 What's up guys test van here, and I just got back from blizzcon At blizzcon those of you who who may not be aware weren't following the news before Myself and the rest of the classic cast crew we got access we got media passes So we got some exclusive access to certain things So myself stay safe and tips Got to join in on a kind of group press conference style interview With two developers and that was Brian Birmingham and John height John heights the executive producer of a while and Brian Birmingham's lead on classic. He was the guy wearing the green shirt at the classic panel and This happened this interview actually happened right before the classic panel so You know we got a chance to kind of ask them some questions bring up some concerns One of the things that we didn't bring up was loot trading Because obviously like we didn't even know about it at the time But you know we talked about shorting we talked about some things in the demo and we get a little bit of interesting insight with the developers and I'm pretty sure this video hasn't been posted anywhere else on the internet I don't think I saw anybody else in there recording actually I saw some people maybe doing voice I know Wowhead was there, but as far as just recording the thing. I don't think I saw anybody else in there doing that So I hope you guys enjoy if you guys like this content if you guys like classic content if you guys are excited for classic Wow I would recommend you checking out my twitch channel twitch.tv slash SVN TV And if you would maybe hit the video with a like maybe sub if you really like it and I hope you guys enjoy And I'm my name is Brian Birmingham and I'm the lead software engineer on the World of Warcraft classic Well You're welcome We're as excited as you are honestly, thank you for having like providing your passion and And making it so that we could really see how passionate our fans were about this because it kind of gave us the motivation To go look and see if this was possible like I know in the past We had often thought this would be too difficult to do it would take too much time would be too much of an effort But because of it the extreme outpouring of support and passion from all of our fans It gave us the motivation to look back and see what it would take to do this and really take some time do some research And and we came up with a path. We really look at work. So thank you Oh like comments in the source code. Oh god I think they're usually I don't know I'm not I can't think of any specific one But there certainly are some some funny ones about you know people usually using some language that maybe they shouldn't and things like that But yeah, I mean usually they're there there are those kinds of funny things, you know, like oh this is you know Take this out before this happens then you can see it's still in there those kinds of things. Yeah, actually I'm sorry future raising expansion. Yes, what do you mean by future like Oh, I see right now we're focused on a world of Warcraft classic We're really excited to hear what the community thinks about it We want to see what the passion is and we're certainly open to other ideas We want to hear what he thinks about that But right now we're staying focused on making sure we recreate the authentic classic experience So that being said, what is your plan for progressive content release within classic? Wow, I want to directly the panel That's coming up in just about an hour or an hour. Great. Okay. Yeah, I'm gonna address that there I've got a very specific question about sharding in particular I Guess there was a post that was released yesterday about one of the CM's online talking about the possibility of sharding in classic Sharding has always been a very contentious topic within the community Have you guys sought out any alternatives to accommodate server load like loing the population caps? Or possibly dynamic respawns or anything like that in lieu of sharding. Is there anything we can do to avoid sharding? I'm really glad you asked that question and I it's a really complicated topic and you're right It's something that is contentious and I understand why people are passionate about this One of the things that we're really committed to and really focused on is trying to create that authentic social infrastructure That authentic sense of community those like knowing who you are on the server knowing who else is on the server And so when we say sharding I want to be clear that that's a term that is often overused and misunderstood And we're gonna have some more communication in the months to come about what the differences are between that and other systems That are very similar to it or might have those effects And we are we are looking at what the what the options are available to us There's a lot of technologies that go into the Battle for Azeroth that have similar kinds of effects and one of the ones I want to call out that a lot of people confused with sharding is Phasing and there is no phasing. There's not another one is cross realm zones And there's no cross realm zones and so when we talk about like the possibility of sharding It really is a possibility of something we want to investigate and look at and see what we can do to mitigate And we'll have more information for you in the months to come. Is that helpful? Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you very much Well, they're quite more unfamously told people who said they wanted the You think you don't because Basically because of reasons like, you know all the changes that people haven't noticed over the years being in front of the game So what's changed to make you guys say, okay, let's go back and give people that well And are you addressing the issues like incremental changes for the game? There's I think, you know, there's there's always the danger when you have this nostalgic view of something that When you bring it back into a more modern era, you know where we have, you know higher resolution graphics And we have a lot of conveniences that we've added, you know throughout modern Wow In some ways to make it easier to play or to take some of the workout of playing That people they're playing today Experiencing what people experience 14 years ago will find it not as attractive And I think that that's sort of where that statement came from is it is a sense that you have this nostalgia We don't want to ruin that nostalgia for you But the really cool thing about it is that we can we can support both of these worlds, you know We're in this very unique situation where there is a game that has been evolving for 14 years that will continue evolve hopefully for another 14 or 15 more and beyond and And we were actually before that game even ends were being asked to bring forward What was the original experience and we can do it? And probably only we can do it in such an authentic manner So what led to us doing it? Honestly, it was mostly the fans, you know, it was continuous feedback continuous requests Attempts on the part of fans to resurrect on their own way Some portion or some, you know, experience that was like that So that's what prompted us speaking of that. Do you have any of the Nostalgia's team members working on classic wow right now? We do not okay cool Yeah, so I was going to kind of back on the topic of like phasing and sharding and I think that You know you talk about how there's different terminology and things may seem similar, but they're not really you know You might see sharding, but you think it's phasing or this and that and I think one thing, you know We talked about this last night. We did a podcast we talked about last night But I think it doesn't really matter what people call it. What matters is what they see and I think that's you know whether they're calling it phasing or sharding, you know, it's sharding but What they see is that they're seeing people taken out of the world, right? And the game's world of Warcraft and it ends up not feeling like World of Warcraft whenever there's not people in the world And I think that's just one of the big things and I know you say it might be something where It might be something you have to look at for the future or whatever, but we know we're pretty involved in the community We get a lot of feedback from people and one of like my personal main goals is to be able to Kind of kind of translate and be able to take what people are saying however way they say it and kind of make it more Kind of kind of easier to understand right and I think at the end of the day a lot of people think that Sharding is not vanilla and it's something that feels that like people feel like it takes away from the game a lot to the point Where people are actually fairly upset about seeing it in the demo and I understand to some extent at least I'm not a developer I'm not a programmer, but I understand to some extent that You guys whenever you're putting out a demo you're putting it out So it it looks appealing to the eyes whenever you first see it like you might hide certain like UI elements and stuff But on the back end it's not actually removed from the game One thing that came up is you can LFR slash LFR on the LFR window comes up. It doesn't work Yeah, you can't see it. You can't click on it, but that's an example of something Okay, let's just like hide this for now and we'll go back and clean it up later after the demo whenever we want to get a real real release out I Don't know that's just kind of more of like a message. I wanted to convey I guess that like that's something that people are worried about whenever they see some stuff like that not necessarily bugs but Design design decisions. That's that's what they're worried about is one of this year design decision It's not necessarily vanilla. That's that's one of the things we wanted to make sure that we addressed That's one of the reasons we put out that post on the community was we wanted people to know that just because you see it in The demo today doesn't mean that that's exactly the way it's going to work This is a demo I wanted to make sure that for the demo people could focus on that we restored the original abilities We restored the original quest content that we restored the original terrain and the areas we wanted to make sure that everybody had a chance to see that that was in and Obviously that the feeling of like community and like large player populations coming together is something that we want to try to recreate That's not something that would have been conducive to being able to see everything else in the demo We want to make sure everybody had that chance to see those things. So as you said, this is a demo It's a very different situation than live And so we made different decisions for demo than we would make for life We really wanted this to come out next summer and we realized that we needed to tell our fans What our progress was and what better way to show to tell you the progress than to show you the progress Yeah, and so we Aaron on the side of we'll leave some of these hooks in the demo So that we can get this on the show floors that we can get it out on people's homes And without we didn't want to cause any alarm that people would think that oh wait a minute This is just you know a refacing of the modern Wow Awesome, believe me. They are going through every little detail to make sure they have an authentic experience down to making vx-12 level engine match the lighting of The lighting as it was 14 years ago awesome So you guys are you guys are adjusting the lighting the lighting in the demo right now is not what we're going to see We have been working on it and it is a lot closer than it was So actually if you come to the panel today, you'll see where it's awesome And what we've done so far to get it to where it is today Also, you're gonna keep looking at it. There's if there's specific things that you guys here different That's one of the reasons that we're so excited about the passion the community brings us is that now that we can show you This demo you can see the direction that we're going where we're bringing it from the modern world of Warcraft back in time And what every every change we make brings us closer to how it was authentically back in 2006 that we hope that you guys will help Us find things that are slightly off and point them out to us and let us know which ones are the most important Absolutely I can't think of anything that was particularly frustrating There have been some some certainly challenges along the way and we'll go on to some examples of that in the panel later but just to give you some examples here for this interview the The the terrain like there's a there's some format differences in the terrain that They don't look right as we started to restore them And we had to go make changes in the code so that they would read the new terrain Actually, I'm sorry in that case we actually changed the terrain so that it would match the new engine But that looks correct in game as that's a perfect example of where like even though we have the original the original data If we wrote loaded into the modern engine doesn't work right You'll see examples of that and then we make changes to it to make it look correct Even though of course the actual data on this piece difference does that make sense you got a question in the back row and then I think Well you said the network stack and actually we don't we aren't even making any changes to the network stack Like that's that's something that is that we are going to use from the mainline code They're from the modern code today, and we're able to keep that as it is That's one of the things that we're excited that we can start with that code for is so that we can keep all those improvements Yeah, well one thing where we're maybe deviating from the original experiences that we want a lot more stability on the network side Hopefully will reduce the Q times that you might have experienced back in the day No guarantees on day one though because we can just think there'll be a lot of people coming in But from that point on that's one of the reasons why we want to go with our modern network code and hardware as well I Would say the yeah, that was pretty straightforward There have been like little changes like making sure that the actual battle that client could Distribute both first of the game simultaneously, and we have great partners throughout the company that maintain that application A question on server population caps have you determined what the server population caps will be I think back in vanilla They're between twenty five hundred to three thousand have you considered raising them or keeping them as they were back in the day? That's not actually how it works It's not like a population cap exactly It's like number of players online, but we are looking at those those are the kinds of things that we're talking about We're trying to find other solutions to make sure that we can provide a lot of stability and also It's real community. We certainly have the ability to have a higher realm population simultaneous than we had back in the day Yeah, so the good thing news is we can dial it, you know back then it was we put air in everyone in that We possibly could before the the CPUs melted So kind of on the topic of a progressive content release Itemization is something else that you know comes up a lot. It's we talked about a lot I don't know if you're gonna talk about this in the panel. They should take about that in the panel Okay, I don't want to waste time It's gonna ask Would you say that the demo is a pretty accurate representation of how far along you guys are or internally or you guys much for the long It's pretty accurate. Is it okay cool Okay It's not it's not exactly that of not knowing what they did we actually have a very we're very fortunate that we were able to Recover so much of our original data and original art and original source code that we were able to put together internally a Authentic recreation of 112 that we can compare things against so we can actually do those side-by-side comparisons This is what actually look like and of course it has all these problems like Exploited behaviors that are allowed or crash bugs and things like that And so of course we don't want to shift that version and that's why we're taking the approach We are but because we have it and we can look at them internally We can look at them side-by-side and say we know what this is that what this looks like And we know what it looks like now and we can look at those differences and then make things make the changes to make our Our bills Wow classic Just I just wanted to kind of tack on to the whole itemization thing Class balance was obviously kind of all over the place back in back in the day And I just kind of wondering what your approach was going to be to Maybe make things that were terrible not so terrible or make things that were really really good If you're gonna plan to bring them down or anything are you advocating that we go in and rebalance the classes back Not necessarily just Wondering if the approach was maybe going to be something like leave it as is and then maybe ask the community like hey Remember that this spec on this class was absolutely garbage and terrible and nobody used it. What if we Made it not so terrible After like however many months or years if there was enough of the community outreach to say like hey Can you tweak this we don't have any plans to make any changes to any of the balance in 112 We're starting with 112 because we feel like it's the most complete and most balanced version of the game that was out And that classic period that's why we're starting there. It's because we feel like it was pretty complete I Don't want to say that we wouldn't listen to the community Obviously, I think the community's passion is important and your feedback is really important and we really believe that every voice matters So we're always listening, but we do want to make sure that we get this authentic recreation because if you want Like the modern balance changes we have those those are in battle for Azeroth If we wanted to to get what we would do today, we have what we would do today That's available, but we don't have what we did back then and we wanted to be able to give people back What we did back then especially on things like class balance and that authentic gameplay experience and those authentic gameplay systems in the Way that they worked. All right. No, that's I'm very glad to hear that Yeah, those those of you that have managed to hang on to your tips and tricks from you know The era are gonna you're gonna see it and flood on the internet for the pages and hits So I would I would advocate you should probably be checking them to make sure that dude is still good because People are gonna be diving for women. What did I need to do for this? Also, I mean it's worth pointing out on that same subject that like some of the problems that we have had Challenges that we've had as we go through restoring this is places where the data and the code don't fit right and what we're trying To do is make them fit better And so sometimes we will find things where it doesn't work the way that it was supposed to and we wanted to and so That's one of the other things we want to reach out the community to help you guys Have you guys help us find all those things? It's a very large expansive game There's a lot of ground to cover and so if we missed something let us know don't like please help us assume that we want to do it Okay, that's what we want and help us So so would you say You know in terms of demo would you say that it's not the demo isn't particularly an act an accurate Representation of what what the game could actually be because I know there's a lot of stuff like for example Shamans can use two-handed weapons right now from what I heard I didn't I didn't put one but somebody's telling me there's a bug where they can get their shaman is a two-handed weapon And there's stuff with debuff slots like personal debuff slots showing up. There's a lot of little like under the table things Okay, yeah, there are a lot of work to do So I would I would say that if you're seeing little differences It is probable that those are things that we haven't finished yet Okay, that's after all we're we're planning to release in summer 2019 But it's not that we're releasing today And so we have a lot of work to do to make that date and so those are some of the things you're seeing there Like shaman's using a two-handed weapon. I believe that's a talent You have to get right and so yeah, if you're able to equip one without the talent, then that's a mistake Right question in the back, and then I think you The bill of 112, you know, I'm not I don't know if I have an exact date there. I'm not sure we have that I mean it was a lot of different little pieces coming together over a long period of time Like it wasn't like a single person working on it continues They were have like a start date and an end date and a number of engineers that were assigned to it It was like it was a research and development project that was happening kind of on the side from a variety of engineers working together Are there any plans for service? I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry We're speaking about tips and tricks from classic two questions ago things like wall job in exploring and it in a terrain Are we still gonna have those in classic? Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure we are not gonna have wall jumping and the reason for that is because we have some of our modern movement enforcement exploit detection code Prevents things like wall jumping and so we won't have that Are there any plans for services like character transfers name changes or any kind of cash off the classic? But We want to examine those in a case-by-case basis right now We don't have any plans to announce any of those and some of those were available in the classic era So we're gonna go look through those in the future and try to figure out which ones make sense for classic We do want to like create that authentic experience and like there were authentic needs for people to do things like character transfers That's an example of what we we might include But we don't have any plans to do that right now when you didn't ask if it wants to caveat be clear It won't be character transfers to and from modern wow and class. Oh, that's a good point Those ecosystems we're gonna preserve and keep that sacrosanct so like transmog two won't work both ways Like if you get an item in classic wow like a transmog They're two different characters until the character in class right play that character in class. It's gonna be able we will have Battle net friends, you know real ID friends You'll be able to communicate with your friends that are playing in modern wow as you would you know people that are playing overwatch But you won't be able to take your character and move it over to modern wow And yes, certainly any like items that you get playing while classic will not transfer over to your main line To your modern characters So on top of a battle net one of the concerns for a lot of people is like cross-faction collusion and I understand how okay if you're already friends with somebody who happens to be playing on the opposite faction on the same server You already have a line of communication established that person you can talk to one discord or whatever, right? But a big concern for a lot of people is the fact that in retail I can go right click on a guy's portrait and then send friend request for battle net and I can open a lot of communication with Somebody on the opposing faction is it something that you guys would be looking at possibly removing because I remember back in the day Cross-faction inclusion was something that was against TOS and now it's getting enabled if it's if it's not that way We have actually had internal discussions about that already awesome thinking about that awesome great Yes, 40 man range will still be I think we're gonna bring them back exactly as they were we think that that is a very important part to That authentic experience It has to do with how we identify what the differences are That's actually very much the point of the panel that we're gonna have is to talk about exactly that question But the crux of it is that when we're going from where we are backwards It's very clear what the path is we can see it everybody can see it You guys can help us see it if we were going from where we were back then to forwards a lot of those issues are invisible to us We can't see them until there's like a million players online simultaneously and then the server crashes or There's a malicious exploit and we don't know about it until somebody reminds us that we've forgotten to fix it And like trying to like replay those four from the history that we've reported that just lands us to where we are today One big discussion I hear a lot of the time is what happens after next ramus has done like old scuba escape is added With player polls custom content or bonus content. Have you guys thought about new content that you'll make for classic wow? Okay, great great No