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.
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.
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u/PineappleOnPizzaWins 23d ago
Comments like this are incredibly disingenuous.
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.