Open Letter to Blizzard Entertainment from Mark Kern

[ls-]

Lol, you're serious? Show me.

He's wrong, but fastest was ~5 days, 4 days and 20 hours to be precises.

[Epoch]

Apologies for my late post, I would have responded sooner, however I begrudgingly found myself explaining to a customer why his xeon processor wouldn't be a good idea for games like bf4 and more and why it isn't a good idea to have a pos system on a unsecured connection.....some people shouldn't be allowed to touch computers.....

I'd like to start out by saying that I don't really agree with the idea of defending Blizzard on this purely from a law standpoint, and I'm not normally one to defend Blizzard at all.

That being said....Legacy servers are dumb and a waste of time and this guy's comments haven't changed my opinion on that. I realize some people might disagree, but I think the debate comes in when you have to consider how many resources would have to be invested into an official Nostalrius.

You would have to....

1. Most importantly, hire people to maintain these servers.
I'm not going to say Blizzard is in any way lacking for money but the numbers on Nostalrius were dwarfed by official WoW, and frankly weren't that big to begin with. As much as people might want to fight it, the honest truth is that classic servers would not have longevity because they're unable to progress and will eventually stagnate. The novelty of the idea was what kept Nostalrius alive, and while yes this does raise the debate of "why remove it" but you have to understand that bringing it back officially would not garner as much attention as people might expect it to.

For the most part the servers dont need to be physically policed every moment. Since Vanilla, the warden client has been upgraded to the point of noticing botting, cheating and more practically by itself. Compare the ticket response times of vanilla, say - 30 minutes to 3 hours (on the servers I was on), to the response time of today - 4 days to 3+ weeks. If anything, blizzard moved a good portion of the gm's that were responding to tickets during vanilla into other jobs or games.
A gm doesn't just sit around waiting. They actually police (when needed) through a third party program (this is why they are very rarely seen in the current game, versus during vanilla when they would talk to people working on new content, and so on.) They have other tasks and only respond when the situation is in need. Think of the warden client like a car alarm - when people start botting, cheating and more (trying to break in) the alarm goes off and alerts gm's.

2. Police the servers. People still need to reported, exploits would almost definitely be rampant. Seriously, there was an absurd amount back then and that was in the internet's infancy; how many do you think would be found in 2016? And that leads to my next problem with it...

Falls in with my above response. Back in vanilla their really wasn't much in terms of exploits, iirc their was a way to duplicate an item by going through a certain instance. I don't really consider wall walking an exploit - if players get so bored that they find themselves getting into areas they shouldn't be, but are able to, then someone at HQ failed at their job. Exploits didn't really pick up until around the burning crusade expansion - botters in bg's, farming, and more.

3. Fixing bugs, and how far bug fixing goes before it stops being a Classic server? What do you fix? What don't you fix? How many people would it take to fix these issues? And again, this leads into my next issue with it:

They fixed enough issues to have a gaming community built around what players have wanted and have been asking for for quite some time. If you can create a community and keep a good portion of people playing, that would be considered a good thing. Every game has bugs which need to be fixed, so that isn't really a con. Ever played final fantasy? FFXI was awesome for it's time. When FFXIV was announced I was hyped, but the game sucked so bad that it was basically scrapped and completely remade. Is it as good as XI was? Not to me, because similar to vanilla, it was a new experience. The remake was better though.

4. The "dark" side of becoming a public, triple A developer game: Bots, hackers and abusers.
This is potentially the worst part. Think about how much modern WoW struggles with this, and imagine it on a rudimentary, easily abused RTS engine with things like Martin Fury still in the game. Good lord, the abuse would be rampant.
As far as I'm aware, even the AQ C'thun model abuse bug was never truly fixed, they simply brought the banhammer down on anyone who dared to modify the game files. And modifying the game's model files is extremely easy, even to this day. The only reason people don't do it is because it will get you banned very quickly.

Not really a dark side. They created a game, people found a way to make money off of it (bots) or chose to be annoying script kiddies. When you get that big you expect those things to happen, this is the reason the warden client exists, and why over the years their have been massive ban waves. The only issues with c'thun I recall, other than randomly porting people inside the stomach and causing a wipe was tentacles would spawn inside the walls, thus making the fight unkillable. This issue was further compounded by certain devs who had a giant ego and couldn't admit they screwed up. Interestingly, months down the line the fight was fixed because it was unkillable. Come to think of it, during MOP their was an area in townlong steppes, by an instance portal that would randomly port people back to aq for the c'thun fight.

I knew a player, who up until he quit to play Wildstar around cata, was modifying game files to change the appearance of druid forms in game. If anything, it was a needed change, and imo a failure on blizz's part since they didn't deem it important enough at the time to give customers a way to change their character look with more than a haircut. What is blizzard doing now with forms and animations?

These are just some of the reasons why classic servers seem like such a simple concept but their implementation would be met with so much trouble that they're more of a pain to officially host than to just ignore the complaints and keep developing still-moving games rather than focusing on relics of the past. People, including this guy who actually worked on the game itself don't really seem to grasp that it's not as simple as just "throw up a private but not private server and let the community police it"; making it a real Blizzard game would be a true undertaking and the end result would be lukewarm at best.
I would so much rather prefer they continue working on a still-moving game...but for the community's sake, reaching an agreement with private servers and just allowing them to exist. They don't actively hurt WoW in its current state and don't really do a lot of harm, and although they are technically illegal and it's within their right to take them down I don't really see why they would.

Blizzard would actually make $$ off classic content. It doesn't even have to be classic only server. An easy way to go about this is to use a current server. Feel like playing aq, bwl or mc with 39 other people? Open raid window check the box for "legacy" and bam, done. Why purchase new servers when you can use current servers but change the code? An easy way to go about this would be to write code that drops your character, stats and item level back down to say level 60. Think item squish, heck they could more than likely take the current code for item squish and adapt it. Want to be sure about it before putting it in the game? Throw it on the ptr. After all the public test realm exists to test things before they make it onto live.

The thing that most players who didn't start until after Vanilla don't understand is that back then if you wanted to raid strat 10, mc, bwl, aq, naxx you had to work together as a group. The content was so new that their wasn't a website like wowhead, you had to learn what worked and what didn't and then spend time clearing it with a group of good people. I actually miss that aspect of wow, and would much rather do that again then go into another raid finder or lfr with people who want to clear mythic or heroic but have no idea what they are doing. In that aspect the game became too easy.

I would love nothing more than for Legion to come out now. I would give my left nut to play an expansion based on the Naga / Queen Azshara. However, the downside with getting to be a big company, is at some point you choose $$ over your customers. Think of MOP and WOD, content which was hastily thrown together, and in some cases content removed only to be added in later as a "patch." Expansions that cost the same as previous expansions, only with less content but a longer wait between.

Also, I would kill for starcraft: ghost.

[Deleted]

front page mods pls

if this gets on the front page all faith in mmo champion is lost.

[Donair]

If Blizzard gives time and resources to it, it will be at the cost of real content.
If they don't and just allow pirate servers to do it instead they are not protecting their intellectual property.

As opposed to what now? Selfie patches? 14 month content droughts? Less game updates than ever before in the game's history? You're exactly right broheim, god forbid anything interrupt all the hard work going on over there at Blizzard with their plethora of content updates. *smirk*

[Exerionx]

He's wrong, but fastest was ~5 days, 4 days and 20 hours to be precises.

This is what I could find. http://www.furiouspaul.com/pc/wow/

So about 4 days and 20 hours.

Yeah I knew that was bs, just wanted to see what he could muster as evidence.

Still, 4 /5 days played is impressive.

[Eliseus]

Thoughts on it:
1) False connection made that a Free server doing well would instantly mean a Paid one would. Its conjecture at best without interviewing all of those people to see if they would be interested in paying for one or not. Free is a really strong selling point when playing a game.

2) False promises. He is saying that All those players will come back. He can't be sure of that.

3) 250k is still a Very small minority of 5Million.

4) He waves those twitch steamers combined numbers as if they mean anything. It means Free publicity, and Possible subscribers. However, there is a few problems with this, such as not all of those people will care about wow and not all of them watch twitch regularly.

5) "Why not add another 1-2 million subscribers" Guy is Really sure of himself here. He has no possible way to assure of this growth.

6) What 1 fan did they change a game around? I have rarely seen them change anything unless its Huge, and usually its against the implementation of something.

In conclusion, the guy seems pretty clueless. Yes, there are some people who would enjoy it, but he is making a lot of leaps as to just how big of an impact bringing the server back would make. He sounds really sure of himself. I honestly don't think bringing them around would make as big of an impact as he thinks.

He also never addressed any of the issues people bring up. He just said how many people wanted it. Ok, that's great and all, but address the concerns. Those concerns being really big problems, such as How to keep people interested and playing the servers when there simply isn't any content being added.

Making these servers would be a huge decision. Once made, they really couldn't bring them down, even if they tank. That is why its been so heavily debated. Bringing them up means that no matter what, they will have to stick with that move and keep them up.

5 million? Says who? Blizzard doesn't give sub numbers anymore.

[Deleted]

Oh my poor ignorant little non coder..

The 'source' is designed to work on older hardware. You can even ask your Nost boys, you cannot pull the source from a disk, run it on modern hardware, and have it just 'work'. They had to do a fair amount to get it to work right on their hardware and even then they only got it working through emulation. Please do your research.

The old servers were also 32 bit, not 64, that would have to be redone.

There would either have to be a whole new client, or a redo of the network code to allow battletag to function in limited respects.

There are a ton of things that would have to go into this, and unless you've done coding and in particular trying to restore older code to modern works, please shush.

Surely a 32bit VM running on modern hardware will perform just as well or even better than physical servers back in the days of vanilla? Very little, if any, porting of the old server code required in this case and no new client either.

[Deleted]

Sure, show us. Back up your claim.

Lmao, so prove me wrong. If you can't do some research yourself, then it's not my problem...

[RickJamesLich]

As opposed to what now? Selfie patches? 14 month content droughts? Less game updates than ever before in the game's history? You're exactly right broheim, god forbid anything interrupt all the hard work going on over there at Blizzard with their plethora of content updates. *smirk*

lmao I was about to say the same thing. Maybe they are secretly working on legacy servers, after all they cut out Farahlon, stuff like Karabor, and there hasn't been new shit in the game for almost a year.

[Aggrophobic]

That's how we got 1.1k page thread. No side accepts what other side says

You're right. The one I talked about was later with RaF it seems. My bad.

[Zantos]

5 million? Says who? Blizzard doesn't give sub numbers anymore.

Sorry, 5.5 Million the last time they told us.

[Epoch]

Sorry, 5.5 Million the last time they told us.

I may be wrong, but wasn't subscriptions measured by the # of accounts opened thus far, not the # of current subs?

[Zantos]

I may be wrong, but wasn't subscriptions measured by the # of accounts opened thus far, not the # of current subs?

Not for wow no. It has always been measured by current, active subs.

[Arkthugal]

I may be wrong, but wasn't subscriptions measured by the # of accounts opened thus far, not the # of current subs?

No, otherwise the count would be more to the tune of 150 million.

[Wolfheart9]

I may be wrong, but wasn't subscriptions measured by the # of accounts opened thus far, not the # of current subs?

Active, paying accounts.

[Doomchicken]

So you have nothing then. How typical.

It's the usual delusional response that you quoted there packers. Where they totes have all the knowledge and what they say MUST be true because they're genericposter1234, leader of the industry and businessman/woman extraordinaire! They never back anything they ever say up and it's hilarious yet sad every time.

[RickJamesLich]

Sorry, 5.5 Million the last time they told us.

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/bli.../1100-6431943/

They stopped announcing the subscription numbers almost half a year ago. This was after a massive plummet of course (which was probably the reason they stopped announcing said numbers) and considering there has been no new content since, I think you and me both know that number is a lot lower than 5.5 million right now lol.

[User Deleted -]

I'm not sure who to believe or how to feel all-around, nor do I know what's under the hood in terms of capability and what it might cost Blizzard to run old versions of the game. They could put a tab on the realm list and go from there, if this is at all possible. Obviously private realms are able to do this with a specific core, which Blizzard might be able to work with Nostalrius or the like to bring them online. I don't think its a bad idea. It would be nice to visit old leveling experiences and end-game versions, especially if people are looking to pay a monthly fee for it. I would. It might even combat the situation at hand - clearing a path by bringing down private servers, though some will still exist, because it's free. They're on the right track with considering Pristine type of realms, but far from what certain people are looking for.

On the other hand, I'd rather memories be memories and the game continues on.

[Budong]

This is a steaming pile of bullshit out of the mouth of a steaming pile of bullshit.

[Divinite]

A lot of fluff and inflatted numbers in here provided by Mark attempting to pull the wool over a lot of people eyes. Unfortunately blizzard isn't stupid enough to fall for such shenanigans.

A good portion of the signers of this "petition" we people signing it multiple times and creating bots to do it repeatedly, greatly blowing out the numbers and not portraying the real number of supporters.
Furthermore, while there might be a lot of people signing the petition that doesnt mean they are all going to come back and play. Im willing to wager that a good portion of the signers would be people who want to support the moment but dont intend actually playing if it were to becoming a reality.

Also the numbers he provided about the twitch viewership is incredibly misleading. 14 million viewers? no, potentially the streamers he has amassed for this list might have a combined 14 mil followers, which is an enitrely different thing. The majority of followers are inactive accounts or people who move on to other streamers when they become uninterested (its the same reason why pewdiepie on youtube doesnt get 40 million views on each video from his subs, only the small portion of active subs and non subs watch his videos)

So while i appreciate the effort he has put in to making this video and sentiment and service he is trying to provide, he needs to base his claims off of fact. If you want blizzard to cave in and make private servers you are going to need to provide a stronger case for it.