Blizzard announced "Classic" World of Warcraft

[Revenant]

WoW was never an MMO (and was also shit). Why? It lacked any "massive" part whatsoever, because everything of relevance happened in instances. And no, world PvP without full loot is not relevant because all it ever did was waste time for players trying to run to the dungeon on a PvP realm.

Are you a fucking lab rat or something? World PvP was fun unless you needed a piece of cookie dough for every single little action you performed.

If you can't lose, you can't win either. And wasting a couple minutes on a corpse run is not losing.

 

[Parabalus]

WoW was never an MMO (and was also shit). Why? It lacked any "massive" part whatsoever, because everything of relevance happened in instances. And no, world PvP without full loot is not relevant because all it ever did was waste time for players trying to run to the dungeon on a PvP realm.

There was no mandatory PvP loot in vanilla though, it got added in BC and before that raid gear was >= even r14 stuff, barring weaps (slow speed). You especially needed to raid for decent trinkets.

WoW was never an MMO (and was also shit). Why? It lacked any "massive" part whatsoever, because everything of relevance happened in instances. And no, world PvP without full loot is not relevant because all it ever did was waste time for players trying to run to the dungeon on a PvP realm.

Are you a fucking lab rat or something? World PvP was fun unless you needed a piece of cookie dough for every single little action you performed.

It's funny when people dismiss wPvP as pointless, while gleefully spending time to upgrade pixels in a game.

That said, the honor system was pretty bad though.

 

[Revenant]

Full loot means looting other players, not PvP gear. World PvP is obviously better than instanced but is meaningless without full loot.

 

[Kem0sabe]

I agree that world Pvp should give loot rewards, maybe not full player inventory, but based on class, race, faction, make it random.

 

[Bester]

What kind of rewards would you like?

 

[Bester]

One way to make things interesting is to make player's gold drop in world pvp. And for banks to be able to hold your gold.

 

[Lacrymas]

WoW was never designed as a PvP game, they started adding PvP elements post-factum. The results were never really good.

 

[Bester]

WoW was never designed as a PvP game, they started adding PvP elements post-factum. The results were never really good.

At the time it was designed, all mmos had a heavy (or at least middleweight) pvp component, so I very much doubt your statement and would like to ask for a citation.

 

[Lacrymas]

The game releasing with no incentives, systems or rewards for PvP should be an obvious giveaway. What kind of citation do you want?

 

[gruntar]

Yet despite not having incentives, systems or rewards, PvP was crazy fun at the beginning of WoW, before it was reduced to joyless instanced grind. Judging by Vanilla intro, which shows series of intense skirmishes between Horde and Alliance and zero PvE activities, WPvP was supposed to be an important part of the game at some point. Obviously devs changed their minds and switched to PvE, If I had to guess why it would be because of server stability, which indeed was absolutely terrible.



Honestly, after watching this what would you rather do, kill some dragons or kick opposite faction asses ?

 

[Lacrymas]

It was the right decision to scrap WPvP. It doesn't work with only two factions, as exemplified by Warhammer Online. In the end, WoW was more about EverQuest and dealing with its ...issues than DAoK or something similar. Instancing was done to give everyone a realistic chance to do the content, deaths were made into minor inconveniences and other such changes. It was the right call to make financially, though, as we are painfully aware.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The game was released in an unfinished state. I'm sure they intended the game to have a PvP component but they never got around fleshing it out for release.

Which worked just as well because people ended up doing PvP just for the fun of it. Ashenvale and Stranglethorn Vietnam in particular were the big PvP hubs where people just slaughtered each other for the fuck of it and "end game" PvP consisted in retarded (but fun) giant clusterfucks and big city raids.

That's one of the things that made vanilla special, that people did shit in the world just for the fun it. I can't count the times i just stopped grinding because some horde fuck ganked me or someone else got ganked and suddenly i would spend the next hour joining up with people to go fuck with the horde in return, for no other rewards besides the personal satisfaction.

To me, what the expansions should have done is come up with new ways for people to interact with each other and have moments of emergent gameplay. Instead they kept focusing in ways to draw people apart and away from the world experience. The world itself should have also been made richer. More lore, more things to explore, more interaction with NPCs etc.

 

[Paper]

If you can't lose, you can't win either. And wasting a couple minutes on a corpse run is not losing.

Couple minutes? I would've camped you til you logged, mr pve hero

 

[Revenant]

Yeah, and after each corpse run you res a bit closer to the instance and eventually vanish into the carebear area. What glorious world PvP.

 

[Emily]

Full loot means looting other players, not PvP gear. World PvP is obviously better than instanced but is meaningless without full loot.

3 problems with this

1) game being designed with a (shitty) soulbound system

2) a much deeper problem, items are worthless in game compared to say a serious MMORPG like Lineage 2 that had loot system with PVP, but it also had castle sieges, collecting taxes and many other things. However there to get even one mid tier item for level say 50 would take u months sometimes. The chance of a B grade item dropping was something like 1 in 100 000, so most of the players had to craft it using really deep and extensive system of getting receipts from long quests and obtaining a LOT of raw material for it. It was quite an ordeal. So losing that item actually meant something. And it wasnt auto dropped, but there was a choice for u to drop any item on u. And this made players being a pirate somewhat viable.

3) the way crafting works, makes items even MORE worthless than they are just by drops. Cause leveling crafting means flooding the market with your worthless trash, which ironically makes finished items more cheap than the raw materials needed to craft them lol.

Now compare to WoW where every single drop in game is an item and u see a start contrast.

 

[Lacrymas]

That's one of the things that made vanilla special, that people did shit in the world just for the fun it.

It's funny how people stopped doing these supposedly fun things the moment a system was implemented for it. Why is that? I'll leave that question unanswered as it's self-evident. You'll still get the chance to gank and be ganked in STV until your heart's content, STV was littered with skeletons and corpses in private servers, so we'll see how long the fun will last.

 

[Hobo Elf]

It's natural to be drawn to the things that are more rewarding even if it's less fun. People have only so many hours a day to grind and they'd rather do something that leads them to an eventual upgrade. In reality most people probably would rather be hijacking Nesingwary's camp in STV rather than running tepid old AB or WSG memes for the nth time, if only there was also an item to be gained from it at the end.

 

[Lacrymas]

That was my point. Being rewarded is eventually more important than self-made fun. They could've implemented something that rewards you for WPvP, but they made the right decision not to because 2 factions inevitably lead to Warhammer Online's failings. Blizz had surprising foresight back then. I think they purposefully chose not to encourage WPvP with substantial rewards in later expansions. It wasn't only because of the PvE focus, I think it's fairly obvious they were intending WoW to have more PvP elements, otherwise the 2 factions don't really make sense outside of lore, but as tine passed it became clear the original idea wouldn't work.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Later expansions and vanilla WoW are two different things. That's the entire point of anything we are talking about here in this thread, right? That they went in a different direction from what the original idea was when WoW was released and generally this was a direction for the worse, especially in the long run.

 

[gruntar]

That was my point. Being rewarded is eventually more important than self-made fun. They could've implemented something that rewards you for WPvP, but they made the right decision not to because 2 factions inevitably lead to Warhammer Online's failings. Blizz had surprising foresight back then. I think they purposefully chose not to encourage WPvP with substantial rewards in later expansions. It wasn't only because of the PvE focus, I think it's fairly obvious they were intending WoW to have more PvP elements, otherwise the 2 factions don't really make sense outside of lore, but as tine passed it became clear the original idea wouldn't work.

As I said, its not 'surprising foresight',but incredibly bad server infrastructure that made Blizzard pass on WPvP and contain it in safe instances. I participated in a few huge fights between top guilds over green dragons during AQ patch, when we farmed nature resist gear, and not only was it great fun, but it also had a purpose and organic rewards. Unfortunately about 100 max level players fighting could cause insane lag and eventually server crash.

What happened in latter expansions is irrelevant, as they decided to make e-sport out of WoW PvP. So much for 'surprising foresight', huh ?

 

[Lacrymas]

Arenas are something else entirely, I was specifically talking about WPvP. Maybe they did indeed scrap the massive PvP ideas due to bad servers.

 

[Paper]

The honour system is indeed quite shitty, albeit mandatory for some classes with some items being BiS til AQ40 and /or Naxx. The points don't matter much, though, PvP is about winning. Vanilla WoW has a much better combat balance for fun PvP than the later games. I understand they changed the game in the name of balance with arenas but vanilla PvP was explosive and depended a lot on how you had built your character previously with xp, gear, talents and consumables.

 

[Don Peste]

https://www.mmo-champion.com/conten...eveloper-Q-A-Submit-Questions-for-John-Staats

John Staats, Bo Bell, Alexander Brazie, and Sam Lantinga recently answered questions on /r/classicwow. John Staats has an ongoing Kickstarter for a book about Vanilla WoW development. You can see other interviews with John here.

Raids

• When the team was building Vanilla there wasn't much of a focus on what players would do for the endgame. Once Burning Crusade came along there was a better idea of what endgame should be. (Source)
• The Karazhan crypts were designed as an additional quest area but was never utilized. (Source)
• Karazhan took years to finish. (Source)
• The portals to Molten Core and Blackwing Lair were a band-aid to the annoyance of clearing a dungeon to zone into them. (Source)
• AQ had the most revisions before going live, though Karazhan had so many issues it didn't launch until the first expansion. (Source)
• John believes AQ was conceptualized as an open world dungeon.
• The designers hated designing around Decursive. (Source)
• John found the fan theory that standing too close to each other is what caused Onyxia to deep breath amusing. (Source)

Cities

• Nuking the "useless" night elf quarter in Stormwind was a positive of Cataclysm. (Source)
• Stormwind was going to have gondolas at some point.
• The city arenas (such as the one in Orgrimmar) originally were going to have events, but this never came to pass. (Source)
• The water above Deeprun tram was just to make the ride less boring. They also didn't realize until too late that it went east to west instead of south to north, but it wasn't a big enough bug to fix. (Source)
• Old Ironforge wasn't particularly needed and so it was never finished.

Classes and Races

• Blood Elves were based on a STRONG request from a poll of Asian players where many remarked on the Horde side that they and their girlfriends wanted a non-creepy femme race to play (Source)
• Runemaster, Necromancer, and Death Knight classes were among the original classes that never made it. (Source)
• Hunter was the last class added and barely made it in. (Source)
• Warlocks and Paladins had class mounts just for flavor. Their classes had archetypal steeds. (Source)
• Originally, Druids were meant to be constantly switching forms, during a battle, but the fact that designers put so much mana costs on shape shifting, dissuaded players from doing so.
• There was going to be a huge quest line where Warlock Players needed to perform a global collection effort to rebuild Medivh's spellbook and perform a group ritual to open the Dark Portal while players on the server protected them from enemy attacks. That was cancelled after the Gates of AQ. (Source)
• The Vanish bug was various class abilities added to the Rogue that didn't have the "don't break vanish" flag set. Getting the flags right was something that became part of the routine, but early on it was easy to miss interactions between spell types. (Source)
• The early class weapon quests were a great idea, that ultimately got cut so they could ship Burning Crusade. (Source)

PvP

• The battles in Hillsbrad Foothills were completely unexpected.

Expansions

• Outland was never part of the vanilla WoW plan. The early Hellfire map was most likely someone playing around with assets. (Source)
• Northrend and Outland were "cut" from vanilla as the team knew they would be doing content updates later. (Source)

Emerald Dream

• The Emerald Dream was cut early in development because the trees and flowers didn't fill up the space as one would expect in a dream setting.
• The Emerald Dream had portals around the world to enter it, similar to the one in Twilight Grove. It was one of the last zones on the list, Metzen wasn't sure what he wanted to do with it, so Bo got approval to cut it. (Source)

Dungeon Design

• Dungeon layouts are more precise now to tailor to the average player and make it easier to naviagate, though he preferred exploring less straightforward dungeon layouts. (Source)
• The unused door in Blackrock Depths that is guarded by a molten giant was put there as an excuse to have the road leading to the city. The thought was that what was behind it might eventually be turned into another raid.

World Design

• The most satisfying design changes was realizing that a room was boring and going back and making it interesting.
• The Undead areas were the last to get added to the original game.
• By speeding up leveling, they found out that it wasn't necessary to have as many zones and dungeons. Most weren't cut, they were saved for later. Grim Batol, Tol Barad, Karazhan are good examples. Some places weren't ideal for Warcraft lore, or well-built (like Dragon Isles) will unlikely see the light of day. (Source)
• The designers had lots of freedom while designing a zone. Metzen gave them the story and a few key PoIs for Durotar and then let them just build it. (Source)
• There were a lot of camps in the zones built early on because there weren't a lot of assets to use. Elwynn ended up with Gnoll camps because tents were the only asset the designers had. (Source)
• Early zones were done by an entirely inexperienced team, with a map of PoIs that Metzen drew years ago as a starting point. (Source)
• The Darkshire roofs were tested to make sure you couldn't get on them, even with mounts. This testing was before epics mounts were around though. (Source)
• Bo built out Duskwood with Darkshire and then expanded outward, adding a cool graveyard. By the time he got over on the other side of Twilight Grove, he remembered Ravenhill and made a "real" graveyard. (Source)
• Duskwood had a ton of lore, while Moonglade and Shimmering Flats had almost none. (Source)
• Silverpine Forest was created several zones in, so Bo had learned a lot by then. It had a similar vibe to Duskwood but a better layout and flow, so it was almost like a Duskwood 2.0. (Source)
• The team was originally going to do something with the Dark Portals, but Metzen kept changing his mind. They ended up with one in the Blasted Lands that wasn't functional. (Source)
• Azjol-Nerub as a zone was supposed to have wall climbing mounts, but this was widely out of scope for the team at the time of Lich King.
• The team wanted the quests and zones to tie in with the dungeons, but there was a ton of content to finish and that got in the way. (Source)
• Shimmering Flats was supposed to be an interesting and fun wasteland. It was finished ahead of schedule. (Source)
• When it came to griefing, the question asked before Blizzard intervened was: Do the players who are being impaired have the ability to fix the situation? (Source)

Tech

• The interior spaces were built in 3DStudioMax and the exterior levels were built with an in house tool called WoWEdit.
• Originally the character animation was done in world coordinates which made them act funny outside the starting zones. They were then changed to local space calculations. (Source)
• The debuff limit on mobs was a tech limitation. (Source)
• Mike Morhaime asked Sam to stop work on the Linux client because they were about to launch the game and didn't have the support resources to handle the Linux client. (Source)
• Lua was extremely fast, extremely flexible, extremely small, had minimal additional modules, so it was easy to secure. Python would have been much harder. (Source)
• WoWEdit has source control built in, as well as permissions based on your job role. (Source)
• Minigames were a desired feature in Vanilla, but the programmers were slammed as it was. (Source)
• WoW shared engine technology with Warcraft 3 very early in development. (Source)
• Eyes of the Beast's main problem was it was disrupted by crossing server boundaries. The tech has improved since it was removed so it could likely return for WoW Classic. (Source)
• There wasn’t a proper way to store arbitrary scripted information on the server for longer than a frame at the time. So you used spells and NPCs to track this stuff for you. So rats would wear a buff for each boss defeated and eventually would tell Major Domo he could spawn Ragnaros. It was cleaned up in the future.

Misc

• Creating content as fast as players consume it isn't a realistic goal. (Source)
• Blizzard had no editing requirements for the book. He got a few things wrong, removed one of the quotes, and added an afterward because they thought the book should have a "what happened to John Staats?" section. (Source)
• If John was still working on the game he would keep the dungeon finder, slow down flying mounts, slow down leveling, ax the teleports, would probably go with class balances that were better than Vanilla WoW, very hybrid class builds.
• John thought flying mounts were too fast. (Source)
• There were AoE stomping infernals that would teleport out of bounds players to GM Island and destroy their hearthstone. GMs would log in, see them, give them a verbal tongue lashing and then teleport them back to civilization. (Source)
• Undead not being able to show bones in China may have been an attempt to slow down WoWs implementation by rival companies. (Source)
• Sam doesn't believe there will ever be a WoW 2 as it is too big an endeavor. (Source)
• Blackrock Depths was built before the Lord of the Rings movies were released but LBRS was a tribute to Moria. (Source)
• The AQ event and corrupted blood incident stand out as the funniest unexpected glitches.
• "Resistance" moments that were challenging spots where you get stuck for a few minutes have somewhat disappeared. Elite quests used to require you to wait around or find a group to complete them, leading to social interaction. (Source)

 

[Ninjerk]

Fucking hunters

 

[Lyric Suite]

God damn Asians are responsible for the faggot elves on Horde.