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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.
Many long-term users were troubled when people like MickeyMouse publically described the the recent duping cheat. I think many WoW users would like to know what steps the administration and code gurus took to correct the problem. Do you get a call from your pissed-off boss at 3 am in the morning?
How do you guys react to all the negative press we've been hearing lately about the actions of gamers who have a severe addiction to your game?
How much economic monitoring do you do? Both in-game and on the secondary market (eBay)? Have you considered working with an economist ( Steven D. Levitt comes to mind, but there are dozens of others as well) to study some of these phenomenon?
Test your net with Netalyzr
What the hell where you thinking with the Darkmoon Fair? Can I at least get an epic t-shirt that says "I went to the Darkmoon Fair and all I got was this stupid Jubling"?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
What sort of challenges did you face in taking a universe that was always primarily for RTS gameplay, and translating it to an RPG? And how does the MMORPG setting allow you to further the story of Warcraft differently than if you'd just made another RTS (if there even is a difference)?
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 much play time have the members of the dev team put into playing other MMO's, either to look for features that may benefit WoW, or to look for stumbling blocks to avoid?
For example, unclear quest instructions like in FFXI or the staggered leveling system in City of Heroes, etc.
-Pope Peter Porker, S.O.W., K.M.K.R., U.G.O.A., F.S.G.S.D.
It's the biggest MMORPG to date in terms of number of subscribers. It's easy to guess that you've encountered challenges due to scale that no other developer has before.
Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently, and when?
Are there any plans for a player hall of (f/sh)ame?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Since your game is subscribtion based, do you think you'll feel a lot of heat from games like Guild Wars who aren't charging a monthly fee to play the game?
(My personal thought is that you won't simply because a person could by both games and only pay for one. I know the reason I don't play WoW is because I would feel guilty by not playing because I know I dropped a good amount of money so I could play that month!)
How about a native Linux client? It runs great under cedega (transgaming wine), even better in opengl mode.
I would like to know what kind of servers, how many, network bandwidth, etc., for WoW.
Is there any consideration for guild halls, house or player cities in the future? SWG's had many issues but their Cities where a very interesting concept, and since blizzard is in a position to use the lessons learned is this something you guys would consider?
Blizzard is one of the few companies that distribues Windows and Mac games together on the same media. Going further, WoW allows Windows and Mac users to play together on the same realms, something which isn't done in other MMORPGS. What kind of hurdles did you have to overcome to get both Windows and Mac versions to co-exist and have you had to make any sacrifices because you were only able to do something on one platfrom and not both?
'Same speed C but faster'
It depends, will I get an answer? When I use the Blizzard technical support forums, they don't answer there.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
I've been into video game editing for some time, with mods and stuff like that. Now I've pretty much given up on it as a viable career, due to the instability involved with trying to obtain (and most of all SECURE) a good video game designing career.
I have had a few interviews, and some really bad experiences with video game companies out there who shall remain anonymous for the purpose of this question.
In once instance, I've been lied to by HR directors on the annual salary, told it was around $65k and it turned out to be $35-40k (which must have meant $35k right?). In another instance, I was strung along for months by a company who decided at the last minute to drop me as a candidate. What a huge waste of time that was. I've been promised before by a designer from a major company that we would do a big project together and get funding for it, only to have the guy over for a steak dinner (filet mignon no less), and a week later he went off and took a job somewhere else, and dropped the project.
What do you say to someone like me who has had ONLY these kinds of experiences with the video game industry?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Are there any plans to introduce accounts that cost less?
I'd like to try out WoW, but I don't have a huge amount of time and paying the high up front and monthly cost seems excessive to me for the amount of time I would play it. However if there was some form of time restricted cheaper account I think I would try it out.
Let me be up front: I don't play any MMORPG's...probably never will. I'm sure WOW is fantastic, but I generally stick to console games.
Which sort of leads to my question. How in the world did the decision for a Warcraft MMORPG get made? I mean, I know it seems like a great idea now but at the time that idea represented a huge amount of money to invest in a new area of gaming Blizzard had limited experience with via Battlenet. The new game also faced the once (and possibly still) formidable Everquest juggernaut. When I first heard about WOW, the general rumors going around were that it'd be an action adventure title about a single Orc in the style of say, God of War or Prince of Persia. I'm just curious who first said at the weekly staff meeting, "Uh...dudes? Like, let's totally go all MMORPG with this biatch and like stuff!" and what was the reaction of the staff and Blizzard overlords.
I have heard tales of accounts being banned for using game exploits (mind-controlling mobs in UBRS to give a special fire resist buff for use in MC) to me, this seems like it is just a part of the game. How do you determine what is an exploit and what is not, and how do you handle the closing of an account that a player has spent potentially months playing and building?
or
What is your take on Chinese farming? It would appear that a lot of people are making thier livelihood dealing in virtual goods in your worlds. Do you account for such things in your continued development of WoW?
I've noticed that "bot"'d characters programmed to do nothing but farm money and items has become a growing problem in WoW. Farming bots can frequently be spotted in the game, and I have evern personally recieved in-game mail spam advertizing mmobay.com . What do you plan to do to curb this issue that is eating away at the economy and atmosphere of your realms?
Marukah
24 night elf Druid
Silverhand
Why does it suck for you? I'm over 15, play mostly during the weekends, and my experience rocks.
What is the process the dev team goes through for balancing character classes, items, NPCs, etc.? Seemingly minor changes can have a huge effect on gameplay, how do you avoid unwanted negative effects on the overall gameplay experience with each content patch? Also, How much of an effect does feedback from the community have on this process?
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
I'm stuck in Arathi Mountains (in the wilderness outside of Hammerfall)... can you warp me to Stromgarde Keep?
Get your Unix fortune now!
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?
Earlier this year, the WoW servers were encountering numerous problems. Some servers crashed and the load was so high that you even has to suspend new subscriptions for a short while.
So, how does today's WoW server infrastructure look like? Did everyone take precautions? Do you use a load balancing system to equal the loads? Did you create more optimized patches? What kind of server hardware do you use?
Thanks,
Paulius
The hip way to get your IP. No ads, ever.
In the WoW community, we have "community managers" that continually insist "sometimes the devs don't tell us" or "we need to check with them", etc. Why don't the devs speak for themselves? On many (most?) other MMOs, the developers (even down to the programmer level) speak for themselves on the boards, and are often VERY open on the direction they are thinking of going. Then even if the players disagree with what occurs, they at least understand it, and know that SOMEBODY is listening to what they say.
But not in WoW. Apparently the community needs to be "handled" by go-betweens. I don't blame the go-betweens as much for this, as this is their job, but why not be as open as others? Feedback could actually come on ideas BEFORE they are implemented on a test server (of which I have yet to see anything NOT implemented on there, INCLUDING bugs), and result in a more streamlined process overall.
"Community Managers" just seem like a way to keep the community away from making the game better, which seems like a mistake. The cries of the majority are RIGHTLY not always heeded, but never knowing the direction of the development at all is far more frustrating from a player's perspective. Why can't the development team speak for themselves, and forget about keeping secrets? We all want to know the future of our game.
With games like City of Heroes, there is an effort to revamp not only upper-end content, but also (importantly) lower-end content as well. Having run over 6 different players through levels 0-40, over a 9 month period now, I can say fairly accurately that there have been virtually no changes in the low-level quests (let alone additions).
Worse, the Battlegrounds/PVP changes have made crafting virtually useless - even at higher levels - because player-crafted items are inferior to drops in instances, which are ALSO inferior to hardcode PVP-earned items.
So with the exception of long-term players, who play hardcore PvP virtually every day, there is little new to enjoy.
What then do you say to a nine-month subscriber who is looking at alternatives (SWG, CoH) that are doing those things better?
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
World of Warcraft was the first MMORPG I gave more than a passing play. Everquest, Asheron's Call, Ultima, SW: Galaxies; none of those interested me, because I saw and read about the endless toil and trouble just to gain numbers on your character stats. WoW was different - I saw the simplicity of Diablo/II in it: easy to play, rich in content, and with a wide world to explore.
But then I got to level 60, and all that ended. Now, instead of being able to do most things alone or with a small group of friends, game accomplishments take a full raid of 40 people? You need someone to plan it all out in advance, you need everyone to agree to common rules and to get along with each other; and you need everyone to be coordinated in order to defeat ridiculous enemies. With this, the challenge of the game ceases to be learning techniques and honing skills, and becomes social. The difficulty is not in playing, but in making sure everyone else is playing.
Endgame is a different game, and I don't care for it. It's not the game I bought. Rather, it's the games I declined to buy in the past. Friends of mine who played Everquest and Final Fantasy XI are right at home, but I'm decidedly out of place, and don't really want to invest hours, days of my time on goals with exponentially increasing difficulty and exponentially diminishing rewards.
The early game is brilliant, and playing it was a joy. Why is that so hard to retain in level 60 play?
Glog!
As a developer and / or game designer on an MMORPG, you will always experience an extreme amount of negativity from the very vocal minority of players who seem to be displeased with every decision that is made with regards to the game.
That said, how are decisions made with regards to these "suggestions" from players? How do you decide the difference between "You can't please everybody" and a suggestion with merit?
First off, as a Mac user who loves MMORPG gaming it was an utter delight to be able to log on the day of launch and play with my brother who is 1800 miles away and running a Windows machine. The way other MMORPG vendors talk this was an impossible task. I thank you for making it either looks so easy, or calling BS on those who said it was hard.
My question is:
What challenges did you/do you face in bringing together clients from different software and processor architectures on an ongoing basis? I'm working off the asumption that the graphics content is similar if not identical and really it's the data translator that sends/receives information from your servers that does most of the client interaction.
Thanks, looking forward to more things to come.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
World of Warcraft is an excellent game, but at the same time it tends to have a "canned" feel about it. What I mean by that is that it seems as if almost everything that a player can achieve has been expressly thought of, balanced, tweaked, and timed by Blizzard.
This is good in a sense--it makes the game simple and somewhat predictable, which is one truth that has made Blizzard games so appealing to the mainstream in the past.
On the other hand, I can't help but wonder if the game would benefit from more depth in some ways.
For example, it would be interesting to have a Morrowind-style enchantment system, where certain (possibly rare) "base items" can hold varying degrees of enchantment, and enchanters can assign a wide variety of abilities to those items. If a player chooses to have an item hold two different types of enchantments, each will be far weaker than just having the one.
In order to prevent extreme specialization, it may then be necessary to implement some sort of penalty for having multiple items with the same enchantment. For example, it would be a BadThing® if every single item on a warrior were enchanted with +1% chance of critical hits.
Another important item, at least important to me, which I believe to be missing from WoW is the role-playing. WoW is classified as a role-playing game, but there really aren't any moral choices of any kind as most RPGs would include (and make an important part of the gameplay).
For example, many of the quests are "good deed" quests, but there exists no option to do the quest "out of the goodness of your heart" or to have to choose between "evil" and "good" quests.
I suspect that perhaps a good way to implement this would be to have an attribute like "virtue", similar to faction "meters."
The benefits of this attribute would be up to Blizzard of course, but a few possible suggestions might include: 1) Requiring that warlocks maintain a fairly low virtue and and that paladins maintain a high virtue (or have penalties).
2) High virtue may lead to a discount at stores
3) Virtue effects faction
I am sure the creative minds at Blizzard could come up with good uses for this idea without ruining the simplicity and streamlining of the game. I hope they do!
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I don't understand the "playable by normal people" complaint. Is the game only interesting/enjoyable if you are a lvl 60 badass? Otherwise, it's completely enjoyable without a huge time commitment.
Either the game is about the journey, or it's about the destination. I've been enjoying the journey for several months with just a few hours a week (10). As of now, I'm just shy of lvl 50.
One of the great things about WoW is how well the game difficulty scales as you go along.
One of the first things that struck me as I played WoW, (other than, "hey, this is a lot of fun") was how sophisticated the server-side code had to be to cope with various tricky things like instance dungeons, visibility, etc.
Assuming it isn't a trade secret, how do your lead engineers "think" about the problem? A first-that-comes-to-mind object model would probably be fantastically hard to scale up and/or verify, due to the huge amount of state associated with even the smallest little things in the game.
On the other hand, you probably didn't write your auction house code in Haskell.
How "cool" is your model of the world?
Blizzard is definitely no friend to Linux or the open source community. Sure they make good games, but thats about it. There is a Linux version of the hugely popular World of Warcraft, and Blizzard canned it, without warming or explaination, even though it was functionally complete and ready to go, and after a discussion of a support agreement with LGP. It would have risked nothing for them to make the game available, and they chose not to.
Recently, webcomics PvP and Penny Arcade have virtually taken over the Dark Iron server with thier respective megaguilds. While it seems boths sides are having quite a bit of fun, it also seems the trafic is bringing the server to its knees. Whats your take on these "specialty servers", and are there any plans for reenforcement, or is the hardware maxed?
#include <signature.h>
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.
Two weeks before world of warcraft was launched the Paladin class was totally changed, with their two main talents (holy strike and crusader strike) being removed as well as their ability to cast undead spells on undead players. What prompted you to make a change so close to launch, and how do you evaluate what needs to be done to balance out the classes?
If you could start over, would you use Linux and Oracle again?
ID does such a good job of making Linux releases - what will it take for you to do the same?
I am glad to help out the Cedega folks, but it would be nicer to not have to use a band-aid.
In other news, we hereby revoke 2004 Game of the Year status for Blizzard's "World of Warcraft," effective immediately.
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I'm putting aside issues like class balance or Gamemaster abuse, because honestly those things are only a problem when the ****ing server is up.
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It's not like I'm sitting here trying to connect at odd hours so I can catch them in something, either - this is in prime time, or on a weekend. The mail system works when it is good and ready. The servers themselves appear to have other things on their mind.
So, my question is basically about how Blizzard is dealing with the problem of servers and user load? People are paying good money, and when the service is available, they're losing that good money, while Blizzard saves it. Thanks!
As more and more of the players reach the raid level content the instances are becoming more laggy and less stable. On my server for example when there are 8+ raids on our side in Molten Core and probably a comparable number on the opposite faction the instances lag to the point where they are unplayable. It's not uncommon for instant cast spells to take 15-30 seconds to go through. Other times the instances will just lockup completely, the chat channels will work but we can't do anything else.
Because of the number of people required to do these instances (40), it is hard if not impossible for us to schedule these except during prime playing time.
I understand that you have offered transfers off of some of the higher population servers, but this doesn't really address the problem. In the coming months are there any plans to beef up the raid instance servers on the higher population servers to accommodate their increases usage?
I appears Blizzard's end-game philosophy is still too heavily geared towards massive 40-man instances. Is this end-game myopia intentional? Does Blizzard actually believe that everyone wants to experience the in-fighting and backstabbing that is so common when you have 300+ member guilds? I belive the best solution is to provide extreemely difficult instances that are maxed with 5 and 10-man groups, that provide a similar level of difficulty/reward ratio as those that require 40-man raids. At the very least, they could provide equipment that will end the balance issues that we currently have that mean that only members of mega-guilds get epic items and succeed in your newest end-game farce (I mean fix), which is Battlegrounds. Is there ever a chance of us getting such elite content for small raids?
Why, for the last month or so has WoW sucked performance wise? You guys seemed to have had it nailed for the first few months but now hardly a weekend goes by that im not in an instance or world crash. sometimes, happening multiple times an evening.
Is it that theirs too much data in the game now? your team is stressed with supporting the EU and Asian servers? IS it because people are crashing the instances (on purpose) to dupe from them?
Its weird because i really love wow, and the downtimes are usually around the order of 10 minutes or less. However, when you've spent 2 hours already in an instance and they it crashes, you cant help but get pissed off.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Thank you WoW team for making one of my friends realize that she married a useless tub of putrescence who's sole purpose in life is to avoid tanning to the point that his skin is becoming clear and evolving to have cat-like night vision and the ability to comfort-mold to virtually any surface,and as a byproduct, making certain that he gets the absolute most out of his $19.95/mo.
Now if only you could have made it just a little more addicting, he might have died from renal failure, things would have been less messy, but hey, I guess that this is good enough.
And do you know who I can call at Pizza hut to thank for having the delivery guy accept credit cards and delivering directly to his home-office window? I'd like to send them a card.
Lots of factors go into why people like or dislike a game. Asking a question like this isn't going to help the developers improve it.
Battlegrounds are a nice feature, but despite them, the World of Azeroth is quite static place. There have been few events - like the orphan week - but nothing big.
Are you planning to introduce "events" into the gaming world that would actually shape it permanently, like in Asheron's call?
For example, a demon/naga expedition force attacking a frontier fortress - and depending on how well the battle goes over the next week the threatened faction either hold the town or lose it. Depending on what happened, the next "event" would be either attempts to retake the town or perform a retaliatory strike. NPCs would do most of the "grunt" work, of course, but players ultimately would contribute to the fate of the world. The happenings could be tied to the actual World of Warcraft timeline. Depending on the server type (PvE or PvP) some of the events could also be between factions (players on both sides of conflict).
Battlegrounds are a good start, but in the end they are just refined team deathmatch maps..
I'm a casual player by all counts. I loaded up the game on release day, and only in the past few weeks finally got my paladin to level 60. I play at my own pace, spending a lot of time seeing the sights and not necessarily grinding or farming loot. I'm in it for the experience and the rich world around me.
I've played a lot of MMOs in the past and usually lose interest quickly because there's nothing obvious to do at the start. WoW breaks that pattern by having a very well crafted early game experience where I'm led around to a ton of great and varied locales, given a variety of quests to do and am told a rich and involved story. That takes me up to about level 30. Then, as an alliance member, I enter Stranglethorn Vale and the game goes rapidly downhill from there.
It feels as if the game had a lot of care and attention given to those first 30 or so levels, packing the areas with great content and wonderful gameplay, then suddenly I'm playing a different game completely. One that involves killing tons of mobs to grind out levels between quests, and then we're suddenly dumped into a game that requires 5-man groups for a large portion of the content.
Was this intentional? Was the first half of the game designed to be a solo, story-driven experience whereas the second half was meant to take what you learned at the start and now apply it to help other players? Why does the game change so drastically at this mid point?
I have to respectfully disagree with your assesment of how playable the game is for people over 15 who don't have 10 hours/day to play. I'm 25, have a full-time job and a wife and I manage to enjoy playing WoW. From just my experience, the game is very enjoyable if you have friends or colleagues to play with.
I regularly play with 5 other friends who are similar ages and have similar real life demands as my own, and we manage to do quite well. We don't power level, and we're not participating in 40 person raids, but we find about 6 hours a week to play together (usually on Wednesday nights) and are advancing through the game at an enjoyable pace that way (in the last two weeks we've had very successful runs through Uldaman and Zul'Farrak).
In my opinion, you don't have to be a level 60 member of a large, well-organized guild that makes regular large raid runs to enjoy the game, though I'm sure that is one way to enjoy it. Why don't you give some reasons why you feel that the gameplay sucks that the developers could actually respond to?
Honor for worthy PVP encounters, Dishonor for killing lowbies. Such a simple idea, and anticipation of this feature was what kept many people playing WoW, finally a penalty for "griefers" for over a year. And then suddenly the Honor rules were published, a couple of months before the system went live, and dishonor was explicitly missing. Many people bring up issues such as reverse griefing, using low level players as human shields, ganging up on high level people, etc, but all of these have simple obvious solutions. In the end, why was this aspect of the system nerfed so badly?
What is your reaction to the reasonably high proportion of female players present in WoW (compared to across all games) and do you think you could further redress the balance by marketing? Do you plan to do so?
"Frag the weak, hurdle the dead, and assassinate those cursed snipers."
Read penny-arcade much? They restored the award, and it's been almost all they've talked about in news posts for quite some time (see the new penny arcade/pvp rivalry server on dark iron) Most of the big early server problems are fixed (my server almost never had any anyhow), so if you want to rant, at least use current information.
Given the success of WoW, are there any plans/contingencies/what-if's floating around Blizzard regarding MMORPG's based on other successful Blizzard titles?
If I look at this addicted friend of mine, I always wonder how to drag him out of this mess...
Would you consider implementing any of the following in WoW:
* server-side limits on game play time:
Use case: A player wants to limit his play time. He voluntarily opts in to playing a maximum of X hours per day/week/month/whatever for the next day/week/month/whatever.
* public user statistics:
Use case: A player wants his (real life!) friends to support him in getting rid of his addiction. He voluntarily opts in to publishing his usage statistics via web/email/blog/whatever for the next x time.
* Slashdotters, be creative and put more anti addiction hints in reply!
Me and 3.5 million of my peers are now firmly addicted to WoW--but we still must eat, drink, and take biological breaks. The only thing that might make me forgo these little trifles of carbon-based life is an in-game weather system.
Are there any firm plans of introducing weather into the game? (e.g. Dust storms in Tenaris; Snow storms in Winterspring; Rain showers in the Wetlands; etc.)
Try looking at the World of Warcraft website. There is a big, obvious, "World of Warcraft Jobs" banner.
While I am no hiring coordinator for Blizzard, I'd say that you should at least posess the ability to use the Internet (at least try to click on the linked content in this story) and/or read.
I know more than you drink.
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?
It would be fantastic to get a *glimpse* of how Blizzard designed the infrastructure to handle WoW. I was actually thinking a field trip to Blizzard would be a great opportunity for my IT department to get away for a few days. Anytime I receive connection hickups or difficulties logging in, I immediately try to understand how Blizzard would handle said situation with server redundancy, as well as database redundancy. What's most interesting to me is how a character object is handled from the database perspective, especially considering how our company views business objects. So, how DO you do it?
It strikes me as an odd choice that all instances should be arbitrarily tuned to a hard-coded number of players (40, 20, or, most often, 5). Given that the game already has the notion of "elite" mobs that have a multiplier applied to their total health, item drop rates, and xp rewards, why doesn't this multiplier adjust to match the number of players in the instance, rather than being fixed at 3?
This seems all the more strange to me in light of the fact that Blizzard has already used this mechanism, with great success, in Diablo II. This seems to confirm that not only is it not a generally difficult thing to implement, it is specifically not beyond the reach of Blizzard in particular.
The current approach of using manually-tuned dungeons seems like the worst possible deal for everyone: players have a limited set of content that suits the play style they prefer, and Blizzard needs to do much more work to separately create content for soloers, small-group players, and huge-raid players. Causing all instances to scale smoothly would seem to allow players the most flexibility, and Blizzard the greatest return on their efforts.
This issue is of personal interest to me because I prefer to play with one to three real-world friends or alone, rather than with thirty-nine strangers. I've essentially ceased playing the game because there's simply no more content that suits the solo/small-group playstyle that I enjoy.
I certainly accept that other people prefer the feel of a huge raid, and I don't wish to deny them any content tuned to their preferences. Indeed, I'd like them to be able to 80-man any instance in the game if they so choose, while I 3-man the same instances with rewards scaled down to match.
Yes, I am familiar with that page, but I'd like it from the perspective of the developers, and not Human Resources, in all their polished glory. I want to hear what the TEAM has to say.
Informatus Technologicus
Do you guys use TCP/IP throughout or do you have different (faster) protocal or Infiniband on the backend? How much of your system performance is dedicated to the various functions (collision detection, cheat detection, packet formation, etc)
The World of Warcraft forums only contain paying users.
Slashdot is a site that they can use to connect to a large pool of gamers, where a decent percentage may not yet play the game.
This exercise in getting in touch with the Slashdot community could be seen by the cynical as just another marketing / advertising excercise.
Connect with a market of tech-saavy gamers who may not be playing your game, who have concerns about the administration and gameplay of the MMORPG. Send out a small contingent of developers who'll talk the sweet talk about how all their desires are coming in the next content issue, while brushing aside how you apply heavy-handed changes in the name of balance. You get free front page advertising on a high traffic server like Slashdot, and maybe a few hundred more subscribers... not a bad deal.
The early game is brilliant, and playing it was a joy. Why is that so hard to retain in level 60 play?
:)
Because at low levels you could solo, and in a 1 - 2 hour playing session you would always come out with a new item, or a new level and with it some new abilities (well new abilities every other level).
At the endgame you need to find raids of 5-40 people to be successful. You group up with them, and raid a dungeon for 2-6 hours. You will sometimes come out with nothing to show for it.
WoW was so successful because levels 1-40 appeal to the casual gamer, and even 1-60 can be done by a casual gamer. Now if only they could make the endgame the same way. One man instances, quests for good items that you don't need raid groups to get, etc.
All in my own opinion of course.
Why is that so hard to retain in level 60 play?
You need the Golden PSP. And a soul.
Wake up.
I definitely agree with this one.
It's the entire reason I cancelled my account and moved to Guild Wars. While I don't know if Guild Wars will be any better toward the end, at least I get the early on experience again. I absolutely despised the end of the game where anything worth attaining on my character was so hopelessly out of reach of someone like me who casually plays. Blizzard consistently said "We realize our main audience is casual players", and then implemented these massive, sluggish requirements on the high level quests.
I don't have 8 hours to sit and play. There are times when I barely have ONE hour.
(Guild Wars is a lot of fun, if anyone is wondering.)
The next vein gave me the same problem. In fact, I had gotten stuck, and had to re-log on 4 of the first 5 veins that I mined with this toon. If I had been a new subscriber, I would have returned the game later that same day, and demanded a refund.
This problem is obviously not just with mining. Sometimes, it can take 7-15 minutes to get an item out of a mail sent to me from another player. Sometimes, it can take 45 minutes to list all one-handed maces on the auction house, even though there's only 23 to list.
What data structuring technique did you use to hash items in the game? (I need to know, so that I stay away from it.) Also, is it too late to fix such a fundamental problem as this?
Lastly, what makes you think that the servers are in "Excellent shape"? Have you forgotten about posts such as this one? I count 397 people who disagree with the developers response (that's 100% of the players who have replied to the initial blue post). Why can you just respond with "ok, we're looking into it" ??
Free unix account: freeshell.org
*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.
In your view what short comings would open source software such as Blender http://www.blender.org/ and the GIMP http://www.gimp.org/ need to overcome in order to be suitable to become part of the pipeline for developing high end game content as used in WoW?
LetterRip
Given the broad network nature of WoW, why did you decide to use TCP/IP instead of something a bit more performance oriented, like UDP? I understand that UDP is not loseless but for things like char positions would it really have mattered? Wouldn't the lower overhead have been more desirable, costs and bandwidth wise?
I have heard many times the 'it's complicated' line on the official message boards, given the revenue you're getting from WoW it's ridiculous you haven't given serious thoughts to fixing this: on many servers AV starts maybe once a day, 2-3 hour waits for WSG are common as well, this makes 'casual' pvp-ing practically impossible for most of your subscribers.
I know you're probably worried about people trading items in WSG across servers due to the high abuse potential but if you disable trading in battlegrounds unless players are from the same server (which should be easy code-wise) cross-server BGs should enable us to actually get in in a reasonable amount of time. Right now my choices as a level 60 are:
= farm for gold while waiting for AV/WSG to open (boooooring)
= find a pickup group for some instance while waiting (which means waiting in IF for an hour for people wanting to do DM west/north or 5-man strath, which NOBODY ever wants to do) only to have the 'you are eligible to enter AV' pop up 30 min inside the instance run (argh)
= level up my alt(s) (gets boring after a while to do the same quests over and over and over and over and over again because there is no new content to be had at 60 really)
And btw, fix the code for the 'estimated waiting time' please, there have been way too many times where I've had the 'ETA 10 minutes, time elapsed in queue 3 hours 15 minutes'.
-- the cake is a lie
Yes, it does appear that you (Blizzard) have made a conscious decision to go for slick playability over user-designed content. Can you confirm this, or would you like to see more player cities and the like? This is something that does seem to be hugely lacking in MMORPGs compared to text MOOs. Given various speculations about the "wikification" of games, how long do you think the top-down content model can thrive?
In order to progress through the game, its important to sell your goods at the auction house. Its practically a requirement. When I play, I generally leave my Hearthstone at Ironforge, because after I'm out running around I need to teleport back there to sell my stuff.
I'm lucky, a friend of mine cannot even step foot in Ironforge. Her computer is unable to withstand the heavy lag and number of players. We went once, it took 45 minutes to get back out. Now I just buy her equipment, and bring it to her.
What is the reason for your decision to limit the auction house to a couple geographical locations within the game? This not only excludes a vast number of players from improving their characters at the early stages because of proximity, but also requires extra travel time, and completely excludes people with lower end systems from being able to easily sell their stuff. Is the reason a technical bottleneck of some sort, or a design decision?
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.
Having some other-worldly demons force these guys to recover the items (if they sold them) and give them back would be a nice way to keep the game going -- and the fear of these demons may get people to refrain from cheating in the future.
Although WoW doesn't seem to have a cool addictive alternate name like Evercrack, I laugh every time I see WoW because there are still hundreds, if not thousands, of cars tooling around the Boston area with WoW scrawled in dirt on various body panels trying to entice women to perform for "Whip'em Out Wednesday", a now-defunct radio station theme. ;)
PepperHacks - Hacking the Pepper Pad
The reason was this game takes a real 180 once you hit level 60. Leveling up was quite easy as a casual player, I could solo and make good gains and group when needed for the more difficult quests. A good balance and a much better leveling system then most MMO's.
Then came level 60. The "high end" PvE content completely alienates the casual player as 4-5 hour chunks of uninterrupted time are needed to progress through places like Molten Core and BWL.
The PvP content (my preference) is even worse. Players have to dedicate an abnormally high amount of time to succeed in the PvP ranking system. And ironically, this is to gain rewards that are quite inferior to their PvE counterparts.
It has been my experience in other MMO's that the "power gamers" always rank up the fastest, get the best gear first, etc, etc and that is expected. However, the casual gamer could achieve these things, it just takes alot longer. This isn't the case with WoW, advancement is predicated on non stop play without letting up, because once you do, you fall too far behind.
So, that leads to this question: Am I alone in this observation/experience, or are you hearing this quite a bit from your player base? That is, are you hearing that the game starts out very casual player friendly, and then turns very casual player hostile at the end game?
And further, if this is the case, are you satisified with this situation, or do you intend to ease up on blocking casual players from aquiring end game gear?
It's been argued that the melee itemization in the game is out of control and casters are falling more and more behind. Do you see this as a problem, and if so, what does blizzard plan to do about it?
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."
I'm a 60 rogue and working on another alt that I'm getting to 60 as a mage, and I agree entirely with the annoyance at having to do big raids to get anywhere at 60.
And it's not a matter of spending hours on the game. I DO that. What bothers me is that I have to count on other people to be good, and also, not to cheat me by ninjaing loot and other silly politics.
I understand that Blizzard doesn't want to create a lot of content that gets instanced for every single player, so single player instances are very technically challenging to create for them.
However, I do wish there were single-player challenges that you *know* you are going to get the goods at the end of if you put in the time and do it right. It doesn't have to be easy, it just has to be something you do where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
*If* my guild takes me to Molten Core and *if* we work well enough together to kill the bosses, my class set item *may* drop and if I *could* potentially get my hands on it. MC takes hours and hours and rarely is finished in one or even three runs at it. While that means more chances at drops for me, it also means that I will be in there for hours and hours with nothing to show for it and no way of knowing if my hours invested will *ever* get me anything. That's not the way to keep people around. They get burnt out on the game well before your new content interests them again.
At 60 Blizzard knows it has run into a brick wall with the level cap, so it is effectively changing the whole landscape of the game to have a game at 60. The problem is that now you need other people to succeed, and those people don't play on your schedule. Whereas you could 1-60 if you couldn't find a group, you had the option of going solo, at 60, you can forget it that. Nothing less than a 5-man group with 1 warrior, 1 priest, and 2 mage/rogue/hunter/shaman/paladin/druid and frequenly 10, 15 and 40. New Zul-Gurub will have a 20 man raid instance. Same thing.
I'm surprised that Blizzard doesn't encourage more solo work. After all, solo players who feel that they can play all the time will stay in the game and pay the fee even if an elite guild doesn't want them or they don't have the time for a guild. I am a hardcore gamer, but I have a job and a wife and there is going to be a day where I simply can't put in the time to be in a full-on guild and I'll want to try another game too. Why shouldn't I have the option to work on the game at my own pace, even at 60?
We are developping a Software Engineering and Game Design degree, which is getting under way this September. What would be, in your opinion, the most important skills and knowledge that students could be taught as far as being effective game programmers, designers, architects, etc?
Also, would someone from Blizzard Entertainment like to be on the Advisory Board for this programme?
Dear Mr. Greenspan,
Based on the experiments we conducted in WoW universe, we are pleased to offer you the following advice regarding interest rate management
Sincerely,
A bunch of nerds from virtual reality.
--
It's OK to ask if they ran into any interesting problems with their economics model, but that stuff about 'benefit to the rest of the world' - this is really something
3.243F6A8885A308D313
- Will not kick you out for being a weekend warrior
- Will invite you to not only the endgame raids but also raiding to get other near-max-level guildmembers "ready" to go as well (keys, quests, etc).
- Happens to raid often enough that your one-or-two "allowed" nights fall on the same time as their scheduled instance raids
There. Just three requirements at a high level. Are there more?I've been told, and I'm beginning to see it, that the game starts when you hit level 60. That's not to say I haven't had a wonderful time exploring the world and adventuring with (and without) friends, but there's quite a bit that I've not yet seen.
I think the problem here comes from different types of games, and I think it's happening to fans of older Blizzard games specifically for a reason. In an RTS, you logged in and instantly had a match that you could finish. Much like a quick game of monopoly, you knew what you were in for that one evening that the wife allows you to play. Once that match ends, everyone goes back to the beginning; the only accumulated resource is your own skills. Starcraft, for example, doesn't remember how much you played last night.
The fact that you spent 40 hours on battle.net last weekend means that you, the real person, are now experienced. It does not mean that the game will treat you differently.
Coming from that environment, people feel like they will never "win" an MMORPG and they are correct. Winning an MMORPG (or any RPG) is only accomplished by enjoying yourself and it cannot be measured in any other tangible way and that is totally alien to a lot of people. These people need a measure of some type and they will cling to any metric they can find. The scale in the bathroom, the bank account, the ladder on battle.net, it's all the same. Even if it's a meaningless unit of measure when read alone, they crave it. This assumption that the "online" game is competitive isn't even consciously made, but it lives deep in some personality types and they will definitely cancel each game account about one month after failing to "win" it.
The rank/honor system in World of Warcraft satisfies this somewhat but, shockingly, this ranking system wasn't announced really or known at all during that first month that the game was available! It really isn't hard to imagine why these folks cancelled.
::jafomatic
I've had mini LAN-parties over at my place, where five or six of us were playing WoW at the same time. MRTG's bandwidth graph remained astonishingly low for the duration.
Recently, I've also used dialup (~44-48K actual) to play WoW and it performs without a glitch, keeping the bar mostly in the green. Even Battlegrounds work, although a delay there is noticeable.
I'm very impressed with the way you've structured your protocol to make efficient use of network bandwidth and I'm curious to learn what the main difficulties were, what the most bandwidth-intensive parts of the system are, and what kind of protections have you built into the protocol to avoid tampering with the inbound/outbound data. I realize you can't go into great detail for a host of reasons, but any tips and tricks would be welcome.
So long, and thanks for all the fish
This is so true. I was going to ask something similar but this post pretty much sums it up for me and WoW right about now. It also is why I am letting my WoW subscription lapse. Please make sure this question is asked.
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
There are dozens of places that currently are just eye candy, some only when flying over the landscape. The airfield NE of Ironforge, the lake above the tram to Stormwind, the Venture Co. camp mountain-locked between Stonetalon Peak and the Charred Vale, the Graymane Wall, southern Silithus, Dalaran, Quel'Thalas, Mount Hyjal... Was all that just meant to be in-flight entertainment? Created-but-cut content? Under construction for later to make it all seem 'fresh and new'? Bait for explorers to lure them into places for which they are banned for seeing early? Please, impart some insight into these holes in the world!
Yes, we understand these tags always apply: fud, dupe, typo, slashdotted, topic name
rooooar
I recently cancelled my two World of Warcraft accounts.
I'd been playing since Beta and with my guild and friends had defeated all but 1 of the 'end game' bosses, excluding the very new Blackwing Lair.
Despite what is being generally assumed in the gaming media, many servers are still not stable despite being 1 year into development after a lengthy alpha and beta test.
My server, Blackrock, being the highest population server must represent some extra challenges but why have you not been vocal and communicative about the almost constant instance and server crashes during peak play times?
(Before I canceled last week, one of the last nights I played Blackrock crashed 5 times in a row consecutively over the span of 2-3 hours AFTER a lengthy extra maintenance period that same week)
There have been reports that instance farmers, dupers and Raid cascading guilds are to blame for the massive server problems we've had in the last month but all of these are rumors, unconfirmed - and yet the problems continue with no official response of any form nor, more importantly, no specific drastic action to fix this long-standing problem.
In addition, why has Blizzard not locked out new players from starting off for the first time on Blackrock?
You have had 3 transfers periods for people to move from Blackrock to other servers and yet all it has done is allowed more free space to open up for other people to start over or for the first time on the "popular" server.
Why have you not 'locked' Blackrock and prevented the massive population problems that continuously plague it?
(For those unaware of the annoyance of instance resets or server restarts - it often meant that after spending 3-4 hours clearing through an end-game instance and defeating 3-4 bosses the instance server would boot you and you would eventually login back at the beginning with all of the 'trash' monsters respawned - requiring you to spend another 1-2 hours to clear back to where you left off. Sometimes this would happen more than once a night.)
Some questions here were about the costs of the game. Casual players (like me, I only play at a friends place occasionally, because I only run linux) find it unfair to pay a lot per month when they played only once a week.
In addition, there have been concerns that the problem with people becoming addicted to these types of games are worsened by the fact that it is easy to justify to play more than is good for you.
Therefore my question is: Why is it not possible to play per hour?
Despite the articles claim that the game is now in great shape it is clear that there a still serious performance problems that have yet to be addressed.
Several months back it was announced that a fix for LAG in Iron Forge was in the works, now many months have gone past and my friend who still has an active account still experiences huge lag in this zone and the auction house. I remember this issue appearing as I an many others present at launch progressed to quests in that zone. Is there a major fix in the works?
Even though the game is designed for mass conflict, it appears that the combined fan bases of penny-arcade.com and pvponline.com have been able to fill a new server and full scale conflicts have already resulted in crashing clients or worse, as well as the dreaded queues. What is being done to resolve these kinds of issues, what is the maximum capacity of a single realm / zone?
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Are there any plans to expose any game information to the "outside"? It would be pretty handy to have something like a dashboard widget that lets me search the auction house or alerts me when a certain item is on it. Of course, it would be even better to be able to bid, but that might open up things like bid sniping programs and such, so I'd be happy with even a read-only interface.
Firstly, i've noticed that WoW lacks relatively any high social endgame content, such as a system of kingdoms or players being able to build up their own towns/bases etc, or really anything where leadership is especially important; I see this as positive. Generally speaking every other MMO, from Puzzle Pirates to Anarchy Online has some sort of feature where guilds have to pour tons of money and resources to support the resources for gameplay only a few people will experience. This omission seems intentional and i'm interested in the factors that led you against that sort of end-game content. In the same vein, the whole system of factions suggests that something similar will be available, but without specific players acting as the primary fulcrums that make the system work.
One thing that i'm curious about is how you see the alliance/horde population imbalance. If you could go back to day one and redo faction, would it still be the same way?
Finally i'm interested in what priority #1 is when you design an encounter. Whether you're designing a battleground or a high end rading zone such as Blackwing Lair, it seems that there are essentially two possible routes. 1. Focusing on the role each individual class will have in the encounter 2. Focusing on the overall scheme of the encounter. The obvious trade off being that focusing on the overall scheme can make players feel as if their individual contribution doesn't matter very much, whereas focusing on class can ocassionally make some classes feel as if they aren't needed at all for a specific encounter. Or does a different thing come to mind when you first begin thinking about how to build an encounter?
Have you thought about adding services to the auction houses, specifically enchants? It would be nice as a person looking for a specific enchant to be able to search the auction house. It would also be easy as an enchanter to sell enchants without standing in a major city and yelling for an hour. Also the auction house would help to stablize the market for enchanting. What are your thoughts?
I played WoW since closed beta, and bought it the day it came out. In about 3 months, I made it to level 60. But... then my interest in the game sort of ended. I didn't care about high end raids, or about any PvP content. Elite content was more of a hassle for me than it was fun and exciting. I eventually cancelled my account. So, my question is, are there any plans for more solo content for the endgame? I understand the concept of a MMORPG is to interact with others, but I don't want to have NOTHING to do if I can only play for an hour and want to do something alone.
Is WoW intending to be a permanent world which will have challenges for years to come or is it imagined as a finite game which will eventually be replaced with something new?
Do you imaging player-created content ever being incorporated into the world? ( beyond a group of characters standing around pretending to be an encounter :-)
Do you think there will ever come a day when you GPL the server-side engine?
Blizz: When are you going to move the story along? Are you planning to shake things up with realigning alliances within both factions?
For example, at the end of Warcraft III: FT, Jaina Proudmoore and Thrall team up against Jaina's father to take him down and reigned in a new era of peace. I played WoW based on the excellent epic story of Warcraft and I thought it would be a no-brainer that both factions could learn the other faction's language and even earn reputation. For those on RP servers, I thought for sure that we would be able to rewrite the story thus fall and try to reestablish that era of peace.
Well, I was wrong.
Since the launch of WoW, the story is dead. What do you plan on doing to push it closer to Warcraft 4 / WoW 2?
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
(Reposted because of the strange formatting of the original, my apologies.)
Warcraft's greatest strength to me is its abundance of hand-crafted quests - something most people before didn't think would be practical in a commercial-scale mmog. The quests are all quite entertaining, but something that's all too rare is for the player to be given a genuine choice. In particular there are several ideological factions within the game, such as the Defias and the Scarlet Crusade that occupy a moral gray area. Someone's real-life or roleplayed sensibilities might lead them to side with one of these factions, but the game dictates the player's allegience simply because there are quests against these factions, but few or no quests to take on behalf of them.
One case in which Blizzard has shown some much-welcome flexibility is the Bloodsail Buccaneers, allowing players to gain the friendship of these pirates who are normally the "bad guys." It wouldn't take an extreme investment of time to allow similar options for the Scarlet Crusade, Defias, Twilight Hammer, Syndicate, etc, etc.
To put the gist of this post in the form of a question: Is there any possibility that Blizzard will allow players to side with any of these factions, as with the Bloodsails?
That's the essence of it. For anyone curious, what follows are my own ideas of how to allow the choice while respecting the massive amount of content build around the assumption that these factions are players' enemies. In particular the Deadmines and Scarlet Monastery dungeons account for many hours of playtime of fighting these factions. That amount of content can't be tossed out nor duplicated, but a fictional reason can be told for someone on either side to do them. (If you don't want quest spoilers, stop reading the post here.)
Before completing the Deadmines instance, the Defias appear mainly as violent thugs. The choice to side with the Defias could easily come AFTER experiencing the Deadmines, so that content can remain completely intact. After delivering Van Cleef's letter and hearing Baros' Alexston's story of the unpaid workers and corrupt nobles, the player might be swayed to the Defias' point of view. However, someone siding with the Defias would be just as motivated to complete the same existing Stockade quests to root out the corrupt noble. All that's needed is two slightly varied dialogue paths and all the quests are still applicable. Some kind of follow on quest could then be provided to make the Defias in Westfall friendly to the player, a la the Bloodsail Buccanneers. Moonbrook might even become a functional town to players that have completed the series. I can't say how to support the choice in the Missing Diplomat quest series though, since it isn't finished. Please finish that, by the way.
For the Scarlet Crusade, the Alliance quests start out being against the undead on behalf of the Crusade, but suddenly the player is forced to turn againt the crusade on the say-so of an NPC he or she just met. First of all, this sudden change could be made more convincing by adding a step to the quest series for the players to go to the torture chamber wing of the Scarlet Monastery. There they would see for themselves what the crusade is doing. This would also give Alliance players a reason to visit that wing, as there are no alliance quests there currently. At a minimum this would make the requirement of turning againt the crusade more believable, but it could be taken further by offering a choice through a dialog with Interrogator Vishas. The first would be to decide the crusade has become overzealous and must be stopped by killing Interrogator Vishas, Arcanist Doan, Scarlet Commander Mograine, and High Inquisitor Whitemane. Alternatively the player could accept a quest from the interrogator to eliminate members of the crusade opposed to his extreme methods - Herod, Houndmaster Loksey, and High Inquisitor Fairbanks. I haven't experienced enough of the Scarlet Crusade content in the Plagu
For great justice.
What have you been doing about code evolution in the game?
You obviously forsee this codebase being in existance for probably another five years (just look at EQ), and it's already been in developement for over three. How do you manage the complexity of this system? I'm thinking in three areas:
Have you considered doing a post mortem? WoW obviously has a large codebase, and generally your team has been able to deliver fixes (every now and then a bugfix backfires).
I have a series of questions but any one being answered will make this avid gamer happy. Has any thought been given to extremely difficult and rewarding five man content? Are there any plans for single player instances that involves severe amounts of skill as a player? Are there any plans for further character advancement beyond grinding for gear? Or are there plans to add questable pieces of set gear that compare accordingly to some end game content?
Can I have your stuff?
oogly boogly!
At the top of the mountain there's a flag, what's left of a campsite, and what appears to be humanoid remains; it's the base camp/monument of the first dwarf explorers who made it to the top.
Kinda surprised you didn't ask about the airport, "under Stormwind," Zul Gurub, Hijal, Caverns of Time... there's a bunch of them.
Will this service eventually be expanded to where players can move a character from any server to any other server? (I'm sure players would pay for this capability and would not mind changing character names if they already exist.)
I'd also like to know if this service might become more granular. My daughter now has a character on my account. Eventually I see us buying another account for her, but I don't want her to have to start over. Would it be possible to transfer a single character from one account to another?
From Thanksgiving 2004 until June 2005, I was addicted to World of Warcraft, playing more hours than I care to admit. I was focused on reaching level 60, achieving the success of building my character. Having been at level 60 now for the past few months, I find myself playing considerably less, and having no where near the fun I had before. High-level instances just don't cut it for me, and a lot of other people I know. What are you going to do to make level 60 play as much fun as level 1-59 play was? I think this is a serious issue for your company to solve, retention is key. Please don't respond by telling me how many high-level instances and battlegrounds you are adding. That's not what I mean.
I just canceled my account. I'm pretty hardcore and would have loved to stay with 1 level 60 character if I could have, but the complete lack of end game content meant I had to reroll alts all the time to continue having fun. I've now rolled enough alts that I can state with absoluet certainty that I have done every quest in the game, been to every instance and killed ever boss short of the BWL bosses.
Blizzard what do you have planned for people like me who wish to play your game but can not due to no additional content (Diremaul was a fantastic step in the right direction that just stopped, nothing new since)?
I've tried pvp but the 3-6 hour queues stopped me dead in my tracks. I've played every class to at least level 30, 4 of them to 60 and 2 others beyond level 50. PvE is now dead to me with nothing to offer other than loot grinding which holds absolutely zero appeal to me.
Professions are worthless as dropped items are better by several orders of magnitude. The unstable servers, despite what this article says, have driven myself and many others to madness. Nothing is worse than spending 5 minutes trying to loot a corpse or 20 minutes waiting for the auction house window to load. The multiple times over the last month in which servers were down for extrended maintenance was unacceptable.
Contrary to your press releases you are losing customers left and right. Many people I have played with since release, people I used to think would NEVER quit have now ended their subscriptions.
My questions and concerns are asked on your own forums every single day by people of like mind, more often than not they are ignored, flamed to death (forum moderators exist there?) or locked and deleted by your pitiful community managers saying repeatedly things like "working as intended", "please be patient", "the developers are happy with this fuctionality" etc. Why am I to believe asking questions is even worthwhile and by extension why is my continued investment of time and money in this game and your company worthwhile?
I think (and I could be wrong) that the moderators are being paid to weed out the meaningful questions and comments and present them to the upper echelon, and return to the players with meaningful replys.
The demands from the players to interact directly with the developers comes more from the castrated responces from the moderators and their own admitted uninvolvement in any decision process than a real desire to speak with the people who make the game.
Having read the discription of how the last Priest review was conducted (providing it was accurate) makes me wonder why anyone would want to do that job.
Perhaps putting a little more detail into the coming soon page, maybe answering at least 1 question from each of the forums each month (not all at once), or provide some sort of progress indicator would (I was going to say reduce the number of complaints, but that would be naieve) reduce the amount of animosity and alienation your players feel.
So here comes my question:
What are the challenges from the developers point of view with keeping lines communication open with the representatives in the field?
I'd like to hear your side of this.
Would you consider introducing Family Account pricing, allow multiple machines to connect from 1 IP address? You could limit the client spawns to say.. 2 other machines.
My wife and children also play WoW, and it would be rather nice if we could make use of the spare computer and play together.
This would be an excellent feature that I'm sure would be welcomed by many. I'd gladly pay a bit extra for this, but can't really justify paying for yet another full account.
Forget that! My question is "When do I get my wife back?!?"
(Actually, it's okay. I use the time to play Matrix Online.)
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
I loved the Warcraft games so much that I could never play WoW (major time sink! :-)
My question is, would your company encourage, allocate time for and generally nudge willing developers to blog?
It seems Blizzard has a bad name among some who used to like Blizzard. This is due to bugs, some bad moves by Blizzard legal, and a "black box" process for customer feedback (many comments here bemoan the 'handlers' on the Blizzard forums).
If anyone's worried about bad postings and replies to the blog, a good example to look at is the Microsoft IE7 bloggers. A public blog seems to have influenced Microsoft into fixing IE7 to a degree more than initally planned, which is a Good Thing for many.
A theory is their developers wanted to do the right thing, and the blog helped support that.
You only need to do it on one world at a time, and items can't cross worlds. So drop that problem, its now reduced to single server at a time (and ids only need ot be server unique). DO the check during weekly maintenance, it'd be a blip on the time it already takes.
Of course, the whole problem is ridiculous, it would all be solved if they used transactions and made all swaps between inventories atomic. This has been solved in the financial world for decades, whens the last time citibank duped a few million?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I've been told, and I'm beginning to see it, that the game starts when you hit level 60.
THIS is the kind of comment that wastes the game.
No, it doesn't start at 60. The game starts when you hit level 1. Bear with me - I'm not being trite.
When you get to level 60, you start being tough enough to participate in the endgame levels. But there's still a heck of a lot of interesting stuff in levels 1-59; it's just finding a team that it's enjoyable with that's the problem.
You're supposed to be able to enjoy 1-59 for what they are, not just as the prelude to a main act.
As an example: I got my first character, a warrior, up to level 47 or 48. I didn't rush, I solod a bit, I explored areas that were dangerous to me, and I had fun doing it. I did all the quests, and enjoyed them. I toiled to collect the 342 mithril it takes to do the mithril order quests, and the 100 or so more it takes to make stuff for yourself at the same time. My guild merged with a 60-raiding guild so that the top-end players could get more out of their game, and suddenly the pressure came on to just whip through 45-60 so I could join in. Hey, where did my game go? I realise that 60 is fun; but I don't think that the rest of the game should be thrown away just so you can get there. Why burn days getting to 60 (2.5 weeks minimum with rushing, according to an earlier post) to have fun, when you can just have fun?
More recently, I've started a whole bunch of characters. I played a druid to 32, then wanted to see what the game was like as a shaman, a hunter, a warlock, a priest. If I ever get to 60, I'll be running various areas through over and over; I can do that at level 20 too, and you get better items a whole lot more quickly. You find good groups, you find bad groups. I've done deadmines several times in a row; it's FUN. It's fun because I ignored the words 'the game starts at 60'. I haven't even got to 50, and I'm having fun. I have tactics; I have good runs, lucky escapes; I have items that replace the ones I have, and I know there's more space later on to get better. At 60, your item gain rate has to drop significantly; you have to spend hours to get the item you want because it's got that bonus. But as soon as it drops, you know what it is already, and you've already worked out that it's better than the one you have; and there's other people who want it too.
I'll stick with doing what I'm paying for - having fun wherever and whatever. I can look forward to participating in WSG again when my chars grow up a little - but I'm not wasting the early content just so I can start slogging on the later content instead.
Quote parent: (I've) had a wonderful time exploring the world and adventuring with (and without) friends, but there's quite a bit that I've not yet seen. And I'm not rushing past ANY of it. It's all there to be enjoyed.
I'm sure various people who are level 60 will scorn me for my opinions; but I'm pretty sure they missed out on a fair bit of fun on the way up. 60 may well be more fun than I expect; but I don't see any reason to let that cloud my enjoyment of the rest of the game. I'll finish off with a last quote from the parent, with which I wholeheartedly agree.
Winning an MMORPG (or any RPG) is only accomplished by enjoying yourself.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious