How long will the Classic servers actually last?

[Nitros14]

Getting to 60 will take approx 6-12 days.

6-12 days of /played time maybe. Unless you're really tryharding it.

[Deleted]

You can't level 1-60 back then in a day, and you certainly can't collect millions of runecloth/red snapper/etc for AQ's opening in a day. There will be less people in it than its release, even with the highest projected success, and they'll mostly be adults with less free time, making gathering people for those big 40 man raids even harder, etc.

That's the stuff that will take time.

I'm fully aware about that stuff and was talking about the actually difficulty of the raids. The things u are talking about are tedious for sure and it's not that easy to get 40+ man doing the grind fast but the moment a new raid tier releases it will be cleared within a very short amount of time, the first tiers even with less then 40 man. The difficulty of the raids is just not comparable to todays mythic raiding, espacially for private server guys who are clearing that stuff for many years.

[Peggybundy]

Blizzard is going to release classic vanilla then milk the shit out of this franchise and release a "classic" version of every expansion following their original timelines. In 14 years from now we'll be sitting here on the cusp of Classic Legion patch 7.3.5 having another discussion about wanting classic vanilla again.

[LazarusLong]

Do you think a single person got both full naxx gear and High Warlord in vanilla? I don't think so.

There was quite a few in my guild. 5-6 I think.

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It's amazing just how unlucky you could get at times and some people have forgotten that or never knew to begin with. For instance, I had 4 pieces of Tier 2 and had already cleared BWL several time before I ever got my Dungeon Set 1 pants to drop. Heck by that point I didn't need the things, but I kept at it because I wanted to finish the freaking Soulforge set.

I can't even remember what weapon I was using then either because I never saw a dang thing drop for the most part and if I did I usually got out rolled.

Top raiders grinded GM for a reason back then. Guaranteed loot, and GM weapons for lot of classes were quite good actually.

[Deleted]

I know people say "yea but we are better players now", classes were not really dynamic, so it's not possible to do significantly more damage in 2017 than back in 2006.

Ofc it is. Theorycrafting and correct gearing alone makes a whole lot of a difference, you would be amazed how badly even players who did naxx back then were at handling this. The knowledge about the right gearing decisions just wasn't there at the time.

It was also quite common to have like 10 people who did basically nothing even in a naxx raiding team. Other factors were bad pc's (hello 10 fps) & internet connections (constant dc's thanks to dialup..), all gone today. Not even talking about knowing tactics for every encounter. Private servers may not be 100% the same tuning like retail in 2006 was but it isn't far away and maybe even harder at some bosses.

I did clear naxx multiple times up to sapphiron back then and killed him and KT a single time after a guild fusion which kinda removed the 10 "bad" players, it was amazing how much easier stuff seemed to be with 40 good people but still not optimized gear, shitty pc's and connections. Now just imagine how it would be with 40 good people, 60fps+, stable connections, encounter and theorycrafting knowledge.

[LazarusLong]

What is adorable is you claimed 16 c'thun kills while even Nihilum only killed him 6 times before naxx40 came out.
But i'm done with this, no point arguing with somebody who is clearly claiming to have done way more than he ever did.

GL with your 10 r14's in guild and 16 c'thun kills man

Pretty sure we continued to kill C'Thun well after Naxx started. But again, you seems clueless to how vanilla raiding was.

[Derpling]

Just wondering - what happens when the content is cleared (yes, it will take months to gear up), and everyone is decked out in T3?

The hardcore vanilla fetishists will stick around congratulating each other about how superior their tastes are. Everyone else will have been long, long gone by then.

[Akka]

Blizzard is going to release classic vanilla then milk the shit out of this franchise and release a "classic" version of every expansion following their original timelines. In 14 years from now we'll be sitting here on the cusp of Classic Legion patch 7.3.5 having another discussion about wanting classic vanilla again.

I doubt they would get successful Cata or WoD servers
And there will be no need to talk of "wanting" Vanilla again, as the servers would already be up

[Deleted]

Blizzard is going to release classic vanilla then milk the shit out of this franchise and release a "classic" version of every expansion following their original timelines. In 14 years from now we'll be sitting here on the cusp of Classic Legion patch 7.3.5 having another discussion about wanting classic vanilla again.

Haha, going the full circle I guess .

[ddsad2212]

Haha, going the full circle I guess .

Can't wait to see the discussed on AP and legendary drop rates in a decades time! At least I'll know to role 7 death knights not one next time and pray for the BIS drops

[klaps_05]

Did they not keep patches saved in a repository? That seems very dangerous to code without a version control system. I have a hard time believing a AAA company would do that.

Yea, but Blizzard is a small indie company.

[Morbownz]

Ofc it is. Theorycrafting and correct gearing alone makes a whole lot of a difference, you would be amazed how badly even players who did naxx back then were at handling this. The knowledge about the right gearing decisions just wasn't there at the time.
I did clear naxx multiple times up to sapphiron back then and killed him and KT a single time after a guild fusion which kinda removed the 10 "bad" players, it was amazing how much easier stuff seemed to be with 40 good people but still not optimized gear, shitty pc's and connections. Now just imagine how it would be with 40 good people, 60fps+, stable connections, encounter and theorycrafting knowledge.

This hasn't improved at all. I've raided and pvp'd on several private servers, the biggest area of evolution is in PvP. Watch a PvP movie and you will see a huge change in the way duels take place, they heavily revolve around potion usage and engineering. PvE Theorycrafting is not more advanced at all. In 2005/6 a large portion of the more hardcore endgame raiding community worked on a knowledge base for people to utilize called Elitist Jerks, it had hundreds of pages of resources. This same knowledge base doesn't exist today, we have BiS lists and hit cap for the modern player who just wants the immediate and easy to understand answer.
I say again, it's not possible to do significantly more dmg today that back in 2006, Frostbolt still takes 2.5 seconds to cast, today Rogues regenerate energy at the exact same rate as they did in 2006. The only difference is like you said, technology improving. But I haven't seen any new strats for killing bosses from these guilds clearing farming Naxx to convince me that have a much better understanding of the content. From my experience players are still referring to old guides and any resources they can dig up from 2006.

[Hottage]

Do you think a single person got both full naxx gear and High Warlord in vanilla? I don't think so.

My gear was full Grand Marshal with a few pieces AQ40 and Naxx. :3

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Did they not keep patches saved in a repository? That seems very dangerous to code without a version control system. I have a hard time believing a AAA company would do that.

They probably did, but after 10+ years there's a good chance they culled the CVS to save space.

The game might have gotten up to build 2xxxx but there are likely hundreds of thousands of revisions to get those 20,000 builds, those revisions take up an awful lot of space, not just on the repository server but also the developers PCs.

Especially when vast amounts of the data is binary resources which can't be diffed easily by verson control software.

[babyback]

Pretty sure we continued to kill C'Thun well after Naxx started. But again, you seems clueless to how vanilla raiding was.

We did BWL throughout the life span of vanilla even when we cleared Naxx. It was a nice gold farm

[tankbug]

First months: Massive interest
6 months->1 year: Declining interest
1 year->: Vanilla enthusiasts (if standard sub is required, a lot of these will still pay private servers for free instead)

[Stunlock]

Did they not keep patches saved in a repository? That seems very dangerous to code without a version control system. I have a hard time believing a AAA company would do that.

The source control systems changed over the last 15 years. For example VSS -> TFS -> Perforce -> GIT. Migrating from one to another source systems means you lose the change histories and branches. So basically you can't go back back to the time before the current versioning system. And even if they have an old VSS backup, the whole build system might not exists anymore or are still used for the current build, so they need to recreate the complete buildsystem.

Then you need to backport all those exploit fixes, crawling through thousands of changes in the 2.0+ builds, maybe even over different versioning systems. This is a huge task, especially if those fixes rely on changes that are post 2.0+

On the infrastructure site, you can't use the current environments, since the retail is still using them. So you need to adjust the complete networks and build a shadow battle.net/login servers since all those servers don't understand the clients from 1.x anymore. Nost and other servers used a different architecture since the whole server is a re-coded emulation.

[Akka]

TPvE Theorycrafting is not more advanced at all. In 2005/6 a large portion of the more hardcore endgame raiding community worked on a knowledge base for people to utilize called Elitist Jerks, it had hundreds of pages of resources. This same knowledge base doesn't exist today, we have BiS lists and hit cap for the modern player who just wants the immediate and easy to understand answer.

Shh, don't break it to people that players who spent two years in Vanilla weren't ignorant noob that suddenly saw the light when the 3.0 and its massive character power boost hit the road.

[Deleted]

This hasn't improved at all. I've raided and pvp'd on several private servers, the biggest area of evolution is in PvP. Watch a PvP movie and you will see a huge change in the way duels take place, they heavily revolve around potion usage and engineering. PvE Theorycrafting is not more advanced at all. In 2005/6 a large portion of the more hardcore endgame raiding community worked on a knowledge base for people to utilize called Elitist Jerks, it had hundreds of pages of resources. This same knowledge base doesn't exist today, we have BiS lists and hit cap for the modern player who just wants the immediate and easy to understand answer.
I say again, it's not possible to do significantly more dmg today that back in 2006, Frostbolt still takes 2.5 seconds to cast, today Rogues regenerate energy at the exact same rate as they did in 2006. The only difference is like you said, technology improving. But I haven't seen any new strats for killing bosses from these guilds clearing farming Naxx to convince me that have a much better understanding of the content. From my experience players are still referring to old guides and any resources they can dig up from 2006.

Well while I know EJ existed back then most people I raided with didn't use that stuff, even late into naxx. Maybe this was a language issue and native english speaking guilds did handle this better, idk. Today u will have way more spread information and as u said, easy solutions like BiS lists everyone will follow. This contributes highly in getting 40 well itemized people together which I think we all agree on was and will be the hardest part about raiding.

[Hottage]

Pretty sure we continued to kill C'Thun well after Naxx started. But again, you seems clueless to how vanilla raiding was.

Even when we were progressing in Naxxramas, we still did 10-15man Molten Core runs to get people their Binding of the Windseekers, Eye of Sulfuras' and bind on equip T1 items to auction.

Blackwing Lair runs were also still on the cards for Elementium Ore and gold farming as well.

[xcoatsyx]

I hope we get a TBC server eventually.


As a warrior nothing will quite match tanking Illidan for me. Watching for those crashes, being ready for shear in what was one of the best raid bosses ever (we won't talk about early BT) but he was great.

Plus, warrior T5/T6 still turn me on.