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Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic

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Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic

#11

Post by nikanj »

maccard wrote: post #8
makosdv wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A vocal minority of the community was pushing for vanilla. There was a somewhat popular (supposedly 150k active players) vanilla server setup by some people in the community (Nostalrius) that was shut down by Blizzard for copyright infringement. It's hard to say what Blizzard will do after they roll out the vanilla servers. They may create TBC, WotLK, etc. servers, or it may be a dud that they just shut down... I'm s…

I wonder how many of those 150k will convert to paying players.

The cost of running WoW servers per player must have plummeted in 15 years, thanks to both better devops and better hardware. They might be ok with a freemium model.

Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic

#12

Post by dnate »

I was surprised to find a game as big as WoW to have a data strucutre which clearly violates some basic forms [1] of database formalization. Isn't database normalizaton something that any cs program teaches in the first few semesters?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic

#15

Post by mkreis »

dnate wrote: post #12

I was surprised to find a game as big as WoW to have a data strucutre which clearly violates some basic forms [1] of database formalization. Isn't database normalizaton something that any cs program teaches in the first few semesters? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

There are very good reasons to violate it. Like performance - you would need to make a sub-select or join, which is costly. Also if you are 100% sure that "no one will ever need more spell effects", it is a valid way to go.

Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic

#16

Post by jeremyjh »

dnate wrote: post #12

I was surprised to find a game as big as WoW to have a data strucutre which clearly violates some basic forms [1] of database formalization. Isn't database normalizaton something that any cs program teaches in the first few semesters? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

You can't always run a normalized database though; often you need to denormalize for performance reasons. In very massive systems, a normalized database is rare.

Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic

#17

Post by actsasbuffoon »

dnate wrote: post #12

I was surprised to find a game as big as WoW to have a data strucutre which clearly violates some basic forms [1] of database formalization. Isn't database normalizaton something that any cs program teaches in the first few semesters? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

Normalization is the ideal, but sometimes you have to de-normalize for performance. Big, complex joins can be a performance killer. Most apps won't reach the scale where they need to worry about this, but WoW definitely has reached it.

Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic

#18

Post by highace »

Vanit wrote: post #5

I'm really interested to see where this leads. They got some quick wins out of this, but they're going to need to somehow revert a lot of game systems to get it back to something approximating the vanilla experience.

Here's my prediction: if you didn't play vanilla when it was available, you're gonna hate it. If you did play it, you'll go back for the nostalgia but will stop when you realise how tough the grind was. Those players will be late 20s and beyond now and won't have the time for it.

It'll be interesting to see how many of those calling for this to happen actually stick around.

Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic

#19

Post by scrollaway »

dnate wrote: post #12

I was surprised to find a game as big as WoW to have a data strucutre which clearly violates some basic forms [1] of database formalization. Isn't database normalizaton something that any cs program teaches in the first few semesters? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

I RE'd WoW for ~10 years. You'd be horrified if you knew how many hacks and crazy-bad technical designs are in the game. The team sometimes infamously has (or had, as of a couple expansions ago) hundreds of thousands of open issues and sometimes squashes bugs which are several expansions old.

Incidentally, they also quite often create new bugs in super-old content due to changes in newer content.

I mean, the work they do is incredible. But it blows my mind how they manage to maintain this game given the amount of intertwined legacy within it. I'm not sure what exactly caused it to become as bad as it did. It's probably a mix of the game being far more popular than they originally anticipated, the team being incredibly large, and the engine itself not being very accomodating.

Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic

#20

Post by booblik »

highace wrote: post #18
Vanit wrote: post #5

I'm really interested to see where this leads. They got some quick wins out of this, but they're going to need to somehow revert a lot of game systems to get it back to something approximating the vanilla experience.

Here's my prediction: if you didn't play vanilla when it was available, you're gonna hate it. If you did play it, you'll go back for the nostalgia but will stop when you realise how tough the grind was. Those players will be late 20s and beyond now and won't have the time for it. It'll be interesting to see how many of those calling for this to happen actually stick around.

Some of us are in the thirties already.
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