Nostalgia is a helluva drug. This sounds like it would be a logistical nightmare. Yes, a vanilla server would initially grab a ton of nostalgic players but Blizzard has to look towards the future. How many players would continue to play 3 months, 6 months, 1 year down the line after a classic server was opened and the novelty has worn off? Do they continue to add content or not? How many would stick around doing same end-game content forever? Do they continue to work on class balancing or not? Do they continue adding new tiers of gear or not? What is the incentive for players to keep players years ahead? Why should Blizzard put time and resources into something that would make far less money than HS, HotS, or Overwatch?
Provide an official avenue for vanilla income and support and this problem goes away.
An irrelevant argument -- even removing the coding and back end issues, the IP belongs to Blizzard -- .
It is the IP issue indeed - and the fact that Blizzard offers servers for people who bought (and in the EU own a copy of) WoW - is what almost certainly protects them.
The network code stuff etc. that was used to run the "non-licenced server" was, by all accounts, developed without and independently of Blizzard not stolen. So Blizzard could make a case for "rewarding" such endeavours - they probably wouldn't need to tbh. And it would indeed need to be beeded up to protect cc details etc. Could be done of course.
Nothing that Blizzard talks about in this note however is, imo, what people want. And why things like refer-a-friend and tokens are mentioned is a mystery; even hierloom stuff! As Nanfoodle says moving people to such a server with no prospect of selling them further expansions .... could be good for Activision Blizzard but certainly wouldn't necessarily be good for the WoW team. If no expansions were needed ....
I think we're going to see some sort of official Legacy / Progression server before the end of the year. Or Blizzard can let another million+ subscribers leave the game and play on private servers instead. I suppose it's their choice.
I think that's pretty wishful thinking with Legion launching and all the attendant bug fixes, patches, balance concerns etc. While it's possible it could happen, I wouldn't look for it for at least a year +.
Oh the irony of demanding IP protection on a service and product they no longer offer and have no avenue for income for said lacking product. Who created this entire issue? Blizzard ... not a single other entity.
Vanilla wow emulators exist because that game no longer exists officially. Retail Wow fundamentally differs from vanilla on philosophical game design levels. Even a pristine retail Wow could not even come close to offering a vanilla game play experience. Pristine retail will indeed attract players but more from their core audience than creating an avenue to attract vanilla players.
oh come on , the game exists , and we all know , if Blizz decides to shut down WoW for good then im sure they wont care about P.servers , ppl like to say that vanilla players wont play on official servers , but thats not true , a lot of ppl come back and play wow because they miss it , every expansion is the same , huge queues , lots of ppl come back , 1 month later leave , yep but thats still $$$ for blizz , the expansion and 1 month (or 2 ) ....
I think we're going to see some sort of official Legacy / Progression server before the end of the year. Or Blizzard can let another million+ subscribers leave the game and play on private servers instead. I suppose it's their choice.
I think that's pretty wishful thinking with Legion launching and all the attendant bug fixes, patches, balance concerns etc. While it's possible it could happen, I wouldn't look for it for at least a year +.
If they're ever going to offer it. I could see it offered as part of an Expansion. Would definitely boost sales.
Lazy and greedy blizzard could do it if they wanted to; its all excuses at this point. wow players have given them BILLIONS and they still balk and will not give the players what they want
I don't think a pristine server would solve any of the hullabaloo.
I want to play Vanilla WoW. I don't want to play Vanilla WoW content with Warlords of Draenor mechanics, or even Legion Mechanics. I want the old talent trees, and the old content, and I want the LFG/R tools as far away from the game as possible.
Making a pristine server seems like spit shining a pile of shit, that is not what people have asked for.
The only thing I would want changed would be the Paladin mechanics back then.
Paladins had so much more depth with the talent trees over the crap system they use now. Paladins are now a shell of a class to what they used to be.
Players are completely unaware of the ops side of running a MMO like WoW - most people think well its just a bunch of servers how hard can it be? I mean you can just rent them from amazon and be done with it.... /facepalm
Understanding how hard it is to run servers is meaningless to the average player ... Vanilla wow already exists, therefore it can be done.
My uncle rebuilt a classic car many years ago, he is a very skilled guy who is now retired. He did this very cheaply because there is no labor involved and he gets all the prices from friends in the industry cost price. He also doesn't have to worry about insurance, sticking to a time frame etc
If you wanted to do this and paid an expert to do it you would have to sell your house, people working for free is not comparable to people wanting to be paid for offering a very skilled service. Do you think these Nostarious people would work for free when Blizzard are offering the service? Do you really?
Also the way copyright works, if you don't protect your IP then it can be taken from you. What if Nostarius ran for another 5 years and then they suddenly wanted to take on wow directly and charge a slightly cheaper sub? It would be a lot harder for Blizzard to stop them if they didn't do it previously because of how copyright works. Keep in mind this company was already accepting donations secretly.
I think we're going to see some sort of official Legacy / Progression server before the end of the year. Or Blizzard can let another million+ subscribers leave the game and play on private servers instead. I suppose it's their choice.
I think that's pretty wishful thinking with Legion launching and all the attendant bug fixes, patches, balance concerns etc. While it's possible it could happen, I wouldn't look for it for at least a year +.
Also they need to find a way to get more money from a legacy server. As it stands they would make no money from expansions or the cash shop on that type of server. So they would need to find more ways to monetize it. If Blizzard does this, it will take big planing to make it worth it for them as well as whats on their plate over the next several months.
It's just a shame that World of Warcraft used to actually be a World. Now all players are channeled directly to the tiny island "du jour" to sit in dungeon finder all day.
It's like if you had a game based on America and there is a lot of awesome content within the continental united states right? Expansion comes out, Welcome to America: Guam. There is so much to do on Guam, we are actually going to boost you and start you off on Guam as well so you never have to worry about all the other content that is now forsaken.
Now Playing: Bless / Summoners War Looking forward to: Crowfall / Lost Ark / Black Desert Mobile
Freaking buy Nostalgia or pay them or whatever since they obviously can do very easily what Blizzard cannot!
Erm, so Blizzard should pay for code that was stolen from them and even pay the thieves themselves...?
Obviously...
Recruit them since obviously Blizzard lacks talent these days
That's unfair and petty.
They have the talent but not the inclination to do it. As the letter clearly states, they are speaking with these people and perhaps something will come of it -- maybe licensed servers and whatnot. The talent and current employees of Blizzard are working on Legion and other live version issues.
If you don't like the game, fine, but be respectful of the work and the workers.
Well, it's hard to respect a company as large as Blizzard being unwilling to complete a simple task that countless other smaller game companies have done. Not to mention, these private servers have shown it's not hard. The fact Blizzard has been unwilling all this time despite the outcry just proves they aren't a company worth respecting. While it was wrong to accuse the workforce behind Blizzard, a company is as a company does. If you work for a company and do something stupid that could make them look bad, they fire you. What about when the company makes all it's employees look bad? What then?
Blizzard is fat and lazy from all the money they made. Seriously, the refusal for an official classic server is not only stupid, it's disrespectful.
Game companies that have accomplished what Blizzard has said they could or rather, would not.
Mythic Entertainment - Dark Age of Camelot
NCSoft - Lineage 2
SOE - EverQuest & EverQuest 2 ( Progression Servers )
The scale and expectations are completely different, you can't compare them. Lineage 2 is an example of why its a bad idea.
Exactly. Those are three examples of why it's not worth their time and effort to go down this road. The only one even mildly successful is the EQ progression server and of the multiple progression servers they've opened only one is populated. It's hard to say if that has even brought them in significantly more revenue or not. It certainly cannibalized a lot from their live server, increased their workload (taking away from live development), and fractured the community.
I would argue that the WoW community has been fractured for a very long time now. It's fractured between the ones who play and the ones who don't.
If the current games was closer to the original experience, would it be more popular today than it is now?
No one could answer that question one way or another.
Take note of : tolerating infringement and authorizing uncontrolled use.
To all of you wow is a game, to blizzard it's a multi billion dollar asset, they treat it as seriously as any other company protects such a valuable asset.
I don't think a pristine server would solve any of the hullabaloo.
I want to play Vanilla WoW. I don't want to play Vanilla WoW content with Warlords of Draenor mechanics, or even Legion Mechanics. I want the old talent trees, and the old content, and I want the LFG/R tools as far away from the game as possible.
Making a pristine server seems like spit shining a pile of shit, that is not what people have asked for.
The only thing I would want changed would be the Paladin mechanics back then.
Paladins had so much more depth with the talent trees over the crap system they use now. Paladins are now a shell of a class to what they used to be.
Maybe so but the entire design was pathetic.. Waiting on procs to do anything. Not to mention most seals were useless. Using the Doomsaw and waiting for it to proc plus SoC to proc at the same time to do any damage at all was dumb. Basically ended up having to hide behind immune abilities.
Use the mechanics they had in beta a long time ago would be fine.
Paladins had so much more depth with the talent trees over the crap system they use now. Paladins are now a shell of a class to what they used to be.
Paladins were shit in vanilla WoW. Combat basically consisted of auto-attacking and using judgment. You had to recast your seal after every judgment. Your buffs only lasted 5 minutes. Their dps was lackluster outside of the burst damage you could get from abusing reckoning. Their tanking was sub-par compared to warriors. In raids they were mostly relegated to healing and spending half their time buffing. I would never want to go back to that version of the class.
Players are completely unaware of the ops side of running a MMO like WoW - most people think well its just a bunch of servers how hard can it be? I mean you can just rent them from amazon and be done with it.... /facepalm
Except Nostalrius was running for about $1,000 a month for the entire server which had 150,000 active accounts (which I'd bet it blows away the current active population on even the largest servers on wow). Given people want just the bare bones to run it, no updates just general running of it, its pennies in comparison to blizzards cash flow, and with the interest it can likely bring a large number of resubs who refuse to play WoD just to play classic.
I'm calling completely BS on that point of "Tremendous Operational Challenges". Unless they ditched the code completely for some reason (which would be terrible business practice on their part) they would have very little to do on their end. Honestly I think its more out of fear that classic is a lot more popular then WoD and they might hold the fear that legion could be very much the same having waning interest because they lack of the confidence they can create a compelling product anymore.
People blaze Blizzard and every other mmo company when they use the term "active accounts" and here you go using it. Unbelievable.
I don't think a pristine server would solve any of the hullabaloo.
I want to play Vanilla WoW. I don't want to play Vanilla WoW content with Warlords of Draenor mechanics, or even Legion Mechanics. I want the old talent trees, and the old content, and I want the LFG/R tools as far away from the game as possible.
Making a pristine server seems like spit shining a pile of shit, that is not what people have asked for.
The only thing I would want changed would be the Paladin mechanics back then.
Paladins had so much more depth with the talent trees over the crap system they use now. Paladins are now a shell of a class to what they used to be.
No they did not. No matter what class you played 99% of players used 99% the same talent build with 3~ points that were left up to you where to pick for minor things like movement speed boost or something little. And even most players used those same 3 points in the same talents.
I have to say if they do get a legacy server going then this will be the first thing in years that Blizzard has done and failed. There is no way it will work for more then a month.
care to elaborate? nost was out for almost a year and only growing, which is why blizz took action.
500k accounts and no telling how many of them were duplicates or active. It probably had an active playerbase of about 20k if they were lucky. It was also free and who isn't going to at least check it out. If WOW was free next year then they would easily gain over 500k accounts in a day. Look at Lineage and how much people claimed they wanted the legacy server and look how hard it failed. Yes if they really tried they could hit the sweet spot but then again they have been trying to hit the sweet spot for over 10 years and going back to legacy isn't going to help them at all.
As for the other topic... The FBI hires people who are criminals all the time to help catch other criminals or prevent crimes. It isn't far fetched for WOW to simply claim this nost server as their own and publish it.
I am a Sr. Systems Engineer. From an Operational standpoint its not hard to build and maintain these servers, the Operational problem comes from building the team. They would need someone like Mark Kern who has experience and can come in from the outside to manage these servers. To pull resources from another team is the problem. You really need to build another team to manage these servers.
What I fail to understand is why so many refuse to take the word of the people inside the company at face value. For Pete's sake. Sometimes things are exactly what they are said to be rather than the grand conspiracy theory that some want the world to believe.
As for hiring the Nost team, why on earth would they? It's like rewarding the guy who robbed you with a job at your Fortune 500 company.
Because Blizzard isn't honest and they aren't known for that, since we're speaking of honesty. They hire people that are bottom of the barrel and they've told flat out lies to their customer base already. Just look at their tech support. It's some of the worst I've ever seen in the IT industry hands down. Blizzard has always been a shady company, they always will be. I have a good friend who used to work for Activision (who now owns Blizzard) and he would constantly tell me horror stories about what went on behind closed doors. It's a miracle that they are even in business still with their shoddy and unprofessional business practices. So if you think the acquisition of Blizzard by Activision is a good thing think again because it's not. I can tell that just by looking at their customer service. It's gotten worse since that point. There was a time that despite Blizzard's misgivings that I at least respected Blizzard for their customer service experience but that's long gone sadly.
I agree with your point on not hiring the Nos team. What they did was ILLEGAL. However that line about not being able to do the classic servers, as someone with a bit of experience with servers and MMO's I can tell you from my own personal experience that it's alot easier than they are telling you. They are simply not being completely honest and preying off of peoples ignorance. As was already pointed out in this thread, if they wanted to set up a classic server they could. Hell EQ1 doesn't have problems. They could do it, they simply don't want to spend the money to do it, and that's what it boils down to at companies like Activision-Blizzard. They see the bottom line. It would detract from their profit margin to run such a server, even though it wouldn't take that much effort. They want to squeeze every last penny that they can out of their product and service.
Banegrivm Leader of the 1st Fist of Light www.1stfistoflight.com
Arguably the worst spokesman this "movement" can choose.
Not really. People like to bag on him because of his failure with Red 5, but the success of World of Warcraft is undeniable and he was a significant part of that, regardless of whether or not some people want to admit it.
Yep and We have WOW Because of Mark Kern. Which people do not realize is that blizzard was going to trash WOW before it launched because of the problems they were having trying to get it off the ground. Mark turned WOW around and made it the best MMO out there.
His Failures of Red 5 is because he tried to make another large MMO during a time when the community was so use to push button easy games and they were not ready for long drawn out games again. Only a bunch of people who want things handed to them are against Classic servers. That is because it will show the the direction WOW Went in was wrong and these players done deserve to be catered to.
Arguably the worst spokesman this "movement" can choose.
Not really. People like to bag on him because of his failure with Red 5, but the success of World of Warcraft is undeniable and he was a significant part of that, regardless of whether or not some people want to admit it.
Yep and We have WOW Because of Mark Kern. Which people do not realize is that blizzard was going to trash WOW before it launched because of the problems they were having trying to get it off the ground. Mark turned WOW around and made it the best MMO out there.
His Failures of Red 5 is because he tried to make another large MMO during a time when the community was so use to push button easy games and they were not ready for long drawn out games again. Only a bunch of people who want things handed to them are against Classic servers. That is because it will show the the direction WOW Went in was wrong and these players done deserve to be catered to.
That's rich. "Everyone who doesn't want the things that i like just want things handed down to them, thats why i think i should have classic servers...something i like...handed to me"
Comments
It is the IP issue indeed - and the fact that Blizzard offers servers for people who bought (and in the EU own a copy of) WoW - is what almost certainly protects them.
The network code stuff etc. that was used to run the "non-licenced server" was, by all accounts, developed without and independently of Blizzard not stolen. So Blizzard could make a case for "rewarding" such endeavours - they probably wouldn't need to tbh. And it would indeed need to be beeded up to protect cc details etc. Could be done of course.
Nothing that Blizzard talks about in this note however is, imo, what people want. And why things like refer-a-friend and tokens are mentioned is a mystery; even hierloom stuff! As Nanfoodle says moving people to such a server with no prospect of selling them further expansions .... could be good for Activision Blizzard but certainly wouldn't necessarily be good for the WoW team. If no expansions were needed ....
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
oh come on , the game exists , and we all know , if Blizz decides to shut down WoW for good then im sure they wont care about P.servers , ppl like to say that vanilla players wont play on official servers , but thats not true , a lot of ppl come back and play wow because they miss it , every expansion is the same , huge queues , lots of ppl come back , 1 month later leave , yep but thats still $$$ for blizz , the expansion and 1 month (or 2 ) ....
"World of Warcraft Ocarina of Time"
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
My uncle rebuilt a classic car many years ago, he is a very skilled guy who is now retired. He did this very cheaply because there is no labor involved and he gets all the prices from friends in the industry cost price. He also doesn't have to worry about insurance, sticking to a time frame etc
If you wanted to do this and paid an expert to do it you would have to sell your house, people working for free is not comparable to people wanting to be paid for offering a very skilled service. Do you think these Nostarious people would work for free when Blizzard are offering the service? Do you really?
Also the way copyright works, if you don't protect your IP then it can be taken from you. What if Nostarius ran for another 5 years and then they suddenly wanted to take on wow directly and charge a slightly cheaper sub? It would be a lot harder for Blizzard to stop them if they didn't do it previously because of how copyright works. Keep in mind this company was already accepting donations secretly.
Also they need to find a way to get more money from a legacy server. As it stands they would make no money from expansions or the cash shop on that type of server. So they would need to find more ways to monetize it. If Blizzard does this, it will take big planing to make it worth it for them as well as whats on their plate over the next several months.
It's like if you had a game based on America and there is a lot of awesome content within the continental united states right? Expansion comes out, Welcome to America: Guam. There is so much to do on Guam, we are actually going to boost you and start you off on Guam as well so you never have to worry about all the other content that is now forsaken.
Looking forward to: Crowfall / Lost Ark / Black Desert Mobile
If the current games was closer to the original experience, would it be more popular today than it is now?
No one could answer that question one way or another.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
To all of you wow is a game, to blizzard it's a multi billion dollar asset, they treat it as seriously as any other company protects such a valuable asset.
Use the mechanics they had in beta a long time ago would be fine.
Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!
Clearly you didn't play vanilla.
Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
As for the other topic... The FBI hires people who are criminals all the time to help catch other criminals or prevent crimes. It isn't far fetched for WOW to simply claim this nost server as their own and publish it.
Because Blizzard isn't honest and they aren't known for that, since we're speaking of honesty. They hire people that are bottom of the barrel and they've told flat out lies to their customer base already. Just look at their tech support. It's some of the worst I've ever seen in the IT industry hands down. Blizzard has always been a shady company, they always will be. I have a good friend who used to work for Activision (who now owns Blizzard) and he would constantly tell me horror stories about what went on behind closed doors. It's a miracle that they are even in business still with their shoddy and unprofessional business practices. So if you think the acquisition of Blizzard by Activision is a good thing think again because it's not. I can tell that just by looking at their customer service. It's gotten worse since that point. There was a time that despite Blizzard's misgivings that I at least respected Blizzard for their customer service experience but that's long gone sadly.
I agree with your point on not hiring the Nos team. What they did was ILLEGAL. However that line about not being able to do the classic servers, as someone with a bit of experience with servers and MMO's I can tell you from my own personal experience that it's alot easier than they are telling you. They are simply not being completely honest and preying off of peoples ignorance. As was already pointed out in this thread, if they wanted to set up a classic server they could. Hell EQ1 doesn't have problems. They could do it, they simply don't want to spend the money to do it, and that's what it boils down to at companies like Activision-Blizzard. They see the bottom line. It would detract from their profit margin to run such a server, even though it wouldn't take that much effort. They want to squeeze every last penny that they can out of their product and service.
Banegrivm
Leader of the 1st Fist of Light
www.1stfistoflight.com
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
His Failures of Red 5 is because he tried to make another large MMO during a time when the community was so use to push button easy games and they were not ready for long drawn out games again. Only a bunch of people who want things handed to them are against Classic servers. That is because it will show the the direction WOW Went in was wrong and these players done deserve to be catered to.
Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!