I Care about Dev Motive

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I am an old RPGer. The thing I look for when choosing a RPG is not things that I can do. The most important criteria is the motives of the game devs as evidenced by the design of content and what is communicated to the expected player base.

I had an early invite to the beginning of beta for WoW, but chose not to because of the early design that overly used CC. That is a design crime for PvP. Many years later I played a free trial to see what I missed and how the game turned out. The early levels were nice. I paid for one more month to see more. Several years later I paid for a couple months to test the game state again. I won’t say all that can be said, of course, but mostly I was impressed by the integration of story and challenges.

All these 16 years I had quietly hoped for a remake of the original, so that I could feel what created the nostalgia. I was very excited to learn about the planned launch this summer, so I watched youtube vids throughout this week; hours per day. Alas, my hope might be dashed already.

Again, I look at what can be gleaned about dev motive. Allow me to elaborate.

  • Alterac Valley 1.12 excises fun options by simplifying gameplay.
  • Sharding hides critical community engagement opportunites.
  • Knowing better than the players (patch adherence)?

The decline in subs happened long after the problems began mounting. I think that we can see the ultimate demise of WoW beginning here in these patches near release. It happens with every MMORPG as one part of the product lifecycle plan. They probably never thought it would last 15 years. Anyways, so the reason I looked at those three things as indications that Classic WoW might not be what I had hoped is because each cares more about growth scheduling and ease of management for employees and game guild officers than for honoring the nostalgia. This is a stupendous motivation fault. Games are not made for the pleasure of management, but for players. Can I get an amen?

I am currently still awaiting with (little) hope that the supreme rulers of WoW will trade in their corporate issued Staff of Evil Darkness for an Everbeating Heart of Wonder. If these things are not fixed, then I will never have played the things that made the memories that made WoW great. Was WoW the first MMORPG that caused players to feel like they needed to play beta to experience the real game?

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Around here there wasn’t a ton of players insisting they do a full patch progression. The mantra of many no-changers early on was “Nothing from outside the Vanilla timeline”.

We all full well knew that 1.12 was within that timeline.

People can complain about them using 1.12 but outside of a few specific people(Brokenwind gets an exception here =P), I see a lot of people coming in after the fact and complaining Blizzard didn’t “listen to what the players want” and it feels an awful lot like “Blizzard didn’t do what I wanted them to”.

I was one of the people who wanted a full blown patch progression, and even other no-change people argued against me on it.

The sharding thing sucks but it’s worth noting that A. it’s not confirmed yet and B. a big reason it’s being done is to avoid dead or dying servers, which absolutely was a problem during Vanilla and beyond up until they implemented more cross realm features.

Having those very early day community opportunities wont mean much if there isn’t a community worth mentioning later on.

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No.

Let’s discuss some things about what is “ease of management for employees.”…

  1. Loot trading. They were originally going to leave it. After people pointed out it was a bad idea, they compromised on it to only work on BoP gear in raids. Not something for the “ease of management” that’s for sure.

  2. Spell Batching. They could very easily have just left it like modern wow. Would keep them from having to do some extra work, but they chose to put it back to or as close to back to what it was in Vanilla anyway.

  3. The Debuff limit. This was designed on a technical limitation at the time. They could very easily not put it back in. Not putting it back in would have serious consequences for raiding the wow experience in general. They’re not putting it back in because it’s just easier that way, that’s for sure.

  4. The content release schedule. They were originally just going to do 4 content buckets and be done with it. After enough people pointed out it was a bad idea and they needed to do more buckets because some places trivialized other places they changed their mind. Now they’re doing 6 buckets, and are not adding in 1.10 itemization in right away. That’s not for the ease of their management is it?

It’s pretty clear that not everyone liked the 1.5 version of AV. It’s also a version of AV that only lasted a month. A single patch. I personally don’t care, but 1.12 doesn’t excise fun from the game. Fun is subjective, so you’re going to have to be more specific on what “fun” was excised.

Sharding, something that is not even confirmed, just something they are looking into, isn’t something they said they want to use permanently, but as something just to help deal with the initial launch.

Not sure what you mean by this. You’re going to have to be a bit more specific in your meaning.

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His name is very telling.

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I think any discussion of WoW from 1.0 to 1.12 has to be fair.

They were doing a lot of patches to fix broken things found by players that they did not discover in their own testing.

They had no idea that Reck Bomb would be a thing and could kill a world boss that was really really powerful and hard to do on a PVP server.

Some really good game design ideas on paper were horrible for a real game. Forsaken were originally treated as Undead meaning they were immune to everything except Stuns, Snares, Shackle and Turn Evil. I mean, on a PVP server why would you be anything else?

While on the topic of Forsaken, because they were treated as Undead a Paladin could rock them with little to no effort.

How about a specific Hunter Pet that with talents do Shadow Damage on a 1.0 second swing timer and hits like an Elite. Sound balanced?

Most of all, they are doing the very best they can with the data they have from 1.12. While it may not be a completely authentic 1:1 experience like Vanilla, most players like myself will take it as that game experience is far and away the very best this game has ever been.

I encourage you to watch some of the 2005 Blizzcon keynotes, and the 2018 keynote about Classic. For convenience I will link them below.

Dungeon Design Blizzcon 2005 - Jeff Kaplan

Raid Design Blizzcon 2005 - Jeff Kaplan

Battleground Design Blizzcon 2005 - Team

Class Design Blizzcon 2005 - Team

Creating World of Warcraft Classic, Blizzcon 2018

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Thank you Sabetha, Dawnspirit, and Kolben for your thoughtful replies.

There are two ways to do Vanilla.

  1. Mishmash the most nostalgic patches for each of the important content or features into a static world.
  2. Run a progressive server, going from a starting patch to a final patch.

The second option could be done only once, or as a repeating cycle. The latter consequently complicates Blizzard’s choices. What happens to characters on reset? If not deleted, then is there still a need for a static server that maintains a final patch state? A good thread to discuss this latter option is here:

As for the sharding mention, I will respond to Dawnspirit.

Using sharding to alleviate crowding during the early leveling phase is not easier to get rid of later. What do they mean by later? Level 60? When instances become the main activity? If no one competes for mobs, or if there are rare opportunites to be picky about party members, then the intent of mitigating damage to community development is merely delayed. The damage could be worsened due to player expectation of resource abundance, which people fear will be an excuse for sharding permanency.

  • Sharding hastens the server average growth rate for character level.
  • Sharding inhibits player bonding and guild recruitment by preventing chance encounters.

We study how others play without thinking about it. We remember instances where another acted for or against our liking towards us or others. We are more amiable toward those who seem to frequently pass by. We avoid or compete with people who gave us reason to /rude. We inspect others. Sharding hides some of these opportunities.

Thank you for providing the video links here! :slight_smile:

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Yes, and many people have pointed that out before. My point is that 1. Sharding isn’t confirmed, and 2. they’ve stated a logical reason behind looking at it. Doesn’t mean I trust them as far as I can throw them when it comes to sharding.