Offical response from blizzard on legacy servers.

[MasterHamster]

And Blizzard is obviously biased toward justifying themselves, so it's hard to just take their word for it.

=>


Yes you are. There is no need to skip B.net or to build an even more complicated dual-system architecture.
Let me quote myself again :

Alright, you're not in the least bit interested in a discussion or talking individual points. And certainly not hearing anything that challenges your view.

Good luck getting legacy realms by telling Blizzard that Blizzard can't know what Blizzard has to do.

[shyguybman]

Honestly I think people would burn through the content so fast. Within a few months people would be asking for TBC. I would def. make a char on the server, although I don't know how much I would play it but it won't feel the same as it did when I first cleared MC/BWL/AQ/Naxx.

[Akka]

Eating crow would imply he finally caves to the demands and promises to make legacy servers. He is actually doubling down on his original position, just using more polite words this time to expand on his "you think you do, but you don't"

No, "eating a crow" just means being proved wrong in a humiliating way. Which kinda exactly fits the bill here

[Deleted]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60CXk503QsQ

[Pantalaimon]

Yeah. Such a great challenge to do vanilla servers when fucking people in their basements can do it for free. It's not like they have a few billion in cash reserves or anything.

And I'm sure your properly qualified with the appropriate technical background to make such a matter-of-fact statement right? *eyeroll*

It's easy to criticize and much more difficult to actually be the person to put forward ideas that legitmately work, without heavily dipping into "a few billion in cash" to appeal to a crowd about the size of what the mythic raiding playerbase is.

[Desparil]

Oh failed developer searching for attention color me surprised he should hold hands with kungen and co.

[rda]

As far as I can tell the bug fixes are built into the client and/or server codes and as we know from the fact there are still parts of the original game in use the current server code works with older parts of the game.

The numeric balancing fixes are already in place why would you go back? For example all you have to do to recreate the Vanilla WSG experience is remove the timer.

...

Here's how it works.

There's current code, it has all the fixes, it has all the QoL changes, it's integrated with everything. But it's not vanilla, we have different talents, we have different spells, different mechanics, different stats, it's all different. Tank spells have different threat coefficients, hunters use focus instead of mana, nobody has a separate slot for ranged weapon, etc.

There's also vanilla code, it has all these old things which were in vanilla, but it doesn't have any of the fixes, doesn't have any of the QoL changes, isn't integrated with the current services.

What they have to do to start vanilla servers is create a third version of the code - they have to take vanilla code and add fixes and other things from the current code (that's called backporting). This third version of the code doesn't exist, it has to be created, and creating it is a ton of work.

I hope this is makes it clearer where the difficulty is.

BTW, what they propose with pristine servers is to take current code and simply disable parts of it. That's easy, but that won't nearly make it vanilla, the mechanics are going to stay new, etc.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

Are you dense? You just proposed to make it double to triple the work and team needed you do get that right? They said in thier response it was too much work to do vanilla and you are already talking tbc legacy servers now too. Don't you possibly get that maybe blizz looked into it and for saw that too? How are you not getting that a legacy server opens a whole Pandora's box of issues?

I'm sorry, but beside your lack of respect and the incredible amount of salt you make, here let me help you.

First of all, they don't release all three at the same time. It's gradual. I'm sorry to break it down to you, but everything you create takes time if you want a revenue. So, they release vanilla. Two years time, then they release TBC. During that time, you have enough time to test your targeted audience and make sure the investment is safe. If vanilla fail? No TBC or Wrath. It's that simple. Vanilla works? Then there's no reason in hell for them to refuse. No matter how you try to put it - your logic doesn't work.

In fact, let me use a rhetoric to illustrate where you're wrong: Once you start doing expansions, people will want more and more and when you open the pandora box, there's no end. Why did Blizzard do any other expansion than Vanilla? They've lost so much money doing it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60CXk503QsQ

Yeah, I agree with him. He looked incredibly professional, I'm surprised. Hopefully the meeting will be there.

[Pantalaimon]

"People do it in their basement for free" If Blizzard was to release vanilla WoW servers, they would not release the 2004 client and say have at it. They would incorporate it into Bnet, they would have to modernize it to run without much hassle on modern OS, and they would probably try to integrate it into live WoW so you can just swap over to the vanilla realm at will. Now granted they are still more then capable of doing it, and definitely should, but its still not as simple as some people are making it out to be.

Shh, don't say that, it pokes holes in the posters' theories about the process being 'overly easy' to do from Blizzard end.

[Akka]

Alright, you're not in the least bit interested in a discussion or talking individual points.

I answered your points, I'm just not interested in spending again tons of time and effort repeating the same thing to have them ignored again. So I just copy-paste it to have them ignored again, which at least save me time.

Good luck getting legacy realms by telling Blizzard that Blizzard can't know what Blizzard has to do.

Blizzard might have much higher quality requirements, but it also have both much higher resources AND the actual source code AND actually gains money out of it.
So yeah, it's not really possible not to see the absurdity of them claiming there is supposedly colossal hurdles when people can do it in their free time with basically no resources.

You're welcome to continue with the circular reasoning "Blizzard says it's not possible so it's not possible because Blizzard said it's not possible..." but don't expect others to be swayed by it.

[vanbrunt]

Let's not kid ourselves. Vanilla has little to do with it. The predominant reason those people play in there is because it's free.

This!

Theres no way Id want to go back to the old days of wow. Nostalgia and rose tinted specs seem to be helluva common. Honestly when you actually start listing all the improvements to the game since vanilla, you see why it should stay dead, and why only folk who have essentially pirated the game play on these servers.

The sheer amount of people clouded by nostalgia is staggering and stupifying all at once. MADNESS!!

Take your vanilla servers and ram em. And Im sorry but I dont buy into "I want 40 man raids" or "everything was harder, thus more fun" BS either.

Completely wrong, you can play for free on private WoD servers too. I've been playing WoW since april 2005 and I haven't met a single person ever who quit wow because of the subscription fee. The ones who play on private vanilla servers play on them because they like playing vanilla, it's not much more complicated than that.

[Tackhisis]

Plenty of things in life are a lot of work and I appreciate that you are one of the more knowledge posters on the subject but I cannot help but think this is similar to being given a Word document from 2003 and being told that in order to read its contents you would need to not only need to find a PC running Windows XP with Office 03 but they would have to rewritten to incorporate modern security standards, etc instead of just opening on a modern PC running Win 10 and Office 16.

No.

There is number of libraries incorporated into vanilla client, and there were hundreds of security fixes in them since 2006. You cannot just distribute software with blatant security holes in it.

World of Warcraft was written for Windows 98. It is incompatible with Windows XP, and even less with Vista+. You cannot distribute software which doesn't work by default on everybody's operating system.

The client has to be recompiled and partially rewritten.

Server has to be rewritten, exploit fixes backported...

[rda]

You're welcome to continue with the circular reasoning "Blizzard says it's not possible so it's not possible because Blizzard said it's not possible..." but don't expect others to be swayed by it.

That's a fair point but I am not sure what would convince you that it is hard (not impossible, but hard). Blizzard aren't making things up here, it really is hard, that's how things are.

[Kauko]

I will add this
Same guys that are loud now, wanted no flying, we got it and we all remember what Devs had to do in the middle of expansion because of that, when they should be working on content... When they were forced by this content creators or better say their fans, to remove flying, they made the Draenor with no flying in mind. WoD hits, people realize noflying is not so good and BAM, they want it back. And so, in the middle of development of content patches, when we should be getting Farahlon, Ogre island etc... they were fixing up Draenor for flying... I am not saying thats the main reason WoD is as it is, but if you think about it, it sure took much of their time. So, you, content creators, STOP OVERHYPING YOUR FANS, because you want something.

[Gaexion Ramza Beoulve]

Meander for a moment into the slightly off-topic.

Batman and Superman, one of the biggest budgeted Cape Movies of all time has fallen on it's face critically speaking. Despite having some of the most impressive visuals and fights ever put to film...and despite being easy to follow and uunderstand it has failed to really connect with all but the most diehard DC fans. O, despite having a huge budget and top notch action and effects it fails to entertain. It fails to grasp you and form an emotional connection.

So back to something more on-topic. Over the past 11 years many competitors have sprung up to try and take a share of the MMO market. Some had better graphics, some had better accessibility, some even had better raids and hard modes but they all failed to do one thing, get me and players like me to be emotionally invested. At some point, and maybe it's my fault, I stopped caring. Whether it was the fall of deathwing or the introduction of Pandas who could play both sides the game has been losing it's grasp.

And that's my roundabout point. For every shiny new feature, for every graphic upgrade and interface addition I just care less and less. Much like a bloated hollywood production I feel like I'm just watching scene after scene happen with no real tangency. More to the point I am not involved. I do not know what can fix it...but I do know you have to try. I do know you have to make yourself vulnerable and you have to be willing to fail and learn from those mistakes.

Is WoW learning? Will devs take the lessons of WoD to heart? Is wow atrophying never able to reclaim the spotlight again? Can millions of dollars of cash infusions help? Or has everyone including the players simply moved on?

[rda]

BTW, that's actually dangerous (not meaning this in a bad way, read on). If *the devs* would want to make vanilla servers - and this guy is a great dev and other devs might listen, they'll find a way. Yes, it's going to be hard, but they'll do it.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, it's great to bring more people into the game. On the other hand, poor Legion will really suffer, it doesn't look all that good now and if they try to also do vanilla servers at the same time, it's going to be a disaster.

Maybe if they do something small now and real vanilla servers later...

[Jewsco]

I'm sorry, but beside your lack of respect and the incredible amount of salt you make, here let me help you.

First of all, they don't release all three at the same time. It's gradual. I'm sorry to break it down to you, but everything you create takes time if you want a revenue. So, they release vanilla. Two years time, then they release TBC. During that time, you have enough time to test your targeted audience and make sure the investment is safe. If vanilla fail? No TBC or Wrath. It's that simple. Vanilla works? Then there's no reason in hell for them to refuse. No matter how you try to put it - your logic doesn't work.

In fact, let me use a rhetoric to illustrate where you're wrong: Once you start doing expansions, people will want more and more and when you open the pandora box, there's no end. Why did Blizzard do any other expansion than Vanilla? They've lost so much money doing it!



Yeah, I agree with him. He looked incredibly professional, I'm surprised. Hopefully the meeting will be there.

You really are incredibly daft aren't you? Why did they release any expansions now? Maybe because it was NEW content did you think of that? What you are proposing is for them to spend resources and man power to release old content. You do get the difference right? So when they release the tbc servers are the vanilla ones closed down or do they keep them up and thus need resources and manpower to keep them going? So you now doubled thier work and now they need a team on vanilla and tbc right? Then a few years later a team and resources for wotlk right? You don't see how that might get expansive and pull away from the live game at all? It won't be like th first time they released the game and those expansions and all thier resource went into the new expansion with these legacy servers they have to keep them as they were seperate from the next expansion. Nevermind how many servers they would need for vanilla, tbc, wotlk etc... And then rp,pvp,pve. All this is simple and easy to do. Oh,and intergrated with bnet and do you allow toons to grow from one seperate server expansion to be next that takes no work. And no bugs ever pop up either. Keep your head up buried in the sand make believe land must be fun.

[Deleted]

The point about asking exactly how Vanilla was, is not because Vanilla is considered "perfect", but because Vanilla "as is" is an accepted standard. Everyone has slightly different preferences - even among all the legacy-server fans, many would like THIS feature, but many wouldn't and would prefer THIS one, etc.
"pure" Vanilla WoW is a compromise that is roughly acceptable to everyone in the legacy field, because it's "how WoW was". Once you start tweaking with it, it opens the can of worm of what is acceptable fix/improvement and what is devolution/ruining the game. Remember that such tweaking ARE in the end what gave us today's retail. People are wary of the slippery slope (and, considering retail WoW, they certainly have very good reasons to be).

So to sum up :
1) Exact replica of Vanilla WoW is the common medium all legacy fan can compromise, any change is liable to create big difference in opinions.
2) If you start to change how Vanilla WoW was, there is no telling where the changes will end, so it might be better not to open the can of worms.

As for why people accepted playing on Nost despite minute changes, it's simply because it's the best approximation available of what Vanilla was. THAT is also the reason why nearly everyone on PS would prefer a true Blizzard-made one, with TRUE scripts and EXACT replica of what Vanilla was. And THAT is also why there is such a fierce competition in the PS scene about "blizzlike" : because it's HARD to be really blizzlike, and that is what most people want.

Also, this. A less wordy and more to-the-point sum up of 2).

Interesting to hear about the "legacy"-viewpoint.
I very much doubt that Blizzard is ever going to be able to deliver that - but then again, I suspect you (read: the legacy crowd) already know this. Perhaps not accepted it, but somewhere you probably know it's not in the cards (and that blue post pretty much confirmed it again).

Nevertheless, interesting peek into the hardcore legacy server mindset.

[Pann]

Here's how it works.

There's current code, it has all the fixes, it has all the QoL changes, it's integrated with everything. But it's not vanilla, we have different talents, we have different spells, different mechanics, different stats, it's all different. Tank spells have different threat coefficients, hunters use focus instead of mana, nobody has a separate slot for ranged weapon, etc.

There's also vanilla code, it has all these old things which were in vanilla, but it doesn't have any of the fixes, doesn't have any of the QoL changes, isn't integrated with the current services.

What they have to do to start vanilla servers is create a third version of the code - they have to take vanilla code and add fixes and other things from the current code (that's called backporting). This third version of the code doesn't exist, it has to be created, and creating it is a ton of work.

I hope this is makes it clearer where the difficulty is.

BTW, what they propose with pristine servers is to take current code and simply disable parts of it. That's easy, but that won't nearly make it vanilla, the mechanics are going to stay new, etc.

Thanks for the answers.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding the whole process behind WoW but is it not essentially a massive set of databases? From what I can see the client and server are fully compatible with the older databases. How difficult would it be, instead of essentially reinventing the wheel, to use the current infrastructure with the older databases?

Don't me wrong I am not saying that Vanilla servers would not be difficult but I get the impression that it is a case of desire within Blizzard rather than ability.

Yeah, I guessed that about Pristine servers. It is a shame that Blizzard decide to take the easy route that pleases no-one instead of the more difficult one that satisfies their customers. I suspect that Pristine servers will end up being a flop which will convince them there is no real demand a genuine Vanilla experience.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

You really are incredibly daft aren't you? Why did they release any expansions now? Maybe because it was NEW content did you think of that? What you are proposing is for them to spend resources and man power to release old content. You do get the difference right? So when they release the tbc servers are the vanilla ones closed down or do they keep them up and thus need resources and manpower to keep them going? So you now doubled thier work and now they need a team on vanilla and tbc right? Then a few years later a team and resources for wotlk right? You don't see how that might get expansive and pull away from the live game at all? It won't be like th first time they released the game and those expansions and all thier resource went into the new expansion with these legacy servers they have to keep them as they were seperate from the next expansion. Nevermind how many servers they would need for vanilla, tbc, wotlk etc... And then rp,pvp,pve. All this is simple and easy to do. Oh,and intergrated with bnet and do you allow toons to grow from one seperate server expansion to be next that takes no work. And no bugs ever pop up either. Keep your head up buried in the sand make believe land must be fun.

Alright, so all those people who never played these expansions - like myself - are actually playing through old content that we've already seen. Alright. I get your logic now.

By the way, world of warcraft had originally over 170 servers. I doubt having 5~10 legacy servers will be problematic for the hardware. You clearly don't know what you speak of - you should go somewhere else. Clearly you're not interested in legacy servers and you're pretty much losing your time here. I know I'm done losing time with you.