WotLK what design philosophy do warmane developers follow lately?

[Allylilith]

I didn't say I can't, I said I can't with just my words alone, and I explained why. It's not a matter of inability, it's of unwillingness to speak by myself for the server and Staff as whole, on something that isn't decided by me individually.

I mean, assuming that the team is on one page for this, it wouldn't really matter who says what that page is, right? I don't feel like that would step over someone, unless they have a different design philosophy themselves.
Like, I understand that none of this is decided by you alone, I would however think it would be nice if the logic behind decisions in the team would be shared with the playerbase and at very least experienced staff members like you

[Obnoxious]

I mean, assuming that the team is on one page for this, it wouldn't really matter who says what that page is, right? I don't feel like that would step over someone, unless they have a different design philosophy themselves.

Too bad that we think differently then.

[Allylilith]

Rather than seeing it as "making changes", see it as "fixing bugs". If something was bugged back on retail 3.3.5a, and it's easy enough to determine it was a bug rather than a design decision, they would like to have them fixed.

toc and togc not sharing an id seemed like a design choice in 3.3.5 rather than a bug. and anything preventing people from performing their optimal rotation should also be considered a bug imo.

It also is hard to see changes as fixes rather than changes, if said things were unchanged in the game for such extreme lengths of time.
For many people warmane's wotlk is the real wotlk. it has been up an order of magnitude longer than blizzards, in many ways it's objectively better and handled superior. So, core changes to how it works without seeing a positive in said changes, are hard to see as bug fixes for the greatest majority of people. The vast majority of people are here to play an amazing game, rather than a 1to 1 copy with all it's flaws.

In terms of underperforming classes, it is also easy enough to determine which ones blizzard considered too weak in 3.3.5 by seeing which ones they buffed in the next patch. Those speccs underperforming wasn't a design choice by them, but rather the inability of predicting how good a specc will be, so why hard force them back into that miserable state, if they were in a better spot the past decade on warmane, if that's not what blizzard themselves would have wanted?

[Arbiterone]

toc and togc not sharing an id seemed like a design choice in 3.3.5 rather than a bug. and anything preventing people from performing their optimal rotation should also be considered a bug imo.

It also is hard to see changes as fixes rather than changes, if said things were unchanged in the game for such extreme lengths of time.
For many people warmane's wotlk is the real wotlk. it has been up an order of magnitude longer than blizzards, in many ways it's objectively better and handled superior. So, core changes to how it works without seeing a positive in said changes, are hard to see as bug fixes for the greatest majority of people. The vast majority of people are here to play an amazing game, rather than a 1to 1 copy with all it's flaws.

In terms of underperforming classes, it is also easy enough to determine which ones blizzard considered to weak in 3.3.5 by seeing which ones they buffed in the next patch, so why hard force them back into that miserable state, if they were in a better spot the past decade on warmane, if that's not what blizzard themselves would have wanted?

There have been a few cases in the past when the devs stepped in and intentionally made a design choice, out of the team's own opinions for what is better for the game. An example we've been given is the behaviour of NPCs during the battle of lights hope during the DK questline. Rather than designing the exact way it was during 3.3.5a, the devs stepped in to give these NPCs a special AI to make it more immersive.
That isn't the general rule 99% of the time, though. If something is bugged, and it can be proven it is a bug -- even if it existed back in 3.3.5a, then the intention is to have it fixed. Sometimes, also, it being confirmed as a bug (and not a design choice introduced in 3.4.3) and being fixed during classic can help greatly to determine it wasn't working as intended.

Report every bug you find, if you can indeed prove it isn't working as it was on 3.3.5a. That's an easy rule to follow. The chances of the devs stepping in and deciding it would be best to leave it in are minimal.

[Allylilith]

How can you differentiate between a design choice of 3.4.3 and a bug fix of 3.3.5 though? I definitely understand what you mean (ulduar gear being higher ilvl is a design choice for example), but more often than not there are grey zones. like for example dk pet dmg. were gargoyle and army bugged in 3.3.5 or is it a 3.4.3 design choice to give them this much damage? right now, I am not sure if to expect such changes to bleed into warmane in the future.

also one clear design choice can affect another and make that one look like a bug fix. for example, I assume that them making toc and togc share an id is a design choice, because of the increased item level of ulduar giving players 2 raids to actively play already, having seperate toc and togc on top of it during that patch would be too much. But now we have this change without higher item level in ulduar, which is a big concern for once onyxia reaches this progression stage.
I also had no interest in playing blizzards new version because I genuinely liked things better on warmane, so that being taken as a basis for changes/bug fixes annoys many players which consciously chose you over blizzard.

At this point, I genuinely think that the differences between warmane and blizzard are what makes warmane better, and many of the changes recently to make it more like either version of blizzard were objectively downgrades.
and thank you for trying to explain

[Allylilith]

another example for a design choice turned into a "bug fix" for warmane are deep wounds no longer being triggered by spell crits since yesterday. blizzard changed their servers to have no batching, so that every crit is considered a seperate event, which made things like a fiery weapon enchant extremely powerful, however on warmane and original 3.3.5, the majority of the time that extra crit just got munched, making it nice budget enchant for people who dont want to get berserking for their bad weapon but also want to have a decent enchant. now because blizzard decided to not have batching in 3.4.3, making those enchants extremely overpowered for them, warmane copied their change of no spell criticals triggering deep wounds, despite it having worked here forever the way it did in 3.3.5 with the same munching as in the original which made these enchants viable, but not op.
I hope you can see how such changes, while seeming like good bug fixes on the surface, dont really do anything good if you look at it deeper

I just dont feel like it's good to rely on modern blizzard for balance changes for warmane, when hate for modern blizzard is the main motivation for most people to play here in the first place. and relying on 2009 blizzard for balance changes, when they had a few months rather than 15years to adapt to how classes perform, isnt the best idea either.
If Omen of clarity procced as good on Blizzard as it did on warmane (making the game balance objectively better) it would very likely not have been changed now. But why do we care about what blizzard does, when the people who play here do so because they dont like what blizzard does? only a handful of blizzard changes are liked by the warmane community, and those aren't taken over. the onky example I can think of for that are cd resets after boss fights to eliminate wait time for sated and big cds

[Arbiterone]

We're not relying on modern Blizzard to balance the game, that's a weird assumption. If something is clearly a bug and it gets to our attention, then it's something to fix. We're not doing things because we want X class to be stronger. It's about fixing bugs and not trying to balance different classes.

Deep wounds isn't meant to proc on spells, it wasn't even a thing until recently when someone found out and started exploiting it and everyone began pretending it's intended behaviour. It doesn't matter that it has been working this way for 10 years. It could take 50 years for us to get notice of a bug and then correcting it.

In short, we want to fix bugs. If a bug existed in 3.3.5a retail, we also want to fix it. The hard part is proving that a 3.3.5a retail behaviour was a bug and unintended.

[Jengoftw]

No idea who told you that or why would they tell you that, we aren't middlemen to reach out to Staff. There are certain matters we might forward to the rest of the Staff (such as a server going offline or crashing repeatedly, for example), but we aren't here to pass on messages.

I don't want to use names, to not make anyone look bad, but at the same time I don't mind providing proof if I am asked to do so.

But I will say this, that whoever told me that was from someone with status from the Warmane Discord, someone that is part of the staff / has connections with the staff, not someone random. And also I didn't mean to message forum moderators and have them as our middleman, I messaged who I believe are part of the staff.

That being said, back to my original point, how can we reach out to a staff and/or to the people who are in charge of the changes that are being done? Also, how can we provide a feedback as a community in a healthy way, how can we be heard and don't have reports get immediately Dismissed on us? Because as of now I feel with tied hands and don't know where to head?

Also, I really appreciate you taking your time and giving us answers here. It feels nice to finally be able to exchange words with a staff member, I really mean it.

[Jengoftw]

Deep wounds isn't meant to proc on spells, it wasn't even a thing until recently when someone found out and started exploiting it and everyone began pretending it's intended behaviour. It doesn't matter that it has been working this way for 10 years. It could take 50 years for us to get notice of a bug and then correcting it.

In short, we want to fix bugs. If a bug existed in 3.3.5a retail, we also want to fix it. The hard part is proving that a 3.3.5a retail behaviour was a bug and unintended.

People on Warmane started using that since WOTLK Classic released and it was discovered there (late 2022), it wasn't really a recent thing. Can back it up with logs.

I fully understand and support that you want to fix bugs. But is it not possible, that in rare cases, some "bugs" might have positive impact? Talking in general, not specifically for this case.

[Arbiterone]

I fully understand and support that you want to fix bugs. But is it not possible, that in rare cases, some "bugs" might have positive impact? Talking in general, not specifically for this case.

Possible yes, sure. Very unlikely though, so much so that it shouldn't impact how players are making their bug reports.

And if it's controversial enough, it goes beyond the realm of bug fixing and gets into suggestion territory, which would be best discussed within the forums. Afaik there's only one single example of a bug intentionally being left be, which was the very controversial topic of the hunter melee weaving thing. I never played a hunter so I don't know much about it.

[Allylilith]

We're not relying on modern Blizzard to balance the game, that's a weird assumption. If something is clearly a bug and it gets to our attention, then it's something to fix. We're not doing things because we want X class to be stronger. It's about fixing bugs and not trying to balance different classes.

Deep wounds isn't meant to proc on spells, it wasn't even a thing until recently when someone found out and started exploiting it and everyone began pretending it's intended behaviour. It doesn't matter that it has been working this way for 10 years. It could take 50 years for us to get notice of a bug and then correcting it.

In short, we want to fix bugs. If a bug existed in 3.3.5a retail, we also want to fix it. The hard part is proving that a 3.3.5a retail behaviour was a bug and unintended.

I mean, most of the recent changes are based on bug reports which use 3.4.3 as evidence. toc togc sharing an id is the most obvious example. How will onyxia progress look once they reach toc and they can only kill 5 bosses per week, and cannot get their 2 bis trinkets, as entering hc locks them out of going normal, unless they abandon their hc group after having that gear to then go into a different group that does normal? this seems like such a bad design choice, which is clearly copied from modern blizzard.
the deep wounds tooltip states that any crits trigger it, it was always triggered by any crits. people have used oils of immolation since many years, many people even reported it and it wasn't changed because it's was according to 3.3.5. Other people reported it not being as good as in modern blizzard because of crit munching, and that got dismissed too. it's only now after years where it's seen as a bug by the staff, and the bug report literally quotes modern blizzard again.
As I wrote in that bug report already : I do not mind this being changed from the original 3.3.5 for balance reasons, but balance reasons being ignored on other changes is frustrating.
how is me going and reporting deep wounds not being triggered by spell crits, while this did happen in 3.3.5 different from someone else reporting that omen of clarity proccs more than 3.3.5? either both reports should be dismissed or both followed through. what is or isnt a bug is subjective, while game balance is more easy to judge objectively, considering the immense amounts of data which was collected from a decade of people trying to get the maximum out of their speccs.

maybe you also underestimate how many people on your servers play for logs. either to compete for higher positions or just to compete against their old self and track progress. any change to their class, but especially nerfs, make this completely impossible, as a 5-10% nerf is having a bigger effect than a year of improving gameplay after you have reached a high level. I think that changes which affect the power of a specc directly should be treated with great care at this point and only be done if deemed absolutely necessary (most likely what the deep wounds changed was deemed as) but absolutely not the case for the recent changes to demo warlock, rogue and boomie, which killed the will to play these speccs competitively for their biggest lovers. Bug fixes or not, those changes alienate a huge part of the player base whenever they happen, and that can hardly be a good thing.
similar logics apply to bosses getting nerfed. for example the sindragosa enrage timer got extended by several minutes, completely trivializing the fight for groups which just stack 8-9 healers now. that might technically be a "bug fix" if the timer was that long, but it was not shorter the past 10 years by accident, was it? early developers decided to go against 3.3.5 and put it to a challenging timer to make the fight more fun. why change this now?
it sadly feels like more and more things which made warmane superior get changed

[Jengoftw]

We're not relying on modern Blizzard to balance the game, that's a weird assumption.

This assumption happens, because of the given answers on reports. On report A we get an answer "This is how it was on 3.3.5a". On report B we get an answer "This is how it was on 3.4.3/WOTLK Claasic".

Yes, I'm sure in most topics the staff and the players would side on the same opinion. But I also think on some topics staff's and players' opinions might differentiate. I would say It's possible that in some/most topics the staff might have a better insight, but on some topics it's also possible that players might have a better insight. Hunter melee weave is an example. You guys listened to the community and arguably this was one of the greatest decisions done ever, because 99% of the players were happy about that. I would argue that the same would apply on the Omen of Clarity changes, despite it being bugged in the past and overprocing, it was in favor of the players and it didn't break the game in absolutely any way, all it achieves is take away fun from the players and absolutely no one likes this change, but we don't even have a way to prove that? What is a way we can use to tell that to you as a community?

[Jengoftw]

Possible yes, sure. Very unlikely though, so much so that it shouldn't impact how players are making their bug reports.

And if it's controversial enough, it goes beyond the realm of bug fixing and gets into suggestion territory, which would be best discussed within the forums. Afaik there's only one single example of a bug intentionally being left be, which was the very controversial topic of the hunter melee weaving thing. I never played a hunter so I don't know much about it.

Sorry, you already mentioned the Hunter topic as I was typing my message and didn't refresh the page.

The Hunter topic fully happened in the report channel.

I wanted to make a suggestion and get the community to give their opinion on the OoC change, but my report was Dismissed 2 hours after it was created, despite it receiving 20 upvotes and some comments already. I do believe if it was left up for some time and given time to reach out to more people, it could potentially reach the scale of Hunter melee weaving topic, because nerfing a class' damage by 5-10% that already does no damage and making them go out of mana is very controversial as well, especially after it worked like this since forever. So what would your suggestion be, open a topic here in the forums and forward people to the forums to discuss about it?

[Arbiterone]

I mean, most of the recent changes are based on bug reports which use 3.4.3 as evidence. toc togc sharing an id is the most obvious example. How will onyxia progress look once they reach toc and they can only kill 5 bosses per week, and cannot get their 2 bis trinkets, as entering hc locks them out of going normal, unless they abandon their hc group after having that gear to then go into a different group that does normal? this seems like such a bad design choice, which is clearly copied from modern blizzard.
the deep wounds tooltip states that any crits trigger it, it was always triggered by any crits. people have used oils of immolation since many years, many people even reported it and it wasn't changed because it's was according to 3.3.5. Other people reported it not being as good as in modern blizzard because of crit munching, and that got dismissed too. it's only now after years where it's seen as a bug by the staff, and the bug report literally quotes modern blizzard again.
As I wrote in that bug report already : I do not mind this being changed from the original 3.3.5 for balance reasons, but balance reasons being ignored on other changes is frustrating.
how is me going and reporting deep wounds not being triggered by spell crits, while this did happen in 3.3.5 different from someone else reporting that omen of clarity proccs more than 3.3.5? either both reports should be dismissed or both followed through. what is or isnt a bug is subjective, while game balance is more easy to judge objectively, considering the immense amounts of data which was collected from a decade of people trying to get the maximum out of their speccs.

maybe you also underestimate how many people on your servers play for logs. either to compete for higher positions or just to compete against their old self and track progress. any change to their class, but especially nerfs, make this completely impossible, as a 5-10% nerf is having a bigger effect than a year of improving gameplay after you have reached a high level. I think that changes which affect the power of a specc directly should be treated with great care at this point and only be done if deemed absolutely necessary (most likely what the deep wounds changed was deemed as) but absolutely not the case for the recent changes to demo warlock, rogue and boomie, which killed the will to play these speccs competitively for their biggest lovers. Bug fixes or not, those changes alienate a huge part of the player base whenever they happen, and that can hardly be a good thing.
similar logics apply to bosses getting nerfed. for example the sindragosa enrage timer got extended by several minutes, completely trivializing the fight for groups which just stack 8-9 healers now. that might technically be a "bug fix" if the timer was that long, but it was not shorter the past 10 years by accident, was it? early developers decided to go against 3.3.5 and put it to a challenging timer to make the fight more fun. why change this now?
it sadly feels like more and more things which made warmane superior get changed

Since Onyxia is it's own thing and the progression part of it is really important, perhaps having ToC and ToGC be different IDs is fair enough. But again, this falls into suggestion territory. I don't know of every individual choice the dev team makes for the game, but a good suggestion thread can add ideas or change their mind on a subject. Keep in mind though that when making a suggestion, you're trying to convince someone about something, you have to be really fair and reasonable to increase your chances of convincing them. They do read threads from the suggestion section and they have made changes from it.

Deep wounds wasn't changed for balance reasons (we've never considered 'balance' when fixing bugs), it was changed because it was determined it being procced on spells wasn't intended behaviour. WotLK 3.3.5a is an old game, if we left it be with all it's old bugs, players would find newer and newer ways to exploit it and the meta itself would shift towards abusing unintended behaviour.

And it is true, something being a bug or not can be subjective and difficult to determine sometimes -- which is why we'll always be open to discussion, and a decision still could be reverted in the future. But if something can be proven as a bug, then they want to know about it so they can fix it.

This assumption happens, because of the given answers on reports. On report A we get an answer "This is how it was on 3.3.5a". On report B we get an answer "This is how it was on 3.4.3/WOTLK Claasic".

I think you're not telling the whole story when quoting "this is how it was on 3.4.3". Could you give an example of such reply?
We're not trying to copy classic, instead we want stay as close as possible to 3.3.5a. But, we want to fix 3.3.5a's bugs too, and sometimes it may be that a bug fix implemented during classic can be enough proof that the previous 3.3.5a behaviour was unintended.

What is a way we can use to tell that to you as a community?

There was a big cryout during the hunter controversy, and it was fair enough that the devs decided to revert it. It's very unlikely that this will happen again. But, the best way to reach out to the devs on a subject that goes beyond bug fixing is the suggestion section of the forums. It's a place that the devs do read and may decide or not to go through with the suggestion.

[Obnoxious]

But I will say this, that whoever told me that was from someone with status from the Warmane Discord, someone that is part of the staff / has connections with the staff, not someone random. And also I didn't mean to message forum moderators and have them as our middleman, I messaged who I believe are part of the staff.

Well, I'll quote one of the Forum rules, not because it's applicable here, but because it addresses my point (italics added to show it):

"#7: No Threads Intended To Call Staff Attention -- If you really want to talk to us, send a PM to the correct department or open a ticket; the forums are not a platform for your drama (which includes complaining about bans, the Forums aren't for ban appeals). General inquiries towards the staff (What's next in development?; Threads that dictate otherwise; etc.) are the only exceptions."

Much like you wouldn't open an in-game ticket to ask about changing your name in the Forum from a GM, we aren't the right department to ask or discuss stuff about the development or bug fixes. We could already know the answer by chance, but we aren't integrated in the minutia of what's being fixed or specific reasons for every single thing. For an accurate answer you'd need to get in touch with a QA or developer, more than likely in a valid bug report, not directly. Can't say why you wouldn't get a reply to your PM saying so, though, it's almost a daily occurrence for Moderators to get one for something we don't handle and telling the person to open a ticket instead or the like.

Regarding providing feedback, you have the Forum for that. You just have to be open to certain fixes not being up to reversion because of feedback.