Because the last thread used the name of an unofficial server, doesn’t invalidate the idea; nor does it invalidate the conceptual discussion that should be had by the company, the shareholders, and the paying customers.
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why fracture the playerbase more? and licensing the server code would mean Blizzard would then need to support third-party hosted servers. Yeah, not happening.
The playerbase is already fractured and Blizzard seems either unwilling, or unable to deliver on the experience they advertised with Era. For those that want that pure, unchanged version of wow, or a changed verison for that matter, licensed servers provide that avenue while still allowing Blizzard to generate revenue without the overhead of hosting the servers themselves.
No more so than any other game in the world that lets players host their own servers. When I spin up a Valheim server for my friend and I to play on, Irongate isn’t responsible for that server and doesn’t need to support me in any way. They provide the server software, I provide the hardware.
About the only thing Blizzard could do (which would be really beneficial, but also optional), is to provide a server browswer that server hosts can register with. The browser would provide indicators of what kind of experiece that server is going to generate for you. Beyond that hypothetical, Blizzard would not be responsible for the experience you have on that server.
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I used to play Vanilla Neverwinter Nights on the private server Richterm’s Retreat Nordock. He licensed the code through Bioware, hosted it on his own home server, modded it slightly to fit the world he designed, and I connected to it through Gamespy.
Good times.
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I would be happy if blizzard did some ‘open sourcing’ but I think it would take quite a bit of work for them to provide something that devs can reasonably build on and users access.
I’d love to build a dota-style moba on vanilla, but to do it in a reasonable amount of time and have a decent product would require blizz to provide quite a bit more tooling than is currently available from open sourced channels.
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Absolutely, it would require some work on their end. How much I’m not sure… private servers have recreated everything so they can do exactly what Blizzard should be doing. If only there was a way they could collaborate in a positive way… 
Even so, I think it’s worth Blizzard’s investment here. You pay $15 a month for access to World of Warcraft and you can join any server that’s registered with Blizzard. Whoever hosts the server takes $10 per month and Blizzard takes $5 per month. Blizzard can still host official servers that people can choose to play on, but they are not responsible for the player experience on non-official servers.
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The good news, on that front, would be the fact that the base code isn’t just 20 years old, it’s more than 25 years old, since that is when they first laid the code foundation.
You might need an AI program to translate from the original cuneiform, but there are non-Blizzard tools available, among growing AI resources, that could help with a lot of the heavy lifting.
Yeah this could be an easier first step towards them consolidating the ecosystem. Let people host wow servers in whatever way they were currently doing and simply give them a pathway to legitimacy.
I think this would overnight help blizz and pserver. But overtime they probably would want to have everyone running a more or less ‘official’ version of wow so users can have some expectations of safety, reliability, etc from their gaming experience.
There is open source version of 1.12 (and lots of others) that you can look at. The game is quite well designed and the code is not impossible to follow. I am sure blizzard official is also that way.
Programming fundamentals and c / c++ haven’t changed that dramatically in the last 25 years.
I think there is probably a layer above the code that blizzard could build tooling around a more GUI centric system (like wc3 map editor style), that could allow for a lot of expressiveness from a wide range of players trying to build in the system.
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That would be the point of having official servers though. If you want that safety and reliability, you can play on the servers that Blizzard provides. If you want to venture out into the unknown, you can invest your time in community servers.
Have you ever played CS:GO? It worked a lot like this. You mostly played on the Valve official ones but if you wanted to do other stuff (like surfing, lol), you could join custom servers. This was all accomplished through the CS:GO client.
I know this was lost when CS:2 launched and nuked CS:GO though, I’m not sure if it’s made its way back. I think I heard somewhere along the way that this was just starting to return.
I haven’t but I can see how it could work with that type of structure.
My wonder is how were those custom servers setup?
Like at the moment in wow, custom servers are using a codebase that has far diverged from what blizzard has, and i think most are designed to work with a 1.12 client. Even providing a single client that can connect to multiple current pservers & official could pose some interesting challenges.
Also I wonder what % of pserver community is there because they want to avoid a monthly fee versus they are looking for a specific gaming experience. If a lot of people are simply trying to avoid monthly fee, then an official ecosystem may simply be ignored by most pservers.
I wouldn’t think the number of pserver players looking to avoid subscription fees would be as high as some might think.
If there was a way to look back at the July to September numbers of a particular pserver’s player count, to see the drop off during Classic launch, that might give some indication.
In the end, in terms of current
US dollars, $15 will get you a month of game time on official servers, or you can have one McDonald’s signature sandwich, a medium drink and a small fry. Adding a hot apple pie will bump you up to $17.
Well my guess would be a lot of pserver users aren’t in places in which a wow sub is the same price as a coffee n snack.
But I have no idea on the actual breakdown - though it would be the pserver owners having to ask their non-paying users to now pay, which isn’t away an easy if ‘free’ was a core part of your service.
My understanding is that a lot of pservers have cash shops for gear, mounts, titles, etc., so you would need to take that into account also.
With today’s gaming culture, I’m thinking easy access to those items the player wants, versus the time your looking at spending seeking random drops, and thousands of honor kills, may be a bigger draw than the “free” aspect.
In that case they were using server software that Valve provided. Which is analagous to what I would expect in this hypothetical situation I’m talking about as well.
With regards to Era, 1.12 is less a client verison and more a ruleset version. I’m by no means an expert but it is my understanding that WoW is fairly data driven already. I’m not calling this a trivial problem, but many games support mods running on the server that propagate to the clients.
It’s not my intent to trivialize the effort that might be involved here, but I think WoW has solved a lot of these problems already or we wouldn’t have things like HC, SoD, Era, and Retail.
Good question! My theory is less than we might expect. People are pretty happy to pay for the things they want. There will always be those who feel entitled to things for free, but I’d be willing to be the real die hards of this mentality are not all that common.
I mean, if I’m being honest with myself I did used to pirate games in my youth (*gasp*, I know!!) because I was a broke student and games were hard to get. Now that I’m an old guy and Steam exists, I’m more than happy to pay for games I don’t even play anymore. Summer sale? Shut up and take my money!
So I think people would happily continue to pay for their sub if it gave them access to an experience they wanted. I’ve never played on a pserver, but I’d imagine it’s more of a hassle to setup and connect to than the official versions are.
People still whinging about Classic Era? That’s wild.
But they are and they do. They’ve built their support around players having access to host their own servers. Blizzard hasn’t built their support system around the customer hosting their own ‘realms’, nor the fact that they then lose control over the gameplay. They’ll then start having to compete for content with third-party hosted servers. By keeping the server code in-house, they can continue to sell experiences to their customers.
Actually does not.
Yes, it does. The server code itself would need to be supported. If the server code is broken, users would raise support tickets with Blizzard.
Depends on the disclaimer; if they state clearly there is no promise of perfection and that’s on us the private teams then its not blizzard’s problem. I have made far more janky things work than someone’s ancient source code.
Simply let us purchase license to the source and let US to the rest.
We can provide our own bug support, our own bot / cheat detection, and punishment to cheat. We can do all the backend work, the only thing I am unwilling to do is use their software without authorization.
Sure. So what then occurs when you offer paid bonuses to play on said server? Spend RL money to purchase tokens to action character/faction/realm transfers? Maybe purchase BIS items from your store instead?
You personally might not do it, but there will definitely be someone who will.
If its a private server then why would it be any concern of blizzard what we do?
If its not part of battlenet then there is no worries for tokens and paid customers from blizzard.
The old servers don’t even support the blizzard store, and that’s ideal if you don’t want MTX on your private realm.
The existing pirate servers use some janky mangos hackware and run fairly good, I have seen them; using authentic blizzard code would surely require some fixing, but that’s ok.
Anyone willing to setup a private realm knows this.
You’re making the assumption that people will be crying on blizzards doorstep over a private realm they aren’t subbed too; at least this is the way I read your post.
Server operators a hardy enough that they can handle it, especially the private community who’s very well attuned to hackware.
Additionally, why would a Server transfer even be component of a private realm? And why would official Bnet players be granted this to a private realm so licensed or not?