something. While you wait on the dust to clear I'll be going to raid tonight in my fully functional WoW. Good luck on your 'options' until Blizz just shuts down the next server.
I couldn't agree more with this. What Vanilla WoW and TBC offered were communities, group and social play. None of that is available with the intense amount of phasing and queuing up dungeons in today's retail version.
Look, I'm a HUGE fan of this game overall and a HUGE fan of Blizzard as an organization and what they've been able to accomplish since the beginning. And as much as I loved the experience I had in Vanilla WoW and TBC, I don't think the masses want to go back to the same content that existed in Vanilla WoW. However, I think the Nostalrius experiment certainly proved that there is an outcry for a sense of community in this game again. People want to log on to this game to go on an adventure with friends and to overcome a difficult objective with a group of individuals and feel a sense of progression. Players are longing for the day that they can log in and organize a group themselves to tackle a certain boss, raid, elite quest, or world event that makes them feel like they are moving forward with their toons.
The problem lies with their current formula for progression which becomes more repetitive than anything else: "Normal, Heroic and Mythic." Before the progression lied in creating a more difficult and diverse raid than the one that was released prior. Now you are playing the same raid over and over in the form of 3 different difficulties which doesn't feel like progression. It becomes repetitive and all you're doing is screwing around with numbers to make things more "difficult" - however the challenges are the same.
I don't think legacy servers will ever exist. However I hope that this "hiccup" in Blizzard's career is a learning lesson for the development team and that they move this game in the right direction again and make it the legendary game it once was.
I'm thinking that if one private server can get 150k players, there's enough demand spread out among the rest and those players to play the game still.
Whether or not the cost is worth it depends on how much they're willing to pay to play the Vanilla servers again, but if a group of people can keep one server running for 150k people with their spare money and donations I think was mentioned, Blizzard should be able to easily.
"El Psy Kongroo!" Hearthstone Moderator
Jester, the private realms don't run on Classic server code. They run on an emulator, using assets extracted from the Classic game client. It's close, but not quite, and it's still full of bugs and incomplete things that the people running the private servers have to script themselves.
To run a proper World of Warcraft server you really need the kind of set-up Blizzard used back in the day. Which was made for a very specific hardware and network configuration. Trying to run the same code Blizzard used back in the day on a machine today would probably result in things breaking, hence why I keep saying the server code would have to be rewritten pretty much from scratch. Libraries, tools and even the programming languages and patterns have evolved in the past 12 years. It really is a lot more work than people expect.
Nothing ever bothers Juular.
Those guys are fucking heroes! Man just don't give up on your dreams okay? Break some laws, fuck it, you are doing it for the PEOPLE. Then when the MAN gets you down just turn it around and say "Hey man, it is a passion project, we'll help you...for FREE" and all is forgiven and gold rains down from the heavens and world peace happens...or something like that.
Ive seen this a few times, people think because its made for a private server its shittly made the phrase "duct taped together" comes up.
The fact that its perfectly functional, is aparently irrelevant.
If its not coded by blizzard its a buggy mess of crap that blizzard would need to spend vast amounts of resources to shore up and make "proper".
The fact that it demonstrably works is aparently irrelevant.
And Everquest is a far different beast from WoW, much much easier to run/host it because of how ancient the game is. Also by the time project 99 rolled around Everquest was free to play I believe.
Also don't ignore the fact that EQ did time-locked servers however they put THAT aspect of the game behind a pay wall. So yeah....