| ▲ | sfink 6 hours ago | |
Users usually don't know what they really want. But neither do developers or product managers. The "understand the underlying problem" part is hard, and easy to convince yourself of incorrectly. There are also shallow wants and deeper wants. I don't have the experience to know, but my guess is that classic WoW was more of a shallow want, where people were very happy to get it, but the deeper want was more about a style and feel of gameplay. The players would be happier with new stuff that kept the magic of the classic game, but they justifiably knew they couldn't trust Blizzard not to add anything without messing it up. So the only practical way to satisfy the desire was to just roll back all the way to the classic version. In a perfect world, some designer would come along and incorporate carefully selected bits and pieces of the new version, probably with some novel changes to balance it out, and end up with something superior to both classic and new WoW. But that would be really hard to get right, and distrusting players would fight it (with very good reasons for their suspicion), and you would have a giant mess of different people claiming that they know what to keep and what to discard, except nobody would agree on the same things, etc. | ||
| ▲ | john_strinlai 5 hours ago | parent [-] | |
>I don't have the experience to know, but my guess is that classic WoW was more of a shallow want, where people were very happy to get it, but the deeper want was more about a style and feel of gameplay. The players would be happier with new stuff that kept the magic of the classic game, [...] >In a perfect world, some designer would come along and incorporate carefully selected bits and pieces of the new version, probably with some novel changes to balance it out, and end up with something superior to both classic and new WoW. this is exactly what they put a lot of effort into for 5-10 years or so. years! blizzard convinced themselves that the players asking for classic didn't really want classic, they just wanted some of the feeling of classic bolted on to the current game. but players actually, really, 100% truthfully, no exaggeration, wanted classic WoW. not retail WoW with some classic-feeling bits. they wanted (basically) bug-for-bug classic. and it worked out great in the end! classic is thriving. retail is thriving. no balancing act between the two player bases needed. | ||