Interview: Chatting World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore With The Devs

mmorpg.com:

Later this week, World of Warcraft’s first-ever Classic Hardcore servers will open up for players to test how far they can go without dying. Leading into this week’s launch, I had the opportunity to participate in an interview with Senior Technical Designer Tim Jones and Game Producer Linny Cooke. We talked about everything ranging from what players can expect when they hop onto a Hardcore server to what they think the future might hold for this type of gameplay, and everything in between.

The entire existence of the current Hardcore experience in World of Warcraft revolves around using an addon that imposes various restrictions on players to keep with the idea of a hardcore character. The way Blizzard is implementing things, there are a number of ways they are making things a bit easier. For instance, players will be able to trade things with other players on the AH rather than only relying on what they themselves obtain. With that in mind, it would make sense for players to be allowed to use the hardcore-related addon on these servers.

However, most add-ons have a tendency to make things a bit easier. Since this is the most common case for WoW addons, I was curious if the team was looking to restrict the use of addons in any way in an effort to preserve the hardcoreness of the game mode. Cooke laid out their approach to addons in Hardcore : «We don’t want to be too directive or prescriptive of ‘this is how you Hardcore ’; Hardcore is your journey.” I really appreciate their take on this, and in the long run, it will likely help this game mode to be more successful over the long term. I do have concerns about some segments of the community getting into arguments over “what is a real hardcore playthrough and what