Newman: What are some of the other decision-making challenges you’re facing for the classic servers?
Brack: I think we want to make sure that it’s very maintainable. I think the challenge of us being able to resurrect classic WoW in its original form is—it has a certain amount of complexity. But that game was very difficult to manage. It would be effectively like us managing two MMOs, which is not something we want to do. The world has moved on. If you think about the infrastructure—if you think about anything, there’s a really good cooking analogy. There is no way to remove the oregano from the spaghetti sauce. You just put the oregano in, and now how do we deal with that?
I was reading the Forbes article, but yes, re-reading it the gist is developing two platforms. I think most of the people reading that (myself included) interpreted it to meaning developing divergent content as well.
Do you plan to roll out future patches and expansions?
Brian Birmingham : What do you mean by future patches and expansions?
Like when Classic launches, there could be a certain point where you could transition to Burning Crusade.
BB : Oh, I see. Right now we’re focused on WoW Classic. We’re really excited to hear what the community thinks about it, we wanna see where the passion is, but we’re certainly open to other ideas and we wanna hear what the community thinks about that, but right now we’re staying focused on making sure we recreate the authentic Classic experience.
While trying to find the Forbes article, I found this too. Apparently Brian differs from J Allen Brack and Ion on their willingness to look at the beyond Classic stuff.
I’m pretty sure Classic WoW was a move on Activision-Blizzard’s part to protect their IP rights as it related to Vanilla WoW specifically as that version is currently not capable of being played through legal means. Which means it is very easy to classify as “abandonware” which leaves Blizzard in a bad position for enforcing take-down rights on said private servers.
That it is being done to protect IP is echoed by the “we don’t care if only 10 people end up playing it.” Because it would me “mission accomplished” all the same when it comes to being able to assert that it was not “abandoned.”
That said, I do think a number of people within Blizzard do think that Classic is “a better direction” to be taking WoW in the long-term than where Retail is heading. The problem with Retail is that genie can’t be put back in the bottle.
So Officially Blizzard is acting to protect it’s IP rights. Unofficially, they’re potentially trying to gauge market interest in something like Classic+ and are reserving judgement until they start seeing hard numbers on who turns up to play classic, and what the player engagement(login time) numbers look like.
The devs who originally added flying have not said that, flying was in the game for a decade before it suddenly became a problem.
Keep in mind the devs who dislike flying(the current devs) are the same devs who brought us WoD, Legion and BFA. So before you praise them for removing flying maybe look at some of things they think are good.
In order to protect their IP, Classic WoW must remain true to Vanilla WoW. Anything they do to Classic which expands on it will likely need to take place in “a walled garden” that is kept separate from the “Classic” version of the game, or else somebody is going to make an Abandonware claim against Vanilla once again.
The landscape for TBC was very different though, both in player experience and actual terrain.
In TBC you got flying at max level, because at Max Level, you’d completed 90% of the launch content, and new content was designed with flying in mind. They expected people to be able to fly and lowered the costs to achieve it. You couldn’t even enter the Tempest Keep instances without flying or a Warlock.
These days, the levelling cycle is only about 30% of the actual content, and further content is all at max level. TBC dailies at the Sunwell were only a tiny part of the content cycle, where the Timeless Isle was one of the largest sections of content in MoP, and Tannan Jungle was basically the WoD game for half of the expansion.
That’s hardly true, the only content added in BC was IQD which was actually a no fly zone. Not to mention flying was in Wrath, Cata and MoP with no issues. It didn’t suddenly become a problem until we got the current dev team in WoD.
IQD was the Sunwell dailies that I mentioned. And yes, it was non flying, but it was also a tiny relatively insignificant amount of the content.
Also MoP no issues? They were already talking about it being an issue that Timeless Isle, people were calling for flying. WoD was where they made a decision. MoP was where it became an issue.
Honestly, I think the bigger issue there were the specific combination of Flying + PvP servers + CRZ + Sharding
Somebody could zip into a shard on a flying mount, gank another player, and zip away, possibly into another shard, before the person who was ganked managed to complete the corpse run back.
Sure they can “zip away” on a land mount as well, but their escape routes are more limited, particularly when it comes to any mobs that may be in the area.
Prior to CRZ + Sharding, Flying wasn’t much of a problem because that’s how PVP grudge matches and fueds develop and have the chance to play out. With CRZ and Sharding? Not much chance at all.
No it became an issue when we got the current dev who never liked flying but couldn’t do anything about it. Flying at max level and not in new content was always a good solution.
The reality is flying doesn’t break anything, which is why they’re able to add flying in the current expansions with no issues, they’re just extremely passive aggressive about it now because of how many subscribers were lost when they tried to remove it outright in WoD.
And yet, when TBC came out there was a whole discussion at the time about how they didn’t want to introduce Flying until max level because it trivialized content, and Druids getting it at 68 presented a question for them. It was also why originally flying was at 60%, so that you’d still make a decision about whether to ride at 100% or fly at 60%. Everyone flew at 60%.
They did it that way because they wanted fast flying to be a significant part of your progression at 60(getting 5K gold in BC was). And people have repeatedly said they would be fine with an equivalent gold sink/grinds to unlock flying speeds at max level in each expansion.
Well then classic will be there for you. Same way BFA is there for the people who want LFR. But any and all rereleased expacs should keep the no changes policy.
Edit: also I’m pretty sure spell ranks were a thing in BC
They’re not. It was one of the “features” of TBC, you only visit a trainer once, to learn the spell/skill, after that it scales with your level.
For one, the Devs didn’t seem to like how the healers in particular were using +healing to downrank their spells in order to extend their mana pools as it played havoc with their vision of how the talent trees were supposed to work. Priests were perhaps the worst offenders as Flash Heal was often substituted by (Lesser) Heal instead(and not to be confused with Greater Healing).
Their other justification was that the practice made the game “too complicated for players” so they were doing us a favor by giving us one size fits all and no ability to downrank. Made sense from a (meta) game play/approach-ability aspect, as even I’ll admit managing that many options, and doing it well, was a challenge.
From the RPG perspective however? Completely horrible, IMO.
You’re wrong. Downranking was nerfed in both BC and even more in WotLK to discourage it. However spell ranks still existed until cata. Downranking was really only a thing in vanilla though.
Most likely the next expansion they will have to change their approach.
No LFR, LFD, Cross realm, Sharding/Phasing, Pokemon Pet battles, Mission tables, RNG gear and stats, “play the patch not the game” mentality, class pruning, “Go-go-go” dungeons, and so on.
Classic will be a huge success, and Blizzard will have to start making retail more like Classic.
Looks like you’re right, I just cruised over to my guild’s forums which date back to the start of TBC(and are still online). I can see downranking getting mentioned(by me, no less) as a thing that was still happening during TBC.
Really need to see about finding that drive with the backup of the guild forums that covered most of Vanilla’s run.