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.

wow cheat

[AlexTheBeast]

Many long-term users were troubled when people like MickeyMouse publically described the the recent duping cheat. [tech-recipes.com] 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?

Addiction

[kevin_conaway]

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?

Economic Monitoring...

[nweaver]

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?

Challenges

[Anonymous Coward]

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)?

Other MMO's

[_Hiro_]

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.

What would you have done differently?

[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?

LEEROY JENKINS!!

[goldspider]

Are there any plans for a player hall of (f/sh)ame?

Subscribtion Fee

[Maagma]

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!)

Linux version?

[SolusSD]

How about a native Linux client? It runs great under cedega (transgaming wine), even better in opengl mode.

Server setup question

[GoatMonkey2112]

I would like to know what kind of servers, how many, network bandwidth, etc., for WoW.

World Economy

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Mutiple platforms

[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?

Server or Gameplay?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you base everything around the gameplay and try and increase server capability afterwards, or did you try and create the gameplay to the capacity of the server's that you wanted to use?

Breaking Through the Great Wall

[mfh]

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?

Reduced priced restricted accounts

[spludge]

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.

If I wanted to work as part of your team...

[HaloZero]

...who would you be looking for, in terms of technical skills, and what sort of background would you be hiring from?

Warlocks

[wpmegee]

When are our complaints that have existed since retail going to be resolved?

I love my class, but have a few issues.

1) soul shards - We are the only class that must go grind and collect reagents to go about daily functioning. Make them purchaseable, or perhaps give us a trinket that lets us summon one for free once every ten minutes.

2) escape spell - Mages get Polymorph and Ice Block, Priests get Insta-cast AOE fear (ours takes 2 seconds) and mind control. Please give us something to stop us getting repeatedly raped by rogues. Perhaps give us banish back like it worked in the beta, useable on everyone, perhaps cost a shard, with a cooldown

3) end game pets - Make the infernal not cost a reagent, it's a nice pet no doubt, but gets expensive. Also the cooldown time is ridiculous, how bout 30 mins. with guaranteed 10-min enslave? The doomguard is nice, but please give us a reliable way to get one. Waiting for curse of doom to proc sucks.

4) Enslave demon. Far too short to be useful for the danger envolved.

5) Voidwalker - please buff his dps - hitting for 20 is seriously gimped. Also I can break is agro very easily with a shadow bolt or Immolate crit.

6) Invisiblity - why the hell are mages getting invis. back. If they get it back, all the other casters are entitled to it as well - they already get portals and free food, water, and mana pots.

Yes i know this is more than one question. Thanks blizz.

Oh yes, nerf shamans.

final decision process?

[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? 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.

"Game Exploits" and Economic Farming

[DarkGamer]

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?

What are you doing to curb farming and ebaying?

[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?

Marukah
24 night elf Druid
Silverhand

Re:Playable for normal people?

[blooba]

Why does it suck for you? I'm over 15, play mostly during the weekends, and my experience rocks.

Balance

[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?

How will you catch up?

[Anonymous Coward]

With so many improvements in EQ2, it is clear that they have surpassed WoW in terms of quest content. EQ2's quests require creativity and ingenuity to solve, while WoW's feel like I'm working a 2nd job (just kill X numbers of monster Y)...

How do you plan to catch up?

Here's one!

[paulius_g]

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

Why don't the developers speak for themselves?

[Erioll]

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.

Still competitive?

[iamsure]

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?

Why innovate, if you're just going to stop later?

[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?

Dealing with the Negativity

[Kaellenn]

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?

Mac and Windows Co-Existing Challenges

[OS24Ever]

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.

More role-playing?

[Sivar]

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!

Re:Playable for normal people?

[TMFUberman]

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.

Programming model?

[Defiler]

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?

Read the LGP interview

[T0t0r0_fan]

http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/10249/ [linuxgazette.com]

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.

PvP vs PA

[Mercano]

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?

Class Changes before Launch.

[JavaLord]

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?

OS and Database choice

[NixMonk]

If you could start over, would you use Linux and Oracle again?

Why is there no native Linux version?

[pyite69]

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.

Game of The Year Retracted by Penny Arcade

[Pavan_Gupta]

In other news, we hereby revoke 2004 Game of the Year status for Blizzard's "World of Warcraft," effective immediately.
...
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.
...
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!

Future thoughts...

[Anonymous Coward]

My question/s is about the future of WoW.

Rumors are out about and of an expansion, could you confirm about this and what we/players might have to look foward to? Also are there any plans to raise the lvl cap of 60 for the many players who have hit this cap and are looking for more challenges within WoW (not all of us can wait in queue for Battlegrounds, jobs take up much of our precious playing time)?

Raid instance lag on high population servers

[Palos]

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?

End Game Philosophy

[terristen]

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?

recent performance issues

[crabpeople]

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.

More dynamic universe?

[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?

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..

Strong Start, Weak Finish

[zoomba]

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?

Re:Read the LGP interview

[utopianfiat]

That's just stupid. It's not like Blizz has anything to fear. There's no good chance of "source purification" to worry about, there's hardly any MSFT retailation that could be expected, and if so, then ID Software has a lot to worry about.
I guess the more appropriate question to ask Blizzard on the Linux client issue is:
Why are you alienating a market which is most likely more dense in players than your other target platforms? Why did you can WoW Linux?

Honor vs Dishonor

[Sparr0]

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?

Question: Women players

[-pms-mistletoe]

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?

World of Starcraft/Diablo/etc?

[halivar]

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?

Implement serverside anti-addictions measures?

[lowieken]

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!

In-game weather

[trepan]

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.)

Server/Database Structure

[Dysfnctnl85]

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?

Re:Server setup question

[Anonymous Coward]

I too am very interested in the back end infrastructure of Blizzard. Not everyone that plays WoW is a little 15 yr. old kid. I work in IT and this is Slashdot so can we get some of the real facts please?

What type of hardware/OS are the game servers?
What type of network bandwidth is required?
What applications are used for realms? I've seen job opportunities for Oracle admins on Blizzard's website? Does the game run on Oracle?
How many people does it take to keep WoW running?
And finally, what happens every Tuesday when the servers are offline for 4-6 hours?

Re:Economic Monitoring...

[team99parody]

How about the reverse of this question.

Virtual worlds seem like an excelent arena for testing and experimenting with various economic models.

Have you guys considered using your world for economic model research that could be applicable helping understand real-world economics and potentially benefit to the rest of the world.

Or, if short of that; have you done any experiments with monatary supply; interest rates; etc with interesting results you can share.

Re:If I wanted to work as part of your team...

[HaloZero]

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.

What type of networking do you use (backend)

[mrjimorg]

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)

Re:Economic Monitoring...

[interiot]

Or, a variant on that question... how important do you think the economy is, as it relates to making the game enjoyable?

Level 60 players are allowed pass on their vast sums of gold to their level 10 alts. "Power-leveling" services online require 2.5 weeks to get to level 60, despite having all the gold in the world. If the economy takes a nosedive, players may still be able to have fun. So is economic monitoring a primary concern to you?

Re:Why innovate, if you're just going to stop late

[Anonymous Coward]

The endgame doesn't stop when you hit 60, it just changes. Prior to level 60, you can just go to IF or Org to get a pickup group to run an instance or yell in a zone for help completing a complecated quest. At level 60, to progress, you have to have 40 people so you can run Molten Core or Blackwing Lair. Some people might consider this a hinderance, but i personally think its an amazing part of the game, if anything far superior to any parts of the game before it. No longer is the game about scripted encounters with quest npcs, its about large scale coordination and guild dynamics. The "quest npcs" are your guildmates, and rival guilds who compete for outdoor mobs.

Some of the most fun I have ever had in World of Warcraft is with my guild, when we raid outdoor bosses and have to fight off the horde at the same time, or negotiate with other guilds on who gets to attempt them, and when. Yes, it requires more of a time investment to join a hardcore raiding guild, but the reward is greater too, and I'm not just talking about the "purples" that one acquires from completing these raids. Level 60, if anything, is when the real game of WoW starts, which in my opinion, is getting to know the people on your server, and joining a guild capable of making attempts at endgame content, or a smaller pvp oriented guild that runs lower instances and forms battlegrounds / gank groups.

Daneth
Level 60 Warlock
Bonechewer

Re:Why innovate, if you're just going to stop late

[Tadrith]

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.)

Inventory lag, broken servers.

[uigrad_2000]

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. -original /. story

One week ago, I created a brand new character (on alliance side, even though I normally play Horde), and picked up mining. I went up to a copper vein, successfully mined it, but then got stuck trying to loot the copper ore. My body was stuck in the crouching position, and I never received what was rightfully mine. So, I logged out, and back in, as I'm so accustumed to doing.

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? [worldofwarcraft.com] 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" ??

Re:OS and Database choice

[StarsAreAlsoFire]

I second this question.

Esp. The Oracle part.

Possible addition: which DB systems even made it into serious consideration?

Re:Linux version?

[endx7]

Recently they added a function to their lua ui api called isLinuxClient(). slouken said the function was being added for "completeness". There is already a isWindowsClient() and isMacClient().

Whatever that means for sure, I do not know.

Plus, slouken is Sam Lantiga, the sdl guy who used to work for Loki. So Blizzard does have someone who is capable, however, they have him doing a lot of other things. :P (Right now I think Blizzard doesn't have enough manpower in developers to worry about Linux client.)

Open Source for Content Creation

[LetterRip]

In your view what short comings would open source software such as Blender http://www.blender.org/ [blender.org] and the GIMP http://www.gimp.org/ [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

Why TCP/IP

[deth_007]

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?

Make BGs shared across servers.

[MarcoAtWork]

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'.

Re:Economic Monitoring...

[Jack9]

For those who are familiar with the WoW economy, every major patch (client-side) since release has included a server-side economic change.

It may not seem like a big deal that the Darkmoon Faire takes 1000 thorium bars PER Darkmoon Amulet out of the economy (through thorium widgetx6->20 Faire Tix), but it's effectively driving up the demand/price of thorium to 3x what it has been since release. Essence of Undeath recipes have bumped up the going price of undeath 1000% (although it stands at 3g it needs to rise to 10g to be in line with other essences). Of course economic monitoring is a primary concern. Even moreso than class balance since it's relatively easy to fix. Rather than fix the fact that most every high level (50+) dungeon has undead who drop the essence, flooding the market (as it were)...they will simply lower the drop rate to bring it in line.

This is not one of those questions that will make the cut.

Yes, what about building/programming/etc?

[Dioscorea]

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?

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 [mud.org]. Given various speculations [slashdot.org] about the "wikification" of games, how long do you think the top-down content model can thrive?

Auction House Locations?

[Robotron2084]

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?

In game punnishment to cheaters

[team99parody]

I think it'd be cool if people who duped such items through bugs suffered the consequences through in-game punnishments -- perhaps denizens from some other dimension who want their stolen items back.

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.

Re:WHY?

[`Sean]

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. ;)

Re:Mutiple platforms

[Rinikusu]

As a cross-platform gamer (I play WoW on both my desktop (PC) and my laptop (iBook), I'm really curious to know how many mac players are out there, and if it's financially viable for Blizzard to continue supporting the mac version.

Casual player alienation

[fantazem]

I recently cancelled my WoW subscription, along with four of my friends.

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?

Itemization

[WPIDalamar]

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 the lack of communication?

[MrPanda]

I want to ask the one burning question that I and almost every other "real" WOW player wants to know. Why is there so little communication between Blizzard and their customers? The class representatives barely ever post on the forums(except for Caydiem of course, beloved by druids everywhere), and many times in the past when they do post they are just plain wrong about game related topics.

Of all the hardcore players I know that is wihtout a doubt everyone's biggest problem, even causing people to leave the game. So what's the deal, how can you have 3.5 million people paying a monthly fee, but the company cannot afford even a bare minimum level of communication and support regarding the game. To top it off, the WOW site is woefully behind the times, contains virtually no hard facts about gameplay, and even relies on website such as Tbot to catalogue game information.

I loooove Blizzard games, from Diablo to Warcraft to WOW but why the slap in the face? You could easily pay for 1 person per class to do nothing but play and post advice/comments/upcoming changes, or field an army of volunteers if you needed them, so whats the big deal?

How about a lifetime subscription?

[Anonymous Coward]

I played WoW for about 8 months on a daily basis. I have a couple of level 60 characters and a few lower level characters as well. I enjoyed the game but after a while I realized that $13/month added up quite a bit. I played the game constantly because I wanted to get my money's worth.

Have you ever considered selling lifetime subscriptions? I might have been inclined to pay $200 for life. It would work out for both parties. I would have gotten a better deal and you'd have gotten more than $154 ($13 * 8 months + $50 for the game).

Ultimate education for a WoW designer?

[JacquesC]

We [mcmaster.ca] are developping a Software Engineering and Game Design [mcmaster.ca] 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?

Re:Economic Monitoring...

[interiot]

For those who are familiar with the WoW economy

If you have any links or further information, I'm sure they'd be appreciated if you posted them.

every major patch (client-side) since release has included a server-side economic change. Even moreso than class balance since it's relatively easy to fix.

My point is that economics don't really affect how fun the game is to play, in general. Yeah, people spend a lot of time at the AH. But a screwed-up economy doens't have that many negative effects on the game:

• inflation hurts auction brokers (formally, in economics, "inflation is a tax on investment"). But I don't know that Blizzard cares about protecting auction brokers
• deflation in the tradeskills makes them less fun (because the game encourages you to spend time on them, but then gives you relatively little reward for that time). If anything, I'd count this as the biggest problem with the economy, but it's not something that Blizzard has (or I think, is able to) address.
• a screwed up economy can make it harder to buy your spells and EQ as you progress. But it takes a fair bit of badness in the economy to do this... players can always farm more if they want more of their spells/EQ.

That's it. On the other hand, the majority of the fun in the game comes from leveling up, doing quests, doing instances, working on professions, talking to people in your guild... these things aren't really negatively affected by the economy.

Network Usage

[pathwayX]

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.

The Auction House: A Seller's Market

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no questioning that the economy heavily influences game play and strategy in World Of Warcraft. It could be said that right now the primary force behind the economy, the auction house, creates a seller's market. Other than word of mouth, there is currently no way for a player to explicitly advertise their desire to buy an item at a given price. Does Blizzard plan to add any features to transform the auction house into both a buyer's and a seller's tool?

Re:Why innovate, if you're just going to stop late

[humina]

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.

Plans for the unfinished content?

[cryptomancer]

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!

When can I make an Undead Hunter?

[gydeon]

I would like to honestly.

Re:Why innovate, if you're just going to stop late

[Evro]

Hooray for the parent post. The following is an essay I wrote about WoW in April 2005. Some of the points are no longer valid, but many of them are. My WoW subscription has been cancelled and I won't be renewing until, at the VERY least, the class balance issues are improved, if not solved. Shamans are WAY overpowered, and the only people who don't seem to agree are Shamans and Rogues, with rogues being the second most overpowered class in the game, especially in PvP. The balance issues are so glaringly apparent that I can only assume that Blizzard intended them to be as they are.

Why World of Warcraft's Endgame Is Not Fun

April 17, 2005

I have been playing World of Warcraft since beta in August, 2004. At the time, I had been playing EverQuest for about 2 years and was growing weary of it: the raids in Planes of Power were long and tedious with very few rewards, and the entire "backflag" system caused a lot of strife within many guilds by forcing them to do long events just to flag one or two people. As the raid leader for my guild, I led everything from raids Vindi in Kael Drakkel to the Emperor in Ssraeshza Temple, to Aten Ha Ra in Vex Thal, to Rallos Zek and Fennin Ro.

Between the mess of flagging and the tedium of the raids themselves (hours of clearing) it became clear to me that Sony was incapable of designing "fun" encounters. Planes of Power introduced events which required lots of "kiting" of mobs, apparently as an attempt to introduce a new element to a game whose events are so tedious that people would put their characters on auto-attack and go AFK for 15-20 minutes at a time and be just as effective as if they'd been playing them.

It had gotten so bad for me that I had taken to reading rather than logging in to EQ. I felt bad since I was the raid leader, but the game had stopped being enjoyable months before. So when a friend let me play his WoW beta account I was stunned. WoW seemed to have everything I had wanted in EQ and none of what I hated.

Among the smaller things I appreciated at the time were: showing exp gain per mob as a number, and amount remaining in this level; showing "percent chance to crit;" showing health/mana regen instead of forcing you to count up your mana regeneration items as EQ did. Some of the major things I loved about WoW as opposed to EQ were the ability for any class to solo without serious downtime (2+ minutes) - downtime is one of EQ's most aggravating aspects, forcing people to sit around and literally do nothing. Experience loss on death in EQ was annoying, and as you gained levels it became insulting, especially when facing monsters that would death-touch. When learning a raid encounter in EQ it was not uncommon for the entire raid to wipe multiple times, and at the end of the night people could walk away having lost up to 10% of their levels (even after EQ's coveted 96% rez). Experience loss also basically prevented any sort of soloing in EQ that involved risk of death, unless you wanted to eat 20% experience loss per death or spend hours running around from zone to zone /shouting for a cleric to rez you in whatever zone you died. You would often have to pay for this "service."

Soloing itself in EQ was horrible. Unless you were able to kite (e.g. Plane of Fire "tables" camp), the only mobs you could kill were 10-20 levels below you and gave little to no experience, and even then many people faced 10+ minutes of downtime between mobs.

In WoW, monsters forget about you after you run a certain distance away from them. In Everquest, monsters chased you until you died or "zoned out." The whole concept of zoning was annoying and immersion-breaking in Everquest. The seamless world in WoW was another thing I loved.

In WoW beta, I played a paladin, as I had in Everquest and in other games. I was pretty pleased with most of the Paladin's abilities, and found the healing power a surprise, having come from Everquest, where the Paladin's heals were a jo

Thottbot

[ModemRat]

Thottbot is a popular add-on to WoW that I couldn't imagine playing without. From interface additions to data mining used for its website to search off of, it has come a long way. Had the developers imagined the extent to which the Add-On capability would change the game? Also i would find it interesting to hear about the issues involved in choosing what is available to add-on software to avoid potential abuse.

High Populations servers still plagued by crashes

[cinderful]

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.)

pay per hour

[Anonymous Coward]

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 [slashdot.org] 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?

Long standing performance issues.

[BagOBones]

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?

External API?

[Jargonwhat]

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.

Software Engineering

[Anonymous Coward]

How much software engineering went into the development of World of Warcraft? The game is massive and has a clear direction, so just how much of this is planned before hand and how much gets done "on the fly"?

Designing the Encounter Vs. Designing the Player

[Shanoyu]

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?

Re:Read the LGP interview

[Anonymous Coward]

The likely answer is that they didn't want to invest the resources support it, and they don't want to release anything that isn't fully supported. Blizzard's tech support/customer service departments for wow are notoriously understaffed, so I'd like to ask, "Why can't you invest the resources to provide a higher level of customer service, including Linux, in-game GM run events, better information distribution, etc. Where does the money go, and how much of wow's income is being reinvested in the game? How much is being spent on hardware and infrastructure, and how much on support?"

Auction Services

[stevet96]

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?

More solo endgame content?

[dividedsky319]

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.

How long do you expect the game to last?

[Fractal Dice]

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?

Moving the story along?

[ChozSun]

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?

Codebase Evolution

[ChefAndCoder]

I've got a more technical/CompSci'ish question for you, just looking for feedback from the development side of things:

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:

• What's your test philosophy (unit tests, test case matrixes, automated/exploratory)
• Every developer hates documentation, but obviously you have even more need for it. How do you balance documentation vs. actually getting the code written.
• Whenever a change/bug fix is proposed, what's your own internal process for addressing it and how has this evolved over the project's life?

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).

Content Additions

[Fringex]

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?

Character Transfers

[Avatar8]

I applaud your ability and willingness to allow character transfers, and I understand its limitations of only allowing high-population servers to be moved to lower-population servers.

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?

Level 60....zzzzz....

[shoshin]

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.

Customer Service

[Belgaren]

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.

Family Accounts

[squidsoup]

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.

Developer blogging as done in Linux, MS groups

[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?

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.