ilyabakhlinlebedev

My name is Ilya, and I've been into WoW emulation since 2008! When I first met the game, after the launch of the first expansion, "The Burning Crusade," I instantly fell in love with it, as there was already something going on while I was trying my best at Warcraft III. Years passed, and my interaction with the game and my passion, whether on the official or the private servers (I even somehow managed to build my own, which I enjoyed for a couple of months), were in a constant decline due to all the infamous decisions Blizzard was making, destroying everything the authors built. One day, I decided to give up and promised myself I'd never waste another minute on it. Well, I lied. Not too long ago, I saw this new idea Blizzard announced: "World of Warcraft - Forever," and I said to myself: "Wait a minute... Isn't this what we all wanted all this time, no matter the expansion? And Blizzard is only trying it now, twenty years later?! No way!" So it got me thinking about rejoining my journey to achieve one of my dream goals: having my own private World of Warcraft server, cared for with the love and respect it deserves, for all the players who've played this game since the very beginning, and perpetuating it for all the new players to come. We'd all agree the game is a piece of art and should be preserved in an immaculate state, so everybody can enjoy it as it's supposed to be: together. The only thing I find most despicable since the first launch is the UI and UX. I mean, the game became more and more complex with every patch. However, the players - not Blizzard - felt that there was something odd, and only because of the contributions by the addon community, the game remained playable. Even more, that community, along with the players - not the fucking Blizzard - has defined how the game should be played in the best way possible, giving players unlimited possibilities to customize every aspect of those two elements (UX/UI). Not to mention that they made it completely free - out of their love for the game - just like the emulator communities - keeping the code up to date and making sure anybody who had the will to try the game out could have a chance, with the ability to create their own worlds with their unique rules. With all this in mind, I decided to come back to the MaNGOS community, as it was and still is my emulator of choice; my goal is not only to get a WotLK instance up and running, but also to build everything it needs so the maintenance and the fixing process wouldn't feel like pain or a burden. I'm talking about a proper website where people can register/log in, interact with each other, exchange their experiences and ideas (something more like a social network, rather than just a forum), and manage their characters, guilds, and raids with all the tools needed for that: who did what, when, how much, and who didn't, without having to even get into the game. I'm talking about the next level of gaming in an already beloved environment with all the tools and features we all begged Blizzard for, which never came. How am I thinking to achieve all of that? Well, I've been a self-taught web developer for fifteen years, with extensive experience in backend environments, CI/CD, and administering GNU/Linux systems. I'm also a huge fan of C, but I've never had enough time to switch from PHP because of the jobs available. On the other hand, though, I managed to build PHP 8.3 completely from scratch (it took somewhat a year and a half for a non-C developer to figure out what the fuck a linker is, how a compiling process works, and why the fuck everybody is using shared libraries in a Docker-isolated world), and I'm proud of it! I hope I can contribute my knowledge to this awesome project you guys kept alive for so long and with so much care. See you around! Regards.