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Report from the Nostalrius and Blizzard Meeting

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The much anticipated meeting between Nostalrius and Blizzard took place last Friday and earlier today Nostalrius posted a report about it.

We already knew that Nostalrius and Blizzard were going to meet in the beginning of June, but we didn't know exactly when for security reasons. It turns out this meeting happened on Friday 3rd of June. Bear in mind that Blizzard also recently met with Mark Kern, another advocate of legacy servers.

From their part, Nostalrius posted an extensive report of this meeting; they were free to do so, since apparently they didn't have to sign an NDA. The staff of Nostalrius had prepared a very detailed presentation on their project, technical details and information about legacy servers in general and how popular they are. A lot of important Blizzard and World of Warcraft executives were present, like CEO Mike Morhaime, WoW Executive Producer J. Allen Brack and WoW Assistant Game Director Ion Hazzikostas. This shows how seriously Blizzard is taking this issue.

Nostalrius also commended Blizzard on their dedication and their interest in legacy servers. It is definite that Blizzard wants legacy servers, but things aren't that simple and they can certainly not be resolved in a single meeting! The technical details are the most important issue hindering the launch of legacy servers at the moment. Blizzard actually has the notorious vanilla source code, but the main problem is the following:

Quote

However, in order to generate the server (and the client), a complex build system is being used. It is not just about generating the “WoW.exe” and “Server.exe” files. The build process takes data, models, maps, etc. created by Blizzard and also generates client and server specific files. The client only has the information it needs and the server only has the information that it needs.

This means that before re-launching vanilla realms, all of the data needed for the build processes has to be gathered in one place with the code. Not all of this information was under a version control system. In the end, whichever of these parts were lost at any point, they will have to be recreated: this is likely to take a lot of resources through a long development process.

You can read the entire meeting report by Nostalrius here.

The community has taken this news extremely well and it's certainly a first step towards realising legacy realms in the live and official version of the game. A lot of people seem to think that Blizzard is going to announce legacy servers during this year's BlizzCon and honestly this is a very likely scenario. What do you guys think?

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Most of the people I know played on Private Servers because they are free. 

I highly doubt those people would pay subscription fee every month to play on a blizzard legacy server.

And because of the amount of work needed to build a legacy server as they mentioned, blizzard is not going to make the servers free to play. So I think if they run it, it's going to be a dead server.

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1 hour ago, mnime said:

Most of the people I know played on Private Servers because they are free. 

I highly doubt those people would pay subscription fee every month to play on a blizzard legacy server.

And because of the amount of work needed to build a legacy server as they mentioned, blizzard is not going to make the servers free to play. So I think if they run it, it's going to be a dead server.

Its the playing for free on these private servers that make people to join them. If you have to pay for it to play, I doubt there will be any large population on those servers. 

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I've looked at some youtube videos where they did a retrospective of how the legacy raids were. There were 2 concerning things that stood out:

1.Limited Debuffs mechanic.

Vanilla bosses had limited debuff slots (I think it was something like 10).

You will have 7 classes that places DoTs on their target as part of their dps rotation, and you also have classes that apply other status effects like Slow or reduce % armor. Now if the boss's debuff slots are full, the newly applied debuff will replace one of the slots. How would the feral druids, affliction locks, rogues and priests feel?

2.REQUIRED raid composition.

From Vanilla to Wrath of the Lich King, certain bosses where SOOO difficult, that they REQUIRED you to stack certain specs to even defeat them.

Frost Mages were for some reason (shrug) able to Freeze Ragnaros via one of their talents, then the next Frost mage spell were able to Shatter (Crit) of that freeze. Raid comps were made up of 75% frost mages so other classes won't override their chilling effect and benefit the most out of shatter.

People were required to have leatherworking just to chain use the Bloodlust drums (no Sated / Temp Displacement debuffs).

 

 

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Biggest problem is that you would have to move people who are involved in developing patches, next expansions and games would have to be moved to make the Legacy servers. I see no point in that, the only solution is letting Nostalrius getting their servers back, or hire them for blizzard to do the Legacys's. People don't realize how boring the game was, demanding but boring, comparing it to the WoW we have today.  The things Archimage pointed out destroy the gameplay too and if Nostalrius wasn't for free, I'm not sure if anyone would play that, maybe only RP servers.

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Even though I would like to see legacy servers back, I do agree that some aspects of Vanilla were literally unplayable/super annoying (some of them were mentioned above). I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I truly believe LFG for dungeons (not LFR) was actually a good thing. Remember how fun (not) it was to spam for a tank in trade chat for at least an hour?

I do believe people are going to play in the legacy servers when there's a period with no content on live servers, but at some point they will eventually run out of things to do there as well. The issue of whether a subscription is required to play in these legacy servers is also very important.

Even though I'm quite curious to see how vanilla WoW looked like (I started playing in late TBC), I truly believe the best kind of legacy server would be wotlk. The game was very polished back then, didn't have some of the stupidities of vanilla or tbc, it was accessible to more people but not everyone, it had great PvE content and relatively balanced PvP.

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Regardless of what comes out of all this, I hope the community understands that Blizzard does listen and care about the community.  Everyone makes fun of the quote "You think you do, but you don't"  and they may have believed that at one time.. but people can be convinced and admit that they where wrong while listening to feedback.  That is clearly the case here and I believe that if Blizzard could "Flip a Switch" and turn on Legacy Servers.. then they would.  The blue posts have all been completely honest in their responses and I hope people see that.

Edited by Fenderxx

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17 hours ago, Archimage said:

How would the feral druids, affliction locks, rogues and priests feel?

 

 

 

Feral druids and shadow priests dont have any raid slot in the "wonderfull" vanila, priest, druid, shaman and paladin was only acepted in raids as healers. Warriors was the only class to main tank raids too 

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I would pay subscription for each Vanila / TBC / WOTLK Legacy servers if they get them back.

You lunch costs as monthly subscription. Skip it once and you will be able to pay it.

Now you can pay with gold to play. If they implement same system (when gold was hardly obtained) you will have no problem playing it for free.

I hope there will be release date announcement on blizzcon this year. 

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