Blizzard announced "Classic" World of Warcraft

[J1M]

No news on this since announcement. This thing wont be released until 2019.

 

[Wilian]

They don't want to release thunder from BfA release that is soon

 

[Sykar]

Missed good ol'a day long Alterac's.

My longest was around 12 hours. Had a couple of hundred alliance scum kills too.

 

[Glop_dweller]

I had a free ten day trial for WoW, I installed it, played it for eighteen
minutes, and uninstalled it. No chance I'll play it again; but I'd play any version of Warcraft.

 

[Sykar]

WoW went to shit once Pandaland came out. I loathed it from the bottom of my black heart.

 

[Xor]

WoW went to shit once cata came out. I loathed it from the bottom of my black heart.

Fixed.

 

[Wilian]

WoW went to shit once Pandaland came out. I loathed it from the bottom of my black heart.

Considering Cata was the worst expansion ever (and content drought in WoD was tame compared to Cata), you are quite wrong. MoP, outside of Panda haters is one of the most robust, content filled expansion of the entire game. It's only fault was too easy dungeons and not introducing heroic scenarios alongside with normals.

 

[Sykar]

WoW went to shit once Pandaland came out. I loathed it from the bottom of my black heart.

Considering Cata was the worst expansion ever (and content drought in WoD was tame compared to Cata), you are quite wrong. MoP, outside of Panda haters is one of the most robust, content filled expansion of the entire game. It's only fault was too easy dungeons and not introducing heroic scenarios alongside with normals.

I played WoW from release until Pandaland regularly. After Pandaland came out I tried for a while but gave up. The talent system alone makes me want to barf and did not care about either story or Pandas or Pokemon one bit. For me the best time was still TBC. /shrug

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Played since late vanilla. Raided a LOT in BC. We killed Illidan before the casul patch (Sunwell patch?) came out that allowed BT entrance without the quest.
The next expansion (was it Wotlk?) killed the game big time. Raids were divided into casul mode and hardcore mode, which made hardcore mode useless and suddenly everyone could access ALL CONTENT. And even hardcore mode could be completed with PUGs. This was it for the game. This is what killed it for me.

 

[Aildrik]

Played since late vanilla. Raided a LOT in BC. We killed Illidan before the casul patch (Sunwell patch?) came out that allowed BT entrance without the quest.
The next expansion (was it Wotlk?) killed the game big time. Raids were divided into casul mode and hardcore mode, which made hardcore mode useless and suddenly everyone could access ALL CONTENT. And even hardcore mode could be completed with PUGs. This was it for the game. This is what killed it for me.

Strongly agree with this. Being able to see new content was one of the big motivators for raiders, especially in Vanilla. I was on Moonrunner during Vanilla where there were very few raiding Horde guilds, and there was a sense of prestige when we finally busted past Razorgore in BWL and eventually had access to a much easier to reach alchemy table (screw clearing through Scholo!!)

I personally had no issue with 'exclusive' content such as Vanilla Naxx (our guild never set foot beyond the zone in, nor did we get past the first boss in AQ40). Never did we feel entitled to any of that content. Having a raid tier that was beyond most players gave you something to strive for and I think a lot of it was from Everquest still being fresh in the minds and hearts of a lot of the devs. I agree it was a real pity when they changed it to the amusement park, 'everyone gets in' design.

 

[Aildrik]

I played WoW from release until Pandaland regularly. After Pandaland came out I tried for a while but gave up. The talent system alone makes me want to barf and did not care about either story or Pandas or Pokemon one bit. For me the best time was still TBC. /shrug

Pandaria was the first time I had ever cancelled my account... lol.

TBC was probably the best expansion, IMHO, to date. I liked some of the storyline in WoTLK but disliked most of the raiding. TBC raids were awesome. Lady Vashj encounter was a total ball buster but I loved learning it with my guild, and it felt awesome to finally beat that encounter. Kael'Thas was a great fight too. I never experienced that adrenaline rush ever again for raids beyond TBC

 

[Sykar]

Played since late vanilla. Raided a LOT in BC. We killed Illidan before the casul patch (Sunwell patch?) came out that allowed BT entrance without the quest.
The next expansion (was it Wotlk?) killed the game big time. Raids were divided into casul mode and hardcore mode, which made hardcore mode useless and suddenly everyone could access ALL CONTENT. And even hardcore mode could be completed with PUGs. This was it for the game. This is what killed it for me.

I was primarily a PvP player so I only casually raided when my guild was short on DPS. I was fine with just having seen early AQ and never set foot in Naxx. Never understood that incessant catering to everyone. It is much better to have different things to offer for everyone.
What made me fume a little was that they brought back the old PvP ranks at some point. I mean it was not super difficult to get rank 10+ mostly patience and a decent group but still considering how much effort I put into putting together PvP groups and leading them I felt a bit of anger when they announced that the new BG system would reward people with the same ranks from the old days. It is just lazy and pandering while also betraying those long time faithful players who grinded their ranks, though some of course dishonestly but that happens everywhere.

 

[Darkman]

If Classic is anything like private servers then it will be shit. The content is way too easy by modern standards

 

[LESS T_T]

Devlog. Go to the link if you want to see tables: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/21881587/dev-watercooler-world-of-warcraft-classic

Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic

Greetings! Development of World of Warcraft Classic is underway, and we’re very excited to share some of the challenges and solutions we’re working on. As we mentioned last BlizzCon, the process of restoring the classic game is not straightforward, and it’s important to us to take the time and effort to get it right—this includes poring over numerous game versions, data, and code; meticulously scrutinizing all the changes we’ve made over the years. Rest assured: The WoW Classic team is hard at work making it a reality, and we’re at a point in development where we’re ready to share some of the things we’ve been working on.

WOW CLASSIC: FIRST PROTOTYPE
The first—and among the most important—decision we had to make was which version of the game to focus on. As many of you have noted, the classic period was two years long and full of changes. Core features like Battlegrounds were introduced in patches after WoW’s original launch, and class design similarly changed over time. After careful consideration, we decided on Patch 1.12: Drums of War as our foundation, because it represents the most complete version of the classic experience.

Once we had our starting point, we began taking stock of what we had in the source code and what we could make available, which included restoring the original development database from archival backups. After stitching various key pieces together, we had a locally rebuilt version of Patch 1.12 running internally. The team could create characters and do basic questing and leveling—and dying, which we did many times. For testing purposes. Obviously.

Our initial runs exposed a few (expected) issues: the game sometimes crashed, didn’t recognize our modern video cards, and was incompatible with our current login system. That first pass also couldn’t support any of our modern security and anti-cheating capabilities. Clearly we had a lot of work to do to make WoW Classic live up to the Blizzard standard of quality, and deliver the experience players want.

THE PATH FORWARD: SECOND PROTOTYPE
Speaking of engineering, World of Warcraft is a very data-driven game, which means the basic code is flexible and the specific way it behaves is controlled by information contained in databases. Things like quests, monsters, items, and the rules for how these all interact are defined by the designers and artists in data.

So we asked ourselves, would it still be possible to deliver an authentic classic experience if we took our modern code, with all its back-end improvements and changes, and used it to process the Patch 1.12 game data? While that might seem counterintuitive, this would inherently include classic systems like skill ranks, old quests and terrain, talents, and so on, while later features like Transmog and Achievements would effectively not exist because they were entirely absent from the data. After weeks of R&D, experimentation, and prototyping, we were confident we could deliver the classic WoW content and gameplay without sacrificing the literally millions of hours put in to back-end development over the past 13 years.

While our initial effort helped us determine the experience we wanted to provide, this second prototype really defined how we’d get there. Starting from a modern architecture—with all its security and stability changes—means the team’s efforts can be focused on pursuing an authentic classic experience. Any differences in behavior between our development builds and the patch 1.12 reference can be systematically cataloged and corrected, while still operating from a foundation that’s stable and secure.

DIGGING IN
So what does it take to recreate an authentic classic experience with modern engineering? Let’s start by categorizing the different types of game data that make up WoW:

• Table data: This kind of information is almost always represented as numbers. How many hit points a creature has, the amount of Strength an item grants, or where and when certain creatures spawn, are all examples of the numerical data we store in our databases. We can also store and enforce relationships between different pieces of data.
• File data: This is often very dense data like 3D models, textures, animations and terrain. Our user interface is built up from XML and Lua files. Many of the art files do not use the same file formats that commercial art tools spit out. Our build pipeline takes these raw art files and translates them into something optimized for our game to read and process.
• Lua scripts: Some features are driven by Lua scripts written by designers, allowing them to easily define custom behaviors for server-side logic without requiring deep engineering knowledge.

HOW ENGINEERING HAS CHANGED
One challenge we face is that all the classic data is in the original format used at launch, but that format has changed substantially in the intervening years. Major work needs to be done in this area to make the modern client compatible with the classic data.

For example, spells could originally only perform three actions on the spell’s target. In table form, that looked something like this:

As you can see, there is a lot of space taken up by ‘Nothing’. Over the course of WoW’s lifetime, we’ve improved our data design and normalized much of our database data. Today, that same data would be separated out like this:

Table Name: Spell

Table Name: Spell Effect

Table Name: Spell Aura

In this form, there is much less wasted space and spells are no longer limited to three effects. But before we can load any database data, we need to transform the old data layout into the new one. This is not limited to spells, as almost every game system (including items, creatures, player characters, spawning, AI, and more) has had its database layout altered over the years.

LOOKING AHEAD
All the work we’re doing will ultimately allow us to recreate an authentic classic experience on a platform that is much more optimized and stable, helping us avoid latency and stability issues. Additional improvements will include modern anti-cheat/botting detection, customer service and Battle.net integration, and similar conveniences that do not affect the core gameplay experience.

We are looking forward to the challenges ahead and share your passion for the classic game; every code check-in data conversion we make brings WoW Classic closer to providing that authentic experience you—and we—want. Thanks for joining us on this journey.

 

[Wilian]

As I expected, they were lying thru their teeth when they said they have no backups or archives or any of that data.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

If these are the only things they can say at this point, means they really do have like 3 people on the entire vanilla team. Fucking hell, it's not going to be released in 2018, is it.

 

[LESS T_T]

I think they said around the initial announcement that they're just getting started work on this.

 

[Aildrik]

1.12 as the era for classic isn't very shocking. While I think it could have been interesting to revisit the game in its true infancy (initial commercial release, or other early builds) - this way you get all of the raid content for Vanilla. Would have liked to experience AV as it was in the early days though, with the questing and that huge ass troll in the middle of the field.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Honestly I dunno what people are expecting out of this.

Vanilla WoW has been done to death. People already know the most optimum way to clear all the dungeons and kill all the bosses

Maybe people will enjoy some of the levelling experience, but really, after 3 - 6 month and killing all the raids and getting the best gears, what's next? Reroll new alts like you would when starting new in new private servers? PVP? Ask Blizz to roll out TBC Classic?

 

[Hobo Elf]

lol even if people really did get bored with the classic experience after 3-6 months it'd still be a smashing success. Live servers can only keep me entertained for a month per year before I run out of meaningful content to do. Blizzard has to add time gated content in neo-WoW to keep people subscribed.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

lol even if people really did get bored with the classic experience after 3-6 months it'd still be a smashing success. Live servers can only keep me entertained for a month per year before I run out of meaningful content to do. Blizzard has to add time gated content in neo-WoW to keep people subscribed.

The power leveller in Vanilla PS can pretty much finish the game in one month before afk-PK in open world stage of the game while waiting for BG.

6 months is fucking generous on my part. I guess Blizz will needs to overtune the dungeon and bosses as well because every time PS try for 100% blizzlike Vanilla people always complain that dungeons are to easy.

Honestly this seems like a 3 moths cash-grab before the server actually dies due to no content.

 

[Hobo Elf]

You are seriously mistaken if you think that Naxx can be smashed within a month after release. You'll still need to be geared up for raids.

 

[Ellef]

The only way it's finished in 3 months is if the kids die from the lack of handholding features introduced since BC.

 

[J1M]

One of the consequences of using the modern client that people don't understand is that they have already removed the ability to use the original's character animations. If you opt to use the original models, you get the new pixar-inspired bouncy animations with the old textures.

The client decision is going to lead to a lot of small differences that will likely add up to killing the nostalgia factor.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

One of the consequences of using the modern client that people don't understand is that they have already removed the ability to use the original's character animations. If you opt to use the original models, you get the new pixar-inspired bouncy animations with the old textures.

The client decision is going to lead to a lot of small differences that will likely add up to killing the nostalgia factor.

Jim, nobody said anything about a new client. They said new backend, not frontend. They're only updating the file formats, character databases, etc.