Laurence

web engineer. Amateur strongman/powerlifter.

[Swearing Sports News @SwearingSport]

You couldn’t fucking write that if you tried😭😭

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

@NotFabTV The solution is just RBGs. Have the gear locked behind rating. It preserves the exclusivity of classic, lends itself well to seasons, would make BGs super interesting instead of honor/hour maxxing and removes the degen grind

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

@designertom This is ace - How is it predicting a route? Is it just a proximity thing of quests in your log? Or does it do anything clever like graph optimisation?

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

@obviousnickname @jonzzy I feel that was the spirit of classic. Classic =/= vanilla

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

@brucustodio1 @vanilla_dad @7ellas1 @Blizzard_Ent Even hardware bans are hard, you could always spin up a VM on your machine

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

@Sathclark @Laganish Unironically Shadowlands is still the best performing retail expansion (in terms of activision investor reports and twitch metrics) since its release (partly due to covid, partly due to the very slow exodus of players from retail)

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

@ghostrat881 @sivhades That are is completely wrong, it has OSRS bigger than jagex reported all time peak themselves. Use the investor reports from Activision for more accurate data

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

It’s likely more than too lol. They wax and wane depending on which version has the more current content. When forever exists, it will be classic that’s more popular. When TLT comes out, retail. Classic definitely pulls its weight and some though in terms of revenue. Little overhead and a huge sub stream

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

@Snowmixy I would have loved PvP gear tied to RBG rating. Preserves the exclusivity that OG vanilla had and removes the degen grind. Feels like the best way to capture the vanilla spirit in the modern game

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

@BanKsEsports Yes

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

@TromaFR @AggrendWoW @Zirene @NoraValletta This should be in the game as standard!

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

@Artemishowl_ The whole thing looks amazing, massive credit to the art team and devs

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

@dedlibru @AggrendWoW Ahh, yeah, I think so too. I thought SoD had a good balance!

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

Exactly - so this idea they were *designed* to be easy (like many espouse) doesn't hold up - right. They *were* hard for their time. We can't use today's knowledge and skill inflation to judge the past. To preserve that spirit, do the raids need to be made harder to compensate? (I'm not saying they necessarily do, just postulating the question).

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

One was the author of the Dev diaries who was a level producer (John Staats) and the other (Mark Kern) was the lead project manager, so he would have/should have known those kind of things intricately (as he would be the one issuing work to the developers). I'm sure they would have tech limitations (as they do now) - but this is from the horse's mouth lol. Are we just going to speculate or accept what the OG team are saying lol

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

@Bignasty848 @Endorall Oh don’t get me wrong it looks great! I was just interested if they’ve looked at the success at classic and though “actually this should be the reference now” even though that was a copy of the original essentially

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

@whoolly99 @Grokmaxxing https://t.co/mnIto53t1l

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

@whoolly99 @Grokmaxxing I’m pretty sure one of the devs said that it was a deliberate choice verbatim!

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

I’m saying that they’re using classic as the reference rather than vanilla. A lot of things that occurred in classic were due to 20 years of accumulated knowledge and ended up going against (for many) a lot of the foundations of vanilla. Like the idea that raids should be easy (I’m not saying they necessarily shouldn’t, either!) seems a classic thing. In Vanilla seeing someone with full T2 for example was rare and impressive, in classic pretty much everyone was full T2 a few weeks into BWL. And a lot of design decisions in many of the classic/vanilla spin offs seem to have come out of that design (the copy/classic) rather than the original. Vanilla never had easy raids by the standards of the time. In fact, if you use relative % of clears as a proxy for difficulty (and that’s arguably the only proxy that works across time periods) then the raids in vanilla were comparable to current mythic difficulty. Very few people were clearing the current content (eg AQ and naxx at their releases)

Yet, despite this, we use classic as the frame of reference - where everyone cleared the raids on day one. That’s my point of using the term simulcra. The copy is slowing becoming the “authority” reference and there’s this idea now that raids in vanilla were deliberately “designed” to be easy - they weren’t!

[Laurence @LozzStokes]

@whoolly99 @Grokmaxxing This was debunked by one of the OG devs apparently - it wasn’t a tech limitation - it was a deliberate choice to incubate communities better by having smaller realm sizes