BBC Coverage - good or bad?

[Metabolomics 2]

I can't decide if I'm pleased to see the launch covered on the BBC website or not. 

 

Fan-made version of 'Classic' World of Warcraft returns

On the one hand it means a new audience talking about it - potentially some more players (I'm rolling on the fresh sever, didn't even know about Nost until the shutdown). 

 

On the other hand it's probably coverage that Blizzard isn't too thrilled to be getting ... 

What do others think? 

[DM1234 10]

Remember when PlayTBC tried to open after the Nos shutdown and got hammered by thousands of players? I just hope the Elysium team is in the brace position...

[Stephen 0]

Remember when PlayTBC tried to open after the Nos shutdown and got hammered by thousands of players? I just hope the Elysium team is in the brace position...

The stress tests seemed successful, I wasn't a part of it but seen plenty of videos and read some stuff, sure there was lag, and the queue was out the door and round the block but it did something right.

[Athena 3]

The article is wrong anyway.

 

More than 250,000 people then signed a petition calling for Nostalrius to be resurrected.

 

The petition wasn't for Nostalrius, but for legacy servers.

[Pishy 0]

We're gonna get shut down quite soon, let's just be real. вау the hype...

Do I want Blizzard to open legacy servers? Nah, they're gonna fu*k it up again anyway, as they always do past 2008.

[Athena 3]

We're gonna get shut down quite soon, let's just be real. вау the hype...

Do I want Blizzard to open legacy servers? Nah, they're gonna fu*k it up again anyway, as they always do past 2008.

 

2009 was still a good year to be honest. Patch 3.3 (dec 2009) introduced the (battlegroup based) dungeon finder and it was Cataclysm that really expanded it's functionality. That's when it all started to go downhill.

Edited December 9, 2016 by Athena

[Stormhart 12]

I see it's as a rather good thing. It shows that vanilla WoW (illegally or not) has huge support from it's community. 

It shows how passionte people are about it and the willlingness to fight for it. It shows that (most) private server community's don't do it to screw with Blizzard, but simply because they want to play vanilla Wow. Something Blizzard doesn't offer. 

 

Blizzard's silence on the topic is worrysome, but imagine the consequences of an Elysium shutdown by Blizzard, which seems to recieve more media attention than the Nost shutdown sofar.

Edited December 9, 2016 by Stormhart

[Zappa 7]

There are so many reasons not to support blizzard anymore.

 

Their behavior towards playerbase is arrogant and money is their only interest.

[Zealotz 0]

Do I want Blizzard to open legacy servers? Nah, they're gonna fu*k it up again anyway, as they always do past 2008.

I fear they will try to open a legacy server once WoW dies for real to make cash on nostalgia and fail miserably as they won't manage to restrain themselves to impose their фекал modern blizzard vision on it or something. They seem clueless, it's hilarious and sad at the same time.

Seriously I lost faith in Blizz the moment I saw these guys feeling forced to shut down legacy servers because they're afraid of its popularity and not being able to do better than a team of volunteer devs working on a broken, 11 years old version of the game they're working on.

[Stephen 0]

I fear they will try to open a legacy server once WoW dies for real to make cash on nostalgia and fail miserably as they won't manage to restrain themselves to impose their фекал modern blizzard vision on it or something. They seem clueless, it's hilarious and sad at the same time.

Seriously I lost faith in Blizz the moment I saw these guys feeling forced to shut down legacy servers because they're afraid of its popularity and not being able to do better than a team of volunteer devs working on a broken, 11 years old version of the game they're working on.

I am not a law expert at all, this is just what I beleive to be true from my brief encounter with game development and the eventuality of selling your software. They have to be seen making an effort to protecting their property, they are legally obligated to attempt to shut down illegal use of their software. Which they do, nostalrius just made it even more public than others to make a bit of noise and rally the crowd to get behind them. Some one correct me if I am wrong.

[Danko 1]

I just hope the servers will stay up despite the high load

[Zealotz 0]

I am not a law expert at all, this is just what I beleive to be true from my brief encounter with game development and the eventuality of selling your software. They have to be seen making an effort to protecting their property, they are legally obligated to attempt to shut down illegal use of their software. Which they do, nostalrius just made it even more public than others to make a bit of noise and rally the crowd to get behind them. Some one correct me if I am wrong.

What you say isn't wrong but I'd encourage you to read this copypasta from ArenaJunkies that made me think about it, it might interest you (Tell me what you think about it if you do).

 

 

I've considered making a separate thread for this post, but I guess i'll just dump it here so no one can read it.

What we see with Nostalrius is that there is a big customer base that wants to play Vanilla servers. I've read the MMO-Champion thread and it seems a lot of sour virgins are convinced that Nostalrius is a fluke. Its player base is not more than that of one or two high pop realms and its filled with people that only play it because its free. Nostalrius actually proves there is no demand for legacy servers according to them.

This is nonsense of course. It is amazing that an illicit "company" without Blizzard support has managed to attract nearly 1 million account sign ups and has 150k active players. Put an official Blizzard stamp on that, and the amount would double tenfold. Because anything with an official Blizzard stamp will attract hordes of drooling fans. Games like Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch wouldn't have a playerbase if it came from an unknown company. Its the Blizzard tag that makes these games popular, or allows them to survive. I don't know anyone that plays private servers because they are free. Rather, they play them because they want to replay the most amazing game they've ever played. I personally would pay more than the current subscription to play on a legacy server, granted if they do it the right way.

Now we've gotten that out of the way. Lets look at why Blizzard will never release a legacy server. First off: It would be highly profitable to do so. The investment risk is very low, as private servers have proven there is a demand for this service. Even if it ends up not being profitable, it is highly likely the investment sum would be returned and the project could just be terminated again without any real losses. From a company perspective, they'd be crazy not to do this.

However, Blizzard is a huge multinational. These kind of big companies suffer in essence from the same issues as a government does. They become inefficient, incapable of innovating and lose contact with their customer base. They become bureaucratic in essence. This effect gets negated if the original owner/visionair of the company is still at the head of it. Think of a company like Apple when it still had Steve Jobs at its head.

When a company gets too big, the top of it is incapable of being involved with every production process within it. Tasks will be delegated to lead designers, developers, managers, data analysts and so on. These people don't necessarily want the best for the company, but rather the best for themselves. This is an issue all big companies run into. As I said before, this gets negated to some extent if the top of the company still has their hearth in it. If their goal is not to make a profit, but to make amazing games then they can steer the process from the top down just enough to still succeed. If we look at the current board of directors, we see that many of them only signed up in the last few years and that most likely none of them are interested in games whatsoever and most likely don't even play this game. They don't know anything about the games, about what the customer wants, they rely completely on those underneath them for information and just set targets that they want reached.

So what happens now is that all these people that had tasks delegated to them will work for their own advantage, rather than the companies or the games advantage. They will try to put their mark on things so they can put that on their CV for future job prospects, salary raises etc. Subscriber numbers are dropping? Don't worry, we have plenty of data analysts that will show its not because of what we are doing but because the market is saturated, MMMORPG's don't appeal to newer generations of gamers, insert whatever else excuse you want to make up. These people are monkey branching from the get go.

Now we have already seen that releasing legacy servers would be a huge profit maker for the company. But how will this work out for its employees? For the managers, developers, data analysts? If the legacy servers stay small, and make enough of a profit not much would happen. However, these legacy servers are a huge threat to all of them. What happens if these servers start to rival or even overtake the live game in popularity? This isn't a unwarranted fear, it is a very real possibility.

What do you think then, would happen with these managers and developers? They will forever be known within the field as those guys who's improved product is less popular than the 10 year old original product. That would seriously gimp any future job prospects. Who would want to hire these guys? Not even to mention, its a direct threat to their jobs in the first place as higher ups might try to cover themselves and instead put the blame on the ones lower than them. People would get fired over this. And what about the data analysts? Such a thing would show that they were completely wrong on anything and didn't understand what was happening. And then we're not even talking yet about the huge blow to the developers ego it would be, if an outdated game they didn't have anything to do with was more popular than their polished brand new products?

So the safest thing to do for them, is to not run legacy servers. If a company had a will, and that will was just to make a profit. Then of course we'd see legacy servers. But what is best for the company, would turn out horrible for some of its employees. So they need to prevent legacy servers from becoming a thing, ever.

And this also explains why some branches within Blizzard have decided to make this move against Nostalrius. Smaller servers are left alone because these prove the argument that "legacy servers are not in high demand". A server such as Nostalrius is a danger for them, because someone at the top of the food chain whose success is more directly related to the success of the company (such as someone on the board of directors) might take notice of this and start the ball towards legacy servers rolling....... 

Edited December 9, 2016 by Zealotz

[Metabolomics 2]

Interesting read - I'm just not convinced that Blizz see a profit potential in legacy servers.

 

They'll look at the numbers from Nost, and the amount of staff time they'd need to sink into organisational change, launch, and then maintaining, and shrug and say it's not worth it.

 

If that's the case then it would be nice for them to just quietly ignore the private servers that are doing this...     

 

Incidentally, a cease and desist letter isn't just fired off without senior sign-off surely?

[Stephen 0]

To tell you the truth I have never put too much thought into why blizzard won't do legacy, I havnt much care either, someone out there will provide the service, either nost/Elysium for free in their spare time or blizzard and charging for the service (which I have no problem with at all). That article does make sense and if that is the case, I won't hold my breath for official legacy.

Incidentally, a cease and desist letter isn't just fired off without senior sign-off surely?

Probably not senior game devs or project leaders but the top cunt in the legal department firing out legal threats to any one breaking IP rules.

Edited December 9, 2016 by Stephen

[Njut 0]

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/128252-a-short-history-of-activision-blizzard-or-how

 

FYI, for people who wonder why and how blizzard went down the drain. quite lengthy, but worth it

 

old read but im sure lots of people here hasnt read it

[gotmilk0112 10]

@that copypasta

 

Yeah, I too saw how tons of idiots claimed that "people are only playing vanilla servers because it's free, they wouldn't play if they had to pay for it!!!"...such bullshit.

 

If Blizzard released an official realm, it'd have perfect scripting, no lag/disconnects, no pay2win bullshit, no incorrect/buggy abilities, no broken quests, etc. etc.

 

I would gladly pay $15, or even $30 a month for what is essentially a 100% flawless Vanilla server.

Edited December 9, 2016 by gotmilk0112

[Destron 2]

I never understand the push to have Blizzard open Legacy servers. There is no doubt in my mind that what they would create would not please this community. 

[Drakbak 3]

Blizzard won't release legacy servers.  They're too caught up in their own brand.  If anything, they'd release a "WoW: Remastered" that would follow a similar storyline, but everything would be reworked from the ground up and would merely feel like a new expansion and nothing like vanilla.

[Gehere 8]

I never understand the push to have Blizzard open Legacy servers. There is no doubt in my mind that what they would create would not please this community. 

 

 

This is a very solid assumption.

 

Look how the community in here, is treating each other.    Imagine how people would be, if they were actually paying for this game.    Now they THINK they are entitled to be vocal - if paying for something - they'd demand it too.

 

#YouThinkYouDo,ButYouDon't.

[arbet 9]

I certainly wouldn't trust Blizzard to keep the game in its original state, but on the other hand the servers would no doubt be in a better condition. I'm quite content with sticking with fanmade servers tbh.

[dvergur 0]

2009 was still a good year to be honest. Patch 3.3 (dec 2009) introduced the (battlegroup based) dungeon finder and it was Cataclysm that really expanded it's functionality. That's when it all started to go downhill.

Dungeon finder is one of the bigger things that ruined WoW. It started the process of taking the game from a relatively immersive adventure to a cold program. фекал, if it were up to me, finding groups would have become harder.

[Mealticket 0]

Dungeon finder is one of the bigger things that ruined WoW. It started the process of taking the game from a relatively immersive adventure to a cold program. фекал, if it were up to me, finding groups would have become harder.

It's the lack of accountability. I remember Undertanker, I remember Matt being a huge troll, if I saw them, I'd remember more people I saw and played with. During MoP, I knew my guildmates. And only the ones in my raid.

[Athena 3]

Dungeon finder is one of the bigger things that ruined WoW. It started the process of taking the game from a relatively immersive adventure to a cold program. фекал, if it were up to me, finding groups would have become harder.

Yes, but my point is that the rest of the year was good.

[Metabolomics 2]

Sadly I think you're right Happy. Blizz all about the money - ain't no profit in Legacy at this point. Unlikely to be in the future either. 

[Elviss 5]

I am not a law expert at all, this is just what I beleive to be true from my brief encounter with game development and the eventuality of selling your software. They have to be seen making an effort to protecting their property, they are legally obligated to attempt to shut down illegal use of their software. Which they do, nostalrius just made it even more public than others to make a bit of noise and rally the crowd to get behind them. Some one correct me if I am wrong.

Idk if you are right or wrong here, since I'm also not law expert, but I also heard from other sources that Blizzard is literally obligated to present some effort in protecting their IP, otherwise they will lose it. So since I heard same thing from couple of different sources I'm gonna assume that you are right.