Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[Charge me Doctor]

and blizzard admited it saying that playerbase nowadays are more fluctuant - just because they changed doesnt mean that blizzard didnt change their buisness policy to accomodate those changes - you can clearly see it in wod - ton of content on launch and nothing later - i think legion will be exackly the same - ton of stuff on launch to lure back milions and nothing when numbers will drop again

And many people enjoy this system over "gated" system, because you can choose to do all content in 4-5 months and quit

[Atelniar]

and blizzard admited it saying that playerbase nowadays are more fluctuant - just because they changed doesnt mean that blizzard didnt change their buisness policy to accomodate those changes - you can clearly see it in wod - ton of content on launch and nothing later - i think legion will be exackly the same - ton of stuff on launch to lure back milions and nothing when numbers will drop again

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yup but the partener is refusing and dont want to change his mind - all you can do is ask in polite way not demand or try to force yourself on him/her (aka recent ddos atacks)

They made their own playerbase more fluctuant, not the other way around. LFD was introduced prior to the idea of "subscribers are cyclical in nature" became a statement. Years prior, actually. 1 + 1 = 2.

[Charge me Doctor]

If you can't grasp the concept of automation-process which devalues human social interaction, maybe you should go to the store more frequently and notice how humans spend less time exchanging pleasantries when they use a VISA instead of actual coins? Or go to the library, where you won't be met by your local librarian who might set some of his/her time aside to recommend you a book. No, you would be met by a silent machine where you are expected to scan the ISBN-number of said book, and you are generally expected to be able to figure out where books are on your own (hence why there is only 1, or maybe 2 people behind the counter to help if you can't find a book). This is the way society has changed due to automated structures.

Do you think LFD and LFR is somehow magically different from its real-life counterparts? If people don't need to communicate, they generally won't, unless they are extremely socially confident. That doesn't make the other part socially awkward, just lazy.

Bold parts are not examples of social interactions in WoW - social interaction in WoW is more like a work in a team that works on a project, than random interactions with strangers. Do you think that it's not important to add people you enjoyed running heroics with to your guild/friend list so you'll have easier time looking for decent players for raid fill or to run couple of dungeons later?

Take challenge modes for example, is the "social" aspect is dead here too? People don't communicate, at all? Even pug raids ask you to join vent where you can socialize with people - it's your choice to avoid it and fool yourself that it's somehow more convenient to not communicate in a game where communication is very important late game aspect

[Atelniar]

i would prefer if they didnt prefer comminting crime in order to have fun - else it would be as if you tried to justify a rapist because he just wanted to have sex & fun and the only thing stoping him from having it was this damn stubborn girl who keeps to say no .(just liek blizzard clearly says no to all people who want legac servers)

False assumption: the service they would like to enjoy does no longer exist. Aka: it almost qualifies as abandonware if Blizzard didn't protect it's IP as they did in this specific case, hence it isn't abandonware. So you can not argue this... Also, cut it with the stupid analogies that are overly exaggerated and malicious by nature. It proves nothing but the fact that you have contempt for Nostalrius...

[PenguinChan]

People have been doing dungeons "as much as they do if the tools did not exist in their current form" but they used to be called "guild runs". Yeah, shocking, i remember in TBC doing that while leveling "/g anyone wants to go through ramparts?" and getting invites, waiting at max 15 minutes to get 2 players near the dungeon, get summoned and start killing elites. Reminds me of something, hm... oh, right, it's fucking LFG/LFD tool that blizzard implemented for those who either too awkward to communicate with other human beings, or for those unlucky people who decided to trust blizzard with their "recommended" servers to start playing at (read: empty).

But i do see your point. I think that blizzard screwed up dungeon tool for leveling - it shouldn't provide THAT much experience/time than regular question, it encourages people spamming dungeons and speedrunning them

And that was a good thing you had a guild to group with and do stuff with. Sure you can have that today and honestly it still exists, but don't fool anyone into thinking that the amount of people actually will run with you on a daily basis, or even multiple times a week. I've been in many leveling / social guilds and as time went on after WotLK's introduction of the LFD tool people stopped communicating as often. The CONVENIENCE factor is a huge reason as to why, because they will log in at any time they deem worthy of play.

This shards players apart on that aspect alone, because if Timmy wants to play WoW at 2 PM to 4 PM he can. John however, plays WoW from 4 PM to 6 PM. Let's just assume both of these players can get on after work at any given time, but they usually decide to play at those times. In current WoW -- there is very little reason to wait a few hours to get some runs going. There is almost no benefit, you're going to go through dungeons stupidly fast no matter what.

But let's compare it back to before LFD existed, and the actual quality of players in general was lower. People not doing dungeons means by average, there will be worse individuals both in skill and gear. Now what does that mean? It means Timmy and John may play together now, especially if they ever catch each other on at the same time. They will start to mix their play time hours together so that they can play with one another. Of course this didn't ALWAYS happen back when, because you'd find players around your time slots. But the principle is still there, introducing LFD and LFR has created this naturally unsocial encouragement.

Don't get me wrong though, I both love and hate these automatic tools. It just feels like Blizzard never accounts for how fast people go through content because of it.

[Atelniar]

Bold parts are not examples of social interactions in WoW - social interaction in WoW is more like a work in a team that works on a project, than random interactions with strangers. Do you think that it's not important to add people you enjoyed running heroics with to your guild/friend list so you'll have easier time looking for decent players for raid fill or to run couple of dungeons later?

They are. Exchanging pleasantries can equate to: compliments regarding knowing your way around an instance, knowing your rotation as DPS, knowing how to keep threat up as a tank (back in the day when threat was relevant, you know), or to manage mana as a healer so as to make the run smooth and wipe-clean (which is no longer an issue due to how healers work these days, mana hasn't mattered since Cataclysm heroics).

In the same way a librarian would set time aside to meet a user's demand, a fellow player would set his time aside to befriend someone they know could aid his own cause, due to competence or otherwise being useful somehow (healers were rare while leveling). When was the last time you experienced that in LFD or LFR, if ever?

So, I just completely refuted your attempt to belittle my argument. How will you proceed?

As to guilds: congratulations, guild recruitment is probably the only main-stay idea of social interaction with a goal that is relevant in today's WoW. Yet, it falls short on every level for new players, why do you think subsriber numbers decline? New players don't feel invested. They don't make new friends while leveling without a guild, heck, they probably never find the right guild because the social interaction that should naturally form bonds, which would lead to group-organized efforts, don't exist anymore.

[Deleted]

i would prefer if they didnt prefer comminting crime in order to have fun - else it would be as if you tried to justify a rapist because he just wanted to have sex & fun and the only thing stoping him from having it was this damn stubborn girl who keeps to say no .(just liek blizzard clearly says no to all people who want legac servers)

No crimes have been committed you silly head.

Anyway where's this petition that we can sign?

[Charge me Doctor]

And that was a good thing you had a guild to group with and do stuff with. Sure you can have that today and honestly it still exists, but don't fool anyone into thinking that the amount of people actually will run with you on a daily basis, or even multiple times a week. I've been in many leveling / social guilds and as time went on after WotLK's introduction of the LFD tool people stopped communicating as often. The CONVENIENCE factor is a huge reason as to why, because they will log in at any time they deem worthy of play.

This shards players apart on that aspect alone, because if Timmy wants to play WoW at 2 PM to 4 PM he can. John however, plays WoW from 4 PM to 6 PM. Let's just assume both of these players can get on after work at any given time, but they usually decide to play at those times. In current WoW -- there is very little reason to wait a few hours to get some runs going. There is almost no benefit, you're going to go through dungeons stupidly fast no matter what.

But let's compare it back to before LFD existed, and the actual quality of players in general was lower. People not doing dungeons means by average, there will be worse individuals both in skill and gear. Now what does that mean? It means Timmy and John may play together now, especially if they ever catch each other on at the same time. They will start to mix their play time hours together so that they can play with one another. Of course this didn't ALWAYS happen back when, because you'd find players around your time slots. But the principle is still there, introducing LFD and LFR has created this naturally unsocial encouragement.

Still, no one stopping you from having more than one friend in the whole game, and there are plenty of people who play the game at the same time as you do.

Living in Russia i can relate to this issue - we had a dude who lived in far east and had +4 hours to our time. Raiding with us was a pain in the ass for him, but because we were good teammates he didn't left us and we still do play together occasionally. I'm not convinced that randomly generated party is more convenient solution to "running dungeons" "issue" (who the hell runs dungeons anymore?) than having a pool of decent players to pick and form a party from. If you run at least 1 dungeon per day and add at least 2 good players from these runs to your friend list - by the time next expansion hits you'll have huge pull of players to team with, being it questing, dungeons, or whatever.

[Atelniar]

No crimes have been committed you silly head.

Anyway where's this petition that we can sign?

Google Nostalrius or something, it's actively being added in the description of almost every youtuber's video that is relevant recently. From Athene to JonTron.

[PenguinChan]

Still, no one stopping you from having more than one friend in the whole game, and there are plenty of people who play the game at the same time as you do.

Living in Russia i can relate to this issue - we had a dude who lived in far east and had +4 hours to our time. Raiding with us was a pain in the ass for him, but because we were good teammates he didn't left us and we still do play together occasionally. I'm not convinced that randomly generated party is more convenient solution to "running dungeons" "issue" (who the hell runs dungeons anymore?) than having a pool of decent players to pick and form a party from. If you run at least 1 dungeon per day and add at least 2 good players from these runs to your friend list - by the time next expansion hits you'll have huge pull of players to team with, being it questing, dungeons, or whatever.

I started doing that once again. This is totally anecdotal so take this as you will -- but after awhile they stopped playing WoW as often or didn't even continue playing after the first add. They still talked sure, or played other games with me (sometimes). But by and large they just started to level past me or never took the time to actually do things together. People may be willing to talk and communicate still, but they are much less inclined to actually be more than just words on a screen. Friends I've made would rather indirectly tell me to fuck off and do stuff alone because it's faster and more convenient. It's an evil that comes with all this automation.

[Atelniar]

Still, no one stopping you from having more than one friend in the whole game, and there are plenty of people who play the game at the same time as you do.

While I am not trying to be difficult just to be difficult, I sat down with a few players who claimed they were new to the game. They planned on not re-subscribing and I was curious as to why (this occured in WoD). He told me he couldn't make friends while leveling and that every guild he joined was impossible to make decent social connections in because they were dead-silent. I tried to argue he should be more selective with the guilds he joined, and look on the forums for social guilds, but for him it was "too late".

So, I think you are wrong. My experience from second-hand sources says that it is not that easy to create social interaction in an environment that doesn't focus on it to progress. That is, in an MMORPG.

My point is: those few who breaks out and tries to get you involved by including you into dungeon runs (which is more time-consuming than simply signing up until you have at least four players with a healer and a tank), or actively try to help you while you quest are in a minority. They are unique individuals who seek out social interaction more so than game progression. The back of the box used to imply that making social bonds was neccessary to make it as a hero in Azeroth. They don't do that anymore, for a good reason. They tossed the concept aside in favour of automation.

[Charge me Doctor]

They are. Exchanging pleasantries can equate to: compliments regarding knowing your way around an instance, knowing your rotation as DPS, knowing how to keep threat up as a tank (back in the day when threat was relevant, you know), or to manage mana as a healer so as to make the run smooth and wipe-clean (which is no longer an issue due to how healers work these days, mana hasn't mattered since Cataclysm heroics).

In the same way a librarian would set time aside to meet a user's demand, a fellow player would set his time aside to befriend someone they know could aid his own cause, due to competence or otherwise being useful somehow (healers were rare while leveling). When was the last time you experienced that in LFD or LFR, if ever?

So, I just completely refuted your attempt to belittle my argument. How will you proceed?

As to guilds: congratulations, guild recruitment is probably the only main-stay idea of social interaction with a goal that is relevant in today's WoW. Yet, it falls short on every level for new players, why do you think subsriber numbers decline? New players don't feel invested. They don't make new friends while leveling without a guild, heck, they probably never find the right guild because the social interaction that should naturally form bonds, which would lead to group-organized efforts, don't exist anymore.

Being hinted that i am a good player? More often than you may think. And usually not because i'm that good, but because i choose to not be an asshole to others. From that limited time i spent on WoD i've got 20 new people on my Bnet friendlist, and two raidcall channels of active, decent-sized guilds. Tomorrow my wife plans to finish her gold challenge mode run on her last dungeon and i'll be helping her to find two DPS from said pool of players

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While I am not trying to be difficult just to be difficult, I sat down with a few players who claimed they were new to the game. They planned on not re-subscribing and I was curious as to why (this occured in WoD). He told me he couldn't make friends while leveling and that every guild he joined was impossible to make decent social connections in because they were dead-silent. I tried to argue he should be more selective with the guilds he joined, and look on the forums for social guilds, but for him it was "too late".

So, I think you are wrong. My experience from second-hand sources says that it is not that easy to create social interaction in an environment that doesn't focus on it to progress. That is, in an MMORPG.

Then i can throw a wild guess that it's difference between EU and Russian communities.

[Deleted]

If you can't grasp the concept of automation-process which devalues human social interaction, maybe you should go to the store more frequently and notice how humans spend less time exchanging pleasantries when they use a VISA instead of actual coins? Or go to the library, where you won't be met by your local librarian who might set some of his/her time aside to recommend you a book. No, you would be met by a silent machine where you are expected to scan the ISBN-number of said book, and you are generally expected to be able to figure out where books are on your own (hence why there is only 1, or maybe 2 people behind the counter to help if you can't find a book). This is the way society has changed due to automated structures.

Do you think LFD and LFR is somehow magically different from its real-life counterparts? If people don't need to communicate, they generally won't, unless they are extremely socially confident. That doesn't make the other part socially awkward, just lazy.

But people don't want to socialise all the time! This is the reason why only a few are talking on bus / train rides, and that they are not talking to complete strangers, but to people they already know and possibly are even friends with. All other people on the ride do anything (reading, listening to music, playing mobile games, chat or watching videos on their smartphones etc.) but socialise! You possibly exchange some few words to be sure that a place is free to sit there or if you have to apologize because you bumped into someone due to an unexpected break of the vehicle. But you don't really socialise all the time in such situations. MMOs are just like such train or bus rides!

Edit: I made 1 acquaintance via LFD in WoD with whom I communicate regularly. He's on a different server (I was playing there previously), but cross-realms are a good thing for this. This had NOTHING to do with me needing him for anything - in fact, I was helping him several times, and never was in a situation where I needed help in return. But it's okay for me - because having an occasional chat partner is more than enough for me in this case. In fact, I like to socialise with people whom I find pleasant - not because they are a tank or a healer and I desperately need one every day when I have to run a dungeon.

[Jyggalag]

I'm not convinced that randomly generated party is more convenient solution to "running dungeons" "issue"

Pre LFD tool - After an hour of searching for player of role X > "Hey player, want to do this dungeon?" > "Sure" > "That went well, let's be friends and do it again tomorrow" > "Ok, what time?"

- Friendship begins via social interaction
- Whole experience including looking for 4 players could have taken an hour or more

Post LDF tool - Queues LFD > Completes Dungeon without typing/saying literally anything to anyone > No friendships made

- 0 social interaction. No new friendships in the works.
- Whole experience took less than 20 minutes.

Several hours of this and the player has consumed all 5 man end-game content in a day and is ready to raid, where a very similar experience takes place.
Player completes game and un-subs. Doesn't really work for a subscription model game. And with 0 social interaction it might as well be a single player game and not an MMO.

Your argument that these tools don't allow players to consume content more quickly than they can appreciate it is completely invalid and pretty ignorant.

who the hell runs dungeons anymore?

Believe it or not, some people loved 5 man dungeons in older iterations of the game because of the difficulty and the social aspect. There's a reason people don't run dungeons any more, and it's because after 1-2 days of running them, players can jump straight in to the most relevant tier of raiding. There's 0 incentive.
There's a reason Blizz want to make them relevant again.

[Atelniar]

Being hinted that i am a good player? More often than you may think. And usually not because i'm that good, but because i choose to not be an asshole to others. From that limited time i spent on WoD i've got 20 new people on my Bnet friendlist, and two raidcall channels of active, decent-sized guilds. Tomorrow my wife plans to finish her gold challenge mode run on her last dungeon and i'll be helping her to find two DPS from said pool of players

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Then i can throw a wild guess that it's difference between EU and Russian communities.

I find that I myself can barely bother on giving people compliments in a dungeon where I will never speak to or interact with said individual again, I try to be friendly and say well-done if the run was good, or even give friendly advice when leveling if I have class-knowledge they do not, but it simply falls on deaf ears half the time. It's gotten to the point where I don't care, I just sign up, finish and return to my focus on killing hordes in some BG which is randomly selected for me for the sake of entering quicker. Not because I enjoy it more than the other BG's. Not because it is fun, but because that's where I can find other players to actually "try" to have some fun in PvP.

Yes, EU and russia are inherently different. The amount of difference between european nations is far more staggering than you might believe. We have the nordic regions which consists largely of Scandinavia (with very close ties, which is why you see "SWEEE?" in every online game with european support. Scandinavians are big into online gaming, be it danes, norwegians or swedes. Then you have the finnish people, who's language has more in common with baltic regions than the rest of the north. They stand out quite a bit but are still frequently found in MMORPG's. Iceland is generally included among scandic people even though they strictly aren't a scandic country. All of these countries master English speech rather well and have close-knit ties, especially in terms of written language or gelogical borders.

Then you have anything from france, the UK, former soviet countries that are independant and every other nation all the way down to Israel and Greece. That's how varied the EU servers are (yes, they sometimes include countries that are not a part of the EU), that is how language barriers are formed and why it is sometimes easier to just keep your mouth shut and not befriend strangers in random dungeons.

[BiggestNoob]

Okay....just because your friends aren't playing Hearthstone does not mean the game is dying. And D3 having seasonal play has been great for the game. They made PLENTY of sales of the game when it released, at this point there is no cash shop to buy cosmetics or anything and yet they still give the game some content.

That's exactly what it means. My friends are your average gamers. I just went around looking at things after that post and it confirms everything I said. Open your eyes and actually look. Your denial and non-stop "Blizzard can do no wrong, all Blizzard games are perfect and perpetually improving in quality and revenue" delusion is wrong.

D3 gets a rush of people at the start of a season and some stick with it for more than a couple weeks. It is nice that the game gets content, I know I'm happy to play the season next week.

That's not content, and the reason nobody keeps playing it is because it's a dead game. I don't know a single person who's bought D3 since RoS, and this coming from someone who was playing with hundreds of other people both at the game's launch and during RoS. Reset, some new legendaries, open a spreadsheet someone put together from playing beta, pick a build, get to GR80+, quit the game. 1-2 weeks max. It's a dead game, it's the same game. And it's absolute garbage compared to D2. It was bad when it first came out for a lot of reasons. RoS was bad for a lot of different reasons. The current game is still bad, and there hasn't been any new content. Legendary effects and a reset, same exact game.

Lord savior director Jay Wilson though. Hasn't made a single good game yet, I'm so glad he's in charge of WoW now! We're headed for 15 million subs by.... turning WoW into D3. What a one-trick pony. Yes, let's take a game that's dead that has fewer players today than D2 does and copy all of the horrible game design from it and.. put them all into the most successful game Blizzard has ever made.

Fantastic leadership and vision.

Calling me delusional because of your personal experiences if you want but D3 and Hearthstone aren't "dead".

Please provide evidence of this because I haven't cited personal experience, I've cited hundreds of data points and I've just gone and looked for the proof I just asked you for. Even the financials from Blizzard show them both on a steep downward trend. The games are dead. The financials agree, the community activity agrees, and a quick survey of ~1000 people agrees. Dead games. Please provide evidence to the contrary.

Games evolve and stories change, get over it.

Interesting, I can still play all those old games even though the story has moved on.

You know these book series where you have a constantly evolving world? I can still buy the first book and go back and read it again to relive my original experience.

Even our shitty copyright law has provisions to prevent this in non-software content. If you unpublish something and aren't actively selling copies, someone can in fact do that for you, without your permission. It's only a matter of time before someone actually takes a lawsuit from the likes of Blizzard all the way and sets precedent about abandonware.

[Atelniar]

But people don't want to socialise all the time! This is the reason why only a few are talking on bus / train rides, and that they are not talking to complete strangers, but to people they already know and possibly are even friends with. All other people on the ride do anything (reading, listening to music, playing mobile games, chat or watching videos on their smartphones etc.) but socialise! You possibly exchange some few words to be sure that a place is free to sit there or if you have to apologize because you bumped into someone due to an unexpected break of the vehicle. But you don't really socialise all the time in such situations. MMOs are just like such train or bus rides!

Edit: I made 1 acquaintance via LFD in WoD with whom I communicate regularly. He's on a different server (I was playing there previously), but cross-realms are a good thing for this. This had NOTHING to do with me needing him for anything - in fact, I was helping him several times, and never was in a situation where I needed help in return. But it's okay for me - because having an occasional chat partner is more than enough for me in this case. In fact, I like to socialise with people whom I find pleasant - not because they are a tank or a healer and I desperately need one every day when I have to run a dungeon.

As much as I could argue otherwise, these days at least, it's supposed to be an MMORPG. Social interaction should be at the core of the experience. It isn't.

One acquaintance? Impressive, I too made one that I would label as someone I communicated with regularly when I was online in WoW. Until I quit, that is, that individual was the overly-social type that enjoyed going out of their way to be friendly. I responded in kind and you had a social interaction, but it required so much effort from at least one side that it was staggering. In Classic WoW my friends list was crowded with people from my own realm, with the exceptions of keeping track of maybe 3-5 alts they had as they were healers or tanks. I made more friends during classic WoW than in any other MMORPG of the last 10 years. That's how impressive WoW was as a social phenomena back then, that is how much the title has degenerated from being a true MMORPG to a lobby-based, automated game.

[Aehl]

We have a petition heading for 150k signatures. We have a multitude of Youtube-videos with anything from 80k to 2 million views. We have streamers who actively streamed footage from these illegal private servers (which you enjoy pointing out are illegal). We even have the sheer existence of private servers (which has been a fact for many, many years). At every turn you fail to address these points as relevant and misconstruct new arguments, which you hope to beat the topic with, some of whom are completely irrelevant to the idea of supply and demand. Such as the matter of legality (the music and movie industry would like a word with you, they know this for a fact).

Now tell me how many will pony up the money to run the server.

BTW you may find this of interest: reposted with permission

Blizzard has run the numbers and has repeatedly said "The cost of creating and maintaining legacy servers is greater than the money that legacy servers would bring in."

For those asking for Blizzard to do this, do some research on what it would take for Blizzard to do it.

Research the cost of hiring and paying (including benefits) professional programmers to recode the original release World of Warcraft to run on modern servers and operating systems for however long that it takes. It will take less time than originally, as they already have the game design and art assets done, but it would all have to be recoded.

Say Blizzard hires 20 professional programmers to work on the project, give a 2 year time frame for completion of the recoding and debugging of the project to work on modern servers and operating systems. To be generous to you let us go with the low end of the salary for programmers @$40k a year. ($40,000x20)x2=$1,600,000 That is just for the salary of the programmers, add on the cost of health insurance and other benefits, add the cost of the computers needed for the programmers to work on.

See how the costs add up quickly?

If you don't hire a new team to work on it, you are pulling resources away from development of the current game which will make content droughts even longer.

You can't use the pirated code from the illegal server, who knows what could be hidden in there, possible ways to access GM powers, enable god modes, access others accounts, etc. Going line by line through that code to make sure such stuff isn't there would take as much time as rewriting the code from scratch.

Research the cost of the new server hardware to run it on.

Research the cost of the infrastructure needed to allow players to access the server. Bandwidth, electricity, location lease, etc is not free.

Research the manpower cost of maintaining the new server.

Research the manpower cost of GMs and other necessary support staff for the new server.

Research other costs that I am sure I am forgetting.

Once you have researched all that and have a total cost, then you need to figure out how many people need to pay how much for how long to make it profitable to create legacy servers.

People with experience have stated it would cost @ 3 million dollars to start up. For the sake of argument lets go with that number as an example.

$3,000,000/ 100,000(petition number, assuming that all signers are real and not easily duplicated signatures using things like guerrilla mail to sign multiple times)= $30 each just to break even and cover the start up costs.

If you can come up with a way to guarantee that 100,000 people will pay $30 plus an additional monthly fee(to cover ongoing infrastructure costs, maintenance, support, and make a profit) for at least 5 years, you have a case to take to Blizzard for the creation of legacy servers.

I think if you actually do the research, you will find exactly what Blizzard has said multiple times, that it would cost more to do than it would make.

You can do the research and try to prove Blizzard wrong with actual facts and hard numbers. If you do, you will either realize Blizzard is right, or have a way to make a legitimate case for legacy servers

[shifuren]

Thing is, you don't need 20 programmers to maintain already existing vanilla, that number is more close to amount working on current content. Again, it's a medium one-time work that needs to be done to integrate it in current infrastructure, almost nothing more after.

[Deleted]

Thing is, you don't need 20 programmers to maintain already existing vanilla

Blizz said, they don't have the original code anymore.
Not quite sure how they managed to do that tho o.O