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On April 12 2016 09:59 deth2munkies wrote:
Honestly, there's no getting through to you guys. It's a horrible business decision, they've told us it's a horrible business decision, it's obvious it's a horrible business decision, but you guys want what you want.
The intrinsic disagreement is that you believe that Blizzard is obligated to "modernize" vanilla WoW by adding B.Net integration, fixing bugs, localizing to languages that the original client wasn't in, etc. I believe that none of these things are necessary for Blizzard to release vanilla WoW, which leads us to vastly different analyses of the actual cost of implementation.
This isn't like releasing a new game. Re-selling legacy software has a vastly different audience than new release retail games and as such the customer base has very different standards and realistic expectations for what they are getting. This is why services like GoG can exist and make a profit while providing very little in the way of support or fixes for the legacy software they sell. You're not targeting a new, casual audience for your product because you know the returns on that will be low. Not many new players would be interested in vanilla WoW. But because you are targeting a niche audience that already has a nostalgia-centric interest in your product, is willing to put time and effort into fixing things themselves if they don't work out of the box, and generally has pretty tempered expectations of a decade-old product, there is no need to invest a massive amount of time and money in modernizing and heavily supporting your product. Nobody who would be remotely interested in buying it cares either way. You just need to put the bare minimum product out there and the community is willing to do the rest of the legwork.
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donkey post
2 so you can't read it
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People buy repackaged forms of other media that they enjoyed in years past that they since lost or became unavailable--books, movies, music. Why is it so weird that people want to re-experience old games this way?
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What are you talking about, 15k wasn't misleading at all. You could /who and it would return 14k+ people most days of the week when I played.
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On April 11 2016 22:52 deth2munkies wrote:
2) Building an official Vanilla/BC/Wrath/Cata server would take millions and millions of dollars to start and upkeep. I'm not going to pretend to fully understand how game coding works, but even I know enough to know that Blizzard has drastically changed not only their in-game files, but the server architecture running WoW and all their other games. That means in order to make a server on a previous expansion, they'd have to completely re-do everything about how those games connect to the Blizzard servers in addition to acquiring new servers to host them on, relocalizing everything (WoW wasn't in anywhere near as many countries then as it is now), and establishing a support network to monitor customer support, constantly update, and fix bugs. All of that is on top of doing exactly what the private server guys have been doing and reverse-engineering the files, because it's likely they don't have all the Vanilla files archived anywhere because that's typically not what game companies do. The upkeep of hiring additional staff specifically to deal with those servers alone makes it not worth it for them, as it's different enough as to be basically a different game from WoW now, so you'd need an entirely dedicated staff for each expansion's servers.
Even if they charged standard sub rates, these servers would be money-losers. Combine that with the fact that WoW subs as a whole are on the decline and there's really no reason for them to throw this much risk into a title that's starting to wane after 11 years.
If it's so difficult to set up, why could a few Frenchmen do it in their free time?
On April 11 2016 22:52 deth2munkies wrote:
3) Everything you loved about Vanilla is gone and never coming back. The reason why Vanilla WoW was so good at the time was that it took the best parts of existing MMOs like Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies, threw them into a world that we loved (Warcraft), and made it a unique experience by having questing drive the story and progression. Going back to it now is just going back to a worse version of a game that we've been playing for 11 years. All the luster is gone, the newness has been outdone by countless titles since and WoW itself. All of the systems of questing, class balance, raid difficulty, etc, are all inferior to pretty much every other game on the market today and even WoW itself. The best things about Vanilla WoW were exploring the world, finding new stuff for the first time, and doing cool lore related things with characters that you'd seen in other games. Now, the world has been explored to death, there's nothing left to find with WoWhead and countless other online tools, and we've gotten so used to lore characters that we barely flinch when they show up. Going back in time and playing the game as it was doesn't fix any of that.
It may be nostalgic for a while, but when you hit max level and start to remember how painful it used to be just to grind enough to be useful in raids and how simplistic and conceptually easy the bosses were back then, you'll quit pretty quickly. And you won't be alone, while those servers have a pretty consistently high population, there's massive turnover. People are coming in and out all the time, and the vast majority don't hit max level unless there's some mechanism in the server to boost XP or buy 60s. That ties back into the fact that Blizzard won't be able to make money on these servers, because you have to cut that big number down to the number of people who'd actually pay for it (since it's F2P), then cut it again by those that will stay month after month to cover the maintenance costs.
Here's where I couldn't disagree more. The best experience in gaming I have ever had was Vanilla WoW 10 years ago. The second-to-best experience in gaming was Vanilla on Nostalrius. It's not just Nostalgia, the game is just fun. Much unlike modern WoW which is an achievement/mount/pet collection game with browser game elements. Even items in modern WoW feel like shit because everyone has the same fucking items, except maybe with different item levels. There's no community in modern WoW. No open PvP for world bosses. No open PvP because of successful guilds trying to grief each other. No drama. Nothing.
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On April 12 2016 11:02 deth2munkies wrote:
One day, maybe WoW would be like that, but right now there's not a big enough demand for it. I already pointed out how 10-15k quoted on Nostalrius is both misleading and a drop in the bucket anyway.
One option for them would be to come up with a real number for how much getting a Vanilla version running would cost and put it up on Kickstarter. See if it gets interest. If not - fine, forget it. If yes - then just go ahead and develop it. I'm willing to bet it would get funded in no time.
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On April 12 2016 13:34 Dyme wrote:
If it's so difficult to set up, why could a few Frenchmen do it in their free time?
This is a reiteration of the discussion I had with deth2munkies last page. He believes that unlike a bunch of fans doing it in their free time, Blizzard is obligated to "modernize" vanilla WoW to be up to the standards of their new titles--B.Net integration, localizations for previously unsupported languages, bugfixes, tech support, etc.
As I stated above, I just fundamentally disagree with that assumption. You're not marketing the product to new players, you're marketing it to a community of veterans who already know what they're getting into. They know what they're getting, and they'd be willing to do all of the work for you--community GMs/tech support, client mods, etc. Legacy re-releases aren't targeted at the same audience new retail games are. You can release the absolute bare minimum product and they'll be satisfied and willing to do the work to fill in the blanks.
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On April 12 2016 11:02 deth2munkies wrote:Show nested quote +On April 12 2016 10:59 bo1b wrote:On April 12 2016 09:59 deth2munkies wrote:
Honestly, there's no getting through to you guys. It's a horrible business decision, they've told us it's a horrible business decision, it's obvious it's a horrible business decision, but you guys want what you want. Fair enough to argue that, but you were just telling us how we don't really want to play it like 2 pages back. Take a look at runescape/everquest to see what there customer base thought of reimplimenting vanilla. Hint, it's now bigger then the up to date version. Well you don't. Both of those games have tiny playerbases to begin with nowadays, and the only people that are really playing are those playing out of nostalgia/habit that have been playing forever. One day, maybe WoW would be like that, but right now there's not a big enough demand for it. I already pointed out how 10-15k quoted on Nostalrius is both misleading and a drop in the bucket anyway. And speaking from personal experience, Vanilla outwears its welcome very quickly in the endgame since we've become accustomed to not putting up with the massive amount of bullshit that it wants you to, despite the fact it was a revolutionarliy small amount of bullshit at the time.
I played Nostalrius for...uh a long time. Seven months or some odd and I didn't see myself flat quitting any time soon. I thought I saw the game with rose tinted glasses but man...I was actually rather wrong.
I played WoW from release to WOTLK. I quit before Cata because the game, already going in a direction I didn't like, was really doubling down on it. Came back twice just to see if I was wrong. Once in late Cata and once in WoD. I quit both within a few months (which happened to be enough to clear all content and realize it sucked). I continued to play Nostalrius for far longer than that. To ease my conscience so to say I kept my sub active on WoW while I played Nostalrius. Call it homage if you will. (I have since cancelled my sub since)
So..please stop telling other people what they want. It is so arrogant it's hard to really explain. You don't get to TELL PEOPLE what they do or do not want in a game. I know what I want and why I want it. You do not know what I want and you definitely don't know why I want it. A blizzard panel already said this and well...it wasn't well received. So I can explain it to you and explain why Nostalrius drew so much attention. Especially with the downward crap fest that was WoD.
You are under the impression that people were playing Vanilla for the end game. They were not. So few people saw the "endgame" of Vanilla that you simply can't make that assumption for how enormous Vanilla WoW was. No, while some did play for the end game raiding, most did not. I played it for the end game raiding as well and even happened to be one of the lucky few that not only saw Naxx 40 but got to clear it. That wasn't actually what kept me in the game.
Back then servers mattered. Back then Horde vs Alliance mattered. There was an actual community within your server. Your server was a different LARGELY ISOLATED world and it felt like you actually were a character in that world. You started to learn who the other faction was because you'd start to run in to them more often. You learned who your own faction was because you were always with the same people. You learned who sold what, when they sold it, and how much it was going to cost you. You explored the world because you had no choice...mounts were hard to get and walking was the name of the game. You actually felt...like you were PART OF A WORLD. You were actually in an MMORPG. You could actually form an identity completely separate from your own and have that identity make a mark on the world in the server you were playing. You had to, god forbid, find a group by talking to people and then WALK TO THE DUNGEON. You had an actual reputation with the people you were playing with beyond your own guild. Scammers were so quickly ostracized it was hilarious. At one point I felt that blizzard didn't even have to get involved with it because the community took care of it themselves.
PVP servers were a fairly volatile place. You died while questing like you wouldn't believe. People became infamous for hunting in Stranglethorn. People became infamous for hunting those hunters. AV was an epic battle of armies clashing. People actually had different gear. It just felt like a different world.
WoD feels nothing like that. Hell that started fading in WOTLK already. So you want to know why I want to play a Vanilla Server? I want a snowballs chance in hell of getting that feeling back. That feeling of being part of a world that is actually separate from the one I live in. Just to have fun with it. I got it in Nostalrius. I will never get it again in this current or likely any future incarnation of WoW.
That isn't to say Vanilla didn't have its issues. It did...its just those issues were overshadowed for me by the actual game play and community.
The funny thing is that Blizzard had a server right there. The leg work was largely taken care of. All they had to do was, instead of crushing it, allying with it. It doesn't NEED to be connected to B.net. It's a legacy. Anything people find there isn't going to do a damn thing to the current WoW anyway. It already had die hard support and customer service. All that had to happen was to give them the green light, perhaps force a subscription service with a blizzard IP tag, and pay the server costs. While I don't agree with a lot of American IP laws I completely understand that Blizzard had the legal right to do what they did. I understand that a company has to protect its IP or by law they lose the rights to that IP. I completely fail to understand why they went about it in the way that they did. They had an opportunity here and seemed to piss it all away on top of pissing a number of hardcore fans of WoW off...and to what gain? The vast majority of Nostalrius players were likely already lost customers and they could have easily turned them in to returned customers. Instead? Cold day in hell before I pay Blizzard another dime for pretty much anything that isn't a WoW legacy server and even that's iffy now given how they went about this whole thing.
You may have not felt this way with Vanilla. That's fine. I did and I know a load of other people did as well.
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Logged in just to say that I share sentimental support for you guys who wanted and enjoyed vanilla wow. I read about it somewhere else and disagreed with that decision from Blizzard. They really don't seem to be in touch with their players.
I fully support vanilla servers! Though I've never touched the game, nor intend to.
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Yep, the community server based was really what kept the game together as an MMORPG. Nowadays it's just a glorified game lobby with a lot of features, but hardly feels as a MMORPG, or atleast, not like in the old fashion.
In my experience people who enjoyed more vanilla is because they are more interested in the sandbox-esque feeling in a themepark, community, world feeling, have the option to turn off the "sandbox" sometimes or just get a diminished not as punitive sandbox experience, rather than just playing a sandbox game. It was a mix that made WoW very succesful back in the day for good reasons as the community links inside servers tied up closer and closer together.
I would say that flying mounts were the first step that started to lower my enjoyment of the game, as players could bypass interaction with other players while in traveling around the world to do stuff. Zones like the daily quest in the isle of the blood elf were fine, but since it was just a small zone, it was impossible for it to recapture the feeling of actually playing on a world.
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I've quit WoW a long time ago, but I fully support and understand the demand for vanilla servers. I guess Blizzard is afraid that new players (who came post-vanilla) would discover the fact that the game was so much better pre-BC (or pre-WotLK).
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On April 12 2016 22:19 OtherWorld wrote:
I've quit WoW a long time ago, but I fully support and understand the demand for vanilla servers. I guess Blizzard is afraid that new players (who came post-vanilla) would discover the fact that the game was so much better pre-BC (or pre-WotLK).
People that played on Nostralius are veteran WoW players, no legit new WoW players would want to touch vanilla WoW with a 10 foot pole.
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United Kingdom20285 Posts
People that played on Nostralius are veteran WoW players, no legit new WoW players would want to touch vanilla WoW with a 10 foot pole.
Vanilla+TBC had 11m continuous subs and a huge amount of players joining at all times. I honestly think that MOP and WOD have trolleyed the new player experience enough to make it worse than back then.
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On April 12 2016 23:07 Cyro wrote:Show nested quote +People that played on Nostralius are veteran WoW players, no legit new WoW players would want to touch vanilla WoW with a 10 foot pole. Vanilla+TBC had 11m continuous subs and a huge amount of players joining at all times. I honestly think that MOP and WOD have trolleyed the new player experience enough to make it worse than back then.
I doubt that. Looking at the new MMOs that come out lately vanilla seems super grindy and monotonous.
That being said, maybe the community/world aspect of it might be appealing to new players.
I think Vanilla has a better community/world aspect to it, but has much worse actual gameplay.
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United Kingdom20285 Posts
post-stat-squish leveling either through questing or LFG is much more monotonous, brainless, boring than classic+TBC leveling ever was.
I think that classes and specs are generally more balanced now which is great, but all of the content aside from current-tier-raids is a shadow of its former self. Level 1-60 content x1000; it's just awful for both new players and veterans.
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On April 12 2016 23:16 Cyro wrote:
post-stat-squish leveling either through questing or LFG is much more monotonous, brainless, boring than classic+TBC leveling ever was
At least you progress super fast. That shit goes by in a few hours and you outlevel zones. Its boring in the sense its super ez and shit dies fast. Vanilla/TBC is a lot more slow progress type of boring. Esp with the quest design, low mobility and sustain. On top of that, lack gear and stats in that content, (no shoulders until like level 20 or something silly), no spellpower on those low level items too so you're not doing more damage until you buy more ranked shit.
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On April 12 2016 23:16 Cyro wrote:
post-stat-squish leveling either through questing or LFG is much more monotonous, brainless, boring than classic+TBC leveling ever was
What does the stat squish have to do with it? The ease of killing stuff? That was already done when they added Heirloom gear.
The new player experience isn't that important to WoW anymore since its not going to attract a whole lot of new players. It is simply old and new people tend to try out other, new MMO's if they get into the market.
On April 12 2016 23:14 lestye wrote:Show nested quote +On April 12 2016 23:07 Cyro wrote:People that played on Nostralius are veteran WoW players, no legit new WoW players would want to touch vanilla WoW with a 10 foot pole. Vanilla+TBC had 11m continuous subs and a huge amount of players joining at all times. I honestly think that MOP and WOD have trolleyed the new player experience enough to make it worse than back then. I doubt that. Looking at the new MMOs that come out lately vanilla seems super grindy and monotonous. That being said, maybe the community/world aspect of it might be appealing to new players. I think Vanilla has a better community/world aspect to it, but has much worse actual gameplay.
The world felt bigger and you saw more people as you traveled that is for sure. The community tho I disagree with.
The community is what you make of it, The difference was that Vanilla forced you to interact with people you didn't really want to interact with in order to get groups.
The fact we (the players) stopped talking to anyone outside our social circle (be it guild or otherwise) as soon as it was no longer required simply shows that we didn't want to do it in the first place.
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WoW quests have been sticking to the exact same boring formula since Vanilla:
1. Kill X amount of Y
2. Kill X amount of Y and bring back A amount of B
3. Collect X amount of Y
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On April 12 2016 23:20 Gorsameth wrote:
The world felt bigger and you saw more people as you traveled that is for sure. The community tho I disagree with.
The community is what you make of it, The difference was that Vanilla forced you to interact with people you didn't really want to interact with in order to get groups.
The fact we (the players) stopped talking to anyone outside our social circle (be it guild or otherwise) as soon as it was no longer required simply shows that we didn't want to do it in the first place.
For the current WoW players sure, but not for a huge chunk of the people who had left the game ever since then.
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United Kingdom20285 Posts
What does the stat squish have to do with it? The ease of killing stuff? That was already done when they added Heirloom gear.
No, it wasn't. For one, heirlooms only existed for veteran players in WOTLK+ (not classic+TBC) and when heirlooms existed and you had them, stuff still took a little while to die. I quested halfway to cap right before cata with heirlooms on a hunter and then leveled a new one from 1-100 right after the stat squish and it was a completely different game, 3x easier is an understatement.
Stat squish & class reworks is when everything went super wonky. Heirloomless characters are suddenly hitting 3-4x harder than before, relatively. A level 40 char has the health of a level 60 raider even though the quest and dungeon mobs don't hit any harder.
The new player experience isn't that important to WoW anymore since its not going to attract a whole lot of new players.
I disagree. The playerbase in the first 6 years was built from losing subscriptions left and right but pulling in new players way faster than they lost old ones. The average time that every current WoW played has played WoW seems to have been increasing dramatically since around cata.
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The fact we (the players) stopped talking to anyone outside our social circle (be it guild or otherwise) as soon as it was no longer required simply shows that we didn't want to do it in the first place.
This is actually a subject that i've seen talked about a lot. The TL;DR is that players will follow the path of least resistance even when they strongly dislike that path; for good game design you should make the path of least resistance fun.
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