An open letter to the Classic WoW community regarding changes to the game

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Hello, WoW Classic forums.

This post is primarily aimed towards anyone who has been requesting new additions to WoW Classic or improvements. First off, I do not hold any contempt or ill will towards anyone part of this group. I don’t think you are stupid, or that you didn’t play vanilla simply because you want x to be fixed or x to be added. Unfortunately, a big portion of the WoW Classic community has responded to you folks in a way that is either condescending, insulting, or unproductive. So this is my attempt for you guys to better understand where we purists are coming from.

What is a purist?

A Classic WoW purist is someone who advocates for no changes made to the game of any kind. The only changes that can be made are necessary changes (i.e removing leftover functionalities from the BfA client). Other than that, a Classic WoW purist believes the game should be identical to the original - warts and all.

Why is this philosophy defended so strongly in the community?

There are lots of answers to this so I will discuss a specific point that I feel is the strongest and without personal bias.

One reason no changes is popular among the community is that classic wow, like many other old things, is a piece of history. History plays an important role in the human race. Without it, we wouldn’t learn from our mistakes. If we never documented history, how could you guarantee someone 500 years from now will know what happened? How wars could have been prevented? The mindset of the average joe and the wealthy?

Classic WoW is no different in this regard. Since its initial release, WoW has been the most played MMORPG in the industry. If you look at any top 10 list of most active MMORPG’s WoW is sure to be number one on that list. When the game released in 2004 it didn’t have 10 million subscribers like it did back in 2008, but it brought a more casual approach to a niche genre that mainly catered to hardcore players. Which is why it continued to one day grow into the most successful game in the MMORPG genre.

But why shouldn’t the game be changed/updated to modern standards? Why go back to how it was?

I’ll be honest. This portion is hard to write without having some personal bias towards the game, but I’ll do my best!

When you go to a museum and look at the artifacts from those time periods, you don’t expect to see modern improvements made to them. When you go to a reenactment of a past battle, you wouldn’t see the soldiers using weapons that weren’t around back then. You would see them using weapons respective to that period in time. This is why additions like LFR and transmog are very unpopular within the Classic community. Additions like LFR and transmog violate the authenticity of the game, as well as its identity as a seperate game from its modern counterpart.

Here is a quote (https://youtu.be/hhKkP8LryYM?t=1221) from Brian Birmingham, who is the lead software engineer for WoW Classic. This is from Blizzcon 2018. In the video, there is a part where Brian says “We want to recreate it as it was - authentic as it was.” If you didn’t watch the video, the dev team is using both a reference 1.12 reference client (original) and the modern 1.13 client (WoW Classic). While in Sentinel Hill, the dev team noticed the light from a lamppost was emitting a purple color instead of the correct color. So instead of having the light from the lamppost emit a more suitable color for the aesthetic, they decided to choose what was present in the 1.12 reference client - a bright white light. What is worth noting here is that although changing the emitted color could be viewed as an improvement to some, it wouldn’t be authentic.

If the changes we request don’t affect anyone else but us, why shouldn’t it be changed?

With history, there is no running away from facts. Someone could tell dozens of people that George Washington was a communist or that Abraham Lincoln is a vampire hunter. The fact remains that neither of those are true, but an opinion. They may wish that Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter, and while it would be awesome if that were true, you can’t change the past or it becomes anything but. If Blizzard means what they say about preserving the authenticity of the game, they cannot bombard WoW Classic with unnecessary changes, and this includes minor changes.

Let’s wrap this up now…

If you made it this far, and don’t agree with what I’ve presented, that’s fine. You’re entitled to your opinion. I’m glad you read through my post at all. The purpose of this post isn’t necessarily to convert anyone or change your opinion on whether certain changes or additions should be implemented, but more so to give people an understanding as to why people like me don’t want to see any changes made to an amazing game that has helped us in more ways than one.

I hope to see all of you in Classic when it finally releases!

P.S

Please keep it civil. If you want to debate with other players, please be respectful when doing so. Also, don’t feed the trolls!

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#nochanges
:vulcan_salute:
:us:

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I agree I want the authenticity preserved, but as a software engineer myself I welcome technical backend, client and api improvements that lead to a better experience without compromising the authenticity.

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By and large the game experience should be the same.

I disagree with the “extreme purists” who don’t accept that certain elements of reality aren’t the same as 2004. Layering for example is required. So is the modern API and the modern infrastructure.

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There are areas where no changes doesn’t really work…

For example, on beta you don’t dismount when you start casting unless you specifically add a /dismount line to every spell and macro it…

Authentic? Yes. Would change game play by changing the functionality to just dismount on cast as a baseline? Yes.
Still annoying as all hell to not have that baked in functionality and force people to create macros for everything? Also yes.

Change could (and should) easily be done

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Yes. That was the point I was trying to get across. I understand that there will be necessary changes on the backend in order for Blizzard to accomplish this. I just don’t want to see additions to the game or changes that compromise its authenticity.

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Right there with you.

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Just want to point out that authenticity does not necessarily mean exact replica. Here is one definition I found:

“conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features”

To me that means that being authentic to Vanilla only requires that the essence of Vanilla is preserved, small QoL improvements or even larger changes that keep the essence of Vanilla still preserve the authenticity of the game.

Of course, just as the definition of authenticity is open for discussion, so is the enumerated features or feelings that constitute the essence of Vanilla.

As a software engineer I also look at the user facing interfaces as no more defining than the underlying systems, which have been radically changed. If those systems can be improved in the name of QoL and iteration, so too can the user facing interfaces.

I respect your opinion though. We can always have a friendly discussion about our opinions, and I think it makes the game better. The main point I always try to make is that the line between what is authentic and non-authentic is always blurry and does not exist objectively.

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We’re getting Vanilla running on all the new tech modern WoW runs on.

There you have it unless you want to be more specific.

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I personally would consider this a necessary change simply because, as you point out, the functionality would be the same. Just to be clear, my opinion on not changing aspects of the game is centered around unnecessary things like adding more FP’s, transmog, etc…

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It was less about QoL and more about delivery systems. The 1.12 client wouldn’t work on the CDN because of the Data folder delivery and cross-product storage files. Coupled with 13 years of bug fixes and exploit patching, they chose to not reopen all those old holes, and instead went with old content on the new environment.

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I also believe I read that the seed values for most of the game was lost and they required the PS folks to help them recreate numbers for the game. So the people who are claiming the game is not balanced the same might be right. I also heard they found a better way to extract the data via scraping some system which gave them better results.

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They have a complete backup of 1.12. This is partly why this version is the one being used.

Absolutely false. They talked to the Nostalrius crew about the difficulties of recreating the environment, but the QA Lead Nano said that they didn’t take any information from the Nostalrius team.

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That doesn’t seem to corroborate with the Mark Kern video I watched. He said Nostalrius was helping to recover the numbers lost. I guess the numbers are not hard coded into the code base and it requires some form of database to lookup in.

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Do you consider it a change to use data/settings from earlier patches?

If yes then youre a 1.12 purist, nothing else.

The majoriry of the community as I see it dont want changes that havnt been in the game at some point - which again is no changes.

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All I know about backend stuff is that the devs want to “make run gooder on new 'puters.” I’m fine with that. Classic would not be ruined if my gryphon never flies into the side of a building, or I never fly in to a wire-frame Ironforge, or my Mage never blinks and falls through the planet, or if I never zone into SM Armory and find myself in a mostly-cleared instance with opposing faction members, or if…

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He wasn’t on the development team.

Once we had our starting point, we began taking stock of what we had in the source code and what we could make available, which included restoring the original development database from archival backups. After stitching various key pieces together, we had a locally rebuilt version of Patch 1.12 running internally. The team could create characters and do basic questing and leveling—and dying, which we did many times. For testing purposes. Obviously.

They had the backup for 1.12. They don’t need Nostalrius, because they have the 1.12 backup AND all the code.

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Interesting, I wonder what kind of motivation Mark Kern would have for making up something like that.

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He was responsible for delivering the petition and connecting the Nostalrius crew to Blizzard. I imagine he thought that what he said was true, even if it wasn’t.

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Why’d they meet with Nost devs, then? I never followed the fine points, just the headlines so I genuinely don’t know. But if they had all the data, why’d they invite the Nost people?