Developer Interview with Brian Birmingham on Classic Season of Mastery

wowhead.com:

Wowhead had the opportunity to speak with Brian Birmingham, Lead Software Engineer for World of Warcraft Classic, asking questions about Season of Mastery, updating old raids, and community concerns for Classic Era realms.Brian Birmingham, Lead Software Engineer, World of Warcraft Classic

Wowhead: Who is the target demographic for Season of Mastery? Most of the biggest vanilla fans (that played on private servers) do like world buffs and are what are often referred to as “dad gamers”, that aren’t necessarily looking for sweaty difficult raids.Brian Birmingham: We talked about this a lot leading up to Season of Mastery, and there were actually two different groups, with one thing in common: that they liked Classic but had criticisms about our initial “no-changes” release. The first group was a vocal one. During all of our raid releases, following Classic’s initial release, they would ask for us to disable, disallow, or delay world buffs on the current raid. In essence, they were chasing an authentic experience rather than an authentic set of rules. 15 years ago, most raid groups didn’t stack world buffs for raids, and this group of players remembered that experience and wanted to re-live it. Expanding that group a little, there were some people who complained with each release that the raids were too easy—that they were already “solved.” That was exactly our intent with Classic, of course, but their feedback was still valuable. They were communicating a desire for a harder, or at least more interesting raiding challenge in the Classic environment, and we wanted to deliver that. The second group were players who enjoyed the sense of exploration in Classic, but after playing for a few early levels, quit