Blizzard announced "Classic" World of Warcraft

[Wilian]

I played last year on a private server and it was extremely well scripted. Less than a dozen bugged quests out of thousands, and only 1 of them you couldn't validate. All dungeons and raids scripted, based on previous works and original vanilla videos (all vanilla raid add-ons working). No game breaking bugs in gear and talents. At this point, I wonder if it had less bugs than official vanilla wow.

Blizzlike server, so exact same levelling speed.

As for the money debate, it's really dependent of your knowledge of the game. All noobs will struggle. Particularly on a new server where there is no one to buy your stuff.

On this 10 year old server, it was pretty easy to make money. Copper at 1G like others said. I had 1000G at lvl 30 and 3000 at lvl 60.

On a new server, I'm not sure what's the best strategy. Obviously, hitting 60 as fast as possible is one, since you can then grind considerably more at max level. My guess is that after 2 weeks, there will be some lvl 60 on the server, so you take gathering skills (Mining and Herbs), store that on other characters and sell at lvl 40 to buy mount. If you're playing casually, there should be lots of higher players to buy. Fishing is also one of the best options.

As someone who has made developement for two, three different servers in potentially thousands of hours, this is just bollocks. In current strain of private servers ( Or any ever really) there really aren't any that'd not have massive differencies to how retail played out. Whetever something is scripted or not means very little when matters around it are dysfunctional.

One of the very good examples of this is how mob balance works and how they're often overtuned through two different values (attack speed - damage range) while undertuned thru' miscalculations based on lack of information ( sunder armor removing armor in linear fashion instead of more and more incrementally as stacks are applied )

Lets say we have mob called A on a private server. On private server, this mob A typically has attack speed ranging somewhere between 0.763 (something totally arbitary) and it's damage range is 150-165. In retail Classic, this said mob would have attack speed of 2 and damage range of 120-135. That's not a shy difference of minutiae scale. And this oftentimes is even more evident on elite mobs.

This is how most mobs in private server scene works vs. how they appear in retail. That is why we had mass amount of "retail classic is too easy, this is not how I remember vanilla" crying from peeps who base their experience entirely around private servers. They have no context, no understanding and then go claiming they know how it should be. Same goes with mob abilities. Majority of mobs in the core databases misses most of their abilities and usually have 1-2 notable ones to give just enough illusion, mainly for 1 reason. Adding abilities thru' database which is the easy way often bugs out in spectacular fashions and no core has yet solved this and coding them to have those abilities thru' core edits requires plenty of programming and is rarely cost effective.

The second notion is that no one knows how armor reduction calcultations are really done, same for resistances so we often end up situations where mobs lack armour entirely if they have their armor values set to their correct numbers instead of imaginary boosted armor values which is a -massive- boost to any melee DPS.

To say there would be less bugs on retail when they have access to proper 1.12 client for referencing than on a private server who has no real data on many of the major matters and have a lot of shit simply tuned out into wackiness only showcases there's a big perspective issues.

 

[hivemind]

t. rebirth shill

 

[Wilian]

Facts are facts regardless of the scale of your hurt butt.

 

[hivemind]

i'm not butthrut I was just bantering you in a friendly fashion

 

[Wilian]

Forgive me, it has been tense day. A power outage gave me a Windows registry error and I had to reinstall the whole shit

 

[hivemind]

hope it gets better buddy

 

[Metro]

Probably better if everyone just ignores him about WoW at this point. He thinks his 'lived experience' on a mature private server is authoritative about the actual game.

1000g was the cost of an arcanite reaper on my server and I bought one of those in the first month. Couldn't even tell you if raids were released at that point because grouping with 39 people sounded like a nightmare.

I don't know what you experienced but, speaking as someone who played WoW retail day one, getting 1,000 gold was not easy. Most people couldn't even afford epic ground mounts for the first several months.

 

[Syl]

As someone who has made developement for two, three different servers in potentially thousands of hours, this is just bollocks. In current strain of private servers ( Or any ever really) there really aren't any that'd not have massive differencies to how retail played out. Whetever something is scripted or not means very little when matters around it are dysfunctional.

One of the very good examples of this is how mob balance works and how they're often overtuned through two different values (attack speed - damage range) while undertuned thru' miscalculations based on lack of information ( sunder armor removing armor in linear fashion instead of more and more incrementally as stacks are applied )

Lets say we have mob called A on a private server. On private server, this mob A typically has attack speed ranging somewhere between 0.763 (something totally arbitary) and it's damage range is 150-165. In retail Classic, this said mob would have attack speed of 2 and damage range of 120-135. That's not a shy difference of minutiae scale. And this oftentimes is even more evident on elite mobs.

This is how most mobs in private server scene works vs. how they appear in retail. That is why we had mass amount of "retail classic is too easy, this is not how I remember vanilla" crying from peeps who base their experience entirely around private servers. They have no context, no understanding and then go claiming they know how it should be. Same goes with mob abilities. Majority of mobs in the core databases misses most of their abilities and usually have 1-2 notable ones to give just enough illusion, mainly for 1 reason. Adding abilities thru' database which is the easy way often bugs out in spectacular fashions and no core has yet solved this and coding them to have those abilities thru' core edits requires plenty of programming and is rarely cost effective.

The second notion is that no one knows how armor reduction calcultations are really done, same for resistances so we often end up situations where mobs lack armour entirely if they have their armor values set to their correct numbers instead of imaginary boosted armor values which is a -massive- boost to any melee DPS.

To say there would be less bugs on retail when they have access to proper 1.12 client for referencing than on a private server who has no real data on many of the major matters and have a lot of shit simply tuned out into wackiness only showcases there's a big perspective issues.

You obviously know your stuff, I don't. Maybe you have an opinon on this (I don't ).
This happened last year on this server: Based on this formula for armor reduction,

uint32 Unit::CalcArmorReducedDamage(Unit* pVictim, const uint32 damage)
{
    uint32 newdamage = 0;
    float armor = pVictim->GetArmor();
    float tmpvalue = armor / (getLevel() * 85.0 + 400.0 +armor);

    if(tmpvalue < 0)
        tmpvalue = 0.0;
    if(tmpvalue > 0.75)
        tmpvalue = 0.75;
    newdamage = uint32(damage - (damage * tmpvalue));

    return (newdamage > 1) ? newdamage : 1;
}

they did a one year investigation of old vanilla videos and decided to reduce the armor of most bosses from ~4700 to ~3700.

Any idea if it's valid?

 

[FreeKaner]

I don't get the argument about only 1% of players doing AQ40/Naxx or even later BT/Sunwell. That just means 99% of the players in the realms are on the same page and same level, so what's the problem?

 

[J1M]

Never understood why they dump new players into empty leveling zones instead of having servers that are full of lower level players and having people pick a realm once they hit the latest expansion. Then you don't have to invalidate everything before the end-game.

 

[Metro]

I don't get the argument about only 1% of players doing AQ40/Naxx or even later BT/Sunwell. That just means 99% of the players in the realms are on the same page and same level, so what's the problem?

The "problem" from the consumer's perspective is that you are designing content that 99% of your playerbase won't see and/or has no interest in seeing. The argument was never about certain people having powerful gear, it was about resource/man-hour allocation in development.

 

[J1M]

Perhaps they need to invent more endgame content with some level of challenge that is not raiding then.

Obviously coercing people into raiding has not prevented subscriptions from falling.

Ergo, that approach, however rhetorically convincing, is objectively wrong.

 

[Metro]

They did that in the form of what we see in modern WoW: world quests, new Timeless Isle-like zones, new five mans, and mythics that allow the five man dungeons to scale. I think it's a decent job but, personally, I get bored of doing that stuff in about a month. Of course, I get bored of raiding, too. Unless you're into farming I don't think the fundamental design of WoW will hold anyone's attention for very long.

 

[J1M]

The key word there was 'challenge'. Twenty difficulty levels of the same dungeon is not interesting or fun. It is also lazy.

I agree they need to shake things up. If they had decided not to make traditional raid zones and instead put all their effort into Warfronts as a single-expansion form of endgame content (instead of an automatic victory timesink) it might have worked out.

It could have been a type of organized content where the players had to respond to shifting conditions created by the AI.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

 

[Hobo Elf]

The key word there was 'challenge'. Twenty difficulty levels of the same dungeon is not interesting or fun. It is also lazy.

I agree they need to shake things up. If they had decided not to make traditional raid zones and instead put all their effort into Warfronts as a single-expansion form of endgame content (instead of an automatic victory timesink) it might have worked out.

It could have been a type of organized content where the players had to respond to shifting conditions created by the AI.

It actually is fun, but it wears out its welcome fast when it's the only decent content worth doing out there. And it became increasingly harder / longer to find a decent group to play with as players started dropping like flies, which made it not really worth your time to try and organize a party for Mythic+ dungeons. I mean, I played a Healer and my friend was a Tank, and we still struggled to find DPS after a while. That's fucking crazy. You know the game is dead when you have a hard time finding DPS ffs.

 

[Metro]

It actually is fun, but it wears out its welcome fast when it's the only decent content worth doing out there. And it became increasingly harder / longer to find a decent group to play with as players started dropping like flies, which made it not really worth your time to try and organize a party for Mythic+ dungeons. I mean, I played a Healer and my friend was a Tank, and we still struggled to find DPS after a while. That's fucking crazy. You know the game is dead when you have a hard time finding DPS ffs.

This is the biggest reason I don't get into WoW more than a month or two per expansion. You need to know decent players in order to do dungeons and whatnot. Playing with randoms is ten times more frustrating than any entertainment value you would get out of it. Main reason I will wait a few months before playing Classic -- let the baddies disperse after the initial wave.

 

[deama]

I really hate how in most MMOs I play a class and when I level up it assigns attribute points automatically, e.g. in WoW my warrior kept getting intelligence, like, why? That's fucking useless for him!

 

[J1M]

It increases how quickly your weapon skill ranks up.

 

[Syl]

It increases how quickly your weapon skill ranks up.

On a vanilla server, I tested this. As a feral druid, I had plenty of weapon skills still at 1 at level 60. For one, I used my feral gear (~+300 intel) and reached 280 in 1 hour. For another one, I used my healing gear (~+600 intel) and reached 280 in 1 hour. Double the attribute, roughly same result. If it has an impact, it's negligible.

 

[J1M]

Or maybe +300 int already put you at the effectiveness cap.

That is far more than a warrior would have. (By vanilla server I assume that you mean private server in which case your test is also invalid.)

 

[Wilian]

It increases how quickly your weapon skill ranks up.

On a vanilla server, I tested this. As a feral druid, I had plenty of weapon skills still at 1 at level 60. For one, I used my feral gear (~+300 intel) and reached 280 in 1 hour. For another one, I used my healing gear (~+600 intel) and reached 280 in 1 hour. Double the attribute, roughly same result. If it has an impact, it's negligible.

None of the private servers has any idea of the values regarding int -> weapon skill speed scaling and many servers outright has this whole thing broken.

 

[Syl]

It increases how quickly your weapon skill ranks up.

On a vanilla server, I tested this. As a feral druid, I had plenty of weapon skills still at 1 at level 60. For one, I used my feral gear (~+300 intel) and reached 280 in 1 hour. For another one, I used my healing gear (~+600 intel) and reached 280 in 1 hour. Double the attribute, roughly same result. If it has an impact, it's negligible.

None of the private servers has any idea of the values regarding int -> weapon skill speed scaling and many servers outright has this whole thing broken.

Or maybe +300 int already put you at the effectiveness cap.

That is far more than a warrior would have. (By vanilla server I assume that you mean private server in which case your test is also invalid.)

Ok ok, you got me.

I would be interested to know what it will be on Classic. I seriously doubt it will have any meaningful impact. Nobody tested that back in the day?

 

[J1M]

I was being a little glib. I think the only reason a melee class would have a set of intellect gear would be a shaman that needed to level 2-handed weapon skill after respec.

Int is the worst stat for warriors, but interestingly spirit is not worthless for them. It increases the amount of health the warrior will regen when moving between mobs, reducing required eating and overall downtime enough that it actually makes sense for it to appear on plate levelling gear.

(Something that was certainly not common knowledge back in the day.)

 

[Lyric Suite]

I don't get the argument about only 1% of players doing AQ40/Naxx or even later BT/Sunwell. That just means 99% of the players in the realms are on the same page and same level, so what's the problem?

It's because people felt they deserved to have access to all the content they were paying for, either by means of the subscription or by buying the expansions. At least that's the argument i believe. Not that they didn't try to give content for casual people as well, new races, new starting areas etc, but i guess the majority felt "cheated" that they made content that was very hard to access but which everybody had to fund whether they got to experience it or not.