Not what I said, I said timers will be the next cost cutting measure as they continue to downgrade all their services.
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Fair enough, but generally speaking it does actually matter, since Blizzard has to pay for those bytes no matter where the customer’s avatar is at in the game world.
Not really. Let’s say a m+ right now takes 30 minutes to complete if you’re going at a normal, timed, not-mdi pace. If you remove the timer and someone attempts a crazy key so they wait for lust every pack. Lust 100 times in a dungeon. They spent 1000 minutes in that key, basically an entire waking day. In a day, they get one key done. If I farmed the same time, I get 30. Unless they rewards are so ridiculously exponential in scale, my 30 runs will get drastically more rewards.
It’s unlikely that anything will be put in place that taking 16 hours to complete will ever be more rewarding.
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Yes, but unless there’s a hard method of kicking the players out, it does not help in any way get the players out and keep resources down.
But that’s the thing. They specifically told us that it wouldn’t be player housing like done in other games. They never intended it and if I had to guess, the whole player housing vibe came from players not from devs and it was just ridden as though it were.
Garrisons Are A Big Deal Guys
Stockton took over to talk about what’s going on with the garrison system, specifically talking about the origins of it: instead doing the standard MMO model of housing (Stockton specifically called out choosing the color of your drapes or arranging furniture) the origin was in coming up with ways for the buildings to change gameplay. Over the course of the beta, that’s something that’s been added to more and more over time.
Kosak reiterated the concept that the garrison is meant to call back to the RTS concept of building up a base over a period of time. As you get further along in the expansion, your garrison becomes more complex and more improved, not just in terms of the gameplay but also visually.
Stockton then took over again to talk about how the garrison’s building-oriented concept let them use the buildings are rewards for gameplay; instead of just getting new armor and new weapons for playing the game, here’s a Mage Tower. Garrisons are a whole new form of supplying rewards to players, in addition to letting players have something they can enact a lot of control over. It’s your base, you’re the boss, go to.
From: warcraft.blizzpro com/2014/09/05/cm-lore-hosts-warlords-qa-with-the-devs/
I’m perfectly fine with a “soft enrage” such as dying x-amoumt of times or get wrecked.
What I DO NOT want to see players going in after a botched run for mats. It kind of ruins the purpose.
But how do you maintain the purpose without killing the fun? Treat them like visions.
You get mats once per week. After that, you can run as much as you wish for zero reward but having fun wrecking or getting wrecked.
In fact, I can guarantee that if Torghast is structured like this, you may never see me do any other content LOL.
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‘timer’ in vision hasn’t been a thing since rank 10… and even then, your ability to burst down stuff / avoid mechanic play a MUCH bigger role than the slowly ticking sanity drain.
Mythic+ has a timer at all levels that says “ok. I’m going to sit and play intently for 45 minutes straight and anything at all that comes up in RL must be ignored”.
none of the mythic require 45. not even close… is holding your pee for 20 min such a problem amongst adult now?
Why can’t Blizzard think up ideas that isn’t slap a timer on it?
you know what’s funny?
99,99% odds the reason you fail in mythic + / visions isn’t because of the timer. it’s because of the mechanic you get hit by or your inability to properly play your class. Even in +15 you can single pull / no fancy-skip your way through and EASILY time them.
you know what’s also funny? If blizzard decide against a timer in Torghast… guess what they’ll add to make stuff more difficult / change of routine? that’s right. mechanic, overlap, puzzle… stuff the plebs of WoW struggle with.
your moronic crusade against timer will just make it harder on you.
Something the actual good developers of the original game managed to do back when the game was popular?
you mean… like the stratholme timed run? essence of the red on vael? enrage timer on everything BWL and up? time-trial in TBC heroics? stuff like black morass? do you even know what you’re talking about?
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Well of course, none of us (probably; bet a few CMs may be here to sway opinions) work at Blizzard.
But I can use my 30 years of networking and programming experience, as well as my knowledge of how corporate America does data centers and writes customer-facing applications, and come up with reasonable estimates of how things are done at Blizzard, based on using their products for 15+ years.
You want better, go ask Blizzard. But good luck getting an honest answer out of a corporation though.
Why would they stay if they failed the timer?
…To finish the run? idk, I don’t like giving up.
They had a player housing portal in Stormwind since either Vanilla or BC. And back then it was expected that a MMO should have housing, it was a feature all of the other MMOs had.
They finally removed it in a later xpac after people kept pointing it out to Blizzard and asking for real housing.
In a game like WoW, where for the hard-core its all about being successful and getting the best gear? Really?
For gaming, they host their own data centers, i believe there are ten of them across the US, but that was a while back.
What you’re probably remembering is in 2017 after a high profile DDoS attack, the moved their authentication servers to AWS. Their gaming servers run on proprietary software not compatible with EC-2 offerings.
Storage for games is amazingly small, and communication with the server is also very light. Communication with the server isn’t like a firehouse of data, but instead the server and the client both have an idea of what’s important, and share when those things change, the client is responsible for rendering the effect. Say I run forward and cast moonfire. When my position changes (the client update loop is like 60/s) it sends a packet with a vector to indicate my position and velocity and a time stamp, and possibly some anti cheating token if it’s up. It’s bits of data. The event for the moonfire sends a spell ID and a time stamp.
All of the stuff in storm wind is a collection of Vector3 data points and asset tags, and mesh tags (for collide-able stuff). Kilobyte or two of data at most. The assets are part of the client, mind you, in a local “asset store”. They don’t need to be rendered by the instance. Vector3 and asset tag is enough, and it basically just runs in memory, looping for collision detection to generate kore events. No communication needed.
The storage required would be minimal, and the communication with the server smaller still, because only events need to be shared. Even scaled to millions or tens of millions of users, that’s a manageable workload.
Okay now you’re just getting silly. I gave you a reason, but you just want to be right. Drop that cement and bricks.
Much of what you wrote seems correct (there are four data centers), but you also have to take into account the quantity of players playing the game, as it increases the quantity of usage even when the program is written well to minimize bytes across the wire.
So if your best program communicates most efficiently, that is great at 10K clients. But when you get to 10M clients, your costs go up allot, and your profits diminish, even with an efficient client code.
Do you know if they own their hardware, or lease it out at the data centers?
See, what you’re not factoring in with this one is you get more rewards the further you get.
So it’s not doing a 30 vs 30, its getting to floor 115 vs 125.
Your reason seems b.s., which is why I challenged it. Your followup reply to seems to validate my thoughts on the matter.
You perceive my response as “BS” because I can’t answer on account of everyone that doesn’t abandon keys. Very sound logic, there.
You still get gear if you fail the timer, you even get a weekly chest.