You think you do but you don’t

LMAO was he fired?

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Nope. He’s company pres now. No joke, google it.

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We think we do and you don’t

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Promoted to CEO actually.

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We think we do, and we do.

I really should screenshot posts like these for when most of the classic servers are ghost towns in a couple weeks.

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I think therefore I am, I think

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Do you think they’ll maintain pops similar to private servers or do you think people will opt for them instead because they’re free?

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THE WALL OF NO - REVISED AS OF JUNE 18, 2015
=========================================

SUMMARY:

  1. Blizzard does not believe there are enough people interested in utilizing this idea long term to justify the costs necessary to bring it about.
  2. Blizzard feels this idea is counter to the nature of MMO’s; non-progression equates to stagnation and eventual boredom.
  3. Blizzard does not possess the old code. No, they did not save it as a “backup” - they might have for the launch of Cataclysm, but that was over four years and two expansions ago. Even if it were “recoverable” by other means (i.e., see “private” servers” below) it would still require lengthy and expensive rewrite, a task Blizzard denies interest in.
  4. They have no plans or desire to recreate the original version(s). They refer to the notion as “a logistical nightmare,”… and in keeping with #1 above the time, money and resources required are prohibitive and unjustified.

TL;DR: “Too much cost, too little interest and it’s not what the game is about… we’re not doing it.”

Proponents of “Classic” (or any other variant thereof) servers rarely put thought into the idea. This would be similar to requests for the film industry to make silent films again, or the auto industry to mass-produce Model-T cars again. Avid collectors, people who look fondly back on those days, or new folks curious about the past might take a look at them, but that wouldn’t be a high number of people in the first place - never mind the few of those who would actually pay for the experience. There’s not enough market for those, so those companies are not doing it; neither is Blizzard. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a market - just that it’s nowhere near large enough to make it worthwhile.

BLIZZARD’S STANCE ON LEGACY SERVERS:

There are many Blizzard references on the issue over the years, from many different Blizzard employees; you can read most of them in previous Walls of No. For this one, we’ll focus mostly on a recent (May 29, 2015) interview with Lore, just to keep the length of this Wall a little more bearable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-ewtKpNMm4&feature=youtu.be&t=4m45s

(Quotes edited for brevity)

I honestly - I think [progression servers] would be a really cool idea. It’s just like - it’s a hard sell, because it’s a whole lot of work to put one of those together, and, the idea, like… if we put all of that work into that, that means … those people are working on that instead of something else, and there’s like, a GIANT list of what those ‘something elses’ could be.

We’re talking about a time in the game’s life when night elves were considered to be the best race for leveling because they had faster corpse runs.

I think the risk with something like that is a whole lot of people go ‘yaaay yeah, no no no I totally wanna play Classic,’ and then they play for like two days, and then they go ‘Well. That’s my fill of Classic FOREVER … I remember now … this game was not NEARLY as good back then.’ laughs

Don’t get me wrong… I think there’s a lot of people that would actually be totally into it and be like ‘this is the type of game that I wanna play.’ I think there’s a number of people that would be like that. I am just… my thought is that the sort of risk of it is - is that number of people high enough to justify the cost, or are we going to like - if Blizzard were to roll something out like that - would we be putting more engineers on making this work than players who participate? chuckles

The other side of it is, if we’ve got this one developer who’s just doing nothing but this for… five years… like, what else could he have done in that time? Like, are we talking about, now there’s two or three major game features that never get added because this guy was working on that instead? It’s interesting, really, thinking about it, because it’s the sort of issue that game developers face that there really isn’t ever an answer to.
So like if you say ‘oh I’ll just hire someone else to do those other features’, like, okay, but… then we’re still faced with the question of should we have this guy working on vanilla servers? Or should we have him working on … ANOTHER new feature? Like, hiring more people just means that now there’s ten, or twenty, or forty features that never make it into the game. So. It’s an interesting sort of tradeoff.
And there almost certainly is a point at which it would make sense. In theory, anyway. … It’s just a question of - do enough people in the current playerbase want this to justify the amount of time that’s gonna be spent to putting it together?
The reality is, what would almost certainly end up happening - IF it were something that Blizzard were ever to decide, to come out with vanilla servers - would be something where they’ve said okay, NOW it’s valuable to have vanilla servers, so we’ll put ten techs on it or something, instead of having one guy sort of chipping away at it for years. Because then what happens if that guy leaves?

Blizzcon 2014 :
Do you plan to introduce classic realms?
No we do not plan to. It is too hard to maintain that many versions of the game.

THE PROBLEMS WITH PRIVATE SERVERS:

Furthermore: Some have argued that even if Blizzard didn’t keep “backups” of old code they haven’t needed or worked on for nearly five years, they could take their code from these private servers, if they so desired. There are three major problems with that.

  1. Most private servers are buggy in a lot of ways, because they aren’t perfect copies of the live servers back in Classic. Frequently functionality is flawed (broken quest chains – some items, achievements, mounts, etc., not obtainable); they are generally buggy and unreliable. Blizzard would have to fix such code to make it useable – an undertaking which would likely take as long and cost as much as simply rewriting it from scratch… both of which they’ve described as a “logistical nightmare” and have said they’re not going to do.

  2. Most private servers are altered in a lot of ways. If the devs were to take someone’s Classic server data and trust that it was up and running properly, they would risk the possibility of - just to give some examples - hidden obscene content, or hidden, functional, Martin Fury shirts. And, yes, that can happen: when Nintendo released the first Pokémon games, they were completely unaware of the existence of Mew until well after the fact. It should be obvious that Pokémon Red and Blue are far simpler games than World of Warcraft; it would only be easier to hide things like that in the sheer bulk of game code that Classic WoW would have. Again, the devs would need to spend a lot of time going over them to make sure they’re up to par.

  3. Not to mention that Blizzard’s stance on private servers is that they are illegal and unwelcome. This has been their stance from the very beginning. All other concerns aside, for them to simply take code from these servers would mean openly condoning the theft and illegal abuse of their property. It shouldn’t need stating here how unlikely it is for that to ever happen.

In fact, Blizzard had a recent banwave in April 2015, targeted at Twitch players who were streaming use of said servers:

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1751535-So-Blizzard-wants-to-shut-down-private-streams-on-Twitch

I’ve read forum topic on Battle. net that Blizzard is shutting down private server streams from Twitch.

http://www.arenajunkies.com/topic/297116-people-getting-banned-on-twitch-for-streaming-vanilla-servers/

People are currently getting banned within five minutes of turning on their stream. So yeah. :slight_smile:

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/31cv9e/blizzard_suddenly_getting_aggressive_with_twitch/

Every time blizz starts coming after these people, the community starts buzzing about Legacy servers, but they just flat out will not happen.
One of the simpler reasons is the “if you give a mouse a cookie” argument. You release classic wow servers, people are going to want BC servers. BC leads to LK, etc. etc… Every time they release a new expansion, people will eventually want a server for the old one available. Of course, no one’s going to want to go on to them after a while, but blizz won’t be able to remove them, or people will !@#$%.
They cost money to run, they cost effort to maintain. You’ll need at least one per expansion, and the thing is that they don’t draw and hold crowds large enough to justify maintaining them. Also, they detract from the current game’s market. Enough people spend their time in legacy, and when that content gets to stale for them they look back at the current model and think, eh, screw it, and quit until the nostalgia bug bites and they come back to mess around in MC/Kara/ICC for a month.

WHAT’S CHANGED SINCE CLASSIC:

In addition, very few players asking for a Classic Server have really thought through just what they’d be missing out on. Below is a list of key features introduced patch-by-patch up to the launch of Warlords of Draenor.

Burning Crusade

2.0.1 12/05/2006

  • Looking for Group interface tool (not LFD)
  • Pet stats scaling with their player’s stats
  • Multiple characters being able to use the same HoT on the same target (more than one druid can Rejuve the same person)
  • Resilience
  • CC effects lasting no longer than 12 seconds max in PvP
  • Honor Points as currency
  • Arenas
  • Hunters able to use traps in combat
  • Warrior rage generation normalized with weapon speed
  • Thrown weapons use durability instead of stacks
  • Crafting time for equipment reduced
  • Meeting Stones usable as summon stones
  • Main Tank option in the Raid UI
  • Display enemy cast bars

2.0.3 01/09/2007

  • Pets no longer attack CC’d targets
  • Pet raid frames
  • Flying Mounts

2.3.0 11/13/2007

  • Guild banks
  • Bonus healing also giving some bonus spell damage, making solo content easier on healers
  • Faction vendors giving discounts for reputation levels
  • Player pets attacking enemies from behind when possible

2.3.2 01/08/2008

  • Yellow question marks for completed quests on the quest givers instead of exclamation points

2.4.0 03/26/2008

  • Characters retaining talented spell ranks so they don’t have to relearn the spells after retalenting
  • Daily Quest limit raised to 25

2.4.3 07/16/2008

  • Apprentice Riding at level 30

Wrath of the Lich King

3.0.2 10/14/2008

  • Hit, Crit, and Haste no longer divided between Spell/Melee.
  • Spell pushback no longer infinitely pushes a spell back.
  • Spell power and healing power merged.
  • Calendar feature
  • Companions and Mounts changed from items; now accessible through the pet/mount tabs.
  • Focus frame
  • Lost tabards, pets, mounts, and keys can now be restored through vendors
  • Linkable trade skills
  • Improved quest sharing
  • Visible timer until the PvP flag clears
  • Macros and key binds saved server side
  • Auto looting mail
  • Druids and shaman able to use items while shape shifted
  • Barber shop

3.0.8 01/21/2009

  • Mounts no longer have racial restrictions within factions
  • Mob tapping improved
  • Corpse run speed improved
  • Rep gains from monster slaying no longer deprecate compared to player level
  • Chat frames able to be made Noninteractive
  • Special GM chat UI

3.1.0 04/15/2009

  • Dual Specialization
  • Ground Mounts no longer dismissing when you enter water
  • Farmable capital city reputation without just farming outdated cloth for months
  • Pet taunts on raid bosses don’t affect player taunts
  • Holding Alt over equipment slots to show other items for that slot
  • Color blind option
  • 2-hour refundable items when purchased with alternate currencies (badges, honor, etc.)
  • Confirmation boxes to prevent accidental talent point placement
  • Class Roles in the LFG feature
  • Raid lockout warnings/escape option when entering a raid in progress

3.1.2 05/19/2009

  • Equipment Manager (saving sets)

3.2.0 08/05/2009

  • 2 hour “just in case” trade window for raid & dungeon loot
  • Upgraded cat/bear form art
  • EXP through battlegrounds
  • NPCs to turn EXP gain off
  • Dungeon/raid lockout extensions
  • Shorter mount cast time
  • Apprentice Riding at level 20
  • Journeyman Riding at level 40
  • Expert Riding at level 60
  • Expert Riding flight speed changed to 150% instead of 60% (faster than ground mounts now!)
  • Double-paned quest log for easier quest info viewing
  • Uninterruptible casts now shown differently
  • Druids able to see their mana bar while shape shifted
  • Holding Shift to compare a piece of equipment to a currently equipped one
  • Visible item level
  • Vendor prices shown on items even when not currently using a vendor
  • More mailboxes in the capital cities

3.3.0 12/09/2009

  • Better descriptions in Character Creation
  • Reduced/removed daze chances for lower level players
  • Knockbacks no longer dismounting players
  • Maximum character level limitations for meeting stones removed
  • Taunt diminishing returns retuned and made easier
  • The ability to track quest objectives on the map
  • LFD & cross realm groups
  • Looking for Raid interface (not the actual LFR we know now)
  • Dungeon & Raid difficulty shown on the minimap
  • Disenchant added next to Need or Greed in roll options

3.3.3 03/23/2010

  • Random Battleground feature
  • General raid buff range increased to 100 yards, from 45

3.3.5 06/22/2010

  • Right clicking chat types in the chat frame to move the types to separate windows
  • Battle. net accounts now friendable

Cataclysm

4.0.1 10/12/2010

  • Flexible raid lockouts - you can now do a partial raid clear, then join a completely different group (assuming they’ve cleared at least as far as you had)
  • No more ammo
  • Auto-ranking spells
  • New in-game raid frames

4.1.0 05/04/2011

  • Players resurrectable through their character frame even after releasing
  • Character and Target frames now unlockable/movable
  • Target & Focus shown on minimap

4.2.0 06/28/2011

  • Dungeon Journal
  • Healing crits for 2x the heal instead of 1.5x
  • Buffs no longer generate threat unless they directly cause healing or damage
  • CC no longer pulls the group being Ccd
  • Need rolling on a BoE binds it to you, preventing AH ninjaing
  • Can no longer skin corpses already being looted or skinned by other players
  • Everyone gets /roar
  • Rearrangable characters on the Selection Screen
  • Dismiss Pet option on unit frames
  • Items turning yellow in the repair frame when under 20% durability, not when under 5 (not %).

4.3.0 11/30/2011

  • LFR
  • Transmog
  • Void Storage
  • Tank threat buffed
  • Bag search
  • Quest objective tracking on the minimap
  • Mass raid assist checkbox
  • Ability to unlearn profession specialization without unlearning the actual profession

Mists of Pandaria

5.0.4 08/28/2012

  • Account wide achievements, pets, & mounts
  • AoE looting
  • Removal of the ranged/thrown/relic slot
  • Daily quest cap removed
  • Roll result frame
  • Item filtering at vendors

5.0.5

  • Pet Battle System

5.2.0 03/06/2013

  • Tap to Faction for world bosses
  • Absorb effects visible on character frames

5.3.0 05/20/2013

  • Loot Specialization
  • Ability to harvest nodes for reduced harvests if not at the appropriate level in their gathering profession

5.4.0 09/09/2013

  • Flexible raids

5.4.2 12/10/2013

  • Cross-realm mailing for BoAs

Warlords of Draenor

6.0.2 10/13/2014

  • New character models
  • Increased barber shop options, decreasing the need for the paid appearance change
  • Premade Groups tab
  • Quest items no longer taking inventory space (as often)
  • Tradeskill items stacking to 200 instead of 20
  • Account-wide Toy Box
  • Bag cleanup
  • Reagent bank
  • Flexible system incorporated into non-Mythic raids going forward
  • Automatic Hit & Expertise caps
  • Reduced cost of rez spells
  • Personal Loot
  • Outline Mode
  • Favorite Mounts
  • Flying mounts usable as ground mounts in no-fly zones
2 Likes

I hate those changes

You think you hate them, but you don’t.

Doomoracle. You seem to have way too much time on your hands.

Because I copy-pasted an old post?

lol

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To quote myself from another thread:

As it stands he is right… you see we are in the “You think you do” part of his statement, the part where everyone rushes to claim their Names and is excited about Classic.
For the second half, “but you don’t.” we will have to see how many are still playing in a year or so.
Hopefully Classic will be a success bit to proclaim it so now is very premature.

Brack thought he knew best, but he didn’t.

1 Like

This launch is gonna be a forest fire. Kinda pathetic they had all this time to plan and EVERY PVP est server has an insane que

Surely it won’t take a year of our subscriptions to offset the costs of servers and development…

I know for a fact I was NOT the only one who resubbed for this.

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*is

/TENCHAR

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retail players: i dont want to play classic

me: you think you don’t but you do

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I would be really surprised if too many people from private servers even log into Classic. I don’t think you can compare something free like a private server to a paid service like Classic.

You can be sure they will end up consolidating servers down until there is maybe one or two of each server type.