Like many wowkids I grew up to be a software engineer. It’s a very common route for gamers, and I suspect a fair number of the people reading this have a similar background.
Software is a tough business, I get it. But any developer can spot a bandaid fix from a mile away, and I see TONs of them being tossed into the game. My current favorite?
Warmode.
The Alliance had given up, so they scaled rewards and created the Against Overwhelming Odds weekly quest. Awesome! Bravo, Blizzard.
There are a couple different ways you could have done this:
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Count literally every server in a given region once per week and assign a bonus to that faction (least effort)
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Count active players on a single server or cluster once per week (more accurate and slightly more effort)
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Count active players in real time, or daily, and update the bonus dynamically (most effort)
They chose the least effort. The developer assigned gave the broadest, least accurate solution, and the fallout is that some realms the horde is hunted to extinction while the Alliance get a 30% warmode bonus for doing the hunting.
Case in point…my server. RP servers skew heavily Alliance. They are the opposite of most servers. So the allies outnumber us in every zone by 5 or 10 to 1, AND get bonuses for it.
Is it that big of a deal? No, not really. But it’s sloppy. It’s bad design. It’s the kind of thing you get from bored devs who are phoning it in and knocking out the quickest fix they can.
That’s to be expected with WoW at this stage of its lifecycle, but it is still frustrating to see. Typos in quest text, persistent bugs, and poorly implemented features.
I miss Blizzard of old =(
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Recently had a talk about the state of WoW with 2 old high school friends. (We used to write text based games back in the 80’s for fun. 1 is now a project lead on the software side, the other is a computer engineer.) They never played wow.
While explaining the increase of bugs cropping up in old content every time a new patch or expansion is added, both people brought up the age of the game. Their main concern was that it sounded like the game was being designed in a vertical or linier style - as opposed to a modular design.
I wonder if Ion would ever consider having one of their Q&As be about the 'health; of the game engine and code that is now OVER 15 years old. (remember, the engine was finished before the game was released.)
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Could be time for an update yes, not as bad as a certain 6-year old games franken-engine but doesn’t mean it’s perfect.
I wonder if it would be easier to just make a brand new game than to update it at this point though.
well one of their top brass said they are putting their best personnel into mobile development, so its a safe assumption wow is getting team second stringers for the time being
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The engine WoW uses is Blizzard proprietary. They designed it and built it from the ground up. And it’s OLD. Like OOOOLLLLLDDDDD and outdated. It literally CANNOT take advantage of the new GPUs that are out today, or in the past half decade, and still lean much more heavily on the CPU (which the engine still cannot utilize properly) compared to any other game on the market… They would have to basically burn WoW down to the ground and start over if they wanted to update it. At which point they might as well make WoW2.
As a side note: I did wonder, when they were getting Classic together, if they might not take advantage of the opportunity to see if they could rebuild the engine while they were doing that, but… from what I’ve seen they haven’t. Or they looked at it and gave it up as a game of silly buggers.
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To be fair, Blizz has been putting a lot of work into modernizing the graphical part of WoW’s engine in Legion and BfA – that’s why it now uses DX12 and Metal. It has a way to go still but it’s already better than it was and the foundations have been laid for much more dramatic improvements.
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id be afraid if they updated too much… look at the UI, they “updated” that and ive had to /reload more times in BFA than i ever had to from 2006 till BFA release… Today i couldnt see any loot in the dungeon journal and only WQ’s i could see were pet battle ones on the map… disabled addons, relogged and even /reload again, still same thing. but another character it was fine… so i dunno.
just gonna say i hated the UI “upgrade” in beta, and i still hate it today.
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At last year’s Blizzcon Allen Adham stated that they have moved all their best developers to mobile projects, and in the case of WoW it really shows. They will fix issues in high profile content like M+ dungeons and current raids, but anything else is low to no priority to them these days.
Things like CRZ/sharding and level scaling broke the game in many places and those issues have still not been ironed out.
I have numerous bugs that I filed in Legion and BfA that have still not been fixed. Several have been mentioned by others periodically on the forums so I know it is not just me.
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Oh sure. But as someone else mentioned, everything they update breaks 100 other things that they have to run down and fix. And some of that breaks things, etc until they reach the end of the chain. And even with those updates, they are STILL miles behind other more current games in their graphics (although for WoW it doesn’t really matter much for what they do) and their ability to take advantage of today’s technology capabilities. Which causes other problems. Like, not being able to have a real 40 on 40 pvp battle because the engine literally can’t handle it and crashes out. Or the servers adjust for the load and suddenly it’s 40 on 10.
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It’s almost never easier to “just make a brand new game”. 99% of the time the problems aren’t in code per se, they’re in code dealing with either game data (e.g., items, NPCs, world objects) or in-game scripts. In either case your options are to either copy the existing code, in which case you copy the bugs too (“bug-for-bug compatible”), or you rebuild the game data and scripts from scratch to match your new systems. Fifteen years of game data and scripts.
So either you do it the fast way and it doesn’t help, or you do it the right way and it’s far from easy.
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Some of their best people. Some. Not all. They never said they were putting all of their best on mobile development.
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The large battle problems boil down to a couple of things:
– Because of player abilities, there’s many times more units on screen in 40v40 battles today than there were in the original game. It used to be that 1 player == 2 units maximum, but with all the pets and semi-pets we have now that number has gone out the roof.
– Extreme number of units wouldn’t strain modern computers if the game hadn’t changed graphically since 2005, but it has… immensely. Hundreds of thousands more polygons, textures that are 4-6x higher resolution, fancy shaders, advanced lighting and shadows, etc.
– Server tech has changed. In vanilla each server was hosted on a physical server box. Today, “servers” are loosely grouped shards that live cloud hosting services like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Services.
Cloud hosting is tuned for average gameplay which is typically a handful of players casting a handful of abilities. Dump the avalanche of players and their legions of pets in and well… you get lagfests like TMvsSS because each extra unit in combat dramatically increases the number of interactions per second, quickly outstripping what the servers are tuned for.
So if you want an easy way to improve both graphical and server performance, tone down the pet/semi-pet insanity.
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The issue with counting active players is a very important question. How does one define active? I’m not being snarky or sarcastic, its a genuine question. How much activity in a week does it take before they’re considered an ‘active’ player?
The problem with your “most effort” idea is that this would be more overhead, and thus latency issues, that the system would have to deal with.
The issues of how they define regions, that I will agree with. They need to define regions in a better manner. Because there are current Regions that are Alliance heavy and there are Regions that are currently Horde Heavy. They need to redefine how they define a Region.
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Speaking as a fellow dev, I have to disagree with your premise. You gave three viable solutions to an apparent problem, but I don’t think the guys doing the coding made that call. More than likely, the decision was made in a different department and the orders were handed down. I can’t fathom that the people capable of writing this game would be unable to make any of your options work.
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Just don’t dude. You don’t know anything about Wow coding.
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What you’re talking about is game play design decisions and the solutions that we got are probably based on them not needing any coding to implement.
Most likely there are technical and process limitations on having one server behave differently than another, i.e. currently you can’t have one server with bonus for one side and one server with a bonus for the other.
If I had to hazzard a guess it’s probably due to how they rollout updates and patches and wanting to rollout the same code to every server. There’s probably not an easy way to implement per server settings on a weekly basis.
So really, not due to sloppy coding, due to wanting to avoid codding new functionality to begin with.
And we have a winner!
Its never about incompetence on the dev’s part, its all about big corporations trying to save money in every way they can.
Why would they take the expensive route when they can take the cheap route and people will still pay for the game?
That was the whole premise behind WoD, wasn’t it?
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I think you’ve confused Development and Design.
I’m sure the software engineers who develop this game had nothing to do with the decisions on how Warmode is designed, and your software engineering experience does not itself give you insight into the game design decisions.
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