Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan gave an interview on Reddit this week that provides an interesting perspective from an original World of Warcraft developer who defected to Overwatch.
“I think classic is a great idea,” he says. “I have great nostalgia for what the game was. I think people need to be careful about what they think the magic was versus what it actually was. I don’t think what made the classic servers great was the shitty quests. I’m allowed to say that because I wrote all of them.”
Indeed, he stresses the importance of community and lauds the absence of the dungeon finder, but he also points out that some of vanilla’s problems: the lack of server transfers, the lack of well-distributed auction halls, and the smaller servers.
“There are a lot of systems in place now that I think actually make WoW a better game, that contributed to there being a small the community… people are going to be in shock at some things that were in classic WoW. Think about flying your griffin … you had to go stop-by-stop, clicking each link. You couldn’t go grab a beer while you flew across the world.”
Kaplan’s busied himself talking up Overwatch too – specifically, the “strike team” he’s assembled in-house to fight toxicity, one of the year’s buzzwords. That’s in addition to another team battling cheaters and hackers. Indeed, Kaplan’s plan ought to remind you a lot of Riot’s philosophy, down to telling reportees that the toxic turds they reported actually got what was coming to them.
“We’re starting to action less toward silences and more toward suspensions. If somebody’s doing bad behavior, just silencing them can sometimes convince them to do things like throw matches and grief in other ways. If you keep exemplifying bad behavior, we’re gonna have you leave the game [permanently].”
