“He was not involved in vanilla” is probably at least a little dishonest. Define involved. Involved in making the game? No. Involved in playing and analyzing the game at the highest levels? Yes. Absolutely. The guy is a veritable fountain of vanilla World of Warcraft knowledge. I bet if the two of you faced off in a game of vanilla trivia, he would destroy you so badly that it would be painful to watch.
One of the guys who ran Nostalrius just did an AMA on the Classic WoW subreddit. The dude has met Ion personally and says Ion knows exactly what a real vanilla experience is – more so than the p-server developers who were working with incomplete information.
Whether you think current retail WoW is good or not is kind of irrelevant. Ion and crew aren’t brainstorming up new development ideas for Classic WoW.
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The people who got paid to quit worked at a customer service center in Ireland. They had nothing to do with game development. Paying someone a full year’s salary to move on is a whole hell of a lot nicer than just handing them a pink slip and telling them to kick rocks.
Blizzard’s reticence is annoying. They’ve established multiple channels for them to directly communicate to their customer-base. They have given us paltry. A bad sign imo.
It’s similar to the dryspell of info we had prior to blizzcon. They will announce everything at once in a huge chunk, if they don’t at least have some form of closed beta or some kind of external testing then the project was doomed from the start. You can stay positive knowing that once the dataminers tear through the actual release and get proper numbers for encounters / pathing, private servers would then be on an equal threshold.
Mage, Hunter, Rogue, and “LF2M healer and tank” is the wow equivalent 4 people instantly going widow, hanzo, gengi, ashe in OW as soon as the lobby loads.
This. Ion KNOWS. But he’s a corporate guy now. Whether or not he cares is a different question. If I worked for Blizzard and the execs told me they didn’t care about the authentic Vanilla experience, I wouldn’t care either.