Assistant WOW Game Director Ion Hazzikostas talks Legacy

[Norjak]

maybe, Blizzard licenses Nostalrius to keep their project, giving to blizzard some money

If they can do this & get it past the lawyers who are protecting their IP, it would be great.
I have to say though, Nost has always been a re-creation based on memory & what information can be gleaned from the internet. It was arguably the best private project out there, but not without errors, bugs & omissions. Even after their "focus on current content" a few months ago there remain lots of needed changes...look at the bug tracker, even if 1/2 of those are legit it represents a lot of work.
If Blizz is able to provide tangible support to the project without making sweeping changes, would be even better...

[huertakas]

Vanilla is a lot more than tuning the levelling experience gained. It is tuning everything, from talents to quest rewards, from elite quests to running around quests, to what is what tuned and designed for originally. There is no new balance. There is no code fix for harmonizing destructive features into a fun game. Developers, however, always look at the world as something they can solve. Because they like to solve problems.

This problem however is not only above their pay grade to solve, it is also above the pay grade of blizzard HQ to solve. Since they cannot abandon vested business interest and IP protection. Thinking they can is wishfully deluding yourself.

[Sirganksalot]

Vanilla is a lot more than tuning the levelling experience gained. It is tuning everything, from talents to quest rewards, from elite quests to running around quests, to what is what tuned and designed for originally. There is no new balance. There is no code fix for harmonizing destructive features into a fun game. Developers, however, always look at the world as something they can solve. Because they like to solve problems.

This problem however is not only above their pay grade to solve, it is also above the pay grade of blizzard HQ to solve. Since they cannot abandon vested business interest and IP protection. Thinking they can is wishfully deluding yourself.

Screw it, just bring out Cataclysm 2.0 and call it "Demonic Fracture" or some J.Allen Brack-induced disease of an expansion name. Demons shake the universe so hard that the world and everything in it goes back in time and reverts to its former state.

"oh muh ghud guize Draenor, The dark portal, Northrend, pandaria (and the pandas) all got deztroid, and the cataclysm was miraculously fixed!. Demons hit so hard they sent us back to original content"

Revert to former content. Scrap everything with an explanation. Demons died in the process of it.
I mean, it's pretty much on par with the current explanations for expansions anyway.

[Sharax]

I'm curious, haven't they realized at Blizzard that the game begins @ max level for the majority of players? That's what they aimed for when they were designing WoW . The thing is, leveling to max in Vanilla had achieved a golden balance between being frustrating and actually feeling rewarding to the player.

All the moronic level increases implemented in WoW's expansions achieved was to obliterate that balance and lead to bad design decisions.

I would have aimed for even lower level caps, like i.e. lvl 20 in original AD&D, as long as each level was harder to attain and offered satisfying rewards (abilities, etc.) to the player, but 60 was ok with the pace implemented in Vanilla because the first levels were really achieved within a couple of hours if you were not entirely new to the game.

But this constant stretching of the leveling process I think deserves a Golden Berry award for whomever came up with that idea.

I find the leveling content one of the most enjoyable parts of the game... seeing the new scenery, the lore. It seems more like an adventure, which is why I like Vanilla.

I get why Blizzard nerfed the levelling experience. Some players wouldn't want a super long grind from 1 to 85 (or whatever). Compounding to that problem is that the leveling zones are dead and thus it's not an MMO experience.

[Uidrae]

Heres the thing. Ion isn't the guy who would be working on a Legacy project regardless. His job is to look forward and make new content so he is a fairly bad person to stick front of a camera to talk about it. He even said so himself in the end. His job is current wow, potential Legacy realms is for the higher ups to decide upon and build a team for if it comes to that.

I think he did a good job.

They already have a Classic Games team for their other games. I could see that team working with Nost. They might have to pull a couple of the old timers off the new crap to help work on the game that they themselves created, but they can replace them with more facebook game devs.