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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?"
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.
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
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'
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'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
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!
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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
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.
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
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."
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
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
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?
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.
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