Open Letter to Blizzard Entertainment from Mark Kern

[Deleted]

And Mark Kern was a team lead, he played a very important role, so let's not talk about guys putting floppies in boxes.

I work with team leads. Most of them know nothing about the product they are leading. There must be a reason his post WoW endeavour went up in flames.

[Deleted]

The ignorance of this post is baffling if you think 5 people can get the Legacy stuff up to snuff to BLIZZARD quality, not a bunch of people who hold it together with duct tape and chicken wire.

Blizzard quality? The legacy server still exists with all the code, you just need to integrate it with bnet and work out a solution for how you handle different clients etc. People thinking they actually dont have the old stuff still are the ignorant ones.

[rda]

They did it before, without Blizzard. I find it hard to believe that all code is erased.

They didn't recreate vanilla servers in a sane way. They made an emulator. That's not a sane way to do it. (To be precise, it wasn't them who made the emulator either, they took it and added their two cents.)

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I work with team leads. Most of them know nothing about the product they are leading. There must be a reason his post WoW endeavour went up in flames.

Let's not do these stupid generalities. Team leads in your company might be idiots, in many other companies they aren't, that's why they are made team leads.

His post-WoW endeavour went up in flames because he wasn't a good CEO. Many devs aren't, flames like that happen all the time.

[Deleted]

This is the guy who got kicked out from the very own company he started ? I'm totally going to take him srsly...

Or the guy who has been a major part of some of the biggest PC games to date. What have you achieved, I'm sure we shouldn't take you seriously with that logic right?

On Topic:
The guy knows what he's doing and he brings up some awesome points in this video. Extremely well spoken and well sold! I doubt Blizzard will bite here though. They will make another public post saying it's too hard to setup etc and compromise on something that will just make the community more upset.

[rda]

As a total noob in technologies, whats the difference between emulated and "real" servers?

Couldnt blizzard just run an emulator themselves?

Blizzard wrote some code for the client and the server, that's a "real" thing.

The guys who wanted to have their own WoW had the client (everyone can download it), but not the server. They couldn't get the source code for the server, because it's Blizzard's property, they don't share it. So they try and write their own server which behaves like Blizzard's one. That's emulated.

Blizzard can use the emulator, but it's buggy and lacks features. It's just bad. So if they were to launch vanilla servers, they'd do it differently - take the source code for the vanilla server that they have and adjust it for current technologies / add bugfixes / add QoL features, etc. That's a ton of work.

[Deleted]

Let's not do these stupid generalities. Team leads in your company might be idiots, in many other companies they aren't, that's why they are made team leads.

His post-WoW endeavour went up in flames because he wasn't a good CEO. Many devs aren't, flames like that happen all the time.

It's not stupid generalisation. I'm not saying he's an idiot. (altough looking at his next big game he might be) I'm saying a team lead knows a lot of general things, but not much of the small important intricacies of the project he is leading.

[Desparil]

Not everyone is in it for themselves. He's from the vanilla WoW team, the one that actually cared about the players.

Lol give me a break "i liked game most in vanilla so it must be that he cared about players" hes been booted from his own company for being a retard, he is doing this for self promotion same as all those shitheeled youtubers and twitchers using this sorry ass crowd to get subs/views because they know you will hurl in flocks to anything that shits on current wow and praises vanilla.

[rda]

It's not stupid generalisation. I'm not saying he's an idiot. (altough looking at his next big game he might be) I'm saying a team lead knows a lot of general things, but not much of the small important intricacies of the project he is leading.

It depends on what team he leads. It is my understanding that Mark lead the "core" team - responsible for key parts of the product (server, integration, etc), although I can't quote any links (I just don't remember where I heard it, but it was quite some time ago), I could be wrong.

[Deja Thoris]

Twitch never has more than 20k viewers on the wow stream even when people like Soda are there.

To say it will reach 14 mill ppl is so intellectually dishonest I don't even have words.

[Deleted]

I work with team leads. Most of them know nothing about the product they are leading. There must be a reason his post WoW endeavour went up in flames.

You've obviously never been an entrepeneur if you don't understand the route to success is invariably littered with failures. Even the most celebrated and successful companies will have literally dozens of failures relative to the idea which worked out.

[Pua]

But hey, I could do what anyone does! I could google the subject on youtube and post a video of someone that agrees with me and then not talk about it whatsoever.
Let's bring the Facebook-mentality to MMO-C!

I think we're already there. Social media drives life on this planet.

I doubt MMO-C has a sophisticated enough user base to resist it.

[Deleted]

You've obviously never been an entrepeneur if you don't understand the route to success is invariably littered with failures. Even the most celebrated and successful companies will have literally dozens of failures relative to the idea which worked out.

Well no I haven't been. But facing failures is surely different than being kicked out of your own company.

[Pengalor]

I am not surprised, but I am not impressed by that "argument", it's 99% noise from people who parrot something without thinking it through. He didn't fail as a dev, he failed as a CEO.

Except he absolutely, inarguably failed at execution of ideas and budgeting which are the two primary arguments being made against legacy servers by Blizzard.

[Deleted]

But if some servers already feel empty and even a small percentage choose to play legacy more then the live server ends up in an even worse spot.

Why are there even empty servers?

In any case, this wouldn't be a problem at all if Blizzard finally commits to some proper realm mergers instead of putting cross-realm band aids on everything.

[Deleted]

I work with team leads. Most of them know nothing about the product they are leading. There must be a reason his post WoW endeavour went up in flames.

They have people in their team who know. That's what being a team leader is about. You have to know a little bit about a lot of stuff and just be a good people manager, provided you've done your job and assembled a competent team. The team consists of specialists, the team leader is the generalist.

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Twitch never has more than 20k viewers on the wow stream even when people like Soda are there.

To say it will reach 14 mill ppl is so intellectually dishonest I don't even have words.

Can we cut the Twitch crap? Please.

[Deleted]

Well no I haven't been. But facing failures is surely different than being kicked out of your own company.

Like say, Steve Jobs...

[Deja Thoris]

Can we cut the Twitch crap? Please.

Why? He brought it up in the first minute of his video. Do I only have your permission to discuss and agree with points that further your biased agenda?

[Deleted]

Like say, Steve Jobs...

Yeah, like Steve Jobs. I don't like him by the way. He was a genius at marketing but that's about it. Also not sure if that was the same as your own board kicking you out of your own company for the massive incompetence you showed during the developement of your own game. But I could be wrong. Don't know about the Jobs thing.

[Kolvarg]

Why? He brought it up in the first minute of his video. Do I only have your permission to discuss and agree with points that further your biased agenda?

Because 1 thing being exaggerated and/or wrong doesn't make the rest of the video wrong/meaningless.

[quintpp]

Honestly,if they did release Legacy servers and people were actually playing it in a fair majority,so what? whats the big deal? are you people afraid that it will bleed recourses from live wow,give you long times with lack of content? oh wait... that happens anyway. I dont think it would hurt anyone and i think it would be a fun addition to the game,i've stopped playing WoW and doubt i will come back for Legion but i would give Legacy a try for the fun of it.