Should Blizzard release Vanilla servers?

[Triggered Fridgekin]

I'd have no issue if they did. It would no doubt attract the private server crowd because they would be playing in an environment which is the authentic vanilla experience without the worry that they'll be shut down at any given time. $15 for peace of mind, fully scripted encounters, no shit lord admins, and a professional network backbone which won't crash several times a day or cause rollbacks is a better deal than many of the alternatives which are left in the wake of Nostalrius which may be next on the chopping block.

The number of servers required is always ambiguous though. Do you want both PvE and PvP? For each region? What about the expansions? What timezone would they occupy?

Furthermore, there's likely no way Blizzard would foot the bill on support staff. They have enough hatred towards this that I doubt they'd throw money towards support and you'd likely be in a 'shit out of luck' scenario if anything were to happen outside of their automated loot retrieval system.

[Deleted]

Shouldn't even have a no option. The no options are irrelevant.

It's not, unless they are paying for it without involving a single cent of the regular sub money.

Like I said in another thread: If they charge an additional sub/fee for a legacy pass, sure. Spending resources of every player's sub that could go into the current, relevant game on it would not be the right way.

[Lakrin]

it will happen darsithis , you just watch, and no matter how much you disagree with me in the end when blizzard finally do release classic servers, and you invest the time into it, you will see what I Mean and you will wish you had listened to me all along.

Played then, like it better now, don't care if they do implement it but I won't be taking part.

[Eliseus]

It's not, unless they are paying for it without involving a single cent of the regular sub money.

What? You either want the server or you don't want it. People not wanting it doesn't matter when it comes to it's creation. Is my no relevant to thinking WoW should be shutdown? I could go poll millions of people who don't even play WoW that would think it would need to be shutdown, how does that matter to anyone though? It doesn't. The name of the game is to make money, and your no's don't matter in that game.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

Out of curiosity, if it happens. Will it progress from first patch and so on?. Or example a Cata/wotlk server, which patch would it play on? Would it progress? What if I start later and I prefer earlier patch notes then I'll miss out it anyway.

The past is the past, you can't get everything you want. Not saying I don't want it.

There's a general consensus that 1.12 is the official Vanilla patch. It is quite easy to actually block content from being accessed, which mean that a progression would also be possible.

[4dahorde]

I don't quite understand the "No" people here... So because YOU don't want to play it, it SHOULD NOT be released? Even though plenty of people DO want it and plenty people including myself would pay an additional monthly cost for access to these servers. I can't take the "too expensive" card seriously when Nostalrius did it as a nonprofit team of like 30 people.

And just because YOU want it, it should be so? Same arguement. "Plenty" of people want it? what is 'plenty' in a numerical sense, obviously not near enough to justify spending resources on making it happen. It has nothing to do with what we want/don't want, it has to do with resource cost, and it is not financially viable.

People always think they have the answers, it's always about YOU, and what you want. If you were that smart on these subjects you would be working for one of these companies making these types of decisons and not posting on a fan site. I hate to break it to you, but the world does NOT revolve around YOUR opinion, not does Blizzard. FFS someone on the hearthstone forums wanted Blizzard to change the way they implement patches becasue they have shit internet with a data cap. Companies do NOT revolve around what you think they should be doing...either go with what they are doing or move on.

It's not going to happen, might as well get up to speed on that and move on from these lame arguements people come up with why they should. Forums, ESPECIALLY fan sites are VERY MUCH the minority, stop trying to justify that 'lots' of people want it...there may be, in your opinion, 'lots' of people interested, but in the long run there is NOT even close to enough people to justify cost.

Edit: They did it with 30 people for how long!? I never played on it, or knew much about it until all this crap, but wasn't it going to shut down recently anyway due to lack of funds to continue to maintain it..so yea..another arguement that is debunked.

[Eliseus]

And just because YOU want it, it should be so. Same arguement. "Plenty" of people want it? what is 'plenty' in a numerical sense, obviously not near enough to justify spending resources on making it happen. It has nothing to do with what we want/don't want, it has to do with resource cost, and it is not financially viable.

People always think they have the answers, it's always about YOU, and what you want. If you were that smart on these subjects you would be working for one of these companies making these types of decisons and not posting on a fan site. I hate to break it to you, but the world does NOT revolve around YOUR opinion, not does Blizzard. FFS someone on the hearthstone forums wanted Blizzard to change the way they implement patches becasue they have shit internet with a data cap. Companies do NOT revolve around what you think they should be doing...either go with what they are doing or move on.

It's not going to happen, might as well get up to speed on that and move on from these lame arguements people come up with why they should. Forums, ESPECIALLY fan sites are VERY MUCH the minority, stop trying to justify that 'lots' of people want it...there may be, in your opinion, 'lots' of people interested, but in the long run there is NOT even close to enough people to justify cost.

It is not the same. No is irrelevant to this. If a Company want's to make money, how are the no's relevant to them questioning the release of X product? If enough people want it, they get it. It doesn't work the other way around,

https://www.change.org/p/mike-morhai...raft-community

[Darsithis]

1. A company that doesn't do frequent backup is doomed. I do not believe that they do not have a version of the game that they can use.
2. It is possible to use updated hardware with the old code. It requires tweaks, but it is entirely feasible.
3. This is true.
4. It's the same as number two, really.
5. This is already included in the disk version of the game. Items, world, NPC are all held inside a file in each of the old disks for the game.
6. Same as 5.
7. Yes, that's also true.
8. Not entirely true. I'm sure that with the current staff that they have, they can handle both services in term of GMs.I do agree about devs and CM, however.

I think that it's easy to add barriers where there are none. The only real challenge would be to update the infrastructure of the game to an up-to-date version and fit it within the new architecture of battle.net. Yes, this step is costly, but it's not something that cannot be done.

Also 20k players is honestly underwhelming and highly improbable. Vanilla isn't niche - considering how much publicity it received recently, nostalgia and curiosity are enough to drive a healthy amount of players in the first few months which should repay the cost really fast.

That's all just guessing. I can guess too:

1. Check out the 1.12 version of the code from version control.
2. Spin up a virtual server.
3. Point a deploy script at the server.

The point is that neither you nor I know the internal state of Blizzard's codebases. We don't have enough information to even guess the order of magnitude for the cost.

What we do know is that a group of people built a vanilla server on their spare time. And by the way, the code is pretty good (it's on github). It was done, it was stable, it was running reliably at scale. And it did not cost millions. And like I said, they wouldn't have even needed to do anything themselves. They could've just made a deal with Nost and collected sub fees.

A hacked together server, that was banned from even be mentioned on sites like this, got 150k active subs in a year. If it was official Blizzard server, it's perfectly reasonable to expect it to attract 10x that many players. In fact, I'd bet good money on them hitting a million subs in two months.

They've maintained that they don't have that old code in a usable form any more. Nevermind that it has been a decade. It's akin to trying to resurrect a Microsoft Access database vs Sql Server 2012+. Who would want to just use it out of the box?

We don't have enough information to even guess the order of magnitude for the cost

I do have enough information to make a good guess. Again, I've been a developer for 17 years, and I specialize in restoring old applications and rebuilding them in new technologies. I know what developers cost for new hires (having both interviewed and hired them) and I know the kind of resources it takes to fix old applications or upgrade them to work.

Here are a few examples of how easily incompatible things can be:

1 - I just had to release a bug fix for our most used desktop software (a point of sale system) because an icon...yes...an icon...was incompatible with all versions of Windows prior to Server 2008. As a result, anyone trying to open the dialog containing that specific icon would get a parameter incorrect error and the application would crash.

2 - One of our services had to be rewritten when the client upgraded their server from Windows Server 2003 to 2008 because 2008 dropped support for the compression algorithm we were using to compress multi-page TIFF images.

We're just a small company focusing on a few products that aren't even close to the complexity of an application like World of Warcraft and every year I've got to go back and upgrade, remove, or re-design features because of hardware or software changes. Now tell me again that Blizzard can just take their old code and repeat Nostalrius while going back and fixing old bugs, exploits, hardware differences, battle.net code, and the like.

[Donair]

Being forced to group up with people doesn't mean you make friends. It doesn't mean you like those people. I've never really enjoyed those quests, even when I first started playing. I'm a loner most of the time and prefer to go my own way.

Did I have to group up? Yes, there were a few quests where I did and a few times I let people join groups to clear stuff more efficiently. You had to since respawns were horribly slow. Did I care much about those people? Not really. I don't know them. I would probably never meet them again, even on Nost.

Just stop trying to make him see reason. The bolded part says it all. He is the new player base the game now caters to. He will never understand what makes an MMO an MMO. Move along. I know what you're trying to say buddy and I agree completely. I interacted more with my first 2 dungeon pugs on Nost than I did in the last 7 years combined on retail WoW. The entire structure of the game from the ground up encouraged you to socialize and make friends. And if you chose not to and be a loner, your experience suffered dramatically. But he'll never understand that. He is the new face of WoW sadly.

[Darsithis]

I could guarantee you that if Blizzard started a kickstarter for the old school WoW it would be funded in an hour.
If you come with they lost the code bs they could use most of it from Nostalrius, code be up soon for free anyways.

I can imagine it would. Financially I doubt they need to do that, though.

Just stop trying to make him see reason. The bolded part says it all. He is the new player base the game now caters to. He will never understand what makes an MMO an MMO. Move along. I know what you're trying to say buddy and I agree completely. I interacted more with my first 2 dungeon pugs on Nost than I did in the last 7 years combined on retail WoW. The entire structure of the game from the ground up encouraged you to socialize and make friends. And if you chose not to and be a loner, your experience suffered dramatically. But he'll never understand that. He is the new face of WoW sadly.

I realize you're really referring to me.

There is nothing wrong with being a lone-wolf type player. The beauty of WoW is that it gives you the choice of how you want to play. You can group up (and people do), you can level with friends (and people do), you can raid with a guild (and people do), and you can go it alone while leveling (and people do). Forcing people to be grouped up for quests for the sake of grouping is not socializing.

What you're really saying is that in World of Warcraft you're an extroverted person who meshes well in groups. That's great, and you should pursue group leveling if you want. Don't make everyone else who has a different opinion, viewpoint, or personality be forced to do as you do.

[Canitnerd]

100% Yes.

Regardless of whether you think Vanilla WoW or modern WoW is better, there is no denying that they are hugely different games. Nost's huge playerbase, the huge outpouring of support following the Nost shut down and the success of similar legacy projects like oldschool Runescape show that there is a market for that old type of game, and blizzard would be foolish to not cash in on it.

Let's look at some of the arguments against legacy servers

1) Costs - This is just silly. If 30 frenchmen can hack together a reasonably functional private server out of reverse engineered Alpha code and good intentions, a multibillion dollar company like Blizzard with full access to their legacy code would be able to get together working servers very, very quickly. Server hosting costs are hardly an issue, its 2016 not 2004.
2) Its not for everyone - This is fine. Legacy servers wouldn't be replacing live servers, and live servers are perfect for people who enjoy the more casual, singleplayer focused game live provides. The majority of the people who would be paying for legacy servers wouldnt be coming from live servers.
3) People would get bored of vanilla - Just progressively releasing vanilla content at an accelerated rate is an easy year/year and a half of content. But if that proves successful, why not just continue? Keep the vanilla servers up, but offer the option to transfer your vanilla server character to new 2.0 servers, and continue on from there.

Hell, even if you only play Live and have 0 interest in Legacy servers I have no idea why you would be against this. The people who make new live content wouldnt need to be involved and split their time, just a small team of coders to replicate work that has already been done. Hell, it could even help Live servers, as Blizz could look at what works and what doesn't work on legacy servers and draw ideas for how to improve future live patches from there.

[Azgraal]

the few? who's winning the poll again?

And you think roughtly 900 MMO-Champion users who stumbled upon this thread is a clear indicator of WoW players and illegal players who want official servers?

Lol.

- - - Updated - - -

If you come with they lost the code bs they could use most of it from Nostalrius, code be up soon for free anyways.

Why is it always people who have no clue about how software works and haven't got the faintest idea of what Blizzard would have to go to even salvage the "code Nostalrius have written"?

[Deleted]

if all my old vanilla and tbc friend would come back even if its just to see the on the battlenet app and being able to talk to them, i will put the servers up myself lol

[Deleted]

I do have enough information to make a good guess. Again, I've been a developer for 17 years, and I specialize in restoring old applications and rebuilding them in new technologies. I know what developers cost for new hires (having both interviewed and hired them) and I know the kind of resources it takes to fix old applications or upgrade them to work.

And I disagree. I wrote my first commercial application over 20 years ago. Today I run my own software development company where we build complex system software, including multiple specialized servers. I know exactly what it takes to design and implement these system. And I pay salaries, rents, etc. every single month and I too know exactly what a developer costs. What I, nor you (no matter how much you believe you do), know is what level of effort it would take for Blizzard to bring out legacy servers, because neither of us has seen their codebase nor knows their internal setup.

What we do know is that a bunch of guys built a server on their spare time (see MaNGOS on github), which (according to the players) worked very well and at large scale. So clearly the backend is not where most of the complexity in WoW is, it's mostly in the client and those are still available.

And once again, they wouldn't even have needed to build or run the server themselves, they could've just made a deal with Nost and collected free money.

[Darsithis]

And I disagree. I wrote my first commercial application over 20 years ago. Today I run my own software development company where we build complex system software, including multiple specialized servers. I know exactly what it takes to design and implement these system. And I pay salaries, rents, etc. every single month and I too know exactly what a developer costs. What I, nor you (no matter how much you believe you do), know is what level of effort it would take for Blizzard to bring out legacy servers, because neither of us has seen their codebase nor knows their internal setup.

What we do know is that a bunch of guys built a server on their spare time (see MaNGOS on github), which (according to the players) worked very well and at large scale. So clearly the backend is not where most of the complexity in WoW is, it's mostly in the client and those are still available.

And once again, they wouldn't even have needed to build or run the server themselves, they could've just made a deal with Nost and collected free money.

We'll have to agree to disagree, then. We both have a lot of experience in the field, but we both differ on what we think Blizzard would have to do to truly create legacy servers.

[Eliseus]

They didn't lose code. The last community rep response openly admitted to it just being old code. There is no reason for anyone to think they don't have it, better yet, Blizzard being the professional company they are, no one should of been gullible enough to believe this in the beginning. Unless they are like that guy who deleted his entire company the other day.

[Idoru]

I don't quite understand the "No" people here... So because YOU don't want to play it, it SHOULD NOT be released? Even though plenty of people DO want it and plenty people including myself would pay an additional monthly cost for access to these servers. I can't take the "too expensive" card seriously when Nostalrius did it as a nonprofit team of like 30 people.

I don't quite understand the "Yes" people here...So because you want it, it SHOULD be released? Even though Blizzard have said NO for 10 years?

Also, the financial viability of vanilla servers have never been the only reason they don't want to do it.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

I don't quite understand the "Yes" people here...So because you want it, it SHOULD be released? Even though Blizzard have said NO for 10 years?

Not quite. But having legacy version of games is considered as a baseline for many games - and many MMOs. I think the fact that Blizzard support their old games but not Wow in particular sounds two-sided, although I can understand why it's much, much more difficult to adapt a legacy server than say Diablo II (although, they DID manage to adapt it to their new Battle.net infrastructure.)

[Eliseus]

I don't quite understand the "Yes" people here...So because you want it, it SHOULD be released? Even though Blizzard have said NO for 10 years?

Also, the financial viability of vanilla servers have never been the only reason they don't want to do it.

Actually Yes, if enough people want Yes, it should be released. The no is irrelevant.

[Idoru]

Not quite. But having legacy version of games is considered as a baseline for many games - and many MMOs. I think the fact that Blizzard support their old games but not Wow in particular sounds two-sided, although I can understand why it's much, much more difficult to adapt a legacy server than say Diablo II (although, they DID manage to adapt it to their new Battle.net infrastructure.)

Really?
I haven't been following many MMO's the last few years, which ones (that actually have had expansions) have (non-pirated) legacy versions?

- - - Updated - - -

Actually Yes, if enough people want Yes, it should be released. The no is irrelevant.

Sadly (for you) that is not how the world works.