Ion Hazzikostas on 1.12 data:11/09/2018 04:17 PMPosted by Sydrak11/09/2018 02:59 PMPosted by SwitzyI'll be honest, I'd rather have sharding, loot trading, and auto-mute reporting than 1.12 AV. This is a big deal for me. 1.5 AV is an epic back and forth with PvE sprinkled in while 1.12 is a boss rush that's not worth playing.
...Blizzard would do well to revert AV. For many, the difference between the AV versions is night and day; a BG they would enjoy, and a BG they would avoid like the plague.
No they are REALLY stuck on the "It's 1.12 that's what we're giving you" train. If people want to see any major changes to classic it'll have to have the sub numbers and money to back it up. For the simple reason of "It's not authentic to the time." We'll never see old AV unless somehow they cave and even then the quickest strat to AV is STILL to rush the bosses, it just took a lot of time for people ot figure that out. You will NEVER see old AV as sad as that is.
"We really had this 1.12 data that we've been able to restore, and we viewed that as almost sacrosanct. That's everything from you know the world, and the quest lines, and the stories, to individual player abilities, creature health, tuning, and so forth. There's some changes in code and architecture in the way the client responds to the server and vice versa that if we let stand using the modern structure, might have caused this data to produce a different result when it comes to things like game balance. And we definitely worried that if we ever felt like the result was different in a way that compelled us to crack this open, it would very much be like opening Pandora's box. Because the second we start to substitute our modern judgment to solve problems from 12 years ago we are deviating from our goal of a historical recreation of the game as it was and making something different, and that's something we want to avoid."
However, Ion then goes on to list examples, and none of the examples are relevant to AV. No talk about content that is being kept at 1.12 instead of going back in time because they refuse to deviate from 1.12. The closest examples given was the debuff limit and class balance, but Ion goes on to explain that adding unlimited debuffs would alter class balance, while also being inaccurate to vanilla, so they're staying at 16 instead of unlimited debuffs. And class balance at 1.12 was the most balanced version in all of vanilla, so there's no need to revert back.
This just tells me their skittish about changing 1.12 for the sake of authenticity, not that they're "stuck" on 1.12, and most of his statements seem to indicate that they want to avoid moving forward beyond 1.12 data, not backwards.
It should also be noted that, unlike debuff limits, AV is essentially self-contained. Reverting AV to a previous state isn't going to have widespread effects across the entire game, only AV itself will change.
Feel free to quote Blizzard to support your strange confidence in the unalterability of AV, but I'm not seeing it.