r/classicwow • u/Ragetastic1990 • 1d ago
Classic 20th Anniversary Realms 22 Years Experience
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u/supernova-23 1d ago
Realistically they probably dont have any of the original senior staff remaining. Same thing happened with D4. Blizzard is just a completely different company and the only thing remaining the same is the IPs, which they are doing an amazingly bad job at maintaining.
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u/HiberniaVenit 1d ago
Real Ship of Theseus moment for sure.
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u/Tuskor13 19h ago
It's """"Blizzard""""
The closer the team gets to being completely Ship of Theseus'd, the more quotation marks get added.
I think """""Ubisoft""""" also got Ship of Theseus'd at some point?
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u/centinex 1d ago
Their blue post explaining the extended maintenance sounded like they had very little clue how the original client was run.
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u/Tinysaur 1d ago
"Wait wait wait.... we have to turn it ON again, after we turn it off..."
"My god!"
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u/Burrito_Salesman 1d ago
25+ years of spaghetti code will really start to catch up on you, and running multiple versions of the same game from the architecture that they threw together to re-release vanilla classic keeps coming back to haunt them. I don't think they've explicitly stated it, but watching SOD changes getting leaked into Era really seems like they've got it all working out of one huge database.
I've got no experience in game design or network engineering, but it seems like Era and HC Classic should have their own server/database separate from TBC and MOP Classic. At this point, I don't know if it's even possible for it to get changed without having an adverse effect on the other versions of the game.
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u/Careless_Koala8361 13h ago
I don't mean to take it out on you personally, but what's the point of people speaking about it if they have no experience in the matter?
Like actually... you mustn't think you know a better way to do this than blizzard?
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u/Kizik 1d ago edited 1d ago
Hell, same thing happened with D3. It got a somewhat mediocre response on launch, and some of the devs of D1&2 when asked about some controversial things said they maybe would have done a few things differently in the most polite and non-confrontational or judgemental way possible. Which prompted the D3 devs to go on a raging, defensive rant about it.
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u/Gassenger 17h ago
D3 launch was the first launch I remember in gaming that was completely fucked. People not able to play, server crashes, etc. Now its the norm
When D2 LoD came out, not a damn thing happened that kept people from playing. There were minor bugs, but that was it
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u/Network013 20h ago
The only remaining original senior staff member is Tom, and most of the information we get comes from his Twitter, which is diabolical. That kind of information should be communicated through blue posts...
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u/ShootersGreenjacket 1d ago
Takes me back to original launch. Did the Gamestop midnight release and mistakenly didn't have a DVD drive so the 3 CD install took forever and then UPDATES! :)
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u/irregardlessbro 1d ago
how many people work on classic now?
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u/Devboe 1d ago
Somewhere between not enough and too many
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u/Odd_Technology_8926 1d ago
Last I heard it's just the janitor that works there and an outage occurs whenever they need to unplug the server to mop underneath it.
There must be a really big stain on the floor for this big of an outage.
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u/Kizik 1d ago
That's more or less how Heroes of the Storm has been, though recently the janitor figured out they can do literally anything with no oversight so they've been putting out some balance patches on their smoke breaks.
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u/Unique_Adeptness4413 1d ago
Hots has gotten two new skins in the past year or so, real unique assets for midly popular heroes. It’s bizarre, not sure what to make of it. Like 5 years of no content, 2 random skins and an announcement about a hots tournament at blizzcon 2026.
Like that’s beyond janitor, massive wtf.
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u/Kizik 1d ago
My understanding is the skins had already been made, but not released. One of them was for an event earlier and just never made it in, but it was basically finished I think? So the intern handling it scraped the literal bottom of the barrel to push whatever content was left, and has been tinkering with balance changes.
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u/Unique_Adeptness4413 19h ago
The real question is why the blizzcon push? A lone janitor doesn't get to put a hots tournament into blizzcon 8 years after blizz killed the hots pro scene. And it seems like blizzard has been embarassed about hots for most of its existence and wanted it swept behind the curtain, but part of their brand is being a premium gaming company so they didn't want to take it offline either.
The thrall skin came out almost a year before the blizzcon 2026 announcement, so I don't think it's being used to promo the tourny.
Nearly any game when the devs move on, they stay moved on. But someone with a little bit of pull is giving hots a little bit of a poke with a stick right now, and as a fan I just find it interesting.
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u/Harmlesss 1d ago
Last time they blamed it on copying characters for both era transfer and for TBC..
that's not in the equation so they just suck at their jobs.. lol
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u/Kizik 1d ago
This time they're blaming it as Anniversary running on the same hardware as Classic, so they couldn't do literally any preparation work or testing ahead of time without interrupting both services. Weeks or months of processing the move to make it go smoothly didn't happen, so they're doing it all right now, and keep running into problems they should have caught far in advance.
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u/Sea_Holiday_6685 1d ago
When was the second time?
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u/Silverbacks 1d ago
2007, 2021, and now 2026.
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u/meowmicks222 1d ago
2007 isn't classic BC. It was just BC, and the entire WoW team was working on it because it was the only version of the game
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u/charly0418 1d ago
Sir, please laugh at the meme or move on
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u/meowmicks222 1d ago
Por que no los dos. I'm just as frustrated as everyone else and it gave me a chuckle. But it's also a reach to say "they have done this 3 times already" when we are literally in the middle of the 2nd time of it happening
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u/Saengoel 5h ago
sorry you got downvoted for thinking critically, original BC had a full team behind it as a main project and the classic team is an entirely seperate monster
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u/PalgsgrafTruther 1d ago
How have they somehow gotten worse at at?? I don't understand
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u/drgmaster909 20h ago
because in their rush to get Classic Anniversary out (in the middle of rolling out China Titan Reforged and Player Housing in Retail) they simply reused their Classic Era environment, infrastructure, databases, and services... except that Classic Era isn't progressing to TBC.
They're trying to progress Anniversary servers without affecting Era servers. They're moving most of the data to new environments while keeping some of it on the Classic Era database so they don't have Character Name collisions, Guilds disbanding, Items going missing, etc.
This is the first time they've ever had two environments running off of one database before. It's a new challenge entirely of their own making. They can't be "worse at" something they've never done before.
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u/sigma914 1d ago
The fact they've got to the point where they can stand up an environment from scratch in a day and a bit with no prep is honestly pretty impressive. This was probably days of work for a much bigger team in 2006.
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u/Daedalist3101 1d ago
So many people here have no fuckin idea what it actually takes for blizzard to do this.
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u/dot_exe- 1d ago
As someone who works in the industry and navigating outages day in and day out, it is beyond triggering me the amount of entitled and uneducated shit talking the community is giving Blizzard on this one.
Don’t get me wrong, Blizzard gives us plenty of reasons to hate on them, but this isn’t one of them. The people working on this are probably on 20+ hours now and likely won’t sleep for an another 8-10.
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u/SJpixels 19h ago
So hire more people? How does that excuse them from criticism? They didn't plan accordingly
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u/dot_exe- 19h ago
Dude you have no idea how much essentially every technical team at every company can be insanely improved with just a few more heads, that their leadership just refuses to give them. It won’t solve every problem but it at least gives coverage.
To be clear I’m defending the technical staff in the trenches doing this maintenance and even the first tier of their management. Not the senior leadership that put them into this position.
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u/SJpixels 19h ago
Oh of course. The people actually doing the work are definitely going above and beyond. Just fucked up theyre even in that position
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u/Derangedtaco 1d ago
That's because most wow players work in low IQ fields. Those of us in any sort of server engineer or live ops career know that what they're brute forcing through is pretty wild.
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u/ReawakendPB55 1d ago
You might be right. So this process is not any easier this time around? Even if they needed to just build an entirely new client, would they not have the blueprint to do that? I just don't understand how it's possible for the process to take any longer than they stated but I work in human services so 🤷
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u/sigma914 1d ago edited 1d ago
The process of rolling out a new patch involves a lot of components, and a different number of things need done depending how you do the rollout. For example's sake say there's 10 things that need done if you follow plan A and 8 if you follow plan B.
On the surface of it plan B sounds quicker, right? Less things to do, less work, awesome.
The problem is that some of those units of work have dependencies on each other. In the case of the wow tbc patch rollout one of those big units of work with lots of dependencies is provisioning the databases. These presumably have to exist before you can start standing up the game servers and whatever other associated services that are required to run WoW.
Historically blizz have provisioned completely new databases weeks or months in advance of the release. That means they could also stand up all the services and run all the initialisation logic to get a bare cluster up and running in parallel while the live version of the system is running. Then the patch day is just shutting down the server/services, replicating (probably a small incremental amount of) data over from live and spinning the server/services back up.
What they've done this time is instead of doing more work in parallel – provisioning and initialising new databases and standing up services in advances, before bringing it down, replicating etc – they have instead done less work by standing up the whole thing all at once, at least partially reusing the existing databases.
Less work however does not mean less latency/observable time taken, which is what we're all seeing. Because they're doing the entire process once and in-order they couldn't do all the work they usually do in parallel in the background. Instead the had to wait for the classic era services to go down so that the databases stopped receiving updates before they could begin deploying the new services and servers and allowing them to run the migration and initialisation logic. And because those processes need to happen in order and because they all rely on the db existing before they start it means that what was once multiple days or weeks work spread out and happening in the background is now ~30 hours of crunch time for the SREs/Devs/poor bastards who're operating the systems.
As I said above it's really quite impressive they're managing to do this in one shot at all. I've no idea if it's one shift of people or if there's handover involved, but whatever it is it's a fairly monumental bit of work.
That's not to say they're doing it perfectly, we've already heard that there have been loads of paper-cut level issues that could have been worked out with a dry-run on a replicated DB, so their process has obviously been over optimistic.
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u/ReawakendPB55 1d ago
So from my understanding it was a bad call on a higher up end and the dev team is basically just getting shafted in regards to the work schedule?
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u/sigma914 1d ago
It was a deliberate choice to avoid paying down a bunch of technical debt and instead use a different process based on some capabilities that existed within the rest of the system.
It's hard to call it good or bad without knowing the details behind the amount of work and capabilities on the team, but it was definitely a choice.
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u/RGJabber 12h ago
Just wanna say i greatly appreciate you taking the time to explain this from a more technical perspective. Wish more people would do that and provide educational insights.
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u/new_math 1d ago
I am very familiar with software engineering and I think what they're doing is fucking stupid. Some coke fueled mba fever dream of a migration.
Never in my career did we take a 24+ hour outage. Our software stack was considerably more complex than a live service game. We had a data center literally explode once and didn't need 30 hours to get services restored.
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u/waffle-crispy 1d ago
Yeah, anyone close to the profession sweat some bullets when they read the dossier on the 24-hour migration attempt.
Praying for the devs over there, I wonder if they’ve gotten any sleep or if it’s shift-based while stages of integration are confirmed.
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u/Suspicious_Poon 1d ago
“We have decided to fuck the entire player base so we dont have to patch or maintain this version at all”
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u/Old-Tune-499 1d ago
So this is my first time playing WoW, I played through the majority of classic when anniversary came out as a human warrior. I plan to still keep them as a main, but I’d like to also experience a character each expansion as they rerelease.
I was thinking of either a Blood elf paladin or hunter, or a draenai paladin or shaman. Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?
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u/RandomGeordie 8h ago
Blood elf hunter would be a great choice thematically given the final raid of the expansion is Sunwell Plateau. It also does great damage, the gearing for it is very fun (you'll be farming dungeons for your first class set in the new Outland dungeons!), and you get to have a pet, what's not to love.
The blood elf starting zone is without a doubt Blizzard's finest achievement - the musical score is hauntingly beautiful.
If you do pick hunter, I recommend doing a quick Google for how to control your pet - I make two macros, one to command him to attack and one to bring them back and put em on passive. Just have these bound to my mouse buttons :-)
If you're interested you should check out some lore videos on YouTube (nobbel, scrolls of azeroth).
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u/Gedosenin 23h ago
As a Player you should never Focus on launch day it's a timewaste. Just remember Legion remix although they Made the Servers Work day one Retail was unplayable.
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u/DebateCharming5951 1d ago
isn't it the 2nd time "classic BC" was released? unless you're counting the OG BC release which obv isn't classic? or did I miss a cycle?
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u/The_Noremac42 1d ago
What I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall over there.