Q&A Compilation -- WoW Classic Development Team AMA

[Kneeshooter-amanthul (Kneeshooter)]

Are there measures in place to avoid punishing those that get randomly disconnected through no fault of their own?** (i.e. If I wait in a 2-hour queue and finally get in, only to get disconnected 5 minutes later, do I have to wait in the 2-hour queue again?)

This is actually a fairly important question and one which wasn’t adequately answered. All the dev said was that they were increasing the number that could fit in a queue and changing the error message. It didn’t provide a response to the pertinent question of what would happen if you queue’d, were in there for half an hour, minutes away from getting on, and then got disconnected.

The question remains: do you then have to start all over again or do you at least get put back closer to the front of the line?

[Illsak-darkspear (Illsak)]

Ya maybe wait untill servers open? There are plenty of NA realms at low to med population.

[Illsak-darkspear (Illsak)]

Blizzard gives u options. Go to low population if u dislike ques. Wait a month if u dislike ques. Dont play if u dislike ques.

[Illsak-darkspear (Illsak)]

Yes outside of game. Its like hey ill give u Runescape gold for wow gold. Classic and retail are seprated into 2 different gamss just like my example.

[Areiah-emerald-dream]

The no extra skeletons rule is because they don’t want to deal with the lag of generating that many skeletons if everyone has 1-5 skeletons laying around consistently.

It’s a hardware limitation they don’t want to acknowledge to the playerbase so they go with the hate speech excuse lol.

[Flippantgoon-dalaran]

Tell that to the Jewish players who were confronted with swastikas on the ground in WoW. Pretty sure that ruined their “immersion.”

As someone who grew up in a primarily Jewish community, I can tell you that most of them would NOT be offended by something as stupid as some idiot taking the time to do that in a video game. However if this was in real life it would be a different story.

The reason I feel this change is unnecessary and poorly justified is because there are so many unintended uses skeletons provided back in the day that actually added to the immersion of the game. A few users above me listed them out if you haven’t read them.

Another user also pointed out that most of the time it was gold farmers who abused the character corpses by never releasing their spirits/logging off and using multiple accounts to spell out their website.

[Safina-malganis]

You misunderstand the trade. There’s no trade window, only an agreement to follow thru

[Freshbreeze-darkspear]

[Q: What exactly are the pop caps for a layer? And extrapolating from that, what are the server pop thresholds roughly indicating (what makes a server low vs medium vs high?) ]

A: We’re not releasing specific numbers,

I hope this isn’t one of those AMA where all the questions are dodged.

[quote=“Kaivax, post:1, topic:260760”]We may also integrate character transfers (this ultimately became a service in original WoW.)
[/quote]
Paid character transfers. Because that’s what classic WoW was all about, right?

Why stop there? Let people pay to level to 60 on day one. It ultimately became a “service”. So by that logic, ALL paid services should be added to classic. Just as long as you can make an extra dollar off someone. Because that’s all that actually matters here.

Blizzard simply cannot understand their players want classic, and not retail.

[Q: Will there be paid services for Classic? ]

A: We aren’t considering other services beyond character transfer at this time.

“at this time”

Is it really so hard to commit to not adding a bunch of paid services to classic? You seriously can’t promise that won’t happen?

Answering the question in the way you have makes it sound like paid services are definitely coming.

A: Character Boosts are not in keeping with Classic. We don’t want to break any hearts.

…and yet Blizzard won’t commit to definitely not adding them.

[Q: What are the plans after Phase 6? More content for classic or moving to TBC? ]

A: We’ve done most of the hard work by bringing back 1.12 so progressing to Burning Crusade would be a lot easier for us. Our plan is to identify everything we need to do should we ever decide to go this route. We want to be sensitive to the desires of our players. Some may want BC and some may not. We’ll be following the Classic community closely to help determine what our next steps should be.

As much as I would like a BC server to exist… I do not want my classic character to progress to BC. I’d want an all-new character best suited to BC’s balance.

There’s also no point in classic servers if they will eventually turn into retail servers anyway.

It’s less clear what our direction should be with BC and WotLK. As you point out, it is likely that some features of these expansions will not be universally embraced by the Classic community. We’ll be following player progression and sentiment to help guide us in our next steps.

Please. Blizzard is going to do whatever they think will make money. Regardless of what players actually want.

Case in point: “You think you want that, but you don’t.”

[Q: Will you offer free realm transfers if servers get way overpopulated after launch? ]

A: This is definitely one of the options we are considering. But for now, we are encouraging players to use the name reservation period to transfer their characters to lower population realms.

“Maybe” is the worst possible answer.

[Q: What was the feeling in the office when the team suspected, then learned, that Wow Classic was an official project? I imagine some people groaned, others excited, or didn’t care. What was the general vibe? ]

A: The team was very, very excited. The biggest challenge we faced with this project was figuring out whether we could pull this off from a technical perspective. But once we proved that it was possible, and we stood up a reference client, there was no looking back.

Really? Private servers proved this was possible YEARS before anyone at Blizzard would even consider a vanilla server.

Didn’t I read somewhere that Blizzard has always retained the ability to roll back the servers to any version, at any time?

The only technical issue was one you people created. Which was to change 8.0 client rules to that of 1.12. That’s something Blizzard insisted on. Not something that was asked for.

I wasn’t there. So I can’t say how excited your staff is. I can state for a fact that Blizzard could have given us vanilla servers for a very long time, and the only reason they didn’t is because they didn’t want to. So I am forced to conclude your “excitement” is likely disingenuous.

[Keritanima-proudmoore]

Oh you poor naive person.

[Keritanima-proudmoore]

Actually no there isn’t a lot of NA realms at low/mid pop. THe only ones that are that are the two RP servers and the 2 PvP servers brought up on the 19th, the day before the Q&A. For the player that doesn’t want to play on the PvP server and has no interest in RP’ing they have no choice atm but to play on high/full servers. Hopefully Blizz will have a new Normal server for that playerbase before one of them ends up super saturated like Herod of the PvP servers.

[Prophetsbane-firetree]

SKELETONS!
plz k thx

[Krega-echo-isles]

Most quests in Cenarion Hold will be available during phase 5 along with the AQ Gate opening content.

I wasn’t there early enough to see some of these things, which motivates part of my interest in Classic. In case people blow through the phases faster than I can track everything, however, what was Silithus like before the war effort got fully underway?

[Zipzø-thrall (Zipzø)]

Server transfers are 100% true vanilla. #nochanges

I’m not saying I want them in particular, but you can’t just act like they weren’t around back then when they were.

[Jiinxed-eldrethalas (Jiinxed)]

Removing skeletons is pointless and actually ruins game immersion. Why? Because one or two losers might spell bad words?

Yeah, seems silly since bad words can be typed in chat too. Are they gonna ban the chat now too?

[anon19818130]

Can’t wait for classic! Shout out to everyone who’s playing on the best server available: Stalagg cya guys in Azeroth soon

[Promethêios-area-52 (Promethêios)]

Nothing regarding leeway being waaay overtuned? come on man

[Zipzø-thrall (Zipzø)]

They’ve already responded to comments on this.

Blizzard’s words: it’s 100% identical to their reference realm.

[Jonomir-sargeras (Jonomir)]

I do appreciate how much communication we’re finally getting on this.

But it’s pretty ridiculous to grab 2 weeks of peoples’ play time getting them to reserve names basically for the benefit of your testing/metrics, only to tell them a week later to go ahead and throw that away and switch servers because you didn’t start with enough servers, as EVERYONE said you didn’t.

It’s much more of a headache than you realize to go back and forth and re-coordinate with a huge group of people to try and scramble to debate changing servers at the very last minute after many have built excitement and attachment to a particular realm/name reservation/time zone preference/population expectation. All because after all this time of being able to prepare for your perfectly smooth launch you realized that it won’t be enough because you, again, disrespect the following this game has had for years.

You’re literally making people do what you set out to avoid, which is merging/splitting communities, as is happening in the discord (well now, multiple discords) that we had been planning and coordinating for months at this point. Why not just simplify it and release a lot more servers (y’know, like vanilla did, because “vanilla means vanilla”) so you can get rid of layering off the bat and actually do right by the original vanilla community that wanted this project to begin with?

It just seems like you’re making it way more complicated than it needs to be when it’s probably still going to be a mess any way you slice it, just to bend over backwards for the opinions of some tourists that aren’t even going to stick around anyway. Like why is that the biggest priority? Catering to people whining about every little imperfection is what led to the decline of your game today, making a rift in communities. Well, the community that actually will play Classic long-term and keep this project alive just simply wanted the old game as-is without all this extra nonsense that you’re running in circles about. And it’s insulting how little you consider actual vanilla players over modern-day retail tourists.

[Prophetsbane-firetree]

questless just mobs and nodes…no FP and no vendors iirc

[Megaboz-farstriders]

A: We are not planning to bring DX12 and the multithreaded enhancements to the Classic client. The multithreaded support greatly improves performance in large scale environments like Suramar or Boralus. Classic’s world and models are much simpler. It would also increase the system requirements.

First, thanks for all your work bring Classic back to life. Looking forward to it, but this answer is very disappointing.

Although Classic is less demanding in general, the 40 man raiding, WPvP and the like are still quite taxing on a single thread.

Further, the retail client has options for DirectX11 as of this writing. It would seem that increasing system requirements would not be necessary, if that option also remained in Classic. Even if they system requirements are higher with a DirectX12 option, how much higher could that be?

Why not make Classic run as well as possible?