World of Warcraft: Classic Interview

With World of Warcraft: Classic launching in less than a month, on August 27, 2019, Eurogamer interviewed Blizzard Entertainment’s lead software engineer Ryan Birmingham and senior software engineer Omar Gonzalez. The interview touches on the recently finished Classic beta, the difficulties of getting the authentic “Vanilla” feel just right, the developers’ post-launch plans for this nostalgia-driven experiment, and more. An excerpt:

I was obsessed with Ragnaros in Molten Core all those years ago and I love seeing him come back to prominence – it was bizarre being able to solo him because of all the level-cap increases! But those old raids aren’t new to anyone any more, so what do you do about counting world-first boss kills in Classic WoW? Do they override the original scores? That’s not fair, surely – people already know the strategies!

Brian Birmingham: We don’t count them – that’s a community feature.

Omar Gonzalez: We see they happen so we’re aware of them…

Brian Birmingham: It’s certainly still a race for people who want to do that, but I would encourage people to do it at their own pace. There’s still a challenge there – we’ve all seen it, we all know how to do it but there’s still a long road to go. Which strategy for optimising your gear? Which levelling routes? How to invest in, and gear up, each character? There’s still going to be a bit of a debate. We’ve seen a lot of surprising results where people thought they knew how things worked back in Classic – but don’t.

What kind of thing?

Brian Birmingham: We made a post on our forums about exact hit-rate calculation. Some of the fun is trying to figure out the minutiae of these combat equations. The hit-chance against a boss creature was eight or nine per cent, no one could figure it out, so we confirmed it was eight per cent. But people were pointing out, ‘Oh but I have plus-eight per cent hit-chance on my gear and I’m still missing the boss – you guys must have it wrong,’ and we dug in there and said, ‘Actually, if a boss is three levels higher than you, it ignores your first one per cent bonus to hit, so it’s eight per cent chance to miss, and your first point of plus-one per cent chance to hit is totally ignored.

It’s really detailed minutiae but it was this edge case that existed back then, and we made sure we went back and restored those things.

Omar Gonzalez: We have a tremendous community of incredibly dedicated fans, especially when trying to discover these combat mechanics. There was a recent issue with crit percentage chance. We didn’t release the numbers, the actual math, so they sat there for whole weekends punching turtles! For hours and hours on end! To generate thousands and thousands of these combat log entries, which they did a tremendous amount of maths on and ended up deriving very accurate numbers through sheer force of will. It’s that kind of community and devotion that fuels our devotion and passion.