Have petitions ever changed anything (in gaming)? (RE: World of Warcraft legacy servers, 209,000 signatures)

I saw some Blizzard tweets from 2015. I wonder if they think there's enough interest this time! It has never, ever had this much buzz in the past, not even close.

Meridian 59 and Neocron 2? Never heard of them, I'm going to look those up. Thanks for the contribution!

Hopefully Blizzard will see they could probably make more by doing this, money talks!

We did it! Err maybe?

https://twitter.com/NostalBegins/status/724896445766193152

The petition accomplished something. I'm really excited to learn more about what Blizzard and Nostalrius have been working on together.

@deepcovergecko: Having a discussion doesn't mean they are working on something together. You might be getting a little ahead of yourself here.

I could be, a lot of us are feeling it is linked to this but that could also be a farewell video or something.

I am somewhat confident this is going to be a net win, just the fact that Blizzard are taking it seriously now is exciting in itself.

@deepcovergecko: I agree with @mike. You should temper your expectations here. It's great that Blizzard is engaging and having a discussion, but the end result of that discussion may very well just be a thorough explanation of why what you want can't happen or some sort of compromise that isn't quite what you wanted.

They have explained that it's difficult to just run classic servers a little in the blue post on their forums, my armchair speculation leads me to believe they are discussing getting classic WoW running with the aid of Nostalrius who already have a highly developed (5 years in the making) version.

What's interesting is apparently the Mac version runs on PPC hardware so they'd need a new version to run on modern Mac hardware which is x64/x86. I love all the tidbits about WoW's development and server technical details that have come out of this. I completely forgot how different Mac hardware as at the time and just assumed you could still use the old clients.

@deepcovergecko:

What Blizzard actually said in that post was, "We explored options for developing classic servers and none could be executed without great difficulty."

That doesn't mean that they are technically incapable of doing it. It probably just means that it would cost Blizzard a lot of money to do properly and have it be up to their standards, which of course it would. This sounds like a more PR friendly way of saying, "We didn't think we could make enough profit on something like this to make it worth it, so we didn't do it." No company wants to come right out and say they're not doing something because the expected return isn't high enough, at least not in this industry. Blizzard also has the overall consumer image of WoW to consider, and a vanilla server may not fit in with their vision for the product and it's future. People who run their own pirate servers couldn't care less about this aspect of managing a product like WoW.

That's probably why they are in contact with Nostalrius, I can't see any other reason they would be talking because Blizzard sure as hell don't need them to work on the idea of pristine servers.

Kotaku just ran a story about this that pretty much makes it look like they just met to discuss why it had to go down, and that Blizzard stoll doesnt want to go through with the hassle to make classic servers

@deepcovergecko: What's probably why? That doesn't make any sense.

There was initially calls for Blizzard to hire Nostalrius' devteam and have them work with the old versions/code Blizzard have.

Blizzard said before that they don't have the old WoW in a very good state and that it's a big hurdle for this to happen.

Just not sure why else they'd be communicating with Nostalrius.

Actually it didn't. Blizzard said in their current environment it would be "extremely" difficulty to get it working in their current environment but that they'd continue to have discussions about it.

I stand with Blizzard on this as they have every right to protect their IP and by not doing so have ever chance to lose it. It's a shitty thing for the users who liked the private server but a company has to do what a company has to do.

@deepcovergecko: I'm not saying it's this, but a very obvious reason would be to explain to them not to do anything like this again.

Well it kind of did:

So what can we do to capture that nostalgia of when WoW first launched? Over the years we have talked about a “pristine realm”. In essence that would turn off all leveling acceleration including character transfers, heirloom gear, character boosts, Recruit-A-Friend bonuses, WoW Token, and access to cross realm zones, as well as group finder. We aren’t sure whether this version of a clean slate is something that would appeal to the community and it’s still an open topic of discussion.

They're thinking of solutions to apply to the current version.

One other note - we’ve recently been in contact with some of the folks who operated Nostalrius. They obviously care deeply about the game, and we look forward to more conversations with them in the coming weeks.

Here we have some hope this is going to result in a path to legacy servers.

This is much more recognition and hope than we have ever received from Blizzard in the past.

Why are you bringing up the legality? I didn't say they can't shut them down and most people aren't saying it isn't Blizzard's legal right to do it.

I feel bad for the people who had legendary items on the server that got shuttered! The risk you take...

I doubt it, they would be better suited contacting some of the other big private servers still in operation. There's a brand new server coming online tomorrow which is where most of Nostalrius' players seem to be heading to.

I won't link it or say the name because it might be against the rules.

Nostalrius probably would not have said anything on Twitter if that was the tone of the conversation right?

Are you kidding me? Compare BC raiding to freaking 40-man Naxx, and it - while not a cake walk - is much easier.

Also, I'm pretty sure Blizzard downsized dungeons to 5-man groups close to the end of Vanilla WoW, not TBC.

I agree with you regarding Wrath though. The biggest complaint about that expansion was how EASY it was at the beginning. All of the raids were cleared within days of release, and it wasn't until a few months later that Ulduar was released that there was finally a difficult dungeon added. I remember my friends and I would all farm heroics and we just got so bored with them, since it was so easy to get decked out in purple gear. It wasn't until much later that they introduced the three Icecrown 5-man dungeons that we finally got difficult 5-man content again. A lot of people like to shit on Cataclysm, but at least they made the Heroics harder than they were in Wrath.

Why would you assume that?

Wait...what? How exactly does this quote mean that they are thinking of solutions to apply to the current version? You are reading things between the lines that just aren't there.

Nostalrius aren't going to say "We're looking forward to talking more!" if they're simply being scolded by Blizzard.

I'm not sure what you mean. Blizzard said this themselves:

So what can we do to capture that nostalgia of when WoW first launched? Over the years we have talked about a “pristine realm”. In essence that would turn off all leveling acceleration including character transfers, heirloom gear, character boosts, Recruit-A-Friend bonuses, WoW Token, and access to cross realm zones, as well as group finder. We aren’t sure whether this version of a clean slate is something that would appeal to the community and it’s still an open topic of discussion.

So... they are thinking of changes they could make to the current version of WoW (in these 'pristine' servers), which is going to be easier than getting classic servers up (allegedly).

Video from ex-World of Warcraft team lead.

@deepcovergecko: The original point was just that you should temper your expectations. It's nice that Blizzard is being open and discussing these things but nothing they've said or that the Nostalrius people have said seems to imply that anything will be done - only that they're talking about them.

It seems quite certain to me that they're going to do something. The question is, are they going to deliver classic servers or try this 'pristine server' route which has received a lot of negativity so far, the idea of having a more...'hardcore' server has merit but their initial thoughts wouldn't change the game enough and definitely won't appease the die hard fans of previous versions.

I'll be expecting something at Blizzcon and I'm sure they'll be some updates coming in the next few weeks. I have a hard time thinking they will make any changes or add any of these servers before August (Legion's release).

That negativity is the reason why I'm saying to keep your expectations in check. They might do something but it may not actually be what you want.

I'm already a little prepared for that after today, if it wasn't for them being in talks with Nostalrius I'd basically be writing off the idea of the classic servers to be honest.

@random45: Naxx has a few difficult bosses (Gothik, 4H, Sapphiron, KT) but it has a good blend and mix of difficulties with a lot of options, Sunwell is rigidly linear with higher demands on each individual player, due to the nature of 40 man raiding it's functionally impossible for raiding to be more difficult because you have to carry 15 more people, it's very hard to find 25 good players let alone 40, Death and Taxes never had 40 good players. Sunwell killed about 5000 guilds and about 85% of hardcore guilds (including DnT and Overrated incidentally), what was left was a bunch of mergers (Exodus, Premonition, etc.), nothing is even close to that number and the reason why the modern raiding system exists is because Blizzard realized killing off most of the top guilds and barring any progress from almost every other guild wasn't a very smart thing to do, undoubtedly correct but it certainly killed the mystique of raiding post Ulduar.

Or they can have the discussions and do exactly nothing which I was what I expect to happen. Blizzard isn't obligated to talk to these folks and I think it's great that they are listening to a fairly large community of players who want a return to old school WoW. Some of my favorite times from that game are from the BC and WotLK era but if I had to level in from 1-80 again in that world I might do something regrettable.

I just don't see WoW's current state dire enough for them to need to do this. Would it be nice for them to figure something out? Sure but realistically I don't see much coming from this.

Subscriptions are at an all time low so it's a pretty good time for them to try this if they can get the old version running on their own servers.

Even if Blizzard earned a lowly 150k re-subscriptions for these servers (which is a low estimate) they'd be getting another 2.2 million USD a month.

The Nostalrius server had server fees of less than 1000 USD a month with a higher player cap than Blizzard's servers, so the return in investment is huge so long as they don't have to spend a fortune getting the old code working.

@deepcovergecko: The operating costs of a pirate server are not directly comparable to official Blizzard servers. Besides development costs and ongoing engineering services, Blizzard would have to integrate the new Vanilla world into their existing server farms, pay for GMs, technical and customer support, PR, marketing, staff to support all those departments, and more. The costs would be far more substantial than you think they would be.

Anyway it doesn't really matter since no one knows how many subscribers such a server would get, and only Blizzard knows how much it would cost to develop and operate. You definitely cannot say that it be profitable, though. You don't have enough information.

Yeah I know but a common argument by people who are anti-legacy servers is expensive servers, but actually the server fee wouldn't be where the money has to go to resurrect the old versions.

@deepcovergecko: They have to integrate it with their current infrastructure, dig up old code, make it work on modern system while not being nightmarishly buggy. (That latter one was what the private server failed at.)

Nostalrius wasn't nightmarishly buggy, that and the professionalism of the owners is why it was so popular.

I've heard it had its fair share of issues around launch though.

They are far from an all-time low but they are declining. Also with Blizzard not reporting numbers on subs anymore we actually don't have any way of truly knowing what the numbers are at. However Legion is coming up in a few months which will see an increase for subs until people plow through it and get bored.

It hasn't been this low since the first two years of the game and has dropped significantly since WOTLK, the last acclaimed expansion.

It'll be worse now because of the backlash against Blizzard for Warlord of Draenor's crazy lack of content.

See here for more on the latter:

The video Mike Morhaime responded to.

This is the best news.

I wouldn't trust Kern to meet up with anybody, much less the developers of WoW.

Well, he has worked on bigger games than most people in this industry, so he was able to do something right (and I know about Firefall).

@error52: Yeah, fuck that guy I guess? His involvement makes me way less interested. I dunno if that's stupid or not, but that's the way I'm feeling.