by JR Cook - 8 years ago     show comments

Blizzard’s official response to the ongoing debate about classic servers has got me thinking, and to a great extent, I’m sure that was the point. Without going into that entire debate here, Blizzard’s response seemed crafted to re-shape the conversation, mainly by setting the following terms:

• Blizzard is obligated to protect their intellectual property or they stand to lose legal control of it. So pirate servers still need to die when Blizzard is able to target them.
• Blizzard can’t justify the monumental cost it would take to re-create the older versions of the game AND provide them with the support they deserve as Blizzard products without impacting the ongoing support of the current game.
• However, the idea of “pristine servers” that eliminate some of the post-Classic mechanisms that have trivialized elements of the Classic game are a possibility, and Blizzard’s willing to talk about those.

Let’s try to paint a picture of what that could look like.

Reductive Reasoning

Imagine starting a character on a realm where you don’t have any existing characters. In fact, no one does. Literally everyone is starting at level 1. No transferring alts in with bags full of materials to flood the market with, no players with goldcapped toons controlling the economy. In the first few days, if you want to craft some equipment to replace what you’re getting from quests, you need the materials and the recipe to make that happen, because it’s not on the AH. If you want to form a guild, you’re doing it with people that are on that realm, or you’re bringing your friends in from the real world to start fresh characters as well.

Recruit-a-Friend? Doesn’t work. WoW Tokens? Can’t buy them. Heirloom weapons? All your max-level battle pets? Your partner with the max-level tank who offers to power-level you through dungeons? Nope, nope, nope. That boost token you got from buying the latest expansion? They don’t take that card here, bub.

You get the idea. On a pristine realm, everyone starts from the same bottom line. If that sounds like Diablo 3’s seasonal characters, then you may, in fact, be onto something.

Now, that’s where the vast majority of the differences appear to end. If Blizzard had a pristine server live right now, you’d be leveling in the post-Cataclysm EK/Kalimdor with the WoD talent grids. How powerful your characters are on live servers, and what abilities they have, would be the same. A pristine server only REMOVES certain functionality from the CURRENT game, and that doesn’t mean rolling back any other aspect of the game to an earlier version.

That is where some of the pro-legacy server crowd are getting hung up: pristine servers don’t appear to go far enough in replicating the experience of Classic WoW. To an extent, that’s really the crux of Blizzard’s argument here: recreating Classic WoW is fraught with insurmountable difficulties, but turning off functions of the current game? Much more feasible, and it MAY be the substitute people didn’t know they were looking for.

You think you’ll hate it, but turns out you love it.

But What About Progression?

Now here is where we expand on Blizzard’s idea a bit. And for the sake of argument, assume for the moment that the (##) following raid names are just the max number of players allowed in the instance at once, and not actually the number required to clear content. (Yes, I know three level 60 characters cleared Molten Core a couple years ago.)

• January 1st: Pristine Server opens. Realmwide level cap is 60. No raids are unlocked, but Azuregos and Kazzak (like old-school Blasted-Lands-and-occasionally-Stormwind Kazzak) are available World Bosses (40) for max-level characters.
• January 21st: Molten Core (40) and Onyxia’s Lair (40) are unlocked.
• March 1st: Blackwing Lair (40) is unlocked.
• April 14th: Emerald Nightmare World Bosses (40) begin to spawn in rotation.
• June 1st: Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj (10) and Temple of Ahn’Qiraj (40) are unlocked.
• July 14th: “The Dark Portal Opens” event begins.
• July 21st: The Dark Portal is unlocked. Realmwide level cap is increased to 70. No raids are unlocked, but Doomreaver is an available World Boss (25) for max-level characters. All level 60 raids are locked once again.
• August 14th: Karazhan (10), Gruul’s Lair (25), and Magtheridon’s Lair (25) are unlocked.
• October 1st: Serpentshrine Cavern (25) and Tempest Keep: the Eye (25) are unlocked.
• November 14th: Black Temple (25) is unlocked.
• December 14th: The Isle of Quel’Danas is unlocked.
• December 31st: Sunwell Plateau (25) is unlocked.

At this point, you get the idea. Blizzard could choose any schedule they like for how they allow this content to unlock, but the core mechanism is that by enforcing a level cap and incrementally expanding what content players have access to, they can recreate some of the progression pressure that some classic server enthusiasts seem to be after. Assuming, of course, that the encounters still require coordination to do at level.

And while this creates an interesting conundrum when it comes to how certain encounters work when they were designed for one expansion’s suite of class abilities that’s now been replaced by the WoD/Legion paradigm, this either replaces the kind of challenge that those same players are asking for with a new challenge, or in certain cases it requires the same kind of design tweaks we’ve seen done to fights long after they were current content, mostly to allow some raids to be more solo-friendly for max-level characters on live. Either way, it still feels like markedly less work than trying to recreate past versions of the game wholesale.

Moreover, it creates a scenario where World First races are patently more interesting to watch AND more frequent to boot.

Note that with that above schedule, giving 4-6 weeks for each successive tier of content, we still barely get to the end of the first expansion in the span of a single calendar year. Extend this format out (while smoothing over situations like the very long periods where expansion-ending raids overstay their welcome) and it’ll take awhile for Blizzard to catch up with themselves, while also giving players something to do while waiting for the current expansion to roll over.

That said, even I think a six-week period for an entire raid tier might burn out the raiders too quickly, but this is just an example of the idea. This is also just one of plenty of different iterations to consider when you ponder how pristine servers could be done.

Tell us what you think of this idea in the comments.