Im not (yet) a technically savvy person, but, I see private server from a random third party success! Official server from a multi billion dollar company?...NO PROBLEM THEY GOT THE MONEY TO THROW AT ANY PROBLEM THAT EXISTS!
Am I wrong? Or are you just taking the perspective of the grunts who actually have to impliment such changes.
I'm trying to look at it from all angles. While I don't have the number of roadblocks at my company that Blizzard would, I certainly do run into a few of them.
The directors of the project have to satisfy the people in finance (I doubt this is going to be free--hopefully they do a tiered pricing scheme, like no additional cost if you already have an active subscription to retail and, say, $5/month if you're not). If they aren't planning to charge for it, they'd have to make that determination as to whether the goodwill they get from it will exceed the value of the staff needed to run it. They'd need to factor everything in and see if they'd be able to break even. I suspect that's one of the main reasons they want to talk to the people who run vanilla servers: it's a great use study.
When it comes to the programming team, in the interests of both purity and time savings they're probably not going to rewrite the code (rewriting would likely put it overbudget verrrrry quickly) but they're still going to have to do a bunch of work on it to raise the security and reliability of the software while preserving the gameplay. I doubt anyone's going to complain if they prevent cheats and exploits from working, and I don't think anyone has fond memories of the mandatory maintenance windows.
After the code changes/modernization is done, they're going to have to run it through their compliance teams to ensure that the server software itself can't be exploited, as that can lead to some pretty sticky issues (like people getting access to the server that the code is running on). While that's happening, their QA team would be trying their damnedest to break the game. Since they're likely going to be modernizing the client as well (if nothing else to make sure it's using newer graphical APIs so that they don't have to worry if Microsoft winds up dropping DirectX 9 support or something like that), that's going to have to go through thorough testing to make sure that nothing breaks as a result of those changes.
The random third-parties that build this software independently, on the other hand, may not have a bunch of money to throw at the problem, but they don't have any overhead, either. They don't have stringent testing policies in place or a financial department breathing down their necks. In their case, it boils down to whether or not they know enough about the game and its client/server protocol to make it happen.
I needed to do a RAID of all things in the process of getting flying in legion...queue tank, 5 minutes later, raid, kill like 4 things, done. Like, what? Didn't talk to a single human being. I'm not even level 10 on my mage yet and I talked to more people than I did leveling from 100-110 in legion, 8 times.
LFR is one of the things that kill modern WoW for me. I appreciate the fact that it exists to a degree. I mean, the aforementioned finance department wants to make sure that people who don't have time to do proper raids will be able to experience the storyline and keep giving them money.
Buuuuuut, the problem that I have with LFR is that it is more mindless than normal dungeons, and the rewards are simply too damn good. Why bother doing normal raids when LFR gear rewards are a baby step down from that? What's worse is that the ease of getting decent gear in LFR had a rippling effect through normal raiding as well. My friends and I tried like hell to make normal raiding work in Legion, but it just straight up wasn't happening. The people who queue for normal raids are, by and large, complete idiots. People will happily join raiding guilds with no intention to bother showing up for raids. It's ridiculous.
Oh yeah, these modern day snowflakes also get super pissy if you call them out on their bullshit. If they think that me telling them (forcefully, for the fifth time) not to drag displacing effects to me (the main tank) while holding threat on a stationary enemy is "mean," I don't even know what to say. So yeah, a dumbass demon hunter causing our top warrior DPS to get killed (and wasting a battle rez in the process) is apparently acceptable behavior by current generation players. Brilliant.
Before LFR, I don't recall
ever having problems like that. By and large, people knew what was expected of them. They knew that they weren't getting a carry. Standards were higher. Even during Dragon Soul people had the courtesy to not bring LFR bullshit into normal raids. That all started coming crashing down in Mists when Blizzard made LFR more "accessible" without decreasing the awarded gear level appropriately. You actually had to pay attention in DS LFR. In Mists and beyond? Not so much.
Come official release, my main, is a resto shaman, it is my favorite class in that version of the game, however, soloing and grinding money as a resto shaman SUCKED. I did it once, and that was enough.
Heh, yeah, I did that with my priest. I leveled him as holy from 1-80 (1-30ish during BC, the rest during WotLK). I can say that warriors loved grouping with me, though.
From what I remember, the only healers that weren't a complete bear to solo with were discipline priests, and that still was far from ideal.
The game isn't balanced, nobody should pretend it is balanced.
Exactly.
I think a large part of why the game is so different nowadays is that sometime around Cataclysm, Blizzard went from focusing on group balance to emphasizing individual class balance. For an MMO, that sort of thinking is a mistake. Raids nowadays have become more about dividing up a set of increasingly bizarre mechanics than actually knowing how to actually play your damn class. Of course, it's really telling of the modern WoW community when people can't even handle instructions like "go over there when you have X debuff, then walk back when it expires" without fucking it up.
Mage seems like a great compromise class, although I'm not sure they are the "best" at farming gold at 60. Warlock gets a free mount, which that gold could go to an alt or something, so it's nothing to sneeze at, and rogues I think can farm brd with pickpocketing and whatnot. Going to need to do more homework before I finalize it, mage seems to be a great choice so far though.
I'm leaning towards either mage or hunter at this point, favoring the latter just due to nostalgia and experience. We'll see! I'm going to fiddle around with the different classes on my server and determine what I want to do based on that.