Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic | Hacker News Reader

Dev Watercooler: World of Warcraft Classic

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115 pointsingve87 comments

The one thing that I suspect will be missing is new players.

One of the things I enjoyed the most was seeing in chat a player that didn't know how to get from Iron Forge to catch a boat to the other continent, and I'd have fun showing him how to get through the Wetlands to the port. The Wetlands was a higher level than we were at the time the quests wanted us to visit the other continent, so it was a dangerous journey and you'd usually become friends by the time it was over.

Of course everyone knows how to get there now, so I don't know how they can recreate the fun of helping someone out that is inexperienced. The same goes with dungeon fights, etc., -- everyone will already know all the tricks I expect.

I certainly miss the days of exploring a brand new world, the likes I had never seen in a video game before, and helping others (and being helped by others) along the way. Wonderful times! :-)

I never played WOW in its heyday, but literally most of my friends did. I've been considering checking WOW out without reading any guides - as I think 'optimal play' makes games boring.

So there might at least one 'new' player.

Do it, there’s really very little to lose, and a lot to gain.

Said no one about WoW ever. Not disputing the fact that it was arguably the best game ever created and I did thoroughly enjoy it, but damn have lots of people lost so much playing WoW.

I think that's what I enjoy so much about Classic - there's a finite amount of content there. I can hit endgame on my own schedule without worrying about the goalposts being moved by the next expansion.

I thoroughly wish I had invested the 10,000+ hours I've spent on games like WOW in my social life and general well being. It wouldn't have been a 1:1 translation, some time would have been wasted regardless... but I feel like I'd be happier and an all around better person.

I know what you mean - I just have a soft spot for WOW. It really provides the escapism I needed during a difficult time in my life. It was good escapism, though. Instead of just TV and Books, I could check out of the real world and Into WOW and still talk to people, be semi social, and just forget about the fact that I had just lost one of my parents. It was sufficiently active, complicated, social and distracting. That alternate world really helped me.

Full confession: after a few years I had never actually made endgame. I had a lot of characters that were close, but I never had the “efficient play” strategy down enough to really power level any characters.

Coming from someone who played Vanilla WoW (and also WoW in general) for the first time last year on a popular private server: Everyone always expects you to know everything, so one has to mention it quite often, especially when it comes to dungeons where the party decides to go for route X to farm possible loot item Y and you have no idea what they are going to do/break. I still had a lot of fun getting my character to level 60 though (and raising some others). Open world PvP is particularly great.

> Of course everyone knows how to get there now

I like how everyone conveniently forgets that hundreds of millions of gamers never played Vanilla WoW.

Everyone does not know the game like the back of their hand. I have tons of friends who missed Vanilla and she's looking forward to playing it for the first time.

> I certainly miss the days of exploring a brand new world, the likes I had never seen in a video game before, and helping others (and being helped by others) along the way. Wonderful times! :-)

A thousand times this. After trying the beta in it's last, open weeks, I played from the very start with an externally-organised guild, so there was always at least 10-20 people online, and we were able to be amongst the first wave of people to be levelling up on the server in a brand new game (certainly not the first, but in the top 30% of the server at least)

It was wonderful the sense of exploration - moving into places like Stranglethorn vale and not really having anybody higher running around, or all of the quest lines and items mapped out online. Definitely the best experience I've had in an MMO.

I'm under no illusion that this experience is replicable in a rebooted classic server.

Reading option one made me quite anxious. Having to backport a virtually infinite number of bugfixes and support for new hardware features from over 12 years of constant development sounds like a perfect way to burn out developers. I'm glad they went for the clearly more sustainable option of adopting the old data to their new client infrastructure.

It will mean people will find loads of things that won't be the same though.

Take balance. I'd be willing to bet they've done loads of bug fixes on unintended consequences of spells. So the Frostbolt of the new system might actually do a different amount of damage and slow than the Frostbolt of 1.12, once the data's been transformed.

So all the classes will probably be slightly different to how they were in 1.12 and combos that worked back then might no longer work now. Some classes might now be OP that weren't and vice-versa. Monsters that were weak might suddenly become strong, and monsters that were hard might suddenly become really easy.

Not that I'm saying it's the wrong solution, I think it's realistically the best one available to them. But it will probably result in a different gameplay experience rather than, say, just updating the visuals. How different won't be clear till later.

Don't think so. From what the article says, the majority of game defining data will remain the same, albeit modified to fit the new schema. Frostbolt will still be the same power, etc. The changes are to the global game infrastructure and how it interprets these data, so there will be some stuff that used to work that likely won't work now (eg wall walking) and things that were possible (speed hacking, water walking) that won't be possible now.

It makes me really sad that they are including Battlegrounds in WoW classic. There was a magical period from release date to the first Battlegrounds patch where people actually took part in large scale, world PVP. Guilds would get together and raid towns, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had in an MMO. If you wanted to do something, it took lots of planning and working together with people, not just clicking a queue button while you sit in Ironforge. I feel like the vast majority of people started joining post-BC and never experienced this, but it was amazing.

I remember those days. It would have been a very different game if Blizzard had decided to incentivize that kind of world PvP instead of leaving it essentially pointless.

So much weird and cool stuff was possible in vanilla. I remember someone kited a Servant of Razelikh into downtown Stormwind. It could only be killed by activating some object back in the Blasted Lands, so a crowd of dozens of guards and PC’s who didn’t know any better just whaled on it for half an hour.

EDIT: Apparently this was not just for lolz as you could level up weapon skill on the thing. Neat!

Do you also remember the massive imbalances in world PVP? The majority of servers were significantly skewed towards one faction (my own was 3:1) which meant world PVP was super fun primarily for the overpopulated faction.

This is the entire reason battlegrounds were introduced - balanced world PVP was unviable on almost every server. It was one of the primary complaints about the game, and could even have resulted in the loss of the PVP orientated player entirely if it had not been addressed.

The new "War Mode" mechanics sound neat. It's an opt-in experience you set in a capital city, and then when you go out in the world you are in a _balanced_ shard of only others who opted in as well.

I recall the waiting times for Battlegrounds being so long (sometimes an hour and a half...) that there was constant battle around the barrens, stone talon, and ashenvale. Back then you actually had to show up to warsong gultch to get into the queue. Same deal for alterac valley with the constant fighting in tarren mill and southshore.

I'm not too sure about this, but I think this was also before the introduction of cross-server pvp for battlegrounds.

They also will not experience the best part of Battlegrounds, which was server-only battlegrounds. Before cross-server battlegrounds (which Classic will have) you could make a name for yourself on your server via PvP. Everyone on my server knew of this gnome mage named Dewdrop. She was so good she had like 4 healers always on her in AV. She was always in AV and you knew to stay clear or get a group to try and gank her.

Once cross-server battlegrounds came out, never saw her again. Or any of the other people on the server we normally played against. It really ruined the community built up on our server, and was about when I stopped playing PvP.

The secret sauce of Vanilla was the sense of place and sense of community. You don't need the old patch. You need persistent identities and travel time. Small populations, no server or faction transfers, and walking to dungeons is the vast majority of it. I also really miss Vanilla dungeon design, where I felt like I was exploring a dangerous place instead of having a very scripted, linear experience. I loved Blackrock Depths, Maraudon, and Blackfathom Deeps. I get why these aren't economical for developer hours, but they are a magical experience.

Some of the longer dungeons were hard to run, though. I played Vanilla, leveling several different characters to 60, and I'm pretty sure I only managed to run Maraudon start-to-finish once. (Doing just the inner Mauradon shortcut to kill Princess was more common, admittedly.)

I do kind of miss those things, I admit. Instances where you could find keys that would persistently unlock shortcuts, so if you came back later you could bypass bits of it. (Or if you were a rogue.)

That said... the time investment required was quite ridiculous, in hindsight. I don't miss things like sitting in Ironforge for an hour saying "3DPS 1H LFTank" every few minutes... and then spending another hour getting from Ironforge to somewhere like Dire Maul (okay, or being the two? three? people in the group who volunteered to sit around by the dungeon to use the meeting stone to summon that tank when they showed up). The LFG tool exists for a reason.

> I'm pretty sure I only managed to run Maraudon start-to-finish once.

The early dungeons had a massive range of levels, though. IIRC the mobs in outer Maraudon were low 40s (high 30s?) whereas Princess Theredras was lvl 50. You weren't really meant to clear the thing in one sweep.

It didn't help that Maraudon was in Desolace, and the only place harder and more time consuming to get to (for Alliance, at least) was Feralas. It was something like a half hour journey to get there, counting boat travel, gryphons, and riding yourself, so you ended up often only playing with people who were already there, or already questing in the area.

At the tail end of the text based game era I tried to work with a couple different groups building large maps and better story lines.

It bothered me profoundly that the memory usage in the games was proportional to the details of the map instead of the number of players. One guy had built an entire world in the Thad Williams' Memory Sorrow and Thorn universe. It had a great text processing engine but it was built on a fatal use-after-free flaw that was beyond me to fix at the time, and the head of the project understood it less than I did.

Eventually he folded and worked on my second favorite one, which I built a text-deduplication library to decrease their memory footprint by half (there was pushback on expanding the map due to resource constraints). I'm not sure they ever used it. By the time I removed an obvious footgun they'd already said no.

Later I later took a computer graphics class, and when one of the assigments was based on fractal landscapes. I still believe that the right way to run a big world with a small team is to use a generated world as the base, and then have your team carve a civilization into it. The computer makes the river valley, the designers put a town in it. The computer generates a cave, the designers fill it with monsters. The backdrop is cheap as can be from a human and compute resources standpoint, and it's easy to have a big space even before you have enough stories to fit into it. The fourth bit of code I wrote in what became my primary language for years was a fractal map generator, trying to get coastlines and ridgelines that looked organic, but by then I had a real job and had begun to worry about the Skinner Effect in multiplayer games.

Spot on. Dungeon finder and cross server BGs / dungeons killed the sense of community. Instant travel to instances killed the feeling of the size of the world. All the streamlining of combat and the removal of the threat management game made dungeons boring while adding loot tokens made the dungeon grind mandatory.

It's interesting to see them relating the trouble they've had with the old game client when thousands of us play on private servers using old game clients (1.12 is common for much the same reasons discussed.)

I suspect that their standards are different.

Someone who's willing to jump through the hoops to play classic WoW on a private server likely has a willingness to deal with glitches and troubleshooting issues with running a 12-14 year old game client.

Whereas Blizzard wants to provide a smooth official experience, which they're going to give to their mass market audience. They can't get away with saying "yeah, it crashes a lot, and runs terribly on New Video Card X, deal with it", because it makes them look bad.

(For that matter, I suspect things like saying "that crash bug was there in 2007 as well, so it's the authentic experience" wouldn't go over fantastically...)

More importantly, Blizzard want to have the same security they have currently with Battle.net et al.

I like wotlk better, I think it was the best expansion, and I’m sure wotlk servers have more players than vanilla servers now. I don’t know why they chose vanilla over wotlk. :/

A vocal minority of the community was pushing for vanilla. There was a somewhat popular (supposedly 150k active players) vanilla server setup by some people in the community (Nostalrius) that was shut down by Blizzard for copyright infringement. It's hard to say what Blizzard will do after they roll out the vanilla servers. They may create TBC, WotLK, etc. servers, or it may be a dud that they just shut down... I'm sure it will depend on how successful they are and how much effort is required to maintain the servers.

I wonder how many of those 150k will convert to paying players.

The cost of running WoW servers per player must have plummeted in 15 years, thanks to both better devops and better hardware. They might be ok with a freemium model.

If they haven't moved WoW proper to a freemium model, I highly doubt they'll do it for Classic.

Look at EQ. The base game is freemium, but if you want to play on the latest progression servers, you need to pay their subscription price.

There's also a vocal minority who are mad they're starting with 1.12; it has too many balancing changes for their taste.

And another minority who wants the equivalent of EQ's progression servers - they don't want to be stuck at 1.12, they want all the same content releases again.

And another minority who wants TBC. Another WotLK.

Blizzard is going to be disappointing someone with every choice when it comes to classic. And a lot more people are going to be disappointed when they actually go and play that game.

TBF, you couldn't pay me enough to go back and play a warlock with all the prep required to raid Molten Core (and all the "limited debuff slots" BS). That's a lie of course, I'd happily even mule a Paladin for your guild if you wish to pay me $300k+ a year.

Wotlk was like heroin for teenage me.

This was my first thought too. Although I must admit I didn't play WoW until the release of BC (Burning Crusade) and stopped when Cata finished. So I never really got to experience what was special about Vanilla. More specifically for why I'd want WOTLK is for Arena. The last season was the most balanced that I ever experienced it and some of the most fun I've ever had playing WoW or any game in general.

Jumping back to Vanilla one thing I hate about the current expansions is quest helper and honestly this rings true for other games (Destiny for example) as well. I think the lack of a quest/mission guide is a better experience for the player. I remember playing BC and had a blast trying to complete quest. You had to really pay attention and read the quest for specifics and clues to figure out what was needed or where to go. The completion of quest back then felt so rewarding. Now you just look at your map and follow the "little dotted line"[1] then rinse and repeat. This struggling with quest is what I'm most looking forward to with classic WoW.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzOCkXsyIqo

But it will be very, very hard to keep that experience. Where you used to have to turn to other players for help, building those social relationships as they struggled through the same challenges, now the web environment surrounding the game has evolved with very complete documentation an alt-tab away, and all the other players have that as well.

That was already the case back when WoW was first released. Everquest (1) got pretty extensively documented during its lifetime (and mapped, there were no in-game maps until the 4th expansion).

Oh most definitely! It's certainly not for everyone. I mean even back then, if I'm remembering correctly. There was a site called Thottbot for exactly that. Which I occasionally turned to when the quest was lacking in information. Even before Blizzard officially added a quest helper to the game there was a third party add-on. However, with sites like Thottbot you still had to investigate to figure out what you had to do and I think this still gives you sense of accomplishment over just being told what and where all the time.

Edit: words

What made vanilla special was the restrictions placed on the world. Everybody packed into Ironforge or Orgrimmar because that's where the auction houses were. You could chat with tons of people or easily join groups to raid dungeons. Physicality in the world was an important part of the experience. You hung out at the gates of a battleground to play in them, so there was usually a crowd to chat with. When BC came along I remember feeling disappointed that the player base became so fractured all of a sudden. Places that used to be lively were now dead. Sure you always had guild chat to keep the conversation going, but as the expansions grew I remember feeling less connected to the rest of the people on my server.

Although I didn't play Vanilla, as I said above. I've experienced this with the end of Wotlk and beginning of Cata. The introduction to group finder and the ability queue from anywhere for anything really ruined that experience. This caused the game's world to feel empty at least for me anyways.

I agree, late WotLK and Cata took a game that felt like a living breathing world and downgraded it to feeing like a game. The one click cross server dungeon queues and the Disneyland style on rails no detours questing are likely the primary culprits.

Yep. That’s definitely when I stopped being interested in playing as much. I wasn’t even that social a player (I was never in a guild), but I loved the feeling that I was in a virtual world full of people.

That crowd in the city, coupled with the worse trace options- back when mounts were for higher level players and were very expensive - made the actual quests feel a lot more remote.

Special mention to the griffins/hippogirffs. One of the greatest moments of joy I felt when I got on one the first time and could still look around as it flew.

> . I remember playing BC and had a blast trying to complete quest. You had to really pay attention and read the quest for specifics and clues to figure out what was needed or where to go.

I remember that experience of discovery. It only lasted as long as it was all ... undiscovered. I don’t think it’ll work for a repeat performance.

I'm really interested to see where this leads. They got some quick wins out of this, but they're going to need to somehow revert a lot of game systems to get it back to something approximating the vanilla experience.

Here's my prediction: if you didn't play vanilla when it was available, you're gonna hate it. If you did play it, you'll go back for the nostalgia but will stop when you realise how tough the grind was. Those players will be late 20s and beyond now and won't have the time for it.

It'll be interesting to see how many of those calling for this to happen actually stick around.

Some of us are in the thirties already.

I was in the beta in middle school.

I'm in my 30s now. I won't be playing the game because it was about the people you met, not the places you went to.

There is that screenshot floating around of the last player left in a guild under the screenshot of the full guild back in 2005: https://i.redditmedia.com/m4I50ji3u80G3FjSkFCcSpqb2ZHr-4Rcf0...

Just made myself realize that it will be the same time delta between the first and second picture and between the second picture and next year.

That really reminds me of the Overlord anime / light novels, where the main character ends up alone after having had tons of achievements with his guild. He's the only one still logged in when the game shuts down.

Huh, interesting. Probably someone who experienced that themselves. I'll be reading that, thanks for the suggestion.

To anyone expecting this to be good, don't. It's a 'protagonist gets sucked into another world' type of story and not 'protagonist looks at the meaninglessness of life, both on and offline'.

Hmm, it is an isekai, but I think it's above average from many other that I've read. I'm sorry if my post mislead you into believing it'd be a specific kind of story, that wasn't my intent.

As a former vanilla player (fond memories of 1.14 jumping physics bug), and current busy adult, I'm pretty excited about the idea of an MMO with a level cap. I can't keep up with new expansions every six months, but I can and will find fun things I'm interested in trying in an MMO with locked down talent builds and static endgame.

It won't matter if life gets busy and I can only log in once this week. At least I'm not aiming at a moving target anymore.

Casual gaming.

To be fair, WoW still has a level cap. You can play right now and quite frankly it's a much better game for a "current busy adult". Expansions come out every 2-3 years, not every 6 months.

Also being able to boost to the beginning of the current expansion is a huge time saver. Leveling in late vanilla involved a lot of grinding in empty zones.

I'm probably not going to play. However, given I played vanilla in college, then some on and off BC/lich for my masters, then the latest one over the last year as a software dev with a full time job, vanilla seems like it would fit best if that's where I wanted to sink my time.

Even though there were tons of complaints from casual players during the vanilla period, I had mostly only heard about these complaints when they where directed towards top tier guilds. Grinding with small groups was often fun and wasn't so heavily tied to every goal and data point that tied you back into the 'realm/global' competition. Players seemed more likely to invent their own metrics of ranking other players and Guild members, which to me added a level of variability that in retrospect, should have reduced anxiety for game play.

I'm interested to see how it plays out. There's definitely an 'ideal' balance for an mmo that makes it a success, and I think classic WoW had that nailed down. I don't think it's related to GPU cores or cultural trends, some games are timeless beyond the nostalgia factor, and that's because they achieve that perfect balance of interactivity and reward.

Having guild members that did linear algebra to calculate optimal raid arrangements is one of the examples of opening that creative space, rather than closing it with an excess of status bars and shiny hats. Every MMO suffers from what metrics flag gamer status, but I'm simply interested to see what direction classic WoW goes in, and how that affects the general trend of MMOs out there today.

Agreed, the grind is massive compared to current WoW. Also, you’ll need friends to play vanilla, there’s very few stuff which can be done solo and finding groups is very time consuming. I’ll definitely be checking this out for nostalgia but I don’t expect to reach the level cap. Probably not even 40 which used to be quite a feat already back then.

I leveled to 60 solo before joining a guild. It can be done, it wasn't too hard, and now everything is better documented.

Yeah leveling is possible solo. I forgot to mention I was referring to the endgame content.

Yeah, endgame is a non-starter without a large guild. I still miss doing Molten Core 40 man raids. Such a rush at the time.

Spending months (literal days worth of time) leveling, and then entire evenings raiding is just not something I have time for now.

On the other hand I have to imagine I would play a lot more efficiently/smarter than when I was 16.

I was surprised to find a game as big as WoW to have a data strucutre which clearly violates some basic forms [1] of database formalization. Isn't database normalizaton something that any cs program teaches in the first few semesters?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

There are very good reasons to violate it. Like performance - you would need to make a sub-select or join, which is costly. Also if you are 100% sure that "no one will ever need more spell effects", it is a valid way to go.

You can't always run a normalized database though; often you need to denormalize for performance reasons. In very massive systems, a normalized database is rare.

I'm yet to have the privilege to work on a database which I would call truly "massive", so I'm oblivious to how things work in such environment in reality. I've seen the question and the answer you've given repeats many times, but aren't there exists a plethora of tools like table partitioning, materialized views etc. to allow one to have the database in a normalized form and run it fast? Don't they work in practice?

Table partitioning does nothing to solve the performance problems of joins of very large datasets. Materialized views can help but they are not a panacea. You have to trigger the updates yourself, and because they are updated asynchronously, you will not have a consistent view of your data. E.g. you could write a row to the database and not see it updated in your view for minutes.

More importantly here normalising the database has conceptual and interactive overhead: in the original model all spell properties are in a single table which makes import/export and devtools easy, while the normalised schema splits the same thing over 3 different tables (at least, not sure the example is even complete).

I see it as a case of YAGNI.

Also this specific issue likely wasn't a problem of mass: the number of spells in the game is not that high, even today. The issue was throughput, IIRC they had high expectations and they got 10x as many signups as they'd expected.

Normalization is the ideal, but sometimes you have to de-normalize for performance. Big, complex joins can be a performance killer. Most apps won't reach the scale where they need to worry about this, but WoW definitely has reached it.

> Most apps won't reach the scale where they need to worry about this

That’s true for servers running on modern hardware (lots of RAM, extremely fast SSDs), but when I’m working on desktop, mobile or embedded apps, some of them need embedded databases, and I still need to worry about it.

On desktops not all users have SSDs, so when the data is larger than a couple of GB i.e. can’t be cached in RAM, every IO takes 4-5ms because HDD seek latency.

Mobile/embedded devices typically have flash memory so the IO latency is lower, but that flash memory is not as fast as modern desktop or servers SSDs. E.g. some Android phones have 2000 random read IOPS, 220 random write IOPS https://www.phonearena.com/news/Android-storage-speed-compar...

P.S. I even need to worry about this when I’m designing RAM-only data structures. On modern systems, RAM is block device (the block size is 128 bit for dual-channel RAM), and there’s a pre-fetcher silicon in CPUs making sequential access much faster than random access.

I RE'd WoW for ~10 years. You'd be horrified if you knew how many hacks and crazy-bad technical designs are in the game. The team sometimes infamously has (or had, as of a couple expansions ago) hundreds of thousands of open issues and sometimes squashes bugs which are several expansions old.

Incidentally, they also quite often create new bugs in super-old content due to changes in newer content.

I mean, the work they do is incredible. But it blows my mind how they manage to maintain this game given the amount of intertwined legacy within it. I'm not sure what exactly caused it to become as bad as it did. It's probably a mix of the game being far more popular than they originally anticipated, the team being incredibly large, and the engine itself not being very accomodating.

I think it’s a miracle old instances work. They rewrote some of them with Cataclysm, but others have been pristine for 10+ years. And they say Windows works hard for compatibility... :P

Is this too little too late?

After j Allen brack scolded the fans over how preposterous the question of classic servers was. And Blizzard shut down the two major classic servers.

It's possible that the well is poisoned and people won't want to play out of principle or that they just moved onto other games and the time to capitalize on this has passed.

It was preposterous and still is. It just happens to also be what a vocal minority want, so here we are.

There will be a tiny cohort of players who will play this and genuinely enjoy it. The rest will be people who thought it was amazing (it was, in 2004) but have not realized that for 2018, vanilla is in so many ways a bad game.

What has happened that makes vanilla a bad game in 2018?

nothing. But some people who think their opinions are facts don't like it.

Barrens. General. Chat... /shudder

That will be a huge culture clash there. Current servers have a very anti-SJW population. WoW classic really is a classic game. I expect to read lots of angry Kotaku articles, haha.

Hypothesis: Talking while playing - even in the original sense, at the playground, or at the street, but we're moving more and more to the digital avenues - are a big factor in how children and young people form ideas and opinions, to see what's "cool" and "lame".

The schools are where they are polished and shaped, with a tiny bit from parents - if they even talk about these things with their children anymore.

If in the future we see "anti-swj" be the norm we could say that "well, we saw it in barrens chat". Similar with 4Chan back in the day and probably still now.

I wonder if there are experiments going on using the data from ancient game chat and IRC channels (and so on) to verify this, and to check whether we can predict what may happen next.

One scary part is some people may consider this as yet another platform and opportunity to manipulate and control the minds of the future.

1. Where's Manrick's wife??!!!11one1!!!?

Does anybody else find it weird that even their new data structure for spells still has to include columns whose value is "Nothing."

Why are these spells even in a tabular database at all? It seems like each spell could simply be in a JSON file, or at the very least this seems like a suitable place to use a key-value store or a document database.

I still don't understand why they didn't go with either Diablo or Diablo 2. Much easier to make compatible with modern settings, much easier for new and casual players to get into, much easier to maintain, and arguably more people hungry to play it online over legacy WoW players.

And likely much less profitable as well

> Much easier to make compatible with modern settings, much easier for new and casual players to get into, much easier to maintain,

I'm not sure that's true. Implementing classic wow in the modern client sounds like a straightforward data migration that will have some hiccups.

The Diablo 2 code is probably a visual studio 5 project built in direct x 5, they'd have to port all that to something modern. Their server code would need to support their current login system, and is probably not even going to build on a current is without changes.

On top of that Diablo 2 players aren't expecting a monthly charge.

I don't think the money is there.

I think "THE BLIZZARD RANT" explains it all:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzT8UzO1zGQ

Diablo 1 and 2 are still playable online today, so those who really want to play them already are. D1 and D2 are also harder to monetize than WoW, where there's the expectation of paying a monthly subscription instead of making a one-time purchase

I know it sounds dumb, but I can't help but being confused by the domain of the website. I expected blizzard related stuff would be ay least on a subdomain

how is this more blizz related than wow related?

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