Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

> Before we can begin prescribing potential cures, we need a solid diagnosis of the problem, and of its scale.

The revitalization of old games via the "classic" release model has demonstrated that simply undoing the MBA damage is an extremely viable option. World of Warcraft and League of Legends are both great examples of this. Blizzard was even forced to drop the "2" from Overwatch and bring back the 6v6 open queue. Heroes of the storm queue times are under 60 seconds now. This last one they said was dead years ago but they just released a big content update and it sent a very strong message to gamers.

Every morning I pull up YouTube for the last month has felt like 2016. Blizzcon was a breath of fresh air. Proof we can still do things the right way. We need to clear out the org charts and flatten them. There should be one person who owns each game and then everyone else works for them directly. Putting business people above this and letting them jerk around the directors cannot possibly result in long term gains. Anything involving a non domain expert leading in the gaming industry is a short term extraction play that will inevitably ruin the pie for everyone.

For better or worse, some degree of gate keeping is healthy in this industry. I think if you want to be the CEO of Xbox that you must demonstrate some kind of ranked ladder experience in halo or COD. A 1v1 StarCraft match with the interim CEO.

Okay to expand.

WoW classic was certainly a business move, but afaik from watching a couple of wowc videos, a part of the appeal was the rerelease of the following expansions, which they cant just do forever since it would just lead to the same end, so they have to pivot to WoW forever.

LoL classic has not been as successful as wow, and even they have talked about patching the game literally less than a month after its release.

Both of these classic releases don't seem to be permanent games, and their rerelase seems aimed to capture the nostalgia while still providing live service updates in order to prevent people from getting bored because their endgames can't continuously monetize players.

OW 2 was supposed to be a release with a pve mode as it's focus, which it failed, so there was no real reason to have a distinction between ow1 and 2. Both the removal and return of 6v6 and role queue have been nothing more than attempts to balance the game, and I don't really see the need to point it out as "MBA damage" any more than any other patch for any other game.

I have no comments about HOTS because I played at most 5 matches in the game 10 years ago.

>For better or worse, some degree of gate keeping is healthy in this industry. I think if you want to be the CEO of Xbox that you must demonstrate some kind of ranked ladder experience in halo or COD. A 1v1 StarCraft match with the interim CEO. Just a stupid idea idk what to say. Being a gamer has nothing to do with managing a gaming company well

Original classic WoW lasted longer than the expansions. WoW Forever is a horizontal expansion instead of a superseding one.

LoL classic is indeed a bad example, but that’s because Riot didn’t deliver and also importantly used a version that was not at the height of LoL’s success. You can use Runescape as a better example for the return to classic working.

Other mismanaged classic games are the Warcraft 3 remake. So classic does not guarantee success, it has to be done properly.

OSRS is also a great case study, and I think it was the first MMO to do this? At first it was pretty lackluster, but got enough popularity from the nostalgia wave to survive for a bit, but they dedicated a team to it and they ended up doing some pretty great things given time. It gets around 3-4 times more paid players than "mainline" RS does.

I believe there was significant controversy about whether it was safe to update or whether it should be a permanent time capsule. The developers ended up earning everyone's trust by experimenting with new major content on a new continent of the game world that was basically their sandbox, until it was felt they were making the game better and not worse. Even the original version of this new continent was criticised for being a massive empty plain, although now it's more filled in. They also developed a system to poll paying players on whether new updates were desirable or not, and most of the time they wouldn't add something that didn't get 3/4 approval.

> The revitalization of old games via the "classic" release model has demonstrated that simply undoing the MBA damage is an extremely viable option

The rerelease of classic is the MBA damage lol.

Strongly disagree. It is giving the players choices again. At least in the case of WoW. Players will have three options in November. MBA damage would be creating a "classic" experience and then killing the current retail product to force a migration.

I realized my comment was too short and would need explaining so please read the other comment I wrote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50139050

Especially given that Everquest had done that for a few years and was a major revenue stream. That was a 200% "MBA" decision.

And soon we'll see also Wow Legend? I kid I kid.

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