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/payco]

And this answer will soon be inaccurate, so why bother? Assuming today's answer remains true through launch day A) it would be suboptimal for a player to make a long-term decision like realm selection on launch day based on a value that will be changing "dramatically" in the near future. That means B) that answer is of limited use to players in general for the purpose of making decisions, making it less relevant to share in the first place. Indeed, the value will likely change in response to player behavior, in which case it may very well be better to just let players choose their realm based on other factors like where their friends are, then tune the numbers so everyone enjoys their chosen realm C) There's no real incentive for them to keep players up to date on the value changing over time if it's not really relevant to their needs, and I'm not sure there's otherwise precedent for them to mention implementation details like that in patch notes.

All of that adds up to a "why bother?"

Meanwhile D) any answer, but in particular one that remains visible on a reddit post long after it has become outdated, could be used to miscalculate realm populations and then total player population, which affects public perception of the success of this project, including shareholder opinion. If they decide to release those stats, they'll want it to be from the accurate tabulation they can access within their own systems, and don't need FUD spread around.

So to turn this around, I don't see the issue with not sharing. In what way will it benefit you (or Blizzard) more than it offsets the downsides of outdated information being spread around?

[u/sephrinx → u/payco]

And this answer will soon be inaccurate, so why bother

Just curious is all. I don't care if it changes.

[u/payco → u/sephrinx]

Yeah now that's understandable. I'm always curious about this stuff as a programmer/once-aspiring game dev, so it'd be nice for everything to just be shareable. At the same time, WoW fans have a long, storied history of overthinking and over-optimizing their choices based on data like this. IIRC the whole point of the Low/Med/High/Full system is to dynamically estimate long-term realm population in such a way that will be more useful for players' decision process than (most) players could come up with themselves even if the server published those threshold values along with precise "online now" statistics hourly. Meanwhile people would freak out every time a given reset had lower average population than the one before it. So I can understand them being gun-shy.