legacy =/= pristine
Why was pristine even mentioned when this whole thing was about legacy servers? Its apples and oranges
legacy =/= pristine
Why was pristine even mentioned when this whole thing was about legacy servers? Its apples and oranges
I would be alright with the Pristine servers if they were to apply their scaling tech to old raids. That way at end game we can still clear the legacy raids at a challenging pace. They could scale gear to provide an incentive and scale mob hp/damage to compensate for the current build's overpowered talents early. Legion's new crafting and end game questing/rep grinds seem like a plausible solution to much of the "stand in the city" mentality. I don't know, I think the pristine server could really work if Blizzard cared enough to make them great. It isn't legacy, but I just recently launched my own WotLK server to play legacy with a small group of friends and even that was too horrible to bear. Graphics were garbage, game play was lousy. I don't know. I'm nostalgic, but I mostly want to see more content. They should just make the legacy content available using the tech they have, and the rewards worth the hassle to obtain them.
I like the idea of pristine realms, I'd go further and make a full hardcore realm
-Harder mobs
-Harder dungeons
-Only Heroic and Mythic raids
-No ability to fly
-Realm firsts
-Something to balance Alliance and Horde
-Only pvp realms
-No Crossrealm
-No content nerfs
The big problem is just that almost every one of us would have different ideas of what was vanilla, and then there would be constant pressure from various factions to add some of quality of life improvements. So you would have dozens of features, and players would split on which ones should be included, and you would have a lot of people not happy because their list wasn´t the one chosen.
Turning off all leveling and all the boosts would not really make it ´vanilla´.. you have skills and talents... etc.
I feel bad for the Blizzard associates assigned to wading through the Nostalrius tears, pretending to care, giving more of the attention they crave.
Sounds like I hit too close to home with you, didn't I?
No, it's true. This, coupled with the fact that the servers are free, is why they have so much popularity. They would be played for maybe 6 months on Live official servers until people realized how shit Classic WoW really was, and then would be abandoned once more.
Leveling without heirloom gear would be fun, in fact it's how I used to level the last time I played when I leveled together with friends. It doesn't have anything to do with a vanilla server though. For every expansion the power creep of players has increased a lot. What draws a lot of people to vanilla servers is the challenge and how fun the imbalance can be.
You really want to know why: There is a laundry list of reason why but I will break them into catagories: (I know this as a Cloud/Server Engineer for a major provider)
1) The hardware from 2004 is vastly different from Hardware from 2016. The original WoW server was designed to run on early server OS(either Win server 2k/2k3 or early Linux) with early hardware and would have to but completely redisgned to handle new OS software and the hardware advances since then are even more stagering(64bit processing being the biggest). Those people who say that another group did it are not looking at that the Vanilla servers running right now are not up to blizzards network security standards and reliability standards.
2) Next WoW vanilla would need to be rewritten to include battle.net, and other quality of life things that people would demand(guild banks, bug fixes that were released in the BC release that would be easy to look up. Some examples are the jump logout scrypt, early botting mods, early UI mods that could draw stuff on the ground to play the game for you and many chest/item duping hacks to name a few. These were mainly fixed in BC release. They would also be expected to keep up with these balance/exploit fixes as people are paying a monthly fee to a large company with full access to the code. That means first you would need an engineering team to get it up and going(lots of money) and then a smaller engineering team to keep it running and fixed.
3) Next is the bandwidth/server equipment and maintence costs for possibly getting back a small portion of the population back(of those 200k signatures how many currently pay wow and how many would start paying for a vanilla server again) for a small period of time. The majority of people who play a game will not keep playing a game with no new content for a long period of time because there is only so much you can do. SO there is no money in this for blizzard contrary to popular belief.
4) Lastly the problem with current WoW is not the game itself but the player base is no longer a community, even guilds are just a group of people who go kill bosses and not no longer a tight knit group that did everything together. This is mainly because the original player base has become older and does not have the time to play like we did 14 years ago when we were in highschool / college. And the next generation of players is in that instant gratification group of people(where the achievement system comes into play) that does not play a game for 6 hours to gain 2 levels and make 50 gold in stuff to sell in the AH. They would not farm 40 felcloth for your first epic robes.
For these reasons I do not see Blizzard opening a Vanilla server....ever. You may get your cut down server but it will still include all the modern game changes and updates.
This "pristine realm" would still be in the current version of WoW with all its streamlining. What appeals to me in a legacy server is the RPG elements that were present in vanilla. So while I am happy for those who would like it, it's not something I personally am interested in. More options are always good, though.