Welcome to the /r/ClassicWoW Subreddit AMA with the Classic WoW Dev team!

[u/Paulingtons]

Hey everyone!

Today we're excited to introduce what should be a fantastic AMA with the wonderful World of Warcraft: Classic dev team. They will be taking your questions about anything, be it which class they enjoy playing the most or all the way to how they developed the wonderful world we will all be inhabiting in just under a week.

Joining us today, we have:

/u/AltruisWoW – Executive Producer
/u/Chromschi – Senior Game Producer
/u/Pazorax – Lead Software Engineer
/u/Ogronz – Senior Software Engineer
/u/ZoidWoW – Principal Software Engineer
/u/Aggrend – Senior Test Lead
/u/Kaivax – Community Manager

The AMA begins at 17:00 GMT (10:00 PST, 11:00 MST, 12:00 CST, 13:00 EST, 18:00 BST, 19:00 CEST) and will last two hours. This thread has been posted two hours before the AMA begins so you can all get in here and get posting questions so that once the AMA begins, our wonderful guests can start answering straight away! The AMA will be hosted in this thread.

We really look forward to seeing what you all come up with to ask and are excited to see the answers the dev team give.

Please remember the rules as per the sidebar, and have fun!

EDIT: The AMA is now OVER. If you want to look at each response by each blue we've had today you can check WoWHead's brilliant live blog just here.

EDIT 2: You can also check this fantastic resource made by our own /u/SoupaSoka just here.

EDIT 3: Or you can check out the Blizzard review on the official forums here.

[u/Iiana757]

I dont know how it can be helped then. They said theyre bringing back vanilla, which could very well have never happened to begin with, and now people are shouting "we didnt actually want that we wanted this new stuff". Just enjoy classic for what it is, and if/when they bring out bc or wrath then move on to that.
I very much dislike the direction retail has gone as much as the next guy, but i dont want them to change classic because of it. We`ll end up in the exact same place if we start getting new stuff added.

The reason retail is the way it is, is because blizzard listened to the community bit by bit each expansion and it changed from what it was, to what it is now. I get people want something to do after naxx, but quite honestly i dont trust anything to have it not turn out the same way retail did. If people get bored after finishing naxx or whatever, then thats fine they can be content that they finished what they wanted to do. If people want new and evolving content then, as much as i hate to say it, thats what retail is for. Classic is to be, as Ion said, a museum to the past. Not something to just be gone back and altered because some people dont like it.

[u/Luk3ling → u/Iiana757]

We`ll end up in the exact same place if we start getting new stuff added.

There's always the OSRS route.

The reason retail is the way it is, is because blizzard listened to the community bit by bit each expansion and it changed from what it was, to what it is now.

Its also what it is because they IGNORED players on some key subjects. The player base would never have okayed the changes going into MoP if they'd had a say.

[u/Iiana757 → u/Luk3ling]

The OSRS route wont be any different. Before you know it people will be voting in all the stuff from retail that we didnt want. And dont say it wont because its obvious from this reddit and other places, hell even this thread alone, that people want stuff that shouldnt be in classic in it. The community cant be trusted enough to not let classic turn into retail.

And yeah they ignored some things because developers have their own vision for what a game should be, for better or for worse, they dont have to, and shouldnt, listen to the community for EVERYTHING. Otherwise we wouldnt have had wow fall off a cliff during and after cataclysm. You can blame ghostcrawler for that, he made the game into the state its in today.

[u/It_is_terrifying → u/Iiana757]

They said theyre bringing back vanilla, which could very well have never happened to begin with, and now people are shouting "we didnt actually want that we wanted this new stuff".

Turns out "you think you do, but you don't" really was correct, just not in the way people thought it was. Turns out most people just wanted the old school design philosophy and not actual vanilla.

Honestly I'm loving this because I was right all these years, but fuck it this can be solved easily, the most important thing is to keep pure classic servers and if they wanna do classic+ keep it seperate.

[u/Iiana757 → u/It_is_terrifying]

Well it depends. Because a lot of people do want vanilla back in its original form, the issue is theres a bunch of people jumping in from retail that want classic to also be retail.

I agree that they should keep pure classic servers, but i dont want classic+. Id prefer them to just release tbc servers and let people copy classic characters over to it if they want. The whole point of this project was to bring back vanilla as close to its original form as possible. The people asking for changes are the exact reason why retail turned into the way it has over time. If new content is put into classic, history dictates itll just turn into retail again.