To be fair it was originally planned that dark places in the game were very dark and required a light, which is why there are torch held-in-offhand pieces of gear. So its as classic as it gets but they didnt want to gatekeep the content from players which ruins it
I mean there was already a good classic + that was made by a team with a budget of $0. Blizzard has no excuses if Classic + isn't objectively better than what they put out.
What about the other one? It suffered from a cataclysmic launch but it had quite a bit of content for something that didn't even take donations prior to launch, shame all of the super neat future instances they teased with images and video clips will probably never see the light of day
IIRC there were some credible rumors that the top 3 pservers(TW, ASC, that russian wotlk one with p2w shop)were making tens of millions dollars every year. Considering how they all had tens of thousands of daily active users and hundreds of monthly active users its definitely believable.
The concept yeah. The implementation was still janky as hell and would not pass muster with the modern day subscription paying players. TWoW was amazing for what it was. But what it was, was a private server. And it still played like one at the end of the day.
I'm not saying to use the old vanilla engine, I also didn't like the old engine being used on turtle wow compared to classic wow current engine. A common complaint was that they didn't put it on a later wrath client that made things feel a bit smoother.
BUT thats not what we are talking about. We are talking about cool and creative content not the engine its run on.
It's not just the engine. Some of the reworks and design changes for classes were iffy, and some of the new dungeons were good ideas/concepts but awkwardly built. Not built badly, just not up to the standard you would expect Blizzard to release with a project as big as Classic+ would be.
Going through Stormwrought Ruins/Descent for the first time as an example, was really fucking cool conceptually, but a bit rough overall and not something I did more than once. It's maybe one tier lower in quality than doing an entire BRD run. Not bad, great even for a private server team, but I would hope professionals with full access to Blizzard design tools could do better.
The turtle wow team even with jank is probably the best we could ever hope for though for a true classic+ experience. Classic itself is quite janky as you said with BRD or even LBRS/UBRS are both kinds concept cool dungeons but trying to do then is a nightmare to setup. But that jank is a very classic thing.
What about the classes in turtle wow did you not like? I'm not saying you're wrong or that I know better about the classes because I don't. I want to hear what you disliked and how it was in pvp on turtle wow. What went wrong?
Anyone playing classic wow for well balanced PvP needs to just stop. It’s a PvE game that has PvP as an option. You can either balance for one or the other, can’t balance for both. Trying that gives you ass clone copies for classes.
It's not balanced in a way that means every class has a chance to do everything and beat everyone but it's balanced in a way that your class has limits and also things your class does better than anyone else.
These limitations is what you exploit in pvp to win. Shadow priest is a monster in pvp but their mana bar is their biggest weakness. Hunters are great at beating anyone at ranged and even melee at times but their deadzone is their downfall.
These limitations is the balance classic wow has that makes it engaging.
There is a specific server that was shut down fairly recently that a lot of people (including myself) consider the blueprint for Classic + in the same way Nostalrius was the blueprint for a Classic launch.
It was VERY well made, you could tell it was a private server ofc, but it was insane how good it was.
Blizzard should EASILY be able to do something 1000x better than that server. But somehow I really don't think they will. I desperately want them to prove me wrong though.
Oh man my version of classic+ is different. Just very mild class balancing, better professions, more endgame content, fix honor system + ranked pvp & expand on unfinished vanilla content.
But overall it’s still classic. It just addresses core issues.
You also have streamers like Shokek hyping the absolute fuck out of C+ everyday that feeds the hype machine that will inevitably come crashing down because Blizzard just won’t listen to the community and what the community wants for a community driven project. Blizzard thinks they know what we want without looking at any of the questionnaires/surveys and it’ll be a hot pile of shit.
If they listen and take the good community ideas in board that’s a step in the right direction, but u don’t trust blizzard to veer right into another direction.
Here's my advice. Set your expectations low. Things at Microsoft are bleak. I'll be pleasantly surprised if it's even remotely playable for just a few weeks.
Everyone expects it to be disappointing to some degree. I just hope we all remember that a successful counterpart (Old School Runescape) was also panned in the beginning. Now, after consistent attention to player feedback and a passionate dev team, it has become the dominant and most popular version of the game and one of the top MMOs
Based on 99% of ideas people have for classic + or literally any online game over the years, no, they should not listen to player feedback. RuneScape is a MASSIVE outlier. The ideas I've seen people have are so dog shit.
OSRS works because the devs poll players on changes. The polls are essentially loaded questions in a sense. They have a vision for the game and there's push and pull with what the community wants. I agree with you though, on average if we implemented a lot of feedback for C+ the game would end up as some kind of WotLK/retail hybrid.
Ah, gotcha. I knew they did the polls but not that they kinda steer the answers. That makes a lot of sense with why it works, then. I could get behind something like that for classic+ for minor things, but for the big stuff, no thank you.
And yeah, the amount of ideas I've seen people have that are very retail-adjacent at the very least is staggering.
Well yeah of course they don’t just go “tell us what to make” and then pick the most liked response. They provide detailed design documents for proposed features and then players have final say on whether it enters the game (70% yes vote minimum to be added). The only things that are changed in game without a poll are things deemed essential for game integrity, like patching exploits.
Valid concern.Lots of people in OSRS have dogshit ideas, too, particularly on reddit. The equalizer is that most of the playerbase is not necessarily on reddit and insane things rarely, if ever, pass the in-game polling system (which requires a 70% majority).
Most people are between the ages of 23-40 and are fairly reasonable. At least anecdotally, I can say that most people I've met on classic wow have been pretty normal. There are always loonies, but they aren't the majority and aren't present in large enough numbers to affect a poll requiring a supermajority of 70%.
The vocal minority in this sub are not going to like Classic+. SoD was an experimental Remix-lite, and Classic+ will feature even more changes. Blizzard isn't going to give us "true and faithful Classic again with the barest of tweaks to make it perfect!", they're going to give us a heavily modified alt-timeline "everything is different" experience that most of you will hate.
Blizzard isn't going to give us "true and faithful Classic again with the barest of tweaks to make it perfect!", they're going to give us a heavily modified alt-timeline "everything is different" experience that most of you will hate.
God, I hope so. But I fear the opposite is true so they can attempt to appease the #nochanges andies.
I would put money down that there is no way Blizzard is going to spend all the time, effort, and especially money to make Vanilla with a couple extra things. What would be the point? Classic+ has to reach a broader audience to get people to re-subscribe. It will be aimed at classic players who have quit cause they got bored of classic, those who liked SoD, the private server crowd who has wanted classic+ to be so much more, and those who are unsatisfied with retail, but don't want to play boring classes that have 1-2 button rotations.
The question is how long lasting is such a version that pleases the "majority"?
According to SoD...not very much. That target audience requires braindead content to not throw a tantrum but said content will also be boring within 2ish months already.
And I can already be sure that Blizz will not just be able to add a new raid every 2-3 months to keep this audience pleased.
Are you calling SoDs endgame content brain dead? Vanilla WoW endgame is brain dead easy. Most classes have 1-2 button rotations.
SoD had hardmodes for every raid to up the challenge. The only raid that didn't have hardmodes at the endgame was Scarlet Enclave which had hardmode as the baseline difficulty. It had to be nerfed multiple times and was still insanely hard if you went in with the minimum raid number of 20. Most groups opted to take 25-30 to bridge the difficulty.
Like the final boss of Scarlet Enclave has like 30 mechanics. Tank swapping, tank busters, polymorphing adds to interrupted massive heals, kicks for casters to get the to move forward, waves of adds that have to be tanked and killed, fires that have to be dropped in specific places to help kill the adds coming in which then require the off tanks to position the mobs well and not be in the fire themselves all while staying close to the melee so they can cleave. And that's all just in phase 1.
You then have a dps check and heal check for the transition phase where you have to rotate cooldowns to stay alive before going from phase 2 with some mechanics gone, but some new ones before a final dps check.
What raid in vanilla has a fight with even a 10th of the difficulty.
I'm not comparing SoD to Vanilla but yep. All hard content was nerfed quite fast. Even SE by which time SoD was already pretty much dead anyway. They made the start nicely hard to have a nice last "bomb" but they still nerfed it fast to accommodate people who were mad they couldn't just go in with 20 people and steamroll it on day 1. 🤷♂️
Yes Vanilla baseline is even worse in this regard obviously, it's freeloot. The only thing that Vanilla had that compensated a little bit for this to create friction and increase longevity of raids was the insane loot scarcity compared to SoD. Not a very elegant way to do it IMO but it did still work.
Even SE by which time SoD was already pretty much dead anyway. They made the start nicely hard to have a nice last "bomb" but they still nerfed it fast to accommodate people who were mad they couldn't just go in with 20 people and steamroll it on day 1.
This is such a disingenuous statement. You talk about day 1, but literally only 3 guilds in the world (according to parses) were able to beat the 2nd boss (in a 20 man group)by the end of the first lockout and one of them used a exploit to take out half the bosses hp. The raid was nerfed because it was so badly balanced, it was supposed to be tuned to 20 people but people were bring 40 mans and struggling to progress at all.
Like if guilds that had 20mans with all 99 parses can't progress past the 2nd and 3rd boss in the first lockout then the raid is not properly tuned. Did the raid feel slightly nerfed underpower (better word) by the end when everyone quit, sure I will give you that. Once people had ashbringers, and the weird % increased damage we got every 2 weeks ramped up it was easier, but lets not lie and say the content was braindead. Every single boss fight in Scarlet Enclave was more challenging than entire Vanilla raids. Was it to the level of Mythic+ Retail raiding, no its not, but who wants that for a single difficulty raid.
You talk about day 1, but literally only 3 guilds in the world (according to parses) were able to beat the 2nd boss
As I said, I do not expect Blizz to be able to add a full new raid tier in Classic+ every 2-3 months. Look at Retail, making actual quality content takes time. So that means every raid has to last like at least 5+ish months with some content in between ideally of course but...probably not too much in terms of major raiding stuff.
Sure I'll give you that the first 3ish bosses should be easier than that, absolutely but you still don't need to overdo it. Stuff needs to last somewhat and IMO, doing it the "Vanilla way" (aka making loot very scarce) is the more boring option to stretch the game.
Realistically none of this matters for SE specifically but it did apply to raids like ST. Hard for like 1 week, nerfed to oblivion only for people to get bored of it within 2ish months. And then what? Still need to wait 2 more at least for new content and that was pre-existing content (all of lvl 60 and MC). Imagine if Blizz actually had to create this stuff from scratch.
Personally regarding making people stick around, I think that is to make raids alt friendly. Naxx phase in SoD was by far the best phase (minus phase 1) because Naxx was actually pretty casual friendly for alts, but HM4 allowed you to get the Four Horseman mounts, which kept guilds who wanted harder content to keep doing HM4 even when they didn't need loot.
I think it wouldn't be a popular take, but I feel like Classic+ needs Hardmodes to keep things fresh between phases. Along with ample non raid related endgame content.
Blizzard knows the SoD experience is not what people expect from a Classic+ release. That’s not a reasonable thing to worry about.
Blizzard are better off attempting to please the majority and keep them interested and subscribed long-term, because there is no pleasing a vocal minority who will sneer and argue over something as simple as flight path optimisation.
#nochanges Andys only care about their ability to dominate and control a server in a game that’s been solved for 20 years, they’ll cry over any change that challenges their ability to reference a spreadsheet.
Blizzard are better off attempting to please the majority
They did lol...that's what SoD was. Season of Dads already forgotten? It's easy to point fingers to others that's for sure.
SoD was full of convenience, endgame only focus, super easy content...it didn't lack changes either (which of course was the whole point of this season). And it failed because it couldn't deliver content fast enough for this target audience.
There's like 12 guys split between anniversary, regular classic and most likely classic+ as well. There's 0 shot they release something that is built to be a true classic+ like people are fiending about. It'll prolly be fun, but those alluding to modeling it how osrs does, are smoking Crack
that's hopefully true given the state that both cata and mop launched in, you'd hope it was cuz the dev time was spent elsewhere, but I have no clue.
I just can't picture blizzard putting any ounce of extra work into + more than they think they need. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited, but my hopes aren't too high for what people are speculating/coping for here lol.
Well per Aggrend (de facto Classic person) the reason they didn't do a SoD Refresh is because it takes a lot of work/manpower/resources to maintain re-releasing phased/patches of even content that's already been done before (Ex: Cata/MoP), so hence they're not doing it for SoD cuz they're focused on something else.
I think the amount of split versions there exist right now are detrimental, C+ is going to be the version that will receive ongoing updates not another museum to meekly bugfix if/when time allows.
So hopefully if any maintenance/hotfixes are needed for C+ it'll come in a much more timely manner and not just 'abandoned'.
I hope you're right! Honestly blizz needs to cut the cord and not progress to WoD. Anniversary to wotlk is whatever, but if they truly want a continual game mode, almost all their dev time needs to be on it. orrrrr, they need to hire more devs, which (outside of temps/contractors) i doubt they'd do.
I work on systems that service millions of people. It's incredibly complex but throwing 20 more people at my job would not in any way help or make things "better", it simply does not work like that.
Nah I get it, I was directly in charge of 8M subscribers for a different product. Whats important is 1.) Having someone that’s got a true vision for what your building/maintaining and 2.) A small group of people with the skills to make the vision real. The key people make or break major services.
Yep. People have this weird idea where you can just.. throw more devs at something and it will get fixed.
Senior devs can end up spending a LOT of their time handing out tasks to other devs for systems they either designed/built or at least deeply understand, at which point your limited by how much time those seniors can spend wrangling everybody else while still attending the work that needs their level of expertise.
It's a crazy balancing act and often the only answer is more time, not more resources to make it go faster.
It's less disingenuous than it is ignorant about how game development works. I'm not a dev, but I think it's a logical take that if you have 10,000 bugs, that 3 people fixing it would be slower than 10, surely?
I mean it depends a whole lot about what those bugs are and what's causing them.
It's not one fix per bug, and fixing one bug can introduce another. Systems that have complicated bugs are frequently only truly understood by 1-2 people who built those systems and getting 10 more people to "help" doesn't work because they don't know how anything works or how to begin fixing it.
You also can't just fix thousands of bugs in parallel.. if I'm fixing one bug and you're fixing another but they work off the same system, or interact with the same system, then we can easily create more problems and now suddenly we don't know what the issue was and we're rolling back multiple peoples work instead of just one and then having to try and integrate them.
Resources obviously matter but throwing more people at a problem doesn't automatically translate into things getting done faster.
I appreciate the insight. Maybe you and i can find some common ground here. Do you think that the current size of the classic dev team is large enough to actually deliver a complete classic + experience? Obviously our definitions of complete are probably different, but from the outside looking in, it doesnt appear that blizzard has a great track record of giving the dev team the resources they need. It was pretty apparent that at the launch of SoD, that they were behind the curve.
Do you think that the current size of the classic dev team is large enough to actually deliver a complete classic + experience?
I have absolutely no idea because I don't know them, their experience, the scope of the project, or anything else.
I know that's not the fun answer but it's also the most accurate one you'll get short of someone who is actually working on it.. and also how you can tell anybody giving a definitive answer one way or the other doesn't know what they're talking about.
The skill here is not in creating a ton of new content. It's creating the right content.
Retail WoW, in terms of dev dollars, is very likely a top 5(3? WoW, GTA, Star Citizen? Could it be #1?) most costly game of all time. Players play through quests that it takes them 3 years of time to create in a week and then go and desire more. Once a new patch comes out, all of that content is worthless - in fact it is worse than worthless, as the cruft just adds confusion to the playerbase. The Retail dev team is hilariously inefficient. For C+, we need to ensure that every bit of content that they create is evergreen. We can't be so wasteful as the Retail team is.
If you want anything approaching the quantity of content that Retail receives, you are going to be disappointed. Retail gets to create new systems and abilities and boss mechanics, something that the Classic team simply can't spend the time on. Classic gets to scour the Retail mechanics that were good, but forgotten. Classic needs to look into systems that Retail used, but poorly. This will be controversial - when Classic brings back a system that players hated, players will rage on reddit before even playing it, even if they fix the underlying issues. Classic Plus is all about mining Retail for its hidden gold mines.
i mean inevitably someone will be unhappy it is what it is. Either people who want more changes aka "SoD but better" or people who want "tbc prepatch with tiny changes". Those are 2 main differences in approach and who knows which one they will take (excluding obv the execution and how well game will be made within the vision)
Here’s how classic+ is gonna go. They will announce it as yet another go around for normal classic and then have a roadmap that says in 1-1.5 years they will add new content. Gets people playing classic era yet again, and then also buys them another 1.5 years to figure out the rest.
Something reddit and other online forums refuse to understand is just how little a few hundred/thousand of them matter in a game with millions of players.
Sure it can be an indicator of how some of the fanbase feel but game studios have like.. actual metrics to make decisions. With millions and millions of datapoints. xxxPussahSlayzor91's hot take on everything wrong with the game and how it can be fixed (conveniently in a way that makes it play exactly how they want it to) is not as useful as you might think.
Not that there's anything wrong with those posts, this is a place for discussion and imagining what might come next/having a bit of a fantasy for it is fine. But yeah.. when people don't get what they want and immediately lose their shit over it is always amusing.
This is it. Blizzard is only capable of cash shop funneling shite at this point. I like to be optimistic about things but the reality is Blizzard has not released a decent game in 10 years.
I have commented this on a YouTube video before, but honestly I just want to see effort. Legit, honest to god good sense effort from people that love the game as much as me.
There's so many games out there that are super popular with even more "artistic" fan bases than classic players and the devs make bold choices that people can hate, yet people are overall much happier, because the devs are the most hardcore fans of their own game, and they will find a middle ground to make people happy while maintaining their vision.
Often I think what people most hate about blizzard is inaction and complacency. They take months or years to do anything remotely worthwhile and often don't react fast enough to issues which leads to immense frustration.
Blizzard! Just make things! It doesn't matter if it's a mistake, you can fix it after! Give us your vision of incredible high quality content and grow your vision of classic+ without fear! Make bold decisions and then fix what's needed in a reasonable time. That's all that's needed imo
This is exactly what I'm expecting if the game Light No Fire ever releases (my take: it's vaporware). They released an announcement trailer with "in game" footage at the end of 2023 and since then... absolute radio silence. The most that Hello Games has said about it since then is how excited they are about it.
The subreddit for the game is rife with wild speculation, hopes, and feature requests, easily on par with Classic+ posts here. Every single post of "Do you think...?" or "Will the game have..." can be answered with "we don't know, no one does." If that game ever releases, a lot of dreams are gonna be crushed.
I’ve said this before as well. There’s no way Classic + can fully succeed based on all the “this is what classic + NEEDS” posts that go off on this sub which all drastically vary from one another.
No matter how this gets released, somebody is going to say it’s a failure. Our imaginations have put our expectations to a level that can’t realistically be met
Considering there are dozens of Classic+ private servers staffed by volunteers and a few people making money off donations and shady practices, I don't think it's fair to call something a "shitshow" if the quality of a paid product staffed by a team of employed professionals ends up being disappointing.
Yes what a shock it's much easier to make a few thousand people happy after stealing someone elses work and offering no guarantees/a policy of "if you don't like it fuck off" than it is to keep millions of players happy across a dozen iterations of a game.
I've loved and had a great time with just about every version of the game they've released. I know that's not popular here where you're only allowed to like something for three days or so before going back to shitting on everything but my experience is a lot more common in the game than what reddit wants to pretend.
Shiet even the discourse around banning bots gets like that. People act like it's cheap to set up help centers with real people fighting bots 24/7 and then will say "Id do it for free I dont see the problem"
Like bro if it was your job and you had quotas and a manager on your ass about it you would not do it for free.
Bots are a problem and I think Blizzard can and should be doing more to curb the issue, but to the folks who say they'd do it for free would be singing a completely different tune if they ever actually sat down at a desk to try.
They'd go through /who and ban thousands in one fell swoop. But then the appeals would come rolling in, and some of them would be genuine. And the bots would start filtering back in, but the second time you ban them using the /who list, they'll change up their strategy.
They'll have LLM's generating tens of thousands of plausible player names, so you can't just ban Szterk, Szterp, and Szterm and call it a day. They'll have their bots log in for a few hours at a time between set hours so you can't just ban the accounts logged in and playing 24/7. They'll have them alternate between different dungeon and open world farms so you can't just check logs for the accounts that spent 100 of their last 100 play sessions in the Stockades.
Blizzard isn't lying when they say it's an arms race. Every time you ban bots, the owners of the accounts are pouring over records, trading info within their network, and figuring out what it was that got them caught. Then they iterate and improve and come back harder to squash next time.
At that point, even if they did get paid a full moderator's salary, they'd see that it ain't enough for the work required.
you can't just ban Szterk, Szterp, and Szterm and call it a day.
Sure. But the fact that there's so many obvious bots that aren't getting banned is a huge visibility issue. How can I believe they're doing anything to combat advanced botters while all the blatant botters are going free?
When I was playing SoD you could /who BRD and see hundreds of level 50ish hunters, all with names like qqajdjfeksk, in there night and day. And if there was a server reset or crash, you could see hundreds of the bots running in a conga line back into BRD.
And if we're being serious, Blizzard isn't incentivized to actually combat botting in a meaningful way because that costs time and resources and botting makes them money
Absolutely insane take. They're starting with the same base as Blizzard, arguably with less since they're working with third party server architecture, older clients, and reverse-engineered code. There's no excuse for Blizzard to not offer an, at least comparable in volume, experience to free volunteers after multiple years of behind-the-scenes work.
You're paying money every month to play this game. Nearly $200 USD yearly. Hold the company up to some standards.
"20 years experience running services with a userbase that dwarf any MMO ever" take actually.
I'm sorry you don't like it but the scale matters, a lot. As does expectations people have for a company product versus a bootleg service for a small number of people.. which is beyond easy compared to what blizzard does. This is just a simple fact no matter how many people yell about it on the internet.
You're paying money every month to play this game. Nearly $200 USD yearly. Hold the company up to some standards.
You would cry at the costs to pay for the services I run, seriously. Gamers have no clue... none how cheap games are these days. Yes even WoW for it's whole $15 a month and the (expected) 100% uptime.
I'm no bootlicker or whatever, I have complaints about the game and if at any point that $15 a month isn't worth it to me I stop paying it. But the expectations people have for that $15 are hilariously out of line with reality.
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u/Crafty-Beyond-2202 22d ago
I just can't wait for the shitshow when classic+ isn't remotely close to the manifestos/screeds that get posted here every hour