Reading option one made me quite anxious. Having to backport a virtually infinite number of bugfixes and support for new hardware features from over 12 years of constant development sounds like a perfect way to burn out developers. I'm glad they went for the clearly more sustainable option of adopting the old data to their new client infrastructure.
Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic
31–40 of 92 posts
Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic
#32Is this too little too late?
After j Allen brack scolded the fans over how preposterous the question of classic servers was. And Blizzard shut down the two major classic servers.
It's possible that the well is poisoned and people won't want to play out of principle or that they just moved onto other games and the time to capitalize on this has passed.
Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As a former vanilla player (fond memories of 1.14 jumping physics bug), and current busy adult, I'm pretty excited about the idea of an MMO with a level cap. I can't keep up with new expansions every six months, but I can and will find fun things I'm interested in trying in an MMO with locked down talent builds and static endgame. It won't matter if life gets busy and I can only log in once this week. At least I'm no…
To be fair, WoW still has a level cap. You can play right now and quite frankly it's a much better game for a "current busy adult". Expansions come out every 2-3 years, not every 6 months.
Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic
#34I like wotlk better, I think it was the best expansion, and I’m sure wotlk servers have more players than vanilla servers now. I don’t know why they chose vanilla over wotlk. :/
This was my first thought too. Although I must admit I didn't play WoW until the release of BC (Burning Crusade) and stopped when Cata finished. So I never really got to experience what was special about Vanilla. More specifically for why I'd want WOTLK is for Arena. The last season was the most balanced that I ever experienced it and some of the most fun I've ever had playing WoW or any game in general. Jumping back…
But it will be very, very hard to keep that experience. Where you used to have to turn to other players for help, building those social relationships as they struggled through the same challenges, now the web environment surrounding the game has evolved with very complete documentation an alt-tab away, and all the other players have that as well.
Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic
#35I'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.
I'm probably not going to play. However, given I played vanilla in college, then some on and off BC/lich for my masters, then the latest one over the last year as a software dev with a full time job, vanilla seems like it would fit best if that's where I wanted to sink my time.
Even though there were tons of complaints from casual players during the vanilla period, I had mostly only heard about these complaints when they where directed towards top tier guilds. Grinding with small groups was often fun and wasn't so heavily tied to every goal and data point that tied you back into the 'realm/global' competition. Players seemed more likely to invent their own metrics of ranking other players and Guild members, which to me added a level of variability that in retrospect, should have reduced anxiety for game play.
I'm interested to see how it plays out. There's definitely an 'ideal' balance for an mmo that makes it a success, and I think classic WoW had that nailed down. I don't think it's related to GPU cores or cultural trends, some games are timeless beyond the nostalgia factor, and that's because they achieve that perfect balance of interactivity and reward.
Having guild members that did linear algebra to calculate optimal raid arrangements is one of the examples of opening that creative space, rather than closing it with an excess of status bars and shiny hats. Every MMO suffers from what metrics flag gamer status, but I'm simply interested to see what direction classic WoW goes in, and how that affects the general trend of MMOs out there today.
Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic
#36Reading option one made me quite anxious. Having to backport a virtually infinite number of bugfixes and support for new hardware features from over 12 years of constant development sounds like a perfect way to burn out developers. I'm glad they went for the clearly more sustainable option of adopting the old data to their new client infrastructure.
It will mean people will find loads of things that won't be the same though.
Take balance. I'd be willing to bet they've done loads of bug fixes on unintended consequences of spells. So the Frostbolt of the new system might actually do a different amount of damage and slow than the Frostbolt of 1.12, once the data's been transformed.
So all the classes will probably be slightly different to how they were in 1.12 and combos that worked back then might no longer work now. Some classes might now be OP that weren't and vice-versa. Monsters that were weak might suddenly become strong, and monsters that were hard might suddenly become really easy.
Not that I'm saying it's the wrong solution, I think it's realistically the best one available to them. But it will probably result in a different gameplay experience rather than, say, just updating the visuals. How different won't be clear till later.
Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm yet to have the privilege to work on a database which I would call truly "massive", so I'm oblivious to how things work in such environment in reality. I've seen the question and the answer you've given repeats many times, but aren't there exists a plethora of tools like table partitioning, materialized views etc. to allow one to have the database in a normalized form and run it fast? Don't they work in practice?
Table partitioning does nothing to solve the performance problems of joins of very large datasets. Materialized views can help but they are not a panacea. You have to trigger the updates yourself, and because they are updated asynchronously, you will not have a consistent view of your data. E.g. you could write a row to the database and not see it updated in your view for minutes.
Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic
#38I 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.
More importantly here normalising the database has conceptual and interactive overhead: in the original model all spell properties are in a single table which makes import/export and devtools easy, while the normalised schema splits the same thing over 3 different tables (at least, not sure the example is even complete).
I see it as a case of YAGNI.
Also this specific issue likely wasn't a problem of mass: the number of spells in the game is not that high, even today. The issue was throughput, IIRC they had high expectations and they got 10x as many signups as they'd expected.
Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was my first thought too. Although I must admit I didn't play WoW until the release of BC (Burning Crusade) and stopped when Cata finished. So I never really got to experience what was special about Vanilla. More specifically for why I'd want WOTLK is for Arena. The last season was the most balanced that I ever experienced it and some of the most fun I've ever had playing WoW or any game in general. Jumping back…
But it will be very, very hard to keep that experience. Where you used to have to turn to other players for help, building those social relationships as they struggled through the same challenges, now the web environment surrounding the game has evolved with very complete documentation an alt-tab away, and all the other players have that as well.
That was already the case back when WoW was first released. Everquest (1) got pretty extensively documented during its lifetime (and mapped, there were no in-game maps until the 4th expansion).
Re: Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic
#40I'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.
Agreed, the grind is massive compared to current WoW. Also, you’ll need friends to play vanilla, there’s very few stuff which can be done solo and finding groups is very time consuming.
I’ll definitely be checking this out for nostalgia but I don’t expect to reach the level cap. Probably not even 40 which used to be quite a feat already back then.