Wednesday, April 20, 2016

WoW Legends Server Idea

I think opening an actual Vanilla WoW server, with Vanilla quests, classes, talent trees, and other systems would be way too much work for too little reward.

However, I do think that, for a reasonably small amount of effort, Blizzard could make a version of the current game that reasonably approximated the original experience. I'll call such a server a "Legends" server.

A Legends server would have:
  • A constant Legends debuff which reduced health, damage done, healing done, and XP gained by about 50%.
  • Looking For Group/Raid disabled
  • Heirlooms disabled
  • No server transfers
  • No cross-realm zones
  • Battlegrounds/Arena disabled
  • One character per account per server
  • Pet Battle Queue disabled
  • No Starter Edition accounts
  • No Death Knights / Demon Hunters, classes which start at a higher level
  • Black Market Auction disabled
I think that would be enough to create a Vanilla-like experience. You'd still have the same quests, classes and talents as the regular game. But a lot of the elements which Vanilla champions say hurt communities would be disabled. I also think that the amount of work required to create such a server would be relatively low.

You'll note that the one thing I did not add was a level cap of 60, or disabling access to expansions. I think that will be very buggy, and end up eating a lot of QA and bugfixing resources. It would also require class design to be tuned for a cap of 60. Raids at 60 would have be tuned again. As well, there is gear from the expansions available at 60 that outstrips raid gear, and trying to keep that gear out of the hands of capped 60s might be a lot of work.

I think trying for a lower cap is simply unfeasible. Better to simply have the same game as the regular servers, just with some added restrictions. The Legends debuff could be reduced at the real maximum level too, if that turns out to be an issue.

I think a compromise like this could worthwhile for Blizzard to experiment with. Personally, I think a lot of people would roll on the server, but most would soon go back to the regular game.

25 comments:

  1. Interesting idea. But Blizzard would also have to remake AoE abilities. Otherwise tanks would still storm into mobs in dungeons and the group and healers would spam AoE threat/damage/heals.

    Also, Blizzard would have to deactivate the possibility to have quest locations marked on the map. Which, unfortunately, would mean to rework quest description, which nowadays often don't include the location anymore.

    Finally, Blizzard would have to return professions which are useless during leveling right now.

    Even if they did all this, the experience would still suffer from the many timelines which are mashed together. For example, quests would assume four different warchiefs which would be hard to understand for the players. Blizzard would have to make the lore and story consistent again.

    Otherwise I agree, this might be an option.

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    1. For AoE, if mobs are dangerous enough that you have to CC or kill things quickly AoE becomes less viable. But maybe AoE would need to be specifically reduced further.

      I'm primarily looking at this from a minimum amount of work perspective. Disabling quest markers, and reworking lore and stories, would be nice to have, but I think it will end up as a lot more work than the options I chose.

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  2. @Niels: with reduced health and healing done, tanks could die.

    @Rohan: Vanilla servers need no effort. I'm 100% sure that they have a 2008 backup laying around. They only had to solve the login issues (attach that server to Battle.net). The reason why they don't make Vanilla and especially won't make your idea is that it's against the WoW philosophy: every drooling retard is entitled to every reward, being skilled only grants you faster rewards or maybe feats of strengths. In a Vanilla server, or on your server, morons and slackers simply couldn't play.

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    1. I think it's a lot harder than you're expecting. That code is 10 years old. There's probably a lot of fixes that would need to be done.

      To be honest, I think the modern WoW backend is fundamentally different these days. I think it's more virtual servers running on an internal cloud system than a true physical server system like Vanilla.

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  3. Why would they do that. Nobody asks for an annoying version of current WoW.

    The game you just created already exists. It's every other WoW clone created the last 10 years.

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    1. Really? I see lots of calls that Wow is "too easy" and LFD/LFR has caused "a loss of community" and similar complaints.

      I agree with you that there are lots of choices if people truly want a Vanilla-like experience. But for better or worse, those choices seem to be off the table. It's like the players are not "MMO players", they're "World of Warcraft players".

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    2. Vanilla had meeting stones. You could sign up at any inn keeper for every dungeon and the game would automatically create a group for you. :-)

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  4. @gevlon:
    A major gameplay element of classic was that tanks could lose threat if they were not good or there were too many mobs. This added a lot of dynamic, because healers couldn't just concentrate on the tank and group damage didn't require scripted 'fires'.

    Too add to my lost:the mp5 mana regen would have to be reintroduced so that players could actually go oom and mana management meant something.

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    1. That's a good point. Out-of-combat mana regen would have to be reduced drastically. After all, it isn't the Vanilla WoW experience if you don't eat and drink after every fight.

      In-combat regen would be nice to reduce, but I think it would cause balance issues. Certain classes might simply not work with less regen. As my aim is to avoid class rebalancing and tuning, we'd probably have to leave in-combat regen alone.

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  5. I would play on a Vanilla server, but not a Legends one. For me, and I may be a minority of a minority, it is the idea of revisiting the zones as they were and doing many of the quest chains that are no longer there which is the main appeal for me.

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    1. Yes, I understand your point. But I think that's not feasible, so I'm suggesting a "next best option".

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  6. From my perspective, the appeal of a Vanilla server is getting the Old World, pre-Cata, back. Without it, there's just not that much appeal there.

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    1. As I replied to Pallais, I think getting the pre-Cata world back is very unlikely, so this is a "next best option".

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  7. I floated a couple of ideas about possible special rules servers that Blizz could do to raise interest or cater to a crowd that wants something special. (I had something similar to yours in a comment on SynCaine's post about vanilla servers.) I think, in part, a new server where everybody starts at level 1 and that doesn't allow transfers is a good baseline. One of the key ingredients of the old days was a large population in the low level zones.

    @Gevlon - Even if they have those 2008 backups, there will still be work to do. A lot has changed in the last 8 years and Blizz isn't, for example, going to be keen to put something up that likely has security holes they have since fixed. I don't think the effort would be as impossible as Tom Chilton says, but they would still probably need 10-25 people and at least a year of time to get things into shape.

    Meanwhile, the current WoW customers would be screaming because those people should be, in their view, working on content for them and not some retro server nonsense. As they Jagex interview the other day indicated, there isn't a lot of cross over between nostalgia players and current players.

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    1. Yes, a Vanilla server that most people want is essentially Blizzard releasing an entirely new game, which happens to have the same name and content as a previous version.

      In the end, I guess it just shows that the Cata revamp was an entirely bad idea (which I've noted on several occasions).

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    2. You're making the wrong assumption. Blizzard doesn't have to do the work of making a Vanilla server viable. All they would need to do is license the option for Vanilla servers to people. Players have already shown that they are willing to make the effort to get Vanilla servers running. So just tap their efforts.

      If Blizzard wanted to, they could limit them to just recouping the cost of development & ongoing maintenance. Heck, force any logins to be through Battle.ent and Blizzard would know exactly how many were using these servers. This way Blizzard would be sure no one was profiting from their IP. If they wanted to be nice they could let folks charge a subscription, say $5 per month, and split the profits 70/30 (70% going to Blizzard).

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    3. @Pallais - That's one of those things they could do, but since they are Blizzard, would never do. There is no way they would let anybody officially fly the Blizzard/WoW flag without making sure everything lived up to the standards they have set. And doubly so if people had to pay. So, as far as assumptions go, I think you are the one on thin ice in assuming that Blizz would ever go for such an idea. It just isn't within them.

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  8. Im sorry, but I do not think that such a server would even come close to tickling the "urge" to play vanilla that some people have. It might be a hit with a small fraction of those people, but my guess would be that the vast majority of "vanilla"-wanters would look with scorn at such a play by blizzard.

    This is my guess though, of cause i could be misunderstanding the wants of the vanilla-base. But i would think that the core game-play mechanics at the very least would have to be vanilla-esque. (Tanking/healing for instance).

    Blizz has done a LOT more to the game than just add features like the ones you suggest disabling. They have radically changed how the various roles play out (tanking, healing and even DPSing is vastly different experiences now than they were), and for many the urge for a vanilla experience is as much an urge for those roles to play (together) like they did back then, as it is for features like LFD to be gone.

    Some of the suggestions you make would (in my oppinion) specifically hurt the game. Like 1 character only (thats NOT vanilla like).

    I think you are correct that Blizz is more likely to make some sort of legacy server like you suggest, rather than actually giving a "true" vanilla experience. But i think that would be misunderstanding the point of those asking for a vanilla experience.

    Shandren

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    1. I understand what people want. I just don't think that's possible or likely. I'm just suggesting something that I think is possible, and will have somewhat the same "feel" as Vanilla did.

      As for the one player per server restriction, my recollection of Vanilla is that people were far more focused on their main characters. In the modern game, the distinction between "mains" and "alts" is a lot weaker, with many players flipping between characters often.

      My idea with that restriction was to bring back a Vanilla-style focus on your "main" character. It also plays into the reputation requires for a server community. It's hard to blacklist someone for poor behaviour if they have a dozen alts.

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  9. Sorry, but I see zero appeal in that either. I get the impression you don't really understand the interests of "Vanilla players", also based on the comment in your previous post that people should just go play RIFT or whatever instead.

    For me, the main thing attracting me to a Vanilla server was seeing the old world again, the old quests, lore that makes sense - none of this is covered by your suggestion.

    Also, one thing I learned quickly is that people have lots of completely different reasons for loving Vanilla. For example I would see people say even in general chat on a Vanilla server that Vanilla levelling was crap, but they are here anyway because... they love the PvP, the huge raids, the flavour of the classes, gear that matters and lasts, the social aspect, and so on and so forth. You don't get any of that back by cutting XP gains in half.

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    1. I'm probably going to end up writing another post on this, but I prefer to deal in the realm of the possible, not the impossible. I think getting back Vanilla content is impossible. So I think that trying for a vanilla playstyle, flow, and emphasis on guilds and server community is more likely to happen.

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  10. Why do you think it would be that hard to create a 'real' vanilla server? If volunteers can do this with no money and no support by Blizzard, then why can't Blizzard do it?

    I think that classic WoW, like any successful MMO, was more than the sum of its parts. You can't just bring 70% of it back. The 30% would be needed to make the 70% work (fun) ...

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    1. Because of costs, of code-base divergence. The thing is there is a 90/90 rule: The first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes 90% of the time.

      The pirate servers are only 75-80% of the way there, but the remaining work is still much larger than you would think.

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  11. Turns out you were almost exactly correct... a bit scary :-)

    Going to be interesting to see where they end up with this. The responses so far have been (as expected) very varied.


    Link provided to official response to nostalrius situation, if links are allowed :-)
    http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/20743584206

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    1. Heh, it really isn't that hard to predict, with a little knowledge of how a large software project is structured.

      Blizzard's "pristine" server is a decent start, though it's missing the damage/heal/health debuff, which I consider important.

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