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.
Ignore the fact both games are called Wow ... in reality they are 2 completely different games. I stress that most vanilla players simply want official support for a game Blizzard once supported but no longer does in any way. Blizzard simply has to create a solution to draw back these lost players under their support.
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 -- every character, every location, every dungeon, every raid, every piece of equipment, every NPC, every bit of lore, every everything. Whether or not it exists in what you feel is "not its original form", hardly matters from a legal and ethical standpoint when compared to the simple cold fact that every bit of World of Warcraft is Blizzard's to do with what they please...or not. For the time being, that does not include vanilla / classic servers.
you are acting like this dev team is passionate and great. much better than the teams that work twice as hard and you can see it in their games because you are a huge fan of the game from your responses here. Blizzard might have talent but their time frame for patch cycles speaks volumes about how good they really are. Since the early days of wow their teams have been slow about releasing content , much slower than the average team releases on other games. Even during vanilla wow they were dropping subs left and right because of how bad their teams were at release tackling major bugs and network issues that almost killed wow out of the gate. Not to mention the lack of content updates for many many months because of a supergiant expansion that people are done with in less than a few weeks and have to wait months again to continue the story.
Now is wow bad quality no its not, but to act like this dev team is so great or passionate is an excuse to continue to allow them to screw their fans over each patch cycle with even lazier decisions and lack of content for many months. When they destroyed half the world and revamped all the quests during cataclysm you could easily get behind them for taking a long time but that was a major revamp and not some new zones and quests. I personally think management is by far the laziest out there in the triple A companies milking their player base to this day.
As for a private server for vanilla, you can count on something coming from this people are speaking on it constantly. Keep the noise up and it will happen and blizzard obviously talking to the nostal team means they are discussion things that might come of it obviously. I personally wouldn't touch a pristine realm regardless of what they say because the last thing I want to do and many others want is to have to keep leveling up to 110 , it's too many levels and to many quests of the exact same thing where you die of sheer boredom.
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.
Not easy to do classic servers? Have you even thought about the logistics that have to go into putting classic servers back up? Apparently you have not if you think that is a easy process to do.
They have to rebuild the patcher to support two seperate installs of WoW that use completely different data formats now (Remember WoW has switched its data formats atleast two different times over the last few years). They now have to find hardware that can support the legacy server software from back then. You now need an additional maintance crew to support said hardware as vanilla WoW needed to do weekly maintance otherwise it would crash and burn on itself.
You now need to spin up another smaller dev team to support said vanilla wow (cause despite what people think there was a good number of bugs and exploits across the board back then that will need to be worked through). You now need to spin up old CS tools to support said vanilla wow and that means you need to teach your cs team to use two different toolsets for support (so you need to deploy all that and setup for your CS to use) as current WoW support system is no longer compatible with vanilla wow (or you need to take the dev time to bring a old system up to support the new tools. Both solutions take a lot of time to get working correctly)
Now you have to educate the playerbase that if they want to play vanilla wow they will need to download and install a seperate copy of wow (cause lets just be honest there is zero chance you can play vanilla wow with the new clients).
And this is just touching the tip of the iceburg in the logistics of what has to happen behind the scenes to make this work. It is so much more then just a bunch of people going ok lets make a vanilla wow server and then starting up some old software laying around. (And I doubt there current account system will work with vanilla wow so your going to have to spend a good chunk of dev and web team time to get some system in place to connect the two back together)
And all of this for a Vanilla WoW experience that people will enjoy for a year or so and then be bored to death because they have done everything in Vanilla WoW and there will be zero expansions, new content, ect. coming to the Vanilla experience.
The same issue Nost was running into when there Vanilla WoW experience and what to do once the population caught upto the endgame at the time. The players did not want the BC expansion on the Vanilla Servers so they planned to launch BC servers seperate. I honestly do not see a positive outcome to bringing up Vanilla WoW servers for Blizzard. As much as I enjoyed and loved Vanilla WoW the time has come and gone. It just does not make sense from a business side of things.
The smart thing for Blizzard to do would be to get the Nost time to form a small company that Blizzard could lease the rights to run / host and operate a Vanilla Server(s) with Blizzard then taking a back seat row and supervisioning. They could then allow Nost to charge a fee to play on said servers and Blizzard would just take a % cut off the top of that.
That way Blizzard has nothing to lose other then potential IP damages if Nost does something stupid with there license.
But even that has potential issues cause if they do that then they open there selfs up to other companies wanting to get a license to do the same.
And that also begs to defer that even if Nost was to bring the servers back up now would people switch back to them from the other private server they are now playing on that has picked up something like 80% of the Nost population?
I understand why they must protect their brand, failure to do so once opens them up to never being able to, so pirate servers have to go.
I do not agree with the "huge" operational challenges though. Mythic ran 3 separate rule sets back in the day, on a shoestring budget.
Korean gaming companies run separate code bases by region, we dont get whatever Korea got last year, its localized, customized and sometimes quite different yet somehow they manage to patch an maintain all of them
Daybreak runs progression servers of EQ, how is possible they can, but Blizz cant?
Just not buying that excuse since real world examples exist to prove it false.
They should at least be up front and acknowledge they won't pursue any avenue that isn't acceptably profitable, that one I'll believe.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
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.
More depth? are you actually serious?
Vanilla Paladin's were relegated to one of three roles:
- Healbot (which almost every paladin was pigeon-holed into playing, because your ability to provide short buffs through blessings and heal/decurse was all you were really good for).
- Retribution (which was so poorly designed at the time that the spec only had two melee attacks: auto attack and SoCom, which was a proc based on RNG).
- Reckoning Bomber (a gimmick mainly used for trolling or killing complete scrubs who didn't know what to expect from a prot specced Paladin because nobody ever took a Paladin "tank" over a Warrior due to one being far and above the other in terms of performance).
It wasn't until TBC that they actually started to become a genuinely viable melee class, which was entirely thanks to the addition of Crusader Strike and a few obscure talent changes. Paladins were the red-headed stepchild of WoW for the first few years of the game, that is a well known fact.
I was an R14, Grand Marshal, during that era of the game (Zerachiel, I'm actually listed on the Bonechewer wiki, look it up). I was also a member of the one of the most prolific world first progression guilds. I played Paladin from day one of the game and saw every single tidbit of content the game had to offer during vanilla, you don't get any more experienced than I am.
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.
The Nost team didnt make a profit off of their server so how did it rob Blizzard? Does Blizzard offer the version of WOW that Nost was running? Nope. So how are they robbing blizzard?
Why would you hire the Nost Team? Because it will bring WOW players back. There is a large following that want the classic version and Blizzard will make a profit off it. Just talk to Mark Kern who knows what the hell he is talking about.
Profit has little to do with it they offered a free alternative ( a counterfeit) to blizzards live service. WOuld you think it's okay to obtain a copy of a new movie then put it up in your "free" theater without permission? You'd be shutdown in a heartbeat.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I understand why they must protect their brand, failure to do so once opens them up to never being able to, so pirate servers have to go.
I do not agree with the "huge" operational challenges though. Mythic ran 3 separate rule sets back in the day, on a shoestring budget.
Korean gaming companies run separate code bases by region, we dont get whatever Korea got last year, its localized, customized and sometimes quite different yet somehow they manage to patch an maintain all of them
Daybreak runs progression servers of EQ, how is possible they can, but Blizz cant?
Just not buying that excuse since real world examples exist to prove it false.
I think the operation challenges aren't overstated at all.
The 3 rulesets for Mythic are different from completely different code bases. If the engine supports different rule configurations, but is still the same engine, then that is a completely different scenario.
Korean game companies don't run entirely different code bases. They run different rule sets with different data files. The engines are still fundamentally the same. It also takes most of them a huge amount of time to make the translation and update the western client and servers.
Daybreak runs progression servers of EQ and EQ2 based on their current engine, not the original code bases. That's been a big complaint from legacy fans, that the game isn't the same as the original. There is a big complaint thread on the EQ2 forums right now because Necros are super OP in the latest EoF expansion when they were mediocre "back then". Back then it was rangers who were OP and this is what the playerbase expected. As a result the EQ2 TLE player faction is unhappy with DBG over this and their apparent inability to resolve the issue.
None of these legacy implementations have been easy and smooth. It's a monumental, and I guess expensive, task to translate from the East to the West which is why we lost our Lineage 1 servers. Either that or NCSoft are bigger bastards than Blizz.
That's just a portion of the technical hurdles, not to mention the unified patcher, community division, resource allocation, monetization, and I'm sure there are other things I'm forgetting.
Exactly a lot of naive suppositions that Blizzard is just plain greedy and mean not to do it. They probably saying they are considering it but in reality they will not give this much thought seeing as they have bigger fish to fry in expansions and other games.
I understand why they must protect their brand, failure to do so once opens them up to never being able to, so pirate servers have to go.
I do not agree with the "huge" operational challenges though. Mythic ran 3 separate rule sets back in the day, on a shoestring budget.
Korean gaming companies run separate code bases by region, we dont get whatever Korea got last year, its localized, customized and sometimes quite different yet somehow they manage to patch an maintain all of them
Daybreak runs progression servers of EQ, how is possible they can, but Blizz cant?
Just not buying that excuse since real world examples exist to prove it false.
They should at least be up front and acknowledge they won't pursue any avenue that isn't acceptably profitable, that one I'll believe.
Classic WoW is a completely different game from current WoW. It would essentially be another game, an older, uglier and buggier game.
The solution is easy to allow a private server to operate while protecting the intellectual property of Blizzard would be to charge a small franchise license fee. Now the property still belongs to Blizzard and the IP is being properly paid for by way of lease.
The solution is easy to allow a private server to operate while protecting the intellectual property of Blizzard would be to charge a small franchise license fee. Now the property still belongs to Blizzard and the IP is being properly paid for by way of lease.
erm...how is licence fee supposed to protect the IP?!
The solution is easy to allow a private server to operate while protecting the intellectual property of Blizzard would be to charge a small franchise license fee. Now the property still belongs to Blizzard and the IP is being properly paid for by way of lease.
erm...how is licence fee supposed to protect the IP?!
I guess it's a comparison to what a franchise does in certain cases. Like restaurants, etc. can let an individual run/operate it as long as they adhere to the guidelines set by the company. Not sure if that's what was meant, just what I understood.
SedrynTyros said: This can be done with a contract. Those no doubt about that.
Contracts bear 0 protective power, they can only help to mitigate some damage.
To quote the letter:
"And while we’ve looked into the possibility – there is not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server."
Sounds like everyone has their own agenda to push and private servers wasn't one of them. I think the easiest thing to do would be to just hire them and make it an extension of WoW putting them in charge of the classic server. But then a larger business would start holding them accountable to do more and make it profitable. Nice to see good communication, as a lot of other MMO's would have just responded with silence.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
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.
Clearly you didn't play vanilla.
I was always the guy that played odd specs. I was there from launch and I stand by what I say. I loved my vanilla Pally way more than what we have now. Just because most people didnt know how to make their own specs does not mean everyone played the cookie cutter.
Exactly a lot of naive suppositions that Blizzard is just plain greedy and mean not to do it. They probably saying they are considering it but in reality they will not give this much thought seeing as they have bigger fish to fry in expansions and other games.
Well you seem to be making the case that they are not greedy and mean but are instead just heartless and pursuing new money.
MMORPG players are often like Hobbits: They don't like Adventures
Please make a pristine server... but its also important that the current end game on said pristine server resembles vanilla so even on live, as they release the expansions down the road they need to look at some of the other things that made classic so great and go back to that. For one, they've ruined professions. Second, make the general world content at least somewhat challenging so any class can't just mash the keyboard and kill a dozen mobs at the same time. I loved classic when a single add could kill me. I had to at least be aware and pay attention. I liked grouping to do general level progression quests. It's become too boring with every class having way too many survival skills/spells. Sounds like the next expansion is handling a lot of these things so if that was combined with this "Pristine server" idea I'd totally be in. It would be even better than vanilla. Breathing new life into the game while bringing back the sense of community, challenge and fun from vanilla is a sure win in my eyes.
If they were to make a vanilla server, it wouldn't be true vanilla, but vanilla with a twist. They would incorporate a lot of the current stuff with the old most likely. Kind of like what EQ does.
The reason they're not doing it, is because it is not worthwhile for them to do it yet. Once they lose a couple million more subs, then they will probably consider it to bring back customers. It has nothing to do with greed. It is just not profitable enough for the effort yet.
Please make a pristine server... but its also important that the current end game on said pristine server resembles vanilla so even on live, as they release the expansions down the road they need to look at some of the other things that made classic so great and go back to that. For one, they've ruined professions. Second, make the general world content at least somewhat challenging so any class can't just mash the keyboard and kill a dozen mobs at the same time. I loved classic when a single add could kill me. I had to at least be aware and pay attention. I liked grouping to do general level progression quests. It's become too boring with every class having way too many survival skills/spells. Sounds like the next expansion is handling a lot of these things so if that was combined with this "Pristine server" idea I'd totally be in. It would be even better than vanilla. Breathing new life into the game while bringing back the sense of community, challenge and fun from vanilla is a sure win in my eyes.
I would return for a pristine server. No fast leveling, no heirloom gear, no transfers. Would be awesome!
I am sure it has been mentioned several times in here already, but J. Allen Brack is the same smug ass that told players that vanilla servers were never even considered at Blizzcon 2013.
Q: "Have you ever thought about adding servers for previous expansions as they were then?"
A: "No. And by the way, you don't want to do that either. You think you do, but you don't."
Now here he is claiming that they have talked about it often for years. Not sure why he thinks nobody will remember him literally saying that they never thought about it just a few events earlier.
Now he keeps getting hit with proof over and over that yes, this is in fact what a large number of players want. There are large numbers of players that think the changes made to WoW made the game worse, that the changes he was a part of have been a detriment to the game.
I understand why they must protect their brand, failure to do so once opens them up to never being able to, so pirate servers have to go.
I do not agree with the "huge" operational challenges though. Mythic ran 3 separate rule sets back in the day, on a shoestring budget.
Korean gaming companies run separate code bases by region, we dont get whatever Korea got last year, its localized, customized and sometimes quite different yet somehow they manage to patch an maintain all of them
Daybreak runs progression servers of EQ, how is possible they can, but Blizz cant?
Just not buying that excuse since real world examples exist to prove it false.
They should at least be up front and acknowledge they won't pursue any avenue that isn't acceptably profitable, that one I'll believe.
Is that based on your specific knowledge of their code base? Or you just guessing?
Oh, Daybreak did it therefore all other developers MUST do it the same way.
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
Sounds like everyone has their own agenda to push and private servers wasn't one of them. I think the easiest thing to do would be to just hire them and make it an extension of WoW putting them in charge of the classic server. But then a larger business would start holding them accountable to do more and make it profitable. Nice to see good communication, as a lot of other MMO's would have just responded with silence.
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
People can compare what other companies are doing versus what Blizzard could do but a main thing is missing in those comparisons....nothing else in the MMORPG genre is as successful as WoW so they dont need to lol. People will complain even if Blizzard does make the 'vanilla' servers, since you'll have to pay for that and I'm pretty sure people didn't have to pay for the private servers?
Nostalgia is a powerful force when combined with no subscription.
People keep saying stuff like this, rose colored glasses and such. But just look at the success behind EQs classic servers (mostly classic). I mean, they're the only ones smart enough to cash in on the idea, and yes it requires a subscription.
There are/were more than one WoW private servers, but which ones were more popular? Classic. Not because they were free.
The thing is they know players arent happy with the current state of WoW and most will go to play the Vanilla server. There not wanting to take the chance of sub drops I bet. And lets be honest nobody can say with a straight face that vanilla wasnt better then this lobbied turd WoW turned in to.
It's only a pirate server because it's not licensed, lol. This is not some unusual circumstance here. Companies license out their IP to other companies all the time. Dungeons and Dragons ring a bell?
Comments
you are acting like this dev team is passionate and great. much better than the teams that work twice as hard and you can see it in their games because you are a huge fan of the game from your responses here. Blizzard might have talent but their time frame for patch cycles speaks volumes about how good they really are. Since the early days of wow their teams have been slow about releasing content , much slower than the average team releases on other games. Even during vanilla wow they were dropping subs left and right because of how bad their teams were at release tackling major bugs and network issues that almost killed wow out of the gate. Not to mention the lack of content updates for many many months because of a supergiant expansion that people are done with in less than a few weeks and have to wait months again to continue the story.
Now is wow bad quality no its not, but to act like this dev team is so great or passionate is an excuse to continue to allow them to screw their fans over each patch cycle with even lazier decisions and lack of content for many months. When they destroyed half the world and revamped all the quests during cataclysm you could easily get behind them for taking a long time but that was a major revamp and not some new zones and quests. I personally think management is by far the laziest out there in the triple A companies milking their player base to this day.
As for a private server for vanilla, you can count on something coming from this people are speaking on it constantly. Keep the noise up and it will happen and blizzard obviously talking to the nostal team means they are discussion things that might come of it obviously. I personally wouldn't touch a pristine realm regardless of what they say because the last thing I want to do and many others want is to have to keep leveling up to 110 , it's too many levels and to many quests of the exact same thing where you die of sheer boredom.
They have to rebuild the patcher to support two seperate installs of WoW that use completely different data formats now (Remember WoW has switched its data formats atleast two different times over the last few years). They now have to find hardware that can support the legacy server software from back then. You now need an additional maintance crew to support said hardware as vanilla WoW needed to do weekly maintance otherwise it would crash and burn on itself.
You now need to spin up another smaller dev team to support said vanilla wow (cause despite what people think there was a good number of bugs and exploits across the board back then that will need to be worked through). You now need to spin up old CS tools to support said vanilla wow and that means you need to teach your cs team to use two different toolsets for support (so you need to deploy all that and setup for your CS to use) as current WoW support system is no longer compatible with vanilla wow (or you need to take the dev time to bring a old system up to support the new tools. Both solutions take a lot of time to get working correctly)
Now you have to educate the playerbase that if they want to play vanilla wow they will need to download and install a seperate copy of wow (cause lets just be honest there is zero chance you can play vanilla wow with the new clients).
And this is just touching the tip of the iceburg in the logistics of what has to happen behind the scenes to make this work. It is so much more then just a bunch of people going ok lets make a vanilla wow server and then starting up some old software laying around. (And I doubt there current account system will work with vanilla wow so your going to have to spend a good chunk of dev and web team time to get some system in place to connect the two back together)
And all of this for a Vanilla WoW experience that people will enjoy for a year or so and then be bored to death because they have done everything in Vanilla WoW and there will be zero expansions, new content, ect. coming to the Vanilla experience.
The same issue Nost was running into when there Vanilla WoW experience and what to do once the population caught upto the endgame at the time. The players did not want the BC expansion on the Vanilla Servers so they planned to launch BC servers seperate. I honestly do not see a positive outcome to bringing up Vanilla WoW servers for Blizzard. As much as I enjoyed and loved Vanilla WoW the time has come and gone. It just does not make sense from a business side of things.
The smart thing for Blizzard to do would be to get the Nost time to form a small company that Blizzard could lease the rights to run / host and operate a Vanilla Server(s) with Blizzard then taking a back seat row and supervisioning. They could then allow Nost to charge a fee to play on said servers and Blizzard would just take a % cut off the top of that.
That way Blizzard has nothing to lose other then potential IP damages if Nost does something stupid with there license.
But even that has potential issues cause if they do that then they open there selfs up to other companies wanting to get a license to do the same.
And that also begs to defer that even if Nost was to bring the servers back up now would people switch back to them from the other private server they are now playing on that has picked up something like 80% of the Nost population?
I do not agree with the "huge" operational challenges though. Mythic ran 3 separate rule sets back in the day, on a shoestring budget.
Korean gaming companies run separate code bases by region, we dont get whatever Korea got last year, its localized, customized and sometimes quite different yet somehow they manage to patch an maintain all of them
Daybreak runs progression servers of EQ, how is possible they can, but Blizz cant?
Just not buying that excuse since real world examples exist to prove it false. They should at least be up front and acknowledge they won't pursue any avenue that isn't acceptably profitable, that one I'll believe.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Vanilla Paladin's were relegated to one of three roles:
- Healbot (which almost every paladin was pigeon-holed into playing, because your ability to provide short buffs through blessings and heal/decurse was all you were really good for).
- Retribution (which was so poorly designed at the time that the spec only had two melee attacks: auto attack and SoCom, which was a proc based on RNG).
- Reckoning Bomber (a gimmick mainly used for trolling or killing complete scrubs who didn't know what to expect from a prot specced Paladin because nobody ever took a Paladin "tank" over a Warrior due to one being far and above the other in terms of performance).
It wasn't until TBC that they actually started to become a genuinely viable melee class, which was entirely thanks to the addition of Crusader Strike and a few obscure talent changes. Paladins were the red-headed stepchild of WoW for the first few years of the game, that is a well known fact.
I was an R14, Grand Marshal, during that era of the game (Zerachiel, I'm actually listed on the Bonechewer wiki, look it up). I was also a member of the one of the most prolific world first progression guilds. I played Paladin from day one of the game and saw every single tidbit of content the game had to offer during vanilla, you don't get any more experienced than I am.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
Not sure if that's what was meant, just what I understood.
To quote the letter:
"And while we’ve looked into the possibility – there is not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server."
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
The reason they're not doing it, is because it is not worthwhile for them to do it yet. Once they lose a couple million more subs, then they will probably consider it to bring back customers. It has nothing to do with greed. It is just not profitable enough for the effort yet.
Now here he is claiming that they have talked about it often for years. Not sure why he thinks nobody will remember him literally saying that they never thought about it just a few events earlier.
Now he keeps getting hit with proof over and over that yes, this is in fact what a large number of players want. There are large numbers of players that think the changes made to WoW made the game worse, that the changes he was a part of have been a detriment to the game.
Is that based on your specific knowledge of their code base? Or you just guessing?
Oh, Daybreak did it therefore all other developers MUST do it the same way.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"