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Ask Questions of the World of Warcraft Team
You may have already heard of Blizzard's most recent title. World of Warcraft was released in November of last year to high critical praise and a favourable player reaction. While technical issues were a problem for the first few months of retail service, prompt patching and additional world servers have left the game in excellent shape. World of Warcraft has since gone on to become not only the largest MMORPG in the United States, but also the world, with 3.5 million subscribers as of July 21st. Given all this, the likelihood that Slashdot readers would be interested in asking the development team some questions seemed pretty high. The team has kindly offered to take some time out of their extremely busy schedules to answer questions. So, feel free to ask whatever question is burning in your heart. Please stick to World of Warcraft related topics, and only ask one question per comment. We'll take the best of the lot and pass them on to the Team. Their answers will be posted when we've gotten them back.
How is it that you have time to answer questions on Slashdot but elect to ignore questions and problems reported by paying users on your own forums?
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
How do think you are doing keeping long term players interested in the game whilst making it enjoyable and worthwhile for new (or short term) players. Isn't the problem here is that you have to proportionally repay the effort and time that players have put into the game, but at the same time you want to allow people progress without devoting their entire lives on WoW [or getting their backside continuously kicked by the more devoted(obsessive)]
Bonus question: What do you think/compare/dislike about StarWars Galaxies? I'd also be interested to know whether you think the combat upgrade for SWG was worthwhile or whether they should have rewritten the game from scratch i.e. SWGII. Any interesting lessons for WoW to learn from this?
Oh please, if I had mod points, I would mark you as a troll. Given there are 3.5 million subscribers, I seriously doubt the development team would attempt to do customer service. As a professional developer myself, I really do not want to go through all our customer complaints with our software. It's something to keep in mind when developing, but dealign directly with customers is a whole nother matter. Especially since about 80% of the questions could easily be answered by a non-developer, it doesn't make sense to overwhelm the development process by forcing customer support down all the programmer's throats.
Given the Community Managers basicly put up a sticky indicating that there was no evidence of real duping going on in game, I doubt you'll get an answer that you'll consider useful for that question.
I cannot justify spending money to buy the box for a game that CANNOT be played in an offline mode without a subscription. Why do MMORPG developers and publishers think this is an acceptable practice?
How can you possibly expect a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game to have an offline mode?
*sigh* /played at 60. You're an idiot.
I have a level 60 warlock with, well, entirely too many days
For the uninitiated, there are a bunch of warlocks on the forums that think all warlocks should be buffed to the point of uberness. We are currently very balanced, and deadly in the right hands. We can be killed by rogues. We can kill just about anyone else with varying degrees of difficulty. Rogues can be killed by, well, just about anyone they don't get the drop on, including warlocks. Rogues can kill anyone except shaman (nobody kills shaman, they're a trifle imbalanced) and plate wearing classes. Player skill is more important in PvP than player class. Your refusal to acknowledge that you may need to learn to play your class a bit more is just tiring, and really makes us all look like whiners.
Soul Shards: Please go read the class description. You should have known what you were getting into when you signed up. Your lack of ability to RTFM is not my (or Blizzard's) problem.
Escape Spell: You have more hit points than any given mage or priest COMBINED, unless you have really exceptionally bad gear. I routinely have almost 5K, unbuffed, with my PvE gear on. My PvP gear has more stamina on it. Here's your escape spell to keep from getting ganked by rogues: Team up with a rogue. Be bait. You're supposed to be rogue bait, just as priests and mages are rogue bait. Teamwork. Remember, this is a MULTIPLAYER game, not a big, long, solo event. Keep a succubus out, or sacrifice your precious voidwalker, and then deal with the rogue. Then, at some point, explain to me how ice block saves a mage from a rogue. Or an 8 second easily dispellable polymorph that fully heals it's target helps a mage with a rogue. 8 seconds won't open ANY distance for the mage, rogues have that Dash ability to close the distance back up again, and that's about all polymorph lasts in PvP. Or tell why a priest should go ANYWHERE alone. This is a MULTIPLAYER game. Make some friends.
End game pets: Yeah, they suck. Sorry, no arguments here.
Enslave Demon: About right for the abilities gained. There are ways to mitigate the danger and prevent the diminishing returns. If you haven't found them yet, maybe you should roll a mage? I mean, you get to take a world demon and make it your pet for usually about 5 minutes. Compare to priest mind control, which only works for 30 seconds and can be used in the same circumstances. Enslave is a great spell, and the only thing that keeps it from being too powerful is that there aren't that many world demons, and that many world demons are immune to enslave.
Voidwalker: If you're counting on him for DPS, you're doing it wrong. You have more than one pet. Many warlocks forget that. Evil looking chick with a tail, that ring any bells for you? That's your balanced DPS/survivability pet. Maybe you've not done that quest?
Invisibility: Eh, let 'em have it. I can see 'em anyway. If it'll give them a false sense of security and make me more wanted (because my Detect Greater Invisibility spell will actually do something), I'm all in favor of it. Mages are pretty easy meat.
If you're going to complain about something, complain about end-game caster itemization (caster items don't increase DPS nearly as much as melee items), or that the Warlock PvP trinket doesn't do anything we can't already do with a felhunter, or that the Warlock PvP set is the same as the Priest set.
Quit dragging out these pointless "Warlocks Suck" arguments, come up with some new ones. These are old, tired, disproven, and just highlight your stupidity.
So why does it hurt you if that is left as is and there are 5-player instances that are balananced to be as hard as DWL and drop the same loot?
Then you can have your fun agonizing over organizing 40 player groups that will get along and all be on at once. You can fight your 2 million HP bosses where individual player skill and actions mean nothing. I can have my meaningful end-game where only having 5 players mean the skills of individual players make a huge differencce.
With 40 players, each player is a cog. A priest for example is strictly a healer, usually assigned to a couple of players to concentrate on...oooh what fun, cast heal over and over for 30 minutes. A warrior simply spams high threat spells and holds the mob in place where the group wants it.
With 5 players each player is doing a lot more. Maybe the total group DPS is too low, so the preist will have to deal damage as well as healing. Or the warrior can go into damage dealing mode to raise group DPS but they'll take more damage too making things harder on the priest. You have all sorts of options and can play the way you want to see what works for you. Compared to 40-player where everything is a a precisely-scripted minor role, 5-man is far more fun and takes far more skill.
Compare it to an office, in a small office with 5 people, one of the office workers will also have to run the company's website, and support the computer network as well as doing normal office work. It's more interesting because they do a diverse set of things at work. In a 40 person office you probably have a dedicated web admin and net admin, and the work is much less diverse because they're each doing the same thing over and over.
At work, this is a good thing because it allows them to specialize and it's work, not play. WoW is supposed to be a game, you play for fun, so more diverse and interesting things to do in a dungeon is better.
Why are you alienating a market which is most likely more dense in players than your other target platforms?
Keep in mind that the Linux market is *not* anyone who will play a game under Linux. It is *only* the subset of that group that refuses to emulate or dual boot. Given the fact that the majority of Linux users dual boot or emulate the market is far far smaller than you suggest. Replacing a Windows sale with a Linux sale does not generate any new income and does not defray the ongoing costs.
In short, why bother, why add the QA and tech support issues when the community is *already* saying "It runs great under cedega (transgaming wine), even better in opengl mode."