Occultapus 🐙

Professional goblin.
Probably covered in paint, pet hair, or glitter.
Games 🎮 Books📚 Metal 🤘 Crafts🎨

[Occultapus 🐙 @occult_octopus]

It’s been like a week already. We all still fighting? Just shut up and play the game. Or don’t.

[Supatease 💪 @Supatease]

Retail and Classic players arguing on Twitter about Forever.

[Occultapus 🐙 @occult_octopus]

@JaxirRaywhisper @onyxicca Oh honey, I’m not mad. I’m just asking questions. Like I said, I play both versions of the game 🤣 but I will leave you with this post by one of the devs on the game

[Cornfed Nebraska Boy @Marmstrongwow]

I'm seeing a lot of discourse about who WoW Forever is being made for and while I cannot speak for anyone else on the team I can speak for myself. I am making WoW forever for the classic gamer and for the millions of people who have had their accounts lapse over the years because they were not satisfied with changes that were made to the game. Whether those changes were to the art style, the story, social aspects, game design, or changes to their favorite class.

I did not spend the last year of my life relearning and mastering how to do things like we did it 20+ years ago for retail players. I could have taken it easy and just kept doing things like I had done for the past 8 years on retail...because I was much more familiar with it and it actually takes a lot less time to do (height maps on textures do a ton of heavy lifting). Because the reality is that the majority of retail players wouldn't care and would probably actually prefer it. But I felt I had a duty to uphold an artistic vision and integrity that millions of people expect from us. But not just for our players, but for my co-workers past and present who worked on it over 20 years ago. If I could not create something that resembled their work then I failed not only them...but myself.

Please do not take this as me throwing any shade at retail players or the retail team because I am one myself...but I wanted to make Forever as authentic of a Vanilla experience as possible. This involves making decisions wildly different than retail. It means holding the line against changes that create a domino affect down the road. It means keeping friction and inconveniences in the game. It means finding friends and forming groups with strangers and being social!! Because WoWs social aspects have always been the pillar of the game and over the years it has slowly been chiseled away at with changes that allow you play alone.

Since the day I started working on the Riverglades I have lived by three sayings.

"Convenience is the death of the journey."

"If you're making a game for everyone then you're making it for no one."

"Every change we make incurs a debt to the authenticity of the game and sooner or later that debt will be paid."

These are my core beliefs and I had a specific group of people I was targeting with my work. These beliefs cannot be shaken and I will try to hold the line against anything that goes against them and will continue to pester the team about things that feel out of place.

That being said, my hope is that Forever will pull in as many people as possible, whether you are a retail gamer, a classic gamer, someone who hasn't played in years, or even a new player. I hope you can all remember what made this game so special in the first place and that starts with understanding why we are so passionate about keeping it authentic.

[Occultapus 🐙 @occult_octopus]

Not gonna say I told you so, buuuuuut 😋

[Cornfed Nebraska Boy @Marmstrongwow]

I'm seeing a lot of discourse about who WoW Forever is being made for and while I cannot speak for anyone else on the team I can speak for myself. I am making WoW forever for the classic gamer and for the millions of people who have had their accounts lapse over the years because they were not satisfied with changes that were made to the game. Whether those changes were to the art style, the story, social aspects, game design, or changes to their favorite class.

I did not spend the last year of my life relearning and mastering how to do things like we did it 20+ years ago for retail players. I could have taken it easy and just kept doing things like I had done for the past 8 years on retail...because I was much more familiar with it and it actually takes a lot less time to do (height maps on textures do a ton of heavy lifting). Because the reality is that the majority of retail players wouldn't care and would probably actually prefer it. But I felt I had a duty to uphold an artistic vision and integrity that millions of people expect from us. But not just for our players, but for my co-workers past and present who worked on it over 20 years ago. If I could not create something that resembled their work then I failed not only them...but myself.

Please do not take this as me throwing any shade at retail players or the retail team because I am one myself...but I wanted to make Forever as authentic of a Vanilla experience as possible. This involves making decisions wildly different than retail. It means holding the line against changes that create a domino affect down the road. It means keeping friction and inconveniences in the game. It means finding friends and forming groups with strangers and being social!! Because WoWs social aspects have always been the pillar of the game and over the years it has slowly been chiseled away at with changes that allow you play alone.

Since the day I started working on the Riverglades I have lived by three sayings.

"Convenience is the death of the journey."

"If you're making a game for everyone then you're making it for no one."

"Every change we make incurs a debt to the authenticity of the game and sooner or later that debt will be paid."

These are my core beliefs and I had a specific group of people I was targeting with my work. These beliefs cannot be shaken and I will try to hold the line against anything that goes against them and will continue to pester the team about things that feel out of place.

That being said, my hope is that Forever will pull in as many people as possible, whether you are a retail gamer, a classic gamer, someone who hasn't played in years, or even a new player. I hope you can all remember what made this game so special in the first place and that starts with understanding why we are so passionate about keeping it authentic.

[Occultapus 🐙 @occult_octopus]

@robmoya @onyxicca You want mounts at level 1 and flying at level 10? Speed flying so you can get your quests done quicker? 2 shot all the mobs and be max level in a few hours? Then be bored because you’re now max level with nothing to do? Instant teleport to dungeons in zones you’ve never been in?

[Occultapus 🐙 @occult_octopus]

@JaxirRaywhisper @onyxicca So you won’t get mad when blizz takes your CE mounts and puts them on the trading post eventually? I’ve been playing for 20 years and I play both versions of the game. Seeing them putting certain mounts on the trading post and at vendors in remix sucked.

[Occultapus 🐙 @occult_octopus]

After getting roughly 2 hours of sleep, drinking 3 cups of coffee and taking my adhd meds, I can now smell colors and see sounds. Got a to do list a mile long and I now realize I’m going into a manic episode 🙃 after having a traumatic week at work….i guess it’s kinda expected

[Tom Ellis @FwoiblesWoW]

Alright, now the dust has settled and you're just happily playing away, let's answer the most common question I've seen.

1. AHMAGERD, this game is 20 years old, how do you still suck at this!?!
a. Heh, fair enough, sort answer is, this is our BETA PTR environment stack, it's not a Production stack by a long, long, long, long, long, long shot. Betas for WoW aren't usually huge meter movers so this environment just isn't that powerful. This led to the first problem you saw today,

Shortly after we went live and when you got through the login queue (which is just https://t.co/9H8zIxF1Ca protecting itself, rate limiting logins, normal!), you were disconnected. Ah. That's not quite right. This one took the longest of the issue today to figure out (and even then, was around half an hour I think?). Our little BETA environment only uses one REGIONAL realm. Hrm, we should do a panel on WoW infra one day so any of this makes sense. Anyway...

This turned out to be a problem, but it took a while to find because all our services CPU and Memory were A-OK, bored even. And when the https://t.co/0KNMhiGfJH Game Service team took a look at their services that we were talking to and getting timeouts from, they were bored too. What the hell. Eventually engineers figured out that we were hitting the BGS metering system that protects their services from falling over under extreme load. Our tiny little REGIONAL with its two connections that were trying to login A LOT of users, even though it was no where near capped on CPU was completely screwing the math that system was using. We scaled that 2 to an 8 and immediately the flood gates opened once again. We all recognized we need more logging and notifications when this system is kicking in, but this is the first time anyone's seen it kick in when their wasn't an obvious CPU issue to go along with it. 20 years, always something new.

What next... Ah yes, shortly after that, many of you saw long looting times, accepting quests etc, anything that interacted with the database. The PTR database that beta uses was taking a long time to respond to queries. Our intrepid Oracle Database Engineers had to perform a manual analyze on all the tables and setup some automated jobs to periodically keep doing it, this is because some of these tables were new and existing tables were seeing a crapton of inserts and new query behavior so everything just needed to be checked more often while the data was still changing so much. As soon as these were performed DB performance cleared up instantly. For any DB engineers, yes we say analyze because we're old, we know its DBMS_STATS.

Restarts! We kicked you all off. A few hours in, we noticed our WORLD pools that run, well, the game simulation you play on, were running crazy hot on CPU and almost out of memory. We then started seeing the first VMs get hit by the OOM'killer as they threatened to take down the hypervisor. Classic engineers were able to identify that we were not correctly shutting down empty maps, so we were slowly, well, not that slowly, gobbling up CPU and memory. One quick fix through passed through QA but needs restarts to pick it up. We also took the opportunity to add some additional WORLDs just in case, and gave that REGIONAL service a extra friend, just in case.

Marked live once again and you all poured in without fuss. Right now things are incredibly smooth for the first few hours of a public beta, Classic teams watching and fixing anything blocking that comes up but we're otherwise pretty much done for the night, enjoy!

[Occultapus 🐙 @occult_octopus]

@Beartrice_WoW I spent like 5 minutes just swimming and jumping in and out of the water when I figured it out!

[Occultapus 🐙 @occult_octopus]

Thoughts on WoW forever so far: warlock still feels like classic warlock and I love that. There’s people complaining about a lot of lag, but I didn’t experience any of that. I was able to make it to level 5. Spent a lot of time making UI tweaks. There’s a few new quests so that makes it interesting. But it’s been fun so far. I can’t wait for the full release.

[Occultapus 🐙 @occult_octopus]

@Aimeestrasza ❤️

[Occultapus 🐙 @occult_octopus]

My teenager has taken all of my travel coffee tumblers so I was stuck taking my husbands this morning lol

[Toxcyk @_toxicblonde]

As another user has said, the problem isn’t paying the $30. The concern comes from WoW setting a precident.

I would rather pay for a new expansion that comes with said race for everyone instead of getting new content and be locked out of a race, especially when sometimes racials are meta for certain content. The concern comes from, what happens if in another new expansion they release a meta race but it’s locked behind a transaction? It just feels bad. Realistically sure this probably won’t affect the majority of players, and I’m maybe dooming, but I can see the potentially negative consequences in the future if they plan on pushing this.

[Occultapus 🐙 @occult_octopus]

Uninstalled classic and deleted all of my addons for retail and classic to make room for wowF…. And now I’m bored because I don’t want to play any of my other games 🤣 why am I like this? Happy beta eve!

[cassie @cassieblooms]

ok is this a safe space to say I'm confused by the people mad about there being some retail aspects in wow forever? it was never going to be just classic, it was always going to be classic PLUS, almost as if they wanted to take classic and enhance it with more modern features...?

if you want to play classic, play classic! it's still right there? what am I missing here 😅

[Occultapus 🐙 @occult_octopus]

@Typerighting @maddl29 Draenei/lightforged Draenei will always be the superior choice. Space goats!!! But the female form is the best in game imo

[Occultapus 🐙 @occult_octopus]

Me af

[Liquid Eiya @eiyawow]

staring at the pull timer while i have no food buff, wrong talents, forgot it was my key

[BigHeroSixy @BigHeroSixy]

EXCITING NEWS ABOUT WOW FOREVER

Recent interview said that items will be obfuscated to protect against data mining until that item drops for you or someone on the server in WoW Forever.

This is EXTREMELY EXCITING. We will discover end game together as a community! 👏

Full question and answer in image.