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World of Warcraft Interview "Responses"
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?
Response -
We monitor the economics of the game very closely. We watch the in-game economy on a regular basis and have personnel that monitor game logs every day. When we see irregularities, we take action. This can range from exploring the account further, finding and removing exploits, or even possible suspension and bans. We also look closely at out-of-game transactions involving real-world cash for in-game items. Some of those transactions occur over eBay, some do not. But in many cases, the involved parties are warned or suspended, and some accounts are also banned.
2.) What would you have done differently? by Trespass
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?
Response -
Oh yeah, there were definitely things we wished we could have done differently during the development of World of Warcraft. But we learned from those challenges and used that knowledge to improve the game at every opportunity. All of us at Blizzard strive to study the challenges of development and apply those lessons to our next project. It helps us to refine our development process and make each game better.
3.) Mutiple platforms by Fizzlewhiff
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?
Response -
There was never any question that World of Warcraft would be co-developed for Windows and Mac users. Blizzard has always supported the Mac platform; you'll notice that even as far back as Warcraft II and Diablo we were there supporting Apple. However, with World of Warcraft, we wanted to improve that relationship further and shoot for a simultaneous release on both platforms. All of us are thrilled that we succeeded in that respect, and we're sure Mac users are happy as well. Both games are equal in every respect; there weren't any features in one version that didn't make it into the other.
4.) Balance by zaffir
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?
Response -
As you've implied, game balance is a very difficult and challenging thing to achieve. If it were easy, every game would be perfectly balanced. Of course we know that's not the case. Our designers work very hard to try to balance the game and we know that the more feedback we get, the better our odds of achieving that elusive balance. That's why it has always been important to us to hold closed and open beta tests for all our games, a process dating back to Diablo and StarCraft. The feedback of our beta testers has always been invaluable, and that is still the case in World of Warcraft. That's also why we have Public Test Realms and why all our patches go there first: for more testing before we reveal it to the public.
5.) More dynamic universe? by Zarhan
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?
Response -
That's something we're looking into. We'd like to enhance our events and create more ongoing ones as well. Children's Week, Darkmoon Faire, and the Stranglethorn Fishing contest are all steps in that direction. Darkmoon Faire, for instance, will continue to be enhanced with new content so that players can keep coming back for new experiences. The Fishing contest is a weekly recurring event that we hope makes the Stranglethorn area more relevant for players. We can't give away too many details for what we have in store, but our goal is to always make the game world feel and act more alive.
6.) Why innovate, if you're just going to stop later? by Mirkon
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?
Response -
As this question illustrates, the audience for MMORPGs and especially World of Warcraft is very wide and diverse. It is difficult to please all gamers all the time. In fact, some decisions that we make are praised by some players and then criticized by others. It's a difficult balancing act to satisfy so many needs. However, at the same time, we understand that some players just don't have the time or social circle to experience the classic 40-man raids and high-end content of an MMORPG. That's why we created and continue to create more content that can be experienced by casual gamers. Our 10-man PvP Battleground, Warsong Gulch, was a response to this need. It allows smaller groups of people to experience content that is level-neutral and still walk away with great rewards. Arathi Basin, our newest Battleground, is similar in that casual gamers without large social circles can also enjoy playing there and reap great rewards from doing so. Zul'Gurub is an example of non-PvP content that we created for smaller groups of casual players. It is a 20-man raid dungeon that isn't as much of a time commitment as Molten Core or Blackwing Lair. And further in the future, we hope to do some things in Silithus that will enable solo and 5-man groups to still have plenty of fun and questing even after they've hit the level cap.
7.) final decision process? by grungebox
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?
Response -
Well, we hope that you'll try out the game. You might be pleasantly surprised. World of Warcraft was designed to be easy and inviting for non-traditional MMORPG players to try. It has an intuitive interface, stylized and familiar settings, and very easy-to-accomplish quests for the casual gamer. As for why we decided to make World of Warcraft in the first place, well, many of us loved playing MMORPGs and we wanted to make one that had all the features we wanted to see and experience ourselves. Since no one else was making the exact MMORPG we wanted to play, we decided to design it ourselves.
8.) What are you doing to curb farming and ebaying? by Amich
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?
Response -
We have a zero-tolerance policy against the sale of World of Warcraft items on eBay and similar activities. We investigate such allegations very seriously and those accounts that are indeed guilty of exploits or selling of in-game items for real-world cash suffer disciplinary action within the game. We have various steps we sometimes take in dealing with such issues, but trust us when we say we don't tolerate actions that destroy the economy of the game.
9.) More solo endgame content? by Anonymous Coward
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.
Response -
We touched on this in the earlier question, but yes, we know that some gamers want more casual content that can be experienced in short periods of time. Many of our quests are designed to be accomplished in short bursts, and that goes from low-level to high-level quests. In future patches, you'll see more casual content that continues along this philosophy.
10.) Developer blogging as done in Linux, MS groups by Sleepy
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? 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.
Response -
We care deeply about our community and definitely want to keep our World of Warcraft gamers updated, but the development and refinement of our games take first priority. However, we do our best to keep the community up to date with regular updates such as the World of Warcraft "Battle Plan," as well as interviews with various news organizations such as this one. Every company has a different way of reaching out to the community and we feel that the World of Warcraft community site is a great way to keep gamers up to date and informed about every aspect of World of Warcraft. The forums are also a great place for gamers to express their opinions and give feedback about the game.
Spot the one response written by a PR flunky...3...2...1...Time's up!
Q: What would you have done differently?
A: ...we learned from those challenges and used that knowledge to improve the game at every opportunity. All of us at Blizzard strive to study the challenges of development and apply those lessons to our next project. It helps us to refine our development process and make each game better.
So...the answer is NOTHING?
Truer words were never spoken. This whole thing is just more of the same: we don't want you talking to the developers, ever.
Can we resubmit these to get it routed to a technical person? Or possibly make requests on the Forums to get the real answers? This is just useless, but exactly what you'd expect out of blizzard. At least on the forums, you sometimes get a real answer of 'yeah, that's a bug, I don't see it getting fixed anytime soon, so stop doing it.'
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
I am totally underwhelmed by the evolving storyline WOW is putting out. It would be nice if the entire game had the depth of a 300 page novel but sadly it doesn't. After a string of missions from any of the racial leaders there is a little more than finding an item here or there with a shoddy backstory.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
as an ashtray on a motorcycle. What a shame they could get real answers to some great questions.
I thought at first that the story summary was a bit harsh, but it is pretty clear that Marketing neutered the answers and produced a press release instead of an interview. I commend /. for following through with the promise to publish even though the answers were so sycophantic that it made me wince more than once. I guess that's what happens when you have millions of subscribers: you can't say anything even mildly interesting for fear of creating a target for discontent.
Sig under construction since 1998.
What can I say? I'm massively dissapointed. I've been fan of Blizzard, and especially Warcraft franchise, since Warcraft 1... and it more than slightly annoys me to see the company which always seemed to care about its player base visibly more than most other companies suddenly finds it necessary to answer both the most basic and quite intriguiung questions related to their best-selling game with a load of cookie-cut, soulless and rather empty phrases instead of honest, insightful answers that'd show us Blizzard still consists of people who -enjoy- creating games.
Yes, I play on WoW. And while the game, in itself, is quite awesome (though not, by any stretch of imagination, flawless or perfect), I am increasingly annoyed and dissapointed by the kind of feedback players receive for Blizzard representatives on all levels of game - from in-game issues and assistance requests sent to GMs, through many querries directed to Bliz Forums CMs, all the way to requests for assistance regarding account and payment issues. I find it hard to believe that any company that reached its current cult status purely through great products it created by listening to its fans and customers can make such a sudden and radical turn for the worse in the ways it communicates with those same fans who helped it grow into what it is now.
{ Durmitor/Hermann, Alliance side of Terenas (US) Server}
'...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons...' Popular Mechanics, 03/49'
Yeah, it sure sounds like either a PR person or developers' replies by consensus. No one out on a limb or adding any flavour to the replies.
Trolling is a art,
They *used* to be such a cool company, really cutting the edge in gameplay mechanics even when they lagged behind on graphics. WOW is a great game, with tons of eye candy. Unfortunately, it's a great game by a company that's now owned by some mindless,faceless multinational corporation (Vivendi Universal).
The upside of this is that Rome must fall, and the recent exedous of Blizzard's devs has already started to erode away the machine, in this instance. Witness Guild wars, which had several refugees from the Diablo team on board, there's another new one too that sprang up from a WOW team exedous in the last month.
Vivendi just doesn't get that the players can tell when the people making the games are having fun doing it. I cannot imagine that this kind of 're-routing' can be good for morale among the people who matter at Blizzard, i.e the people responsible for actually CREATING the products.
PR Department, pfft.
That's insulting.
-chitlenz
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
(questions snipped for brevity, apologies if any questions were mangled. Also, please read it with a grain of salt *smirk*)
1) Question: 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?
Response: We ban bots. I've banned 3 myself today.
2) Question: ..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?
Response: Why yes, there are things we wished we would have done differently...wha.. is this a two part question?.. Brain.. hurts!
3) Question: ..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?
Response: We made a windows AND a mac version. That means, if you have a mac, you can install it, and play it! Without a PC!
4) Question: What is the process the dev team goes through for balancing character classes, items, NPCs, etc.?..
Response: It's very difficult. Otherwise it wouldn't be easy. Ppl complain all the time. Stop bitching.
5) Question: ..Are you planning to introduce "events" into the gaming world that would actually shape it permanently, like in Asheron's call?
Response: We made it so you can run around and fight stuff. It's awesome.
6) Question: ..The early game is brilliant, and playing it was a joy. Why is that so hard to retain in level 60 play?
Response: Dungeons are cool. You can crawl thru them with 39 of your friends. It's awesome.
7) Question: 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?
Response: Please play World of Warcraft. It's pretty awesome.
8) Question: 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?
Response: Dood, we answered this questions 7 questions ago. RTFA plz.
9) Question: ...So, my question is, are there any plans for more solo content for the endgame?
Response: Dungeons are cool. You can crawl thru them with 39 of your friends. It's awesome.
10) Question: would your company encourage, allocate time for and generally nudge willing developers to blog? 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.
Response: Use the forums plz, kthxbye.
Its because that question has been asked over and over ad nauseum, and the answer is always the same. Its always "Linux doesn't have enough of a marketshare in the gamer market to justify a port." And this is almost always met with indignation and argument by Linux fans. Then the Windows fans usually come in and start flamewars.
So in short. Its already been asked, and answered, and its really not worth asking again.
When you make a post like that you reveal two big things: The inside information you have and your writing style. Between the two, it'd probably be fairly easy to figure out who it was. Unless you stuck to giving information from a cross of groups, and having someone else write your posts for you, you'd run significant risk of being caught. Remember that private companies can fire you for basically any reason. They don't need probable cause even, if they think it's you, they can fire you. Whistleblower protection doesn't apply, that's only for revealing illegal things your company was doing.
Dear WOW "Development Team" --
On behalf of the entire Slashdot Community, I'd like to thank you for taking the time to so carefully craft responses to our questions. It's thoughtful respondents like you that make our workday such a pleasure.
It's with some dismay, however, that I can anticipate that certain members of our community may choose not to respect some simple guidelines that we have established to make this board a fun and informative place for everyone. They are likely to accuse you of being a "marketing droid" or a "PR hack" or a "community-college intern" or having "screwed your way to the middle" or being "functionally retarded" or having "your head up your ass" or your "hand down your pants" or having "your other hand up your boss's ass" or various other unpleasant and discourteous phrases for implying that your responses were less than substantive.
Please be assured that our Moderation System(tm) is designed to specifically addresses many of these users, and simply because you may see a few of these discourteous posts with "+5 Insightful" does not mean we are not working very hard behind the scenes to make sure that this is a fair and objective forum for all involved.
Again, thank you so much for taking the time to respond. We look forward to hearing from you again in the future.
-- The Slashdot "Developer Team"
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
Heck, a lot of the questions weren't even answered!
"Did you leave anything out for compatability?"
Yes, there are Mac and PC versions. They both feature the same content.
"What do you wish you had done differently with the design of this game?"
Yes, designing games is a hard and challenging process, and we learn new things from each one we design.
Those aren't answers. Send the questions back.
I almost can't doubt that it went through the PR wash. The answers are bland, unresponsive and sometimes not even related to the question.
I mean, the one were they respond, "Oh, please try our game; we're sure you'll be pleasently surprised."
Only marketingdroids talk like that.
This is singularly the worst interview I've ever read. It's like an interview with a mural on a brickwall. No insight, just the same facade that you've already seen before. No DEPTH.
I wish companies would realize that when you get an interview list from Slashdot we don't want more dribble that we could read anywhere; we want real answers. *REAL ANSWERS PEOPLE*.
I'm just disgusted at these responses.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
Did anyone else find it ironic that, by having their PR professionals handle the questions instead of the engineers, the interview resulted in terrible PR for Blizzard?
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?