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Re:Abandoned Quake 4 expansion finished by modders and now p... by chrisfosterelli on Thursday November 12, 2026 @10:53AM (#50469436)
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.
Re:Abandoned Quake 4 expansion finished by modders and now p... by lavendermon on Thursday November 12, 2026 @11:22AM (#50469894)
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.

Re:Abandoned Quake 4 expansion finished by modders and now p... by hhh on Thursday November 12, 2026 @11:54AM (#50470376)
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.)
Re:Abandoned Quake 4 expansion finished by modders and now p... by kakacik on Thursday November 12, 2026 @12:07PM (#50470577)
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

Re:Abandoned Quake 4 expansion finished by modders and now p... by MisterTea on Thursday November 12, 2026 @01:42PM (#50472090)
you REALLY want AI to be the linchpin here.
Re:Abandoned Quake 4 expansion finished by modders and now p... by DeluluDon on Thursday November 12, 2026 @03:30PM (#50473766)
How's unemployment going for you?