World Of Warcraft

While it hasn't diminished my desire to see it at all, I can't say I'm particularly impressed by the trailer's song choice.

edited 19th Apr '16 3:12:52 PM by LordVatek

Are 5 vs 5 arena matches still going? My impression was that during BC and Wrath the bracket had the highest potential rating since it was the most balanced.

My experience of trailers is that they take away from the film. Not just spoilers, but they are so formulaic in their layout and presentation that they make every film look identical. And in cinemas, they last far too long. A thirty-second montage of some key moments with only the film's score would do wonders.

Neither is the film's director.

Meh, if you've watched a lot of raid boss fight videos online, having there be techno in Warcraft isn't particularly out of the ordinary.

I kinda like it.
I don't know that it fits Warcraft very well at all, but I like the music itself.
Reminds me of Seizure of Power.

Warlords of Draenor is now ten bucks? Thanks Fighteer. Now I have no excuse not to buy that bloody thing. Full disclosure: I bought Mists of Pandageddon when that went on sale.

Is it still bundled with a 90 boost?

So, now that I've moved on to level my paladin (who used to be my main char during the early parts of Mo P, back when I did actual farming)

Remember how on our Farm we could find and nourish a stray dog and how he'd follow us home?

....He's followed my paladin to Draenor and now sits in his dog house at my garden.

D'awwwww.

Blizzard's response.

In a nutshell, Blizz can't allow private servers because they have to protect their IP, nor is it simple technologically to run classic realms. They are floating the idea of creating realms where all leveling supports — increased XP gain, heirlooms, character transfers, etc. — are turned off so players can get the experience of starting fresh.

edited 26th Apr '16 8:45:44 AM by Fighteer

I hope it pans out to something useful. I'd never play a classic server, but I can appreciate the passion of those that do want to do so, and would be happy to throw money at Blizzard's general direction in order to play the game they choose to play. In fact, I'm almost surprised Bobby Kotick hasn't already waved his pointer finger at his tech goblins and made them configure some servers.

The financial cost (such as it is to a company the size of Activision Blizzard) would be outweighed by the goodwill the decision would get across much of the gaming press as it would be easily spun as a "good news, they've listened to the fans" story coming out of Blizzard.

The costs of operating and running those servers (and employing at least a skeleton team of people as bug squashers) isn't miniscule, even for a company the size of Acti-Blizz, especially if they could be channeled towards stuff that's guaranteed to make a return on their investment.

Plus there's a chance of at least some of this becoming a temporary measure. Blizz saw what happened with the content drought of Warlords, and let's be real here, they're not going to devote resources to creating new content for a decade-old game they can't even be sure a hundred thousand people would play for. And the Blizzard brand is honestly all about sustainability. They design games for the long haul and for long-term support.

So unless there was some way of doing that without completely splitting the dev team in half, maybe we'd see a legacy kinda thing, but it's unlikely. Especially because of the mandatory integration with the modern Battle.net and the no doubt hilarious chaos that would result from that.

And honestly, considering how the fans have been acting in this case, I think this is about the most diplomatic response Blizzard could give, because some parts of that vocal minority of legacy purists have been complete asshats toward the current Wo W dev team in an attempt to make their argument more appealing :/

EDIT: That's not to say that I want to dismiss the idea of legacy servers outright, just that I think the response this time around has been particularly vitriolic. People have been waxing nostalgia about classic Wo W since the release of the Burning Crusade, and I think the combination of content drought and the Internet's unerring ability to stir up vitriol is what's causing the response this time around, and I don't want that to be the message - that if you scream loudly enough about things, you'll get the desired response. That wouldn't be how you educate a child, it shouldn't be how discourse on the Internet works, period.

edited 26th Apr '16 9:00:27 AM by math792d

Frankly, the code base for Classic simply cannot run on Blizzard's current hardware, and dedicating a team to adapt it would be a complete waste of resources, never mind the question of whether they would support it with bug fixes and whatnot (which would technically make it no longer Classic).

A team of enthusiasts managed to cobble together a working server without access to original code at all.

Taking a backup of old version, buying a separate server to run it on and launching it is much less esotheric than what you're saying. They do not need bugfixes or any fancy shmancy achievement and pet bank integration, they just need the vanilla.

And if the vanilla wow flops, they shut it down and reintegrate the servers into clusters running regular version.

Hell, Nostalrius are releasing source code. Literally ALL blizz needs to do after that is buy a server. They can flippin kickstarter it.

edited 26th Apr '16 9:12:46 AM by Adannor

Yeah, shutting down that stupid server gets treated like Blizzard had a hand in causing 9/11.

My shaman is almost 100. Looking forward to Doomhammer down the line, enhancement turned out to be more fun that I remembered. Also considering going back to six-month subs since my job has proven to be stable.

edited 26th Apr '16 9:12:16 AM by Rotpar

Are you suggesting that enough people will resub to the game to make a Classic server a worthwhile investment? Because I have serious doubts about that. Like it or not, if Blizzard does it, they'll be on the hook for the quality of service and people will treat it as a product that they are entitled to receive support for.

edited 26th Apr '16 9:21:10 AM by Fighteer

Private servers is piracy so Blizz had good reason to shut it down, you did not have to own the game or sub to wow to play on it.

And fuck vanilla, original wow was a terrible game and maybe people might level a toon on it sometime but they certainly wouldn't stay on that long enough to be worth it.

One of the things that popped out to me in that official response was specifically they were "talking" to the admins of Nostralius.

They're probably getting offered jobs.

Or being reassured that they won't get sued and making sure that the Nost fellas aren't getting in trouble if they, say, release the source code.

Quite the contrary: the source code is Blizzard's IP and the Nostalrius admins most explicitly do not have the right to release it. "Talking" is probably along the lines of, "If you give us that code and pull back any copies you released, we won't prosecute your asses."

edited 26th Apr '16 11:05:37 AM by Fighteer

Private servers* run their own emulation of the server side. The code is their own original developed to process same data.

The IP clause is over the imagery and text and lore that the server uses to advertise itself, but the word of code the client connects to belongs to nostralmus itself.

*with few exceptions, i.e. Ragnarok Online had two server models used around, one is original, one is stolen from Gravity.

edited 26th Apr '16 11:19:14 AM by Adannor

Video game companies have ruined each other over single lines of code that just so happen to be similar between their engines.

If Blizzard can prove that even a single line of code is the same as one of theirs, and considering what the code was used for, they can claim the "creator" of that code was infringing on Blizzard's rights. Be it IP or copyright.

Edited to add: I do believe source code is protected by copyright law. If that is the case, the pirate server's code could be considered a derivative work of Blizzard's own code.

edited 26th Apr '16 11:52:09 AM by Cid

>They're probably getting offered jobs.

Unlikely

Probably being told how much Blizzard is going to sue them for.

What I find funniest about the nostalgia here is that back in Wrath, there was a thread at least every fortnight waxing about how much better Classic or BC was, now Wrath is most commonly cited as the game's peak.

I wonder if there would be any traction for a crowd-sourced game that had the same structure and similar gameplay to Warcraft (can't copyright those) but a new IP and maps, and advertise it as Classic remade. Let's face it, Classic was a cobbled-together mess in quests and balancing and asking strangers for suggestions would at least make them more imaginative. The obstacle would be making the maps and keeping it running, which is what made the game so popular. But I'd like to see those yearning for the old days try out their own efforts.

Speaking personally, I don't care for slower levelling speeds (my shaman has been XP-locked at 80 or weeks), but I would like the earlier endgame stuff to be made relevant as you pass it. Say if LFR offered raids and heroics some levels earlier and you could complete them with others across several levels like battlegrounds do.

(BTW, one look at videos of Nostalrius's starter zones should demonstrate why cross-realm zones are good for the game; every zone was once teeming with players, now they are desolate and CRZ at least breathes some life into them.)

Starting zones are only populated when people are leveling. The reason that was the case in Classic was that the game was new and adding players all the time. The reason why leveling zones are dead now is because the game's player base is mature: 99% of them don't bother leveling new characters unless they get a case of Alt-itis.

Making Classic servers won't solve any population problems, because once everyone on them is 60, the starting zones will remain just as dead as they were before.

edited 26th Apr '16 1:50:34 PM by Fighteer