Tuesday, November 06, 2018

Blizzcon: Classic Wow

Classic WoW was demo'd at Blizzcon this year, both for attendees and virtual ticket subscribers. As I am neither, I had to rely on reports from other people on the internet. Blizzard also announced that it would launch in Summer 2019, which is a little sooner than most people expected.

From all I've heard, Classic seems to on the right path, and hitting all the notes that people want. There are still minor inconsistencies, but they seem to be around things like tauren melee range, or the exact timing of warlock summons. Which are are relatively small issues.

The two bigger areas of controversy are sharding (multiple copies of a zone) and trading loot. There was some dismay that Blizzard was sharding the demo server, and will be sharding at launch.

In my opinion, Blizzard has to shard at launch. There's going to be a ton of tourists, followed by a steep drop in population. If a healthy server has 5000 people, it will probably need 15,000 at launch. If they open too many servers, three months from now there will be many dead servers. Just like SWTOR's launch. So sharding is the best solution.

The other change is that Blizzard will allow loot trading to other people in the raid. This is primarily so that people can fix mistakes with loot distribution, like master loot misclicks, rather than filing tickets with Customer Service. I think this is reasonable, and probably a good idea.

All in all, Classic WoW looks like it is on track. Then we'll see if people really want all those inconveniences, or if it is just nostalgia.

6 comments:

  1. Loot trading is implemented because Blizzard simply does not want the headache of using ticket system to fix this user mistakes. But the purist simply don't want that. I say give them 100% of version 1.1 feels. All the bugs, all of the 'features'.

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    1. The problem is that people would still file tickets, and CS would have go through them to see if it was an actual bug.

      If misclicking is a common enough event, that's thousands of CS tickets to deal with, even if you deny them all.

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  2. Loot trading will break the game. Vanilla is not about the inconveniences, vanilla is about the community. And loot trading will hurt the community more than LFD did.

    Back when they introduced LFR it was normal to just roll on everything you could, then distribute it to your friends after the run. It was nearly impossible to get an upgrade if you signed up solo. At least that's the experience I had.

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    1. There will be no LFR in Classic though. And sure, loot-trading could be used in a negative way, with people rolling for their friends and such - but there would be negative consequences for them too: they would likely be called out for it, the person affected will probably drop group etc. - I'm not saying it will never, ever happen, but I would expect most people to not consider it worth the hassle. It would effectively just be another kind of ninja-looting.

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  3. I'll just be happy to get back to a single, consistent storyline for WoW.

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  4. Loot trading can introduce the headache of people begging a win-roller for a loot (or even worse bidding it), it can easily be avoided if it was active only on master loot, so that it accomplishes just that for which it is introduced.

    Sharding on the other hand can either be a blessing ONLY if they nail the retention ratio both short-term and long-term, failing to do so will result in megaservers and make sharding a necessity across the board so that the server is playable at the very least, and they would also need to make tweaks to server economy breaking making the whole situation spiral out of control really. Also considering the fact that people usually flock to popular servers it may also make them face severe problems long-term.

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