My belief that AI may have helped Blizzard plan, set up and smoothly launch WoW Forever is inferred and based on the poor quality of their other recent launches. WoW Classic released in 2019 and was a laggy mess for the first few days. Blizzard recently said WoW Forever is their biggest launch in history for peak concurrent players, bigger than Classic or any expansion they've released including Burning Crusade and WotLK.

Blizzard has long been derided for its poor performance when handling massive player events, showing worse performance in that regard than large private servers such as Nostalrius.

The biggest technological advancement in the past couple years that could help explain their sudden and dramatic improvement is AI, in my opinion. I think it's fantastic if AI is indeed a large part of the reason for their rapid improvement.

Someone (you?) linked this here and I ended up buying Q3A and running it through ioquake. Quite a blast, even with just bots.

Not nostalgia for me, I play Quake 3 about 15 times a week with a group of people, it's still awesome fun. We're all so good at it, it's genuinely a difficult competition every time. After 15 years we still get in ridiculous/interesting situations in the same maps all the time.

This is the type of change I am referring to when inferring that AI may have helped develop the changes that enabled such a massive improvement over previous launch events.

I am not a Blizzard employee and don't have insider information. I'm just impressed with their improvements and hopeful it was at least partially enabled by their use of AI to help ideate, design and implement.

LLMs can also greatly streamline this process as well. For a silly gameplay example, if you wanted to enable double jumping in Quake you could do it in a few minutes and a single prompt instead of what would have previously been the start of a pretty significant dive into the code.

Basically I think what we're seeing is that LLMs make everything easy, and so the standard for success is going to increase somewhat significantly simply because there are no longer any barriers whatsoever to doing things.

MMOs are awful. Save your money and time.

It really depends on more than that, as someone who's played a ton of WoW at various times of my life I would say that it's the best case scenario for an MMO that can offer something to everyone, if you have the time it's worth trying. The game itself gets about as deep as you could possibly want and the community can be incredible. it is however best enjoyed when you have at least a few hours to dedicate to it a night to put in the work to be a good community member yourself.

You really get what you give with a game like WoW. The rewards are great, some of the best of any video game experience, but they do not come for free. It really REALLY rewards people who are outgoing and engage in the social aspect.

WoW Forever is probably the best version of WoW for someone looking to start now (I personally like classic better and think retail is trash but ymmv and really good community can be found in all flavors of the game), and there's a lot of hype around it right now.

It's the last mmo, yes. It can't really be re released again and have such a following. It's maintained in the style of 20 years ago but modernised

There's a lot of new players that never played wow in any iteration, so I would think so.

No. Save your time, the game is pointless, like many other games, and offers really nothing except for those with nostalgia. But if you want to waste a month or two grinding for no reason, go ahead.

Do you like Cookie Clicker? Do you think Cookie Clicker would be more fun if everyone clicking could interact with each other? If so, WoW is for you.