Ask Questions of the World of Warcraft Team 1000
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.
Question of venue (Score:5, Insightful)
Playable for normal people? (Score:1, Insightful)
Success of Everquest (Score:1, Insightful)
Why do I need to buy a copy? (Score:1, Insightful)
This seems to be a problem with most of the genre. I haven't played City of Heroes (no free trial), and I didn't follow up the Star Wars: Galaxies free trial because you have to go buy the full box even though you already have the full client installed.
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?
Long vs short term players (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
PLEASE DON'T MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:1, Insightful)
IT IS MOST CERTAINLY NOT! I left WoW because they made it obvious they didn't care to give me customer service, and blocked every attempt at getting a question answered by an actual developer. Seeing them catering to
Re:PLEASE DON'T MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Question of venue (Score:5, Insightful)
Not trying to sound flippant, but that's the reality of it.
Disclaimer: I don't play WoW or any online games, but this Q&A interests me nonetheless.
Re:What would you have done differently? (Score:1, Insightful)
At 3.5 million, it has more subscribers than the chart shows for Lineage.
Re:PLEASE DON'T MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:2, Insightful)
My point is that 80% of the questions aren't being answered by anyone. This is just someone at Blizzard PR sending a nice ass kiss to
" Oh please, if I had mod points, I would mark you as a troll."
Oh well, in that case PFO
Re:Playable for normal people? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:wow cheat (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why do I need to buy a copy? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Why don't instances scale with variable numbers of (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Honor vs Dishonor (Score:1, Insightful)
What is the point of being stronger if, as a weakling, there is no greater risk of being hunted down?
Someone earned that level 60, and there must be a reason, right?
I mean, maybe there should be a spider solitaire game within WoW so that players can escape that unpleasant reality for a few hours.
Expansion of base (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Warlocks (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why innovate, if you're just going to stop late (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
PVP and how it is lacking (Score:1, Insightful)
Does Blizzard have any plans in the future to implement a for of real world pvp system that is not instanced. one that has real world consequences if you dont stand and fight. and real world rewards if you win?
Dual boot / Emulate means no *new* customers (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
Re:Reduced priced restricted accounts (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, personally I think they should have done what Everquest did. The game costs you $10 (or you can d/l it for free) and then you pay a monthly fee.
Or you could compare it to Diablo, and the fact that game was pure repetition and you never really did anything new, and changes came infrequently. So infrequently, that by the time they actually fixed duping the market was flooded with 15/45 IAS Windforce bows that made them more common then a dagger.
Re:Why innovate, if you're just going to stop late (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
Re:Honor vs Dishonor (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Question of venue (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Playable for normal people? (Score:3, Insightful)
- 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.
Re:Question of venue (Score:3, Insightful)
If a dev were to post to one of the WoW forums and say something like "I'm a dev", that forum would quickly become an unusable morass of whining, flaming, trolling, and general bitching. Yes, yes, they're already that way, but it would get even worse, as hard as that may be to believe. I've seen it.
Way back when, Brad McQuaid used to post to alt.games.everquest, and actually participate in the official Everquest forums. This was actually kind of cool, you could talk, and he'd answer.
But then something changed. More and more people kept expecting him to read their posts. Posts started getting made with titles like "BRAD PLZ READ!" or "ATTN VERANT!". Of course, nobody could keep up with the number of messages posted per day, but people would still get really pissed if he didn't respond to their burning issues IMMEDIATELY DAMMIT BECAUSE I PAY $10 A MONTH!!!1!1!
Eventually, the bulk of new messages were nothing but rants and bitchfests about how they were being ignored and why didn't he respond to that message they posted three days ago.
So he stopped posting. Eventually, over the next few months, as people realized that he wasn't answering, the problem subsided.
And one other point. Just because the devs don't POST to the forums doesn't mean that they don't READ the forums.
Re:Choice (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Good idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Playable for normal people? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.