There are some gameplay issues with the WoW Layering tech (Layering is World of Warcraft's name for where you there are multiple shards for the same zone, and players may transfer between each layer as it balances. So instead of different servers, everyone is on one "server", and each zone is sharded to accomadate large populations). But the layering and single realm tech is just really well done. It scales to huge populations seamlessly. There is some polishing on zone boundaries and pvp, but the tech was pulled off without a hitch for a massive launch, millions of concurrent players.

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.

I don't think there is any evidence AI has helped them do this. They almost assuredly used AI, sure. But this seems like its the result of investing in their platform team and infrastructure over many years.

It seems weird to attribute WoW's launch success to AI and not to the 20+ years of experience the industry has with modern online game architecture. When it launched in 2004 the state of MMO games was very different and a lot of those choices are hard to undo on an actively played game. I imagine AI was used but I doubt it had any great architectural insight that the experts at Blizzard didn't.

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.

Wow Classic was fine except for the queue. Any limitations were arbitrary to fit into the no changes mentality that the community had (e.g. queues etc due to limited layers and servers.)

So it could be anything and everything since you are no insider but you choose one specific reason.

Lets agree to disagree, happy to attribute llm wins where respect is earned but not more, to balance out various horror stories

you REALLY want AI to be the linchpin here.

How's unemployment going for you?

I've not even played a second of WoW. Is WoW forever worth playing for someone in my shoes?

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

MMOs are awful. Save your money and time.

As someone who has played a lot of WoW, this is a reasonable response.

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.

Instant Quake 3 nostalgia here: https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/ (actually predates AI)

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.

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

> I have no qualms about whether AI finished this, just enjoying the fact that nostalgia can be invoked more easily and cheaply than ever before.

Maybe making nostalgic experiences available so cheaply is not a good thing. For me seeing mods and reimaginings of old games are interesting because people puts lots of effort into them with attention to detail and their own ideas. Someone recreating Half-Life 1 with modern graphics using AI is not going to create something as cool as Black Mesa, for instance, which didn't attempt to make a 1 to 1 recreation but to improve things and make it fit with more modern graphics.