World of Warcraft: Current Year

a c i d.f l y said:

The organic nature of what the game is was lost somewhere along the way. Probably after Wrath. I'd say BC, but both pulled on monstrous lore aspects. Cataclysm had that opportunity, but people didn't give a fuck about the black drake when he was covered as far back as BWL, with no additional lore between two expansions.

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A few people said it, but the "right" way would be to branch WoW Classic.

Run WoW Classic as Vanilla, and after Phase 6, announce the first expansion to WoW Classic... The Shores of Northrend.

You would run Classic as a complete fork of WoW, reusing the massive assets produced for the current game, but keeping the classic design. I'd skip over Outland for now, since Northrend would not be easier to redesign than Outland, but it would be a very good test bed to how to do such a Classic line.

Guiding principle: keep every quirk and weird from vanilla, remove only the worst part that really, really don't work, integrate only the parts that fit.

No new races, since you skip Outland. No Jewelcraft (you might salvage it, but it's an odd). No DAILIES (you can keep repeatable quests from vanilla, but dailies? GTFO). No heroic mode for dungeons; if you want heroic modes, you make "max+" dungeons tuned slightly above. No 10/25 man raids, you'll keep 20/40. And, of course, the WoW devs are happy that flying does not exists.

Northrend is also a good place to go, since you're fresh out of counter-attacking, destroying Naxxaramas and blunting the LK's assault. Instead of sleeping for a couple year until someone randomly opens up the Dark Portal and you feel the need to fuck up Illidan instead of letting him go against the Legion, you push back and counterattack. So straight Nax->Northrend makes sense.

The main challenges: cleaning some of the storyline. Redoing the stories since phasing is shit and needs to go. And if the quest writers complain, remind them that "limitations breed creativity". You need to redo the whole phasing, which means mainly that:

• You need to redo the Wrathgate story (can't phase Wrathgate, can't invade phased Undercity, and Saurfang Jr is still hidden away on Nagrand anyway)
• You need to redo the entire dual factions of Sholazar (no phasing, no dailies)
• You need to redo the whole Icecrown (it's absolutely insane to navigate without flying, plus massive phasing to invade)
• You need to redo the Dalaran/Blue Dragonflight issue (the concept of a neutral capital is one that doesn't fit Classic)

Things you need to keep:

• +% crit/haste, etc. The main issue that comes from the handful of items that have only/more than half +%. The +% value grow over levels, but if the rest of the item doesn't grow, it will become lesser over time.
• Skills. Keep that.
• Horde Paladins (Taurens, of course) and Alliance Shaman (Dwarves, of course)
• Argent Dawn. What's this Argent Crusade shit?
• Alchemy Specialization, probably add another (Mining Spec: more elements or more gems?)
• Faction Tabards. The best invention of LK, I think.

I'd do the inverse of the planned level squish: Make the expansion 60-75 instead of 60-70. Quest items at lvl 60 in Howling Fjord have the same ilvl/items as greens in Winterspring, and stretch more slowly items. Make naked stat growth slightly slower; the idea would be that 60-75 is equivalent to leveling from 30-60. Since you don't have spell scaling and talent trees, you still yield lots of new ability per 2-3 levels.

That's a rough outline. You need probably a replacement for some stuff (Coliseum - without the dailies, it doesn't make sense). I'd also use this as a testbed for cut-n-paste creation of original content from existing maps. Glue together a handful of titan-themed places and see if you can add a dungeon in Sholazar for example (with the Oracle/Frenzyheart conflict reused as an intro for the dungeon): The Titan Archive.

You can sell that to the beancounters by tying it to the current expansion: if you don't purchase the current expansion, you don't have access to the Classic expansion. Probably would be a hard sell as a separate expansion since it's a copy and paste.

The biggest problem: as you said, if that shit happened, you would have 80% of the players playing Classic rather than Modern.

Fyff said:

The old existing content isn't rotting. People here lost their shit when they couldn't teleport to old content in 4 seconds and had to walk there, experiencing other old content.

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They're just punching through an instance for a mount drop, and the portals were the fastest way to get there. That is not content. That's scratching off the rest of a lottery card when you've already lost.

Chris said:

Level squish will only work if they make a sustainable model for progression that won't need a squish ever again.

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They can't. The only reason you need a level squish is that they simply removed every single level reward, and only left the wrong bits.

The original model had spell/skill ranks. You did repurchase a new rank every 10-16 levels, which made you feel like you progressed, since with enough spell lines, you could twist those every 2 levels.

(by the way, the reason those spells are every two levels? If you look at the original designs in John Staadt's book, you'll see that the original game was 1-25, before they had to inflate levels so that you'd get more dings)

The original model had talent points and tree. You got a new talent point every level, which helped making your feel stronger.

The current model? Every level, your %/rating ratio decreases, while your ennemies ding at the same time as you do, meaning you become WEAKER with every level. Oh, and they know it, they just don't have a simple solution that doesn't begin with "let's scratch all this."

As an aside, and as I posted in my "let's fork Classic from Modern" post, the whole rating debacle is a stupid thing that is entirely linked to... trinkets.

If you have an item with +0.78% crit, then, as your level increases, the effectiveness of that stat increases vs the level at which you got it. Which, by the way, is exactly what happens at max level, when you increase your other items rather than your naked stats.

However, if the total of +% on an item is half or even less, then it's not a big issue. The flat stats (+STA, +INT, +whatever) don't change, meaning the item's value in those areas remain fixed. As a result, the item doesn't grow in ilvl as fast as your level, and it ends up weaker at the end. So the only items where this is an issue are the items that have only "rating-based" stats. Simply nerf whatever +haste trinket you have to have STA/haste or INT/haste or whatever, and you won. Now, you can give +% to people, and they no longer become weaklings.

(of course, it would help if your base stats didn't grow so fast between levels)


All of the current mudflation problems come from picking the wrong solutions in order to make people feel good all the time without raising the barriers to entry. Fuck, when your entire raiding scene requires you to increase the stats by +140% over an expansion, you do end up with problems everywhere as your design strains to accommodate this.