ClassiCast #13 | Vanilla WoW Team Lead Mark Kern & John Staats – The WoW Classic Podcast

Hey guys! We were very fortunate to be joined again this week by John Staats and also Vanilla WoW Team Lead Mark Kern! John and Mark wanted to join us to reminisce and tell stories of the development of the original game. Mark is the one who presented the proposal for official Blizzard legacy servers after Nostalrius had shut down two years ago. This is the first time Mark has done any sort of Podcast or Interview regarding Vanilla WoW since he's left Blizzard, and we were very excited that he was willing to do it with us.

I want playerhousing / guildhousing in Classic so bad now, haha

Esfan wants bigger (mega) servers? I thought he wanted Classic. Jokes aside, it's his opinion which we must respect, but the big issues with big servers are: loss of community feel, easier to get groups, easier to get loot and so on. Sound good right? Well then that "all so cool" loot will have less immersion impact feeling and more people means more can bully others more with less repercussions and much more.

The game back then was made in a different mindset. You can increase the population sure but you can't increase the zones, as they are already made and fixed.

2.5k (to 5k at the VERY most) pop. Since vanilla was about you and the community. What kind of healthy community will there be with high population? It speaks for itslef. Common sence. Keep it "classic".

Would love to see Mark Kern stream vanilla, wow

Perhaps I can shed a little light on the "who can they get to work someone else's game?" question. The simple answer it's a labor of love, but I will go in to details for the small bit I did, I can only imagine how massive the task of an entire game is, for a big-name official company no less.

I worked on level-60 Naxxramas on a private server(s). This was back before many of them had Naxxramas available, so all the first variants were a complete mess. The "best" ones were just copy pasted Wrath Naxx with the boss scripting changed a bit to have the vanilla abilities that were ripped from the wiki, while the worst ones were… just bad. Being the kind of person I am, I was quite pissed off to see a server announce they had a working Naxx and it was Blizz-like yadda yadda then seeing the Stoneskin Gargoyles in the outer-ring (should be Plagued Gargoyles) or Venom Stalkers in Grand Widows hallway (Should be Necro Stalkers), or a mobs ability being cast every 2.5 seconds instead of every 2, etc.

So I went to a dev of a server, it was a somewhat obscure one, but it certainly had some of the best devs. Mob pathing was amazing, scripts seemed very solid, etc. and because it was very small, they were still approachable. I asked them if they would be interested in an extremely accurate recreation of 60 Naxxramas (Being my favorite dungeon, and hating what they did to it in Wrath, I had motivation). He told me make a server on my computer, and set up all the mobs and patrols and such and send the database over with attached notes/pics if needed. So I did just that. I spent many hours pouring through old shitty quality videos from 2006 or whatever, looking for things like "Oh yeah this patrol turns 27 degrees when it reaches that crack in the floor" or recognizing a more noticeable pattern to boss abilities other then the old wiki article that states "uses X ability every 10-30 seconds" and things like "uh wait a minute, this mob's display ID is off slightly (mostly obscured gear on humanoid ones, like the shirt on a DK captain) and also asked quite a few people I knew ran the place back in the day for any info to help shed light.

Well the server didn't make it, mostly due to hosting and such, but I told them to give it out to any other server they wanted/was interested. Some time later a bunch of servers seemed to use the variant I made. But going back to the question, I did it all because I loved doing it, just making sure that deathknight captain turned 27 degrees at that crack in the floor felt great. And I am sure the classic devs probably want the most accurate variant of classic and their mission/challenge/etc. is instead of thinking up something new, getting it as close to accurate as possible. When I hear of things like sharding/loot trading/silence it hurts, because I know all of those are the company more or less imposing them, if the classic team is as dedicated as they sound, they wouldn't want those either.

EDIT: Want to see it, there is a video of a guild doing a full Naxx clear on Nostalrius, looks exactly like what I made except there are a couple Plagued Ghouls mixed with the Plagued Deathhounds in the outer ring, maybe they knew something I missed…

Hearing these two talk makes you want a career in game development, so much passion they put into the work they do and it shows for a game that has captivated the lives of many.
Well done to all, and thank you Esfand, Tips and StaySafe for these podcasts, I wish you all the twitch primes.

HEIL KEVIN JORDAN FOR THE RISE OF THE FACTIONS

I've listened to these dev classicasts so many times i'm nearly ashamed, but not really.

This was a joy to listen to even if I'm a bit late to commenting on this. 😀

John Staats aka Steve O‘s big sober Genius Brother

I wish Mark Kern was the head of the Titan project, I think he would make it good mmo with oldschool feel, not the shooter currrent Blizzard made out of that.

1:28:40
He was completely right

I don't know anything about the guy bottom middle but from looks alone I'd say he has some relation to Ron Jeremy

2:30:30 history repeats?

I really enjoyed this conversation but I really despise how the wow people just disregard all the other MMO's that came before them. "nobody had ever worked at scale like this" statements like this are sort of correct, I mean EQ servers capped out at 3k if I remember right and wow went beyond that, anarchy online, dark age of camelot, asheron's call, matrix online, star wars online, etc….. they all dealt with this shit, wow just had more servers but most of the issues WoW designers discuss were the same issues that Ultima online had but no, WoW was pioneering…

The most annoying bit is they aren't entirely wrong, they didn't bother to recruit anyone that had actually done this kind of shit before so for them, they were pioneering but it was because they didn't bother to recruit experienced talent. Honestly the more I learn about the people that worked on WoW and how inexperienced they are I'm fucking amazed the game wasn't an utter failure.