WoW No Longer Compatible with Windows 2000

So basically that just means XP, Vista, and 7 now.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/products/lifecycle

01/09/2012 09:08 AMPosted by Sivryal

Crap... no playing at work now :(

Lol, tell them it's time to upgrade, for security reasons obviously ;)

01/09/2012 09:09 AMPosted by Larwood

Out of curiosity, how many people are still playing on windows 2000? Must be very few.

You'd be surprised - I remember seeing a post about graphics cards in use by users (by a Blizzard poster I think on the old forums), and it was pretty scary that some really old cards were still in use..

When Cata came out and Win2k users were constantly crashing, there were a lot of users posting crash logs that all showed the same thing.. Wow is currently playable on Windows 2000 via replacing OS .dlls with other versions, which allow wow to work.

It sounds like that little hack will no longer work with MoP.

01/09/2012 10:05 AMPosted by Ain

Is it really wise to alienate any of your consumers when you're already losing subscriptions at an alarming rate? This seems like a poor course of action.

Microsoft has a pretty generous support on their OSes when it comes to making them supportable for long term. They literally only really force you to update once every 5 years. So it's not too unreasonable

Apple kills support for an outdated OS almost immediately following release a new OS. Despite this, blizz still goes out of their way to support OSes as far back as they can even though not only are the they not getting bugfixes, they aren't even allowed the luxury of a driver update. Apple users are forced to upgrade more often if they want any level of support from Apple's end.

Blizz developers can only do so much to support legacy code. When an OS has ended it's lifespan, it stops receiving updates/bugfixes. Blizz games cannot continue to be developed when the OS it's running on lacks critical apis or critical bugfixes and can no longer expect MS/Apple to address them.

Blizz is a company that goes above and beyond in supporting as many users as they can, even if it literally costs dev time to do it or really ridiculous hacks they have to put in their own software to make it run on old OSes. Only when it's beyond fixable do they drop it, which is such the case for windows 2000 going forward, or how PPC macs had to be dropped in 4.0 after devs spent months doing best they could during cataclysm beta to make them work. ultimately the legacy code in the no longer supported OS had issues that become beyond fixable at application level and a stable client for those users can be delivered no longer.

I will pipe in to say that back when WRATH was in the pipeline, Blizzard had listed WinXP as the earliest supported Operating System. I know. I was running Windows 2000 until less than 2 years ago on my home system. I literally emailed Tech Support before it launched to ask if that meant it didn't work - or just that they wouldn't help with issues. (With Wrath it was the latter.) That it still worked until now has been excellent, but eventually there does come a time when software cannot be kept retroactively compatible.

We had to do it where I work as well. Between drivers which are not written for anything before XP and functionalities with 64-bit which don't work on earlier systems but that customers want to see in the software, we have had to move on. Yes, sometimes that means we keep a few creakers around for far longer than they should survive. We have one DOS computer that only gets turned on when certain old irreplaceable programs are needed, a couple of Win95, and only recently did the WinNT and Novell servers get replaced.

I will pipe in to say that back when WRATH was in the pipeline, Blizzard had listed WinXP as the earliest supported Operating System. I know. I was running Windows 2000 until less than 2 years ago on my home system. I literally emailed Tech Support before it launched to ask if that meant it didn't work - or just that they wouldn't help with issues. (With Wrath it was the latter.) That it still worked until now has been excellent, but eventually there does come a time when software cannot be kept retroactively compatible.

This is same for mac OS X 10.4.11 actually. It was dropped as minimum in cataclysm but despite that, the devs still went out of their way to make sure it worked through cataclysm, if the fixes were within reason. MoP will probably actually kill it for real though as the same boat as win 2000.