Official Reply to Vanilla Servers and Nostalrius

[shyguybman]

I saw that. How embarrassing.

It's so annoying he is the cockiest dude ever and just shit talks all the current wow players. Every stream now is looking at old screenshots and he exaggerates everything.

[Shudder]

A server with no cross realm zones, that alone would make me happy.



Where did you get that from? He didn't say anything about having to buy another account or pay extra. It would just be a new type of realm like PVP, RP, etc.

One of the things removed would be wow tokens. So if you are currently paying for your sub with gold you'd either have to make a second account to play on the pristine realm and then pay 15 bucks on top of the 40k gold you're paying for your other account or you'd have to stop using gold to pay for your sub.

[Kiranji]

At the end of legion, the green forces made azeroth explode. The surviving heroes managed to bring along some of there stuff, like there precious mounts, but there was no return and a lot was lost. Horde and Alliance were forced to combine there forces to face up against the pve surroundings in a brand new world. A big city gathered all heroes, blue and red, and yes: in the local pubs many brawls were fought among all sides. The pure pvp heroes were disbanned from this city & gathered in dark and tricky well camouflaged villages.

All heroes, old and new, needed to start all over in this new world. Original choices were again to b made, combining race and class. They let the past for what it was and engaged the visions of the present.

A new vanilla was born, ready to conquer the immaculate future and let go of the glorious past...

[Etselion]

The worst part of all of this is Kungen milking the shit out of the viewers.

The poor old man is clinging so hard to Nostagia. Kinda sad

[aikanaro]

So, I've played wow since launch.. and I loved vanill raided all the way up and into naxx. But 40 man raids were God aweful. Not to mention paladins were open as fuck in pve. Blessing of salvation made vael a joke.. tanks would just click it off one at a time and gg there is your tank order. Don't even get me started on tranquil air totem.. lol. I digress.. I would never play vanilla again. It had its time to shine, I loved it, and I moved on to the next expansion which was way better than vanilla.. I have read all of these comments and I have not been persuaded to play either a classic or pristine server. A few reasons why? I love all my transmog gear, I have every single hunter and paladin tier there is (except all of the original 3). I enjoy 10 man raiding. But most of all... I was there and I honestly believe the game itself is much better. It is the community that causes the issues.

[xezar]

You can't but help call bullshit on their excuses; if all these "regular joes" can implement the coding for private vanilla servers, what is Blizz's excuse when they have vastly more resources at their disposal over maybe a minor squad of guys doing it for free? The coding is obviously out there in one form or another and despite Blizz's claim it's not, no sane person this day and age is going to not have a backup in case shit hits the fan, this isn't the 1900s when filmmakers overwrote film stock to save on costs ffs.

And then they insult the players by discussing something completely off topic, "pristine" realms which don't sound anything like the legacy ones people obviously want. SMH...

[Deleted]

Hi mmochamp!

There are people who claim that "we" want legacy servers, a true vanilla experience with no compromise, no expansions, etc, but I much more support the other "we" who want current expansion life cycle, but with many horrible features turned off that has been piling up since vanilla.

No dungeon finder please. I hate it, an unnecessary tool to make open world less relevant. A tool that takes away the adventure into the dungeon, the actual travel that makes the world feel big, and to be honest make the world even feel that it actually is there. Dungeon finder removes the world between you and the instance, making the game essentially a lobby game. You don't even have to leave the main city in this game anymore to get to max level, because of dungeon tool. It's a mmorpg, it is very hard to understand for someone who loves the open world, why does it have to be turned into something that can be played fully from a lobby? If they added a feature to launch dungeons and pvp directly from the launcher, it would change the game very little from how it currently can be played.

No flying mounts please. Another thing that dimishes the open world, takes away the sense of adventure and the sense of danger. Through air there are no obstacles, no danger, and everywhere can be flown the shortest direct path. It is very much similar feature as the dungeon finder to be honest, because it removes the world from between your character and your destination. I've loved the new expansions not having flight until later patches, but I would much more love a new server where flying mounts are gone entirely, from everywhere. Add teleports or mini static flight paths to places where flying mount used to be mandatory, and there we have it, no flying mounts anywhere to ruin the adventure! <3

No cross-realms please. The ultimate community killing feature. Dungeon tool and cross realms are in the same category pretty much, both reasons not to bother to communicate with people, who soon dissapear into their own realm and become irrelevant to you again. In vanilla we talked in dungeons, not only because they were harder to do, but also because the people were relevant to you, they were ALWAYS from your realm. They were people you met again, in dungeon runs and in towns, open world, etc. My friends list got bigger and bigger mostly because of dungeon runs, and pvp matches that were also realm specific. These days? Nope. No one says a word because you are surrounded with irrelevant people who vanish and you most likely never meet them again after the run, because they are from other realm. I WANT TO PLAY WITH PEOPLE FROM MY OWN SERVER, AT ALL TIMES... Please.

No PvP gear/stats. This is something that is already being fixed in Legion so that is at least happening in the live servers soon. Not many have the time to do separately PvE and PvP gear grind, or keep track of more and more additional stats based fighting monsters instead of people. The game is more fun when you can focus on the gameplay more than collecting many different sets of armor that you need to swap between PvE and PvP. It's just pointless and makes the game harder to enjoy.

Also I'd like the raids back that did not have dozen different difficulty. If you had purples from raids in vanilla it meant you had accomplished something great, and that's that. The difficulty should come by simply having raids of different difficulty, like we had MC in Vanilla, then BWL, etc. With some smaller stuff like Zul'Gurub somewhere there in the middle. Not the same raid with multiple different difficulties, it's alright if not every single person can't do some content because it's too hard for them, seriously, it's fine. Become a better player or skip that content, simply lowering the difficulty is a lazy way to try and please everyone while making the content feel too easy and fractured, uninteresting even.

World of Warcraft without cross realm population, without cross realm dungeons and pvp, and without flying mounts. That is what "we" want, relevant server community, and the sense of adventure and danger without the flying mounts. A World of Warcraft where you don't sit in the capital city lobby, but travel the world because the content is out there, not under a little button that you click.

[Celeclop]

Wow, I'm legit surprised that the poll is basically dead even. I was imagining an overwhelming response on "Yes" tbh.

[Deleted]

why cant legacy servers just exists as a game on its own like starcraft, heartstone etc?

just give the nost-guys the rights to run it, any profit that it may give will go uncut to blizz.. noone is asking for more.

[ohstahpit]

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.

I wanted to take the time out of my day to tell you, you are wrong. I personally would pay MORE money for legacy servers than the current "game". I am not clouded by nostalgia. I simply want a game, let me note this here:

Game
ɡām/
noun
1.
a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.

Yes a GAME that will take the money I am paying and actually have it fucking worth while. I cleared wod content and have played since beta and can verify NO content that has been released in the past 5 years has met any curriculum into the definition of a game. Theres nothing competative about the current state of the game. There's nothing challenging about the current state of the game. you can hit max level from 0 in 5 hours and be fully geared. Why the fuck would I pay for linear dungeons and garrison missions. I can get more adventure and content out of $15 worth of Choose your own adventure books. I am not saying that they should get rid of the current game as there are people who enjoy the current game and they do deserve their own as well. With that said I am simply asking you to get out of your bias and don't cloud the community with your self invoked views.

[Racia]

You want a simple reason someone may not support adding vanilla servers? Resources. Unless the project is handled by all new resources, you're going to take some of the resources from the current team and splinter them off. There is already a large degree of dissatisfaction with the time between xpacs. Removing resources is not likely to improve that.

So if someone vehemently prefers the current content and doesn't want vanilla servers, he or she would have a valid reason to oppose those servers' conception.

Its not new content, its old. Besides, the nostalrius team already said they would be willing to help with this for free because they love the game and what they were doing. I dont see why this have to be a burden to the retail wow, if it had a fee, it would pay for itself.

[Deleted]

I don't think that the prestine realms are that bad of an idea, they can't remove flying in the zones that they let you fly in because some of the things there are only accesed via flying, what they could do is scale the mobs damage and life to make the game harder and reduce xp rates, not only removing the boosts, in order to make dungeons relevant, because if they can just gain exp going through the zones normaly no one would do low level dungeons. as well as making some of the quest mobs elites to make group quests relevant to increace party play, they could allso remove flex dificulty, add the old mount levels (40 and 60) or (30 and 50) and increase their gold cost in order to make them feel like a reward.

[Army Dreamer]

I wonder what part of the voters said they'd play on pristine server will actually do. It might be hyped at start, but it'll end up empty quite soon.

[Kithelle]

So basically a server that just makes it slower to level? No thanks...

[Deleted]

Wow, I'm legit surprised that the poll is basically dead even. I was imagining an overwhelming response on "Yes" tbh.

its a step in the right direction, but it aint good enough for me, so i sid no. its a half-arsed bandaid solution.

[shyguybman]

You can't but help call bullshit on their excuses; if all these "regular joes" can implement the coding for private vanilla servers, what is Blizz's excuse when they have vastly more resources at their disposal over maybe a minor squad of guys doing it for free? The coding is obviously out there in one form or another and despite Blizz's claim it's not, no sane person this day and age is going to not have a backup in case shit hits the fan, this isn't the 1900s when filmmakers overwrote film stock to save on costs ffs.

And then they insult the players by discussing something completely off topic, "pristine" realms which don't sound anything like the legacy ones people obviously want. SMH...

It's not as simple as checking out the code for the last revision of Vanilla and putting it on a server. Also, how long did it take the people to create Nostalrius, I heard it was years. Of course Blizzard has the advantage of having people that actually developed the game there etc. but I would rather them keep 20 people on legion instead of breaking them off onto Vanilla.

I'm not against Vanilla servers I just don't think people realize what has to happen for them to do it.

[Chaelexi]

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.

You can't but help call bullshit on their excuses; if all these "regular joes" can implement the coding for private vanilla servers, what is Blizz's excuse when they have vastly more resources at their disposal over maybe a minor squad of guys doing it for free? The coding is obviously out there in one form or another and despite Blizz's claim it's not, no sane person this day and age is going to not have a backup in case shit hits the fan, this isn't the 1900s when filmmakers overwrote film stock to save on costs ffs.

And then they insult the players by discussing something completely off topic, "pristine" realms which don't sound anything like the legacy ones people obviously want. SMH...

Please read my previous post.

As for your backup of data from 14 years ago, that shit was over written. Nobody keeps stuff for that long.

[vinmmo]

Its not new content, its old. Besides, the nostalrius team already said they would be willing to help with this for free because they love the game and what they were doing. I dont see why this have to be a burden to the retail wow, if it had a fee, it would pay for itself.

Recreating the old content is new work. Doing it at a level that satisfies Blizzard's QA is a more complicated task than a pirate server doing their own thing. The expectations are much higher. The support staff needs to handle different content with different clients. In short, it's not that simple. Adding Vanilla Servers is a significant undertaking and it would likely take away from the current iteration of the game, just from a personnel perspective.

The best I think one could hope for is blizzard to figure out the details of a 3rd party AUP with limited QA to allow some servers to run with Blizzard's blessing.

[Deleted]

Hi mmochamp!

There are people who claim that "we" want legacy servers, a true vanilla experience with no compromise, no expansions, etc, but I much more support the other "we" who want current expansion life cycle, but with many horrible features turned off that has been piling up since vanilla.

No dungeon finder please. I hate it, an unnecessary tool to make open world less relevant. A tool that takes away the adventure into the dungeon, the actual travel that makes the world feel big, and to be honest make the world even feel that it actually is there. Dungeon finder removes the world between you and the instance, making the game essentially a lobby game. You don't even have to leave the main city in this game anymore to get to max level, because of dungeon tool. It's a mmorpg, it is very hard to understand for someone who loves the open world, why does it have to be turned into something that can be played fully from a lobby? If they added a feature to launch dungeons and pvp directly from the launcher, it would change the game very little from how it currently can be played.

No flying mounts please. Another thing that dimishes the open world, takes away the sense of adventure and the sense of danger. Through air there are no obstacles, no danger, and everywhere can be flown the shortest direct path. It is very much similar feature as the dungeon finder to be honest, because it removes the world from between your character and your destination. I've loved the new expansions not having flight until later patches, but I would much more love a new server where flying mounts are gone entirely, from everywhere. Add teleports or mini static flight paths to places where flying mount used to be mandatory, and there we have it, no flying mounts anywhere to ruin the adventure! <3

No cross-realms please. The ultimate community killing feature. Dungeon tool and cross realms are in the same category pretty much, both reasons not to bother to communicate with people, who soon dissapear into their own realm and become irrelevant to you again. In vanilla we talked in dungeons, not only because they were harder to do, but also because the people were relevant to you, they were ALWAYS from your realm. They were people you met again, in dungeon runs and in towns, open world, etc. My friends list got bigger and bigger mostly because of dungeon runs, and pvp matches that were also realm specific. These days? Nope. No one says a word because you are surrounded with irrelevant people who vanish and you most likely never meet them again after the run, because they are from other realm. I WANT TO PLAY WITH PEOPLE FROM MY OWN SERVER, AT ALL TIMES... Please.

No PvP gear/stats. This is something that is already being fixed in Legion so that is at least happening in the live servers soon. Not many have the time to do separately PvE and PvP gear grind, or keep track of more and more additional stats based fighting monsters instead of people. The game is more fun when you can focus on the gameplay more than collecting many different sets of armor that you need to swap between PvE and PvP. It's just pointless and makes the game harder to enjoy.

Also I'd like the raids back that did not have dozen different difficulty. If you had purples from raids in vanilla it meant you had accomplished something great, and that's that. The difficulty should come by simply having raids of different difficulty, like we had MC in Vanilla, then BWL, etc. With some smaller stuff like Zul'Gurub somewhere there in the middle. Not the same raid with multiple different difficulties, it's alright if not every single person can't do some content because it's too hard for them, seriously, it's fine. Become a better player or skip that content, simply lowering the difficulty is a lazy way to try and please everyone while making the content feel too easy and fractured, uninteresting even.

World of Warcraft without cross realm population, without cross realm dungeons and pvp, and without flying mounts. That is what "we" want, relevant server community, and the sense of adventure and danger without the flying mounts. A World of Warcraft where you don't sit in the capital city lobby, but travel the world because the content is out there, not under a little button that you click.

To me that fact that you could look at someone and know their power was a big thing, imagine a wow without transmog it could fit in this idealised version of the game in my opinion.

[IxilaFA]

You can't but help call bullshit on their excuses; if all these "regular joes" can implement the coding for private vanilla servers, what is Blizz's excuse when they have vastly more resources at their disposal over maybe a minor squad of guys doing it for free? The coding is obviously out there in one form or another and despite Blizz's claim it's not, no sane person this day and age is going to not have a backup in case shit hits the fan, this isn't the 1900s when filmmakers overwrote film stock to save on costs ffs.

And then they insult the players by discussing something completely off topic, "pristine" realms which don't sound anything like the legacy ones people obviously want. SMH...

What makes you think the people who developed Nostalrius were regular Joe's? There's a broad difference between people who take the time to develop and maintain a server as a side project or a hobby and actually pulling aside developers for new game content to develop this stuff.