
How World of Warcraft Was Made - nodivbyzero
https://www.usgamer.net/articles/how-world-of-warcraft-was-made-the-inside-story
======
meritt
The most impressive aspect of WoW to me was just how well the game ran on
commodity hardware at the time. EQ2 came out the same month and ran very
poorly on top-of-the-line PCs. Vanguard beta hit a year later and it was
nearly unplayable on anything but the most cutting edge of systems. I really
think Blizzard's focus on performance optimization and UX had a very
significant contribution to the success of WoW and widening the playerbase.

~~~
dsl
So many people I played with were able to enjoy the game because it would run
on the $350 eMachines PC they got at Walmart. Accessibly really increased the
draw of the game for regular consumers because you could get your friends into
it easily.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
I ran the game on a beat up dell laptop for several years, 40 man raids and
everything. Had to run it on the lowest settings, but was able to get 30 FPS
on it.

I remember I played so much that on the left side of the laptop where my palm
rested all the paint had worn off of the laptop.

------
btown
> "From a pure hardware side, we weren't prepared. From the standpoint of how
> fast people were getting to max level and are we going to have content in
> place for them; we weren't prepared. We never really experienced what it's
> like to be on a game that never ever ends," adds Pardo. "In a lot of ways
> everything starts the moment you launch, which none of us were really
> mentally or emotionally ready for the difference, because again a lot of us
> had shipped games and you go through that final moment where you launch this
> thing and it's finally out there. Honestly, the first two years of post-WoW
> development was really this perpetual state of 'Can we just catch up to the
> popularity of the game?'"

True for so many startups as well, where "max level/endgame" is the arrival of
users with needs you didn't anticipate, whose momentum and confidence you rely
on to present your brand in the marketplace. For every ounce of stress,
though, there's two ounces of excitement, and that's its own fun.

------
no_identd
Why & how WoW succeeded, in my opinion:

User Interface Customization using Lua.

Also, I think WoW indirectly taught a lot of developers about Taint checking (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking)
) - something I still feel extremely bitter about missing from Javascript,
replacing it with "Signed Script Policy" in retrospective seems like a bad
idea, to the point where people re-invented it after it got removed, but still
no community maintained implementation exists:

[https://github.com/phvogt/NoMoXSS](https://github.com/phvogt/NoMoXSS) (The
paper for this has 579+3 citations [+3 because there exists a separate
citation network due to Google Scholar being, well, Google Scholar:
[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4323801493645906635](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4323801493645906635)]:
[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9547351675563063950](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9547351675563063950).
Yet I don't see this kind of feature in any mainline javascript
implementation.)

[https://github.com/idkwim/jsTaint](https://github.com/idkwim/jsTaint)
(Different project, it seems)

~~~
Ataraxy
I agree about the addons. They effectively outsourced the user experience of
the game to the users and their UI was pretty awful back then so it was
welcome.

That being said, I always found the Guild Wars 1 user modifiable UI woefully
underappreciated along with many other things about the game.

------
Jyaif
"After leveling for a bit, you'd eventually drop down to gaining half of the
experience that you'd normally gain. Players absolutely hated it. So Pardo
flipped it around. The early, enhanced leveling was framed as the player
gaining bonus experience, while the non-rested state was framed as normal,
making players were much happier."

Love it.

------
k__
I saw so many people drop out or destroy their relationships because of WoW.

I'm lucky the monthly fee was too much for me bacm in the days :/

~~~
JazzXP
I had the opposite. I met my wife playing WoW, then had a few drinking nights
with the guild and one thing lead to another.

~~~
drdrey
Also met my wife in WoW. Human connections can happen in unexpected places...
like the beaches of Tanaris

~~~
eahman16
Change Tanaris for Stranglethorn Vale for me and... :-)

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canada_dry
My son and I played for years together. We got pretty competitive so when he
leveled to 80 slightly ahead of me, I was pissed at him for several days!

Good times.

Oh, and seeing Ozzy live at Blizzcon was pretty sweet too.

------
ArchTypical
TL;DR This wasn't much of a writeup, more of a nostalgic media-piece.

