Classic update. It will be on 1.12 and it will be on battle.net :)

[voidillusion]

Yes cause WOW is still the only MMO played by milions after 14 years. All the other mmos have died out in maximum two years. But yes tell me more about how wow failed or how wow is dead...

WOW is the only mmo that adapted and has survived all these years and all these "NEW WOW KILLER MMO OMFG IT'S GOING TO LOSE MILIONS OF SUBS STOP PLAYING THIS GAME LOL" wow killers.

So yes tell me more about how wow failed when every new mmo that gets launched nowadays dies after a week.

WoW failed, the 12M subs utopia failed, ppl still playing retail just didnt realized it yet, most of them anyway.

[Dudas]

This isn't developers' problem, it's community problem and decision of each individual player. Developers provide world, players make it alive. You want live in a world that you like - make effort, convince others that you're right or accept majority decision.

Developers should not solve any such problems. When and if you want all decisions to be made without your participation - log in retail, there you don't have to make almost any.

Yes they should. You as a company provide a game. But the game can't be played properly because you didn't provide solutions that scale with the amount of players you have at launch.

The best example is bless online. A mmo relaunched 1 month ago. The launch of it failed because all the streamers and their armies entered their game and crashed their servers because they had no phasing. After two days of complete crashes everyone left the game because it was unplayable. Now that game is played by 20k people.

Now we come to wow that will have millions try it out at launch. So they have to provide something for server stability so you can actually play the game. And not just 5hour queue and server crashes every two hours.

[Bluespiderman57]

Apparently you haven't played recently so you talk out of your ass. Leveling nowadays if you do it without dungeon spam and without heirlooms (aka ONLY DOING QUESTS) takes 4/5 days of /played to go from 1 to 110. The fact that in vanilla it takes 10 days of /played it's whatever leveling will not matter and it won't be as aids as people put it. Those that want to play classic already know what to expect from it.

2nd just because it takes 6 months for you that doesn't mean it takes 6 months for everybody. I'll be done with everything in two/three months tops if they don't have all the raids launched. And probably I won't return afterwards. Every 6 months to come and play for one month 12 year old content it's just stupid.

Make everything available from the start. I will go and get my t3 as fast as possible and be done with it. You will still play for one year to get everything you want. Everyone will be happy. You can enjoy it the way you want it. I can enjoy it the way I want it. You will be in a casual guild and have fun at your pace. I will be in a hardcore guild filled with elitist pricks that invest time and do what needs to be done and have fun my way.

Stop treating this as if only you matter. Every single player matters so they need to come out with the best solution to satisfy all types of players. If they gate content many will quit and probably won't return after 6 months when they only release one raid that people will roflstomp in two raiding nights playing for three hours.

Again they are doing this for the feeling not for progress and omfg only 1% have entered naxxramas. Everyone will have t2 and t3 in Classic. The game will be filled with star wars clone troopers everybody with bis gear and running around fucking things up for the fun of it. Don't expect that people will be stuck in that blue gear all looking like clowns. The game will be so easy that people will get to clear raids with pugs and not guild only. There will be many changes in how Classic will be played.

The core and the mechanics will be the same. But people will behave differently. Can't wait for people to ask you for warcraftlogs or to check your character on wowprogress (and don't lie to yourself things like this will happen no matter what you or blizzard says or does) even if they don't add the achievement system ingame to check you directly. My type of players won't bother with those like you that have "taken their time" and on top of that you are a hypocrite because you consider tryharders like me "idiots for rushing the content". Play as you want but don't bitch about when I play as I want.

Dude you are kinda forgetting something: Gear. Depending on how the tuning was done, even if you and 39 other people rushed to 60 and were raid ready in 3 months, it's very likely you wouldn't be ready for BWL 3 months after that. With just Ony and MC at that time, you would only get about 25 pieces of gear a lockout, for about 12-ish lockouts(Ony is weird). Anyone who's played Vanilla or pservers will tell you, you WILL get repeat pieces. Not only that, but the first 2 bosses of BWL will require that gear more than any other fight in the instance. There is almost no "skill" in those fights, just numbers. So yeah, at least for the first new raid, they could gate it and it wouldn't really matter.

[Echocho]

If you want to be seen like that pretending that you dont know or understand that vanilla had that cap for technical reasons then sure, go ahead, who am i to stop you from making a fool out of yourself.

It doesn't matter. The debuff slot limit was there for technical reasons, should they remove that too? If they change the server caps they have to alter the entire game since it was designed around that specific number. Mob respawns, quest items, everything in the outside world needs to be changed just in order to provide a non authentic experience. That's a lot of unnecessary work for something that nobody wants in the first place. Authentic vanilla #nofuckingchanges

[voidillusion]

It doesn't matter. The debuff slot limit was there for technical reasons, should they remove that too? If they change the server caps they have to alter the entire game since it was designed around that specific number. Mob respawns, quest items, everything in the outside world needs to be changed just in order to provide a non authentic experience. That's a lot of unnecessary work for something that nobody wants in the first place. Authentic vanilla #nofuckingchanges

You wont find disagreement here, as i said i dont enjoy packed servers at launch. I do have to admit however that servers like the big ones i knew in pservers, despite being a horrible experience in the first levels for the exact same reasons you said, they ended up being vibrant and busy in the mid to late game, there's always ppl looking for stuff to do in a server with 7 to 8k ppl, what that, regardless of whatever ppl think, is a requirement for the sucess of classic, big servers, with lots of folks.

[caervek]

I am looking forward to the potential for 6 day long AV matches again, with 30k Honor kills and stuff. That will be good times. We can all walk to Snowfall Graveyard and give Korrack the Raid Wiper a big hug! :-)

Not a fan of multi-day matches but I would love to see some multi-hour AV battles again, I hadn't even thought about that before, roll on Classic

[Akka]

Nobody that is hardcore will complain about no content don't you worry. Everyone that is hardcore will get full t3 and stop playing afterwards. The casuals will complain about the lack of content cause they can't put up with the grind so they still want to play but they don't want to do the weeks of rep grind killing the same 3 types skeletons for hours.

Is that the moment when I break it to you that people aren't cleanly divided between "the hardcores" on one side and "the casuals" on the other, that there is a whole lot of degrees between each extreme, that many people intermingle (so you have rather hardcore players with rather casual ones), that you can be dedicated and somewhat "hardcore" and still have a low amount of hours to play (or conversely be very casual in your approach of the game despite having tons of hours to play) and so on ?

If the content is so easy, as many people claim it, then even the casuals will manage to clear it.
If it's not as easy as it's made of, then it'll let people be busy for a while. Because prior to WotLK, it was the expected and regular method : progress at your own pace. There wasn't this idea that you had only three months to clear a raid tier - it was an enduring target to "advance", and the main difference was about speed (hardcore would progress much faster). Midcore players will have their progression - just a slow one, as it was meant to be at the time, something that current WoW has forgotten and which is one of the main reasons of its failure.

[Dudas]

WoW failed, the 12M subs utopia failed, ppl still playing retail just didnt realized it yet, most of them anyway.

Yes much arguments, such debate, very logic. I think the fact that 5M+ still play a 14 year old game it means it is fun for them and they enjoy it.
Meanwhile there isn't a single other mmo out there that has lived as long as wow and still has millions of active subs playing the game. So I can't call it a failure sorry.

Yes there are some aspects of the game that I don't enjoy or even retail players hate as much as I do. But the overall experience is that it is still fun to play for millions and they enjoy it. And we still have hardcore pve guys, hardcore pvp guys, hardcore collectors and so on.

Meanwhile show me another mmo that still has millions of active players after 14 years. There isn't. So WOW didn't fail no matter how much you subjectively dislike the new gameplay.

[Akka]

You wont find disagreement here, as i said i dont enjoy packed servers at launch. I do have to admit however that servers like the big ones i knew in pservers, despite being a horrible experience in the first levels for the exact same reasons you said, they ended up being vibrant and busy in the mid to late game, there's always ppl looking for stuff to do in a server with 7 to 8k ppl, what that, regardless of whatever ppl think, is a requirement for the sucess of classic, big servers, with lots of folks.

I think that Blizzard expanded the size of the servers toward the end of Vanilla or early TBC.

Regardless, I think a 5k max is fine, but beyond that it becomes overcrowded. Pservers fare better with higher pop because they are nearly always international and as such have languages and nationalities to take into account (even if truly international guilds exist and tend to be the norm, there is a substantial amount of players who stick to their own), and because players simply tend to aggregate around the same server to avoid the risk of "dead server", which isn't as critical in an official one.

[Mister K]

Personally it's disappointing to me that they're going with 1.12.

Molten Core/Blackwing Lair/Ahn'qiraj will all be fairly silly with 16 debuffs and Naxxramas class redesigns. Like ridiculously fast kills.

Much of the early gearing process will be irrelevant as well, which will also mean rapid gearing and destruction of the most of the game's raid content.

Also, no opening of Ahn'qiraj

I think 1.12 with time locked content. So its drip fed to us over course of months would be nice.

[Echocho]

Rag will be dead within 3 days because the boss was designed for people who are nowhere near as good as the modern WoW raider, not because of 1.12 balancing issues.

You can't even reach lvl60 in 3 days so I find that very unlikely but I wouldn't be surprised if he's dead within 3 days when enough people have reached lvl60. It all depends on how much fire resistance is required. Back in the day you needed a certain amount of fire resistance on ranged players, on private servers it's only needed on the tanks but those servers are hardly accurate on the other hand so who the hell knows.

[kamuimac]

It doesn't matter. The debuff slot limit was there for technical reasons, should they remove that too? If they change the server caps they have to alter the entire game since it was designed around that specific number. Mob respawns, quest items, everything in the outside world needs to be changed just in order to provide a non authentic experience. That's a lot of unnecessary work for something that nobody wants in the first place. Authentic vanilla #nofuckingchanges

ye this ship has sailed with this interview

[voidillusion]

Yes much arguments, such debate, very logic. I think the fact that 5M+ still play a 14 year old game it means it is fun for them and they enjoy it.
Meanwhile there isn't a single other mmo out there that has lived as long as wow and still has millions of active subs playing the game. So I can't call it a failure sorry.

Yes there are some aspects of the game that I don't enjoy or even retail players hate as much as I do. But the overall experience is that it is still fun to play for millions and they enjoy it. And we still have hardcore pve guys, hardcore pvp guys, hardcore collectors and so on.

Meanwhile show me another mmo that still has millions of active players after 14 years. There isn't. So WOW didn't fail no matter how much you subjectively dislike the new gameplay.

If you don't consider a failure abandoning a strategy completly that lead a game to be as sucessfull as it once was then i don't know what failure is.

Yes, WoW is still the only(?) alive MMO out there, and i still do play it from time to time, but being alive and mantaining 5M(?) active ppl worldwide when they had a paradigm that led them to once have 10 to 12M active players, is considered a sucess? I'm not arguing wow is dead, it's far from it, and the cash cow will still be milked for years to come, but when you compare it to what it once was and what it could have been if they had mantained the same principles it's hard to not consider it a failure.

[Alkizon]

Yes cause WOW is still the only MMO played by milions after 14 years. All the other mmos have died out in maximum two years. But yes tell me more about how wow failed or how wow is dead...

WOW is the only mmo that adapted and has survived all these years and all these "NEW WOW KILLER MMO OMFG IT'S GOING TO LOSE MILIONS OF SUBS STOP PLAYING THIS GAME LOL" wow killers.

So yes tell me more about how wow failed when every new mmo that gets launched nowadays dies after a week.

But they don't use old WoW rules, but new ones - that's why. And by the way, just because game stayed for a long time on those "old" conditions, it scored sufficient game base in order to "die long". Moreover, most people who played then don't play now, and this is another game, with different rules and with another community.

Yes they should. You as a company provide a game. But the game can't be played properly because you didn't provide solutions that scale with the amount of players you have at launch.

The best example is bless online. A mmo relaunched 1 month ago. The launch of it failed because all the streamers and their armies entered their game and crashed their servers because they had no phasing. After two days of complete crashes everyone left the game because it was unplayable. Now that game is played by 20k people.

Now we come to wow that will have millions try it out at launch. So they have to provide something for server stability so you can actually play the game. And not just 5hour queue and server crashes every two hours.

When it's server hard/soft-ware problems - then yes (but what your talking about - isn't such one), when this is a violation of game rules by means of cheats and glitches - then yes (but what your talking about - isn't such one). In other cases (your ex.) - no.

exept now they wont have to worry about it - since they are using modern infrastructure they will without doubt use sharding tech .

They won't because MMO shared open world's rules matters.

Without it it'll be the WOD launch all over again. Completely unplayable.

Classic won't have such same numbers of people at launch as WoD had for server max.population + horde/alliance began all in one place - Classic won't have this, each race will begin at own place. This isn't even close to comparable, a bad example.

Wildstar

Wildstar was a somewhat different beast, and no, there were quite different rules. In addition, I don't consider classic option to be "ideal in all respects", it would be very reckless. But we aren't talking about Pristin servers (where of course you could make enough changes and adding new expansions = content without violating basic rules and also make it better), just about Classic. But as developers promised "just classic", there's nothing to discuss here.

[kamuimac]

I think that Blizzard expanded the size of the servers toward the end of Vanilla or early TBC.

Regardless, I think a 5k max is fine, but beyond that it becomes overcrowded. Pservers fare better with higher pop because they are nearly always international and as such have languages and nationalities to take into account (even if truly international guilds exist and tend to be the norm, there is a substantial amount of players who stick to their own), and because players simply tend to aggregate around the same server to avoid the risk of "dead server", which isn't as critical in an official one.

exept now they wont have to worry about it - since they are using modern infrastructure they will without doubt use sharding tech .

[arel00]

I'm still astonished at people complaining 1.12 will make stuff like MC too easy. When the fuck has MC ever been hard?

We were ignorant of raiding, had no clue about mechanics, didn't understand stuff like defense capping for crit immunity or covering the combat table, but that was US, not the world. With 15+ years of knowledge we could enter MC with 1.0 bugs and shit, and still run it to the ground without beating an eye.
The only significant change to MC would be whether they remove the reputation requirements to douse the runes, and honestly I don't remember when that was implemented. Ragnaros will be going down the minute he can be pulled, rep or no rep, patch or no patch.
Again, if you guys think vanilla was hard - mechanically, not because of numerical (read: gear) blocks - you are either very delusional or badly misinformed.

1.12 was picked because it's stable and balanced, and that's all there is to say about the choice. Difficulty is an illusion, sure, it may make earlier content easier, but I hardly care if I kill half of MC on my first pull instead of my third.

[Deleted]

Fixing charge will have a major impact in PVP, esp against skilled players. In vanilla when charging a moving target you would probably only arrive in melee range 40-45% of the time, whereas on live its more like 95%. Skilled PVP players in vanilla knew how to jump charges and it would allow them to survive against the already really strong warrior.

I played as a Frost Mage (Rank 11) against Warriors all the time and wasn't even aware you could do that. Do you have any sources for these numbers?

Since PvP happened either in front of IF (where there wasn't anything to bug out the charge), in open world (where it was so infrequently it didn't really matter all that much) or in BGs (where one single kill really wasn't that impactful in the grand scheme of things) I don't see how this would be a big deal. Warriors were terrifying not on their own, but because they always had a healer behind them.

[Echocho]

exept now they wont have to worry about it - since they are using modern infrastructure they will without doubt use sharding tech .

Without it it'll be the WOD launch all over again. Completely unplayable.

[Dudas]

Is that the moment when I break it to you that people aren't cleanly divided between "the hardcores" on one side and "the casuals" on the other, that there is a whole lot of degrees between each extreme, that many people intermingle (so you have rather hardcore players with rather casual ones), that you can be dedicated and somewhat "hardcore" and still have a low amount of hours to play (or conversely be very casual in your approach of the game despite having tons of hours to play) and so on ?

If the content is so easy, as many people claim it, then even the casuals will manage to clear it.
If it's not as easy as it's made of, then it'll let people be busy for a while. Because prior to WotLK, it was the expected and regular method : progress at your own pace. There wasn't this idea that you had only three months to clear a raid tier - it was an enduring target to "advance", and the main difference was about speed (hardcore would progress much faster). Midcore players will have their progression - just a slow one, as it was meant to be at the time, something that current WoW has forgotten and which is one of the main reasons of its failure.

PVE content raid clear will be all about the mindset of the guild as a whole.

Let's go like this for the sake of the example:
Hardcore guild will clear everything in a month. (by 2nd month most will unsub since they have no pve raiding content to do)
Semi-hardcore in between 1 and 3 months.
Casuals in six months.

You as an individual will look for a guild at the pace that you want to play.

Now we will have to see how the mindset of the people that play classic will be. If the bigger percentage will be in the semi hardcore and hardcore there is no reason to release raids every 6 months. They will lose a shitton of subs that most likely aren't willingly to return every 6 months for a month of "progress" for the sake of killing Nefarian or Kel'thuzad let's say.

If they will cater to the casual plebs that need months to do leveling and they are the 90% of the playerbase c'est la vie they will some 10% hardcore subs and that's it. Imo they will just release them all from the start and that's it. With AQ gates quest being on zero so you can start progressing on it from day one if you want to travel there and use 100 plants for the progress.

[Echocho]

1.12 was picked because it's stable and balanced, and that's all there is to say about the choice. Difficulty is an illusion, sure, it may make earlier content easier, but I hardly care if I kill half of MC on my first pull instead of my third.

When MC was current content it was much harder, not just because of we being noobs but because tank threat was much much MUCH lower. DPS had to hold back their damage, which lead to the fights lasting longer which lead to healers going OOM. MC was actually gear dependent back then, raising tank threat along with most classes doing more damage overall completely removes that dependency.