So speculate how long until MOP? June, August, October, December or ?

[chaos5061]

Mists of Pandaria: Chris Metzen interview Pt.1

From WoW Insider:
Chris Metzen, senior VP of Story and Franchise Development, the man behind the story of World of Warcraft, was gracious enough to sit down with WoW Insider for an interview at the Mists of Pandaria press event. Chris discusses Garrosh and the Siege of Orgrimmar, Varian Wrynn, neutral factions, older expansion races, WoW's newfound story freedom, and more.

WoW Insider: The big thing that really struck me from your talk at the beginning was this whole Garrosh thing, because that just seemed so bold. Did you have a longstanding plan to do that with Garrosh's arc, or did it just seem like the right thing to do for this particular expansion?

CM: I would say Garrosh remaining Warchief ... his term as Warchief was always going to be ... brief. Bringing him up, you know, Alex Afrasiabi created this character for Outland, hanging out in Garadar, and he was just written so well. I just went, "Wow, this character's really bitchin'. Let's leverage him forward, let's get him going." We always knew we would make him Warchief, but that would be a short reign. It's not his Horde. So what's totally funny to me is, as we've been talking about for the past couple of days and throwing it out to people and they were going, "W-what! You can't get rid of him! We love him!" As compared to two years ago, when people went, "What the hell were you thinking, Blizzard? This character sucks! You ruined my Horde! You ruined everything! What the hell are you guys smoking over there!" So it's been funny seeing going from absolute hate, recognizing fans are so incensed about it ... We're just spinning fiction, you know? We're spinning stories. We said, "This'll be good for the franchise. It's gonna be bumpy for a while, but it'll be fun."

You take the one thing that's so solid about the Horde -- Thrall -- and you pull him out, and you just watch what happens. It was a really fun ... I guess virtual social experiment to see how people would react, but it was also a story we wanted to tell. You know this guy was never meant to be Warchief forever. And so just seeing from the level of total hate to these days people going "What? We actually kind of like this guy!" It just says a lot about the WoW community, like, I know people don't always read quest text, or, like, the lore lore. There's deep lore and then there's just what's going on, and I love that a lot of players just seem really engaged with what's going on. And I love that, after eight years, people are still engaged.

So yeah, there's always been a plan for Garrosh and his tenure as Warchief, and where it goes after this is really, really interesting. I guess I can't really tell you yet, but I guess ultimately I didn't know this would be the expansion set where we did it -- I was hedging my bets against the next one, but -- the more we got into Pandaria and started balancing themes and decided where ultimately everyone (the Alliance and Horde) would go, the theme where there was this underlying war and the pandaren were just in the crossfire, that theme really just started to demand to be foreground as we started developing all the fiction for this expansion. And we started thinking, well, what's the ultimate expression of this? We don't have a Black Temple as such. Pandaria has its own mega end events and they're really satisfying, but they're very self-contained, it's a Pandaria issue. So what's the gear-up? What's the crazy, globe-shattering conclusion?

And again, it was an Alliance-Horde issue. And someone -- I don't remember who, and I wish I did because I want to give this dude a medal -- threw it out at a meeting and we all went, "Holy cow, that's the craziest idea." That's high-stakes warfare. That's not us sitting back on our haunches and going, "Uhhhh, what about some new continent? Aliens from Planet X or whatever?" Well, I guess we did that with Burning Crusade. You know what I mean, though; that's radical, it's highly emotional. It's a city we love.

Well, the city, right now, it's Garrosh. You look at the old Orgrimmar and it's wood and sticks ...

It's almost quaint, right?

Yeah, this almost ... pastoral look, compared to this new one, all red and black iron ...

A war machine! Yeah, I remember when we did that we got the art set from Borean Tundra and I was like (deep, guttural voice), "Yeah, I like that! Let's do it everywhere!" So yeah, I love that we turned on a dime and went "this is the truth of the story." It's not about Pandaria, and I hope that doesn't translate into sounding like we're not intensely passionate about Pandaria and the events that go down there. It's just a front, and the events that transpire there, and the way it crescendoes, it leads directly to the Alliance and Horde going crazy, like the things that we find and the truth that we find kind of kicks things into overdrive geopolitically. There's a power there that shouldn't fall into, uh, some people's hands. So you know, I guess I forgot what your original question was.

I'm pretty sure you answered it! It was just sort of like, was this a long game?

It was, yeah. WoW in general we have kind of a long game, a set of themes and arcs that we know will define the franchise over time. How they actualize per expansion, well, there's a little more grey space. And that really depends on how the design's going, how we feel at the time, how we're feeling about Warcraft, if it's what we want to build, what we want to play. Certainly it's affected by what we're playing, too, and sometimes you find the right spaces to pull on these massive overarching things and this was the right space for that.

Speaking of the Alliance, people have been really interested in hearing about Alliance lore progression. We had Cataclysm, and that was about Thrall. There was obviously some Alliance stuff in the background, and you have Varian's issues coming up, stuff like the books -- but with the Jaina book and with Mists of Pandaria, what can Alliance fans look forward to?

We said at BlizzCon, there's a big marquee quest line coming up that takes great advantage of the scenarios that Dave and Scott were talking about today that adds this sort of new place between solo questing and dungeoneering. And we call it the Trials of the High King, and hopefully at the end of this thing, leading right up to the gates of Orgrimmar, Varian's really gonna find his feet and he's really gonna become ... You know, like when I look back at Warcraft past and I see guys like Uther and Lothar -- Stunning, Chris, how many vowels and "th" sounds can you throw into your names? I guess we're just lucky there weren't any apostrophes in there -- but I very much always wanted Varian to become like those characters, you know? He's a little younger than they are, but there's a stud in there, a rock inside that kid, that could be a better king than his daddy was, a better king than we've ever seen.

We started him like Garrosh, you know, weighted. He's pissed off and he's got this Wolverine overdrive kind of personality, and by design, you know? You can't just start him off perfect, there's nowhere to go from there. So I wanted him to be a little gritty, I wanted him to have some deep issues he could work out over time, and Pandaria, with this quest line, is where we finally see him work them out. And in the novel Wolfheart, and in the short story too, we've been seeing him work it out. We were working hard to dimensionalize him as a character. And the community only sees certain things that are evident at certain times.

They see the Wolverine.

Right, yeah. And he has acted like an asshole, much by design. But now it's time for him to pull it together, because the world is acting like an asshole, and it's all teetering on the brink. And he's gotta find that next gear and really become this king that all the Alliance races unequivocally tell, "Yeah, we will follow you to the gates of Orgrimmar and beyond." So I'm really really excited about Varian and about the Alliance in general.

Here's an interesting thing -- I'll go ahead and say this even though we haven't built the encounter yet so anything can change, just to illustrate what we mean by Varian's growth and his change of heart and the change to the way he fights. Everything we've set up at story level in this expansion is about why and how we fight, because you can go Garrosh style and beat the tar out of them and beat them so bad that it'll (goofy voice) "leave a hole in their racial memory"... you know, the grandkids are gonna out dizzy. You can fight war that way, but ultimately, you betray everything you were fighting to protect in the first place, which is the heart of this.

[chaos5061]

Mists of Pandaria: Chris Metzen interview Pt.2

And a way I like to illustrate this, even in the Orgrimmar encounter (bounces up and down in his seat a little, excited), I have asked the guys to have one of the main objectives, you know like when you're going through a dungeon and you have those little side quests? Well, one of the main side quests is Varian being very specific: "Protect the kids. We're not here to conquer these people; we're here to bring down a guy that needs bringin' down." So imagine artillery, imagine the soldiers -- it's gonna be horrific -- but Varian saying, "We're the good guys. We're not here to massacre or enact vengeance on these people. They've been put upon by a bad man."

So in a way, I want even the gameplay to indicate that Varian is fighting a very different kind of war than Garrosh, remembering what the Alliance is supposed to be about. This lawful good overdrive. We're supposed to be superheroes, you know? Have we lost our way a little bit with all this roughin' up? And I want players to feel that overdrive -- we're in it to make the world a better place. And I think also the Horde will have its own version of that, you know, stopping to consider what's happened the past couple of years and what's been lost and fighting its feet again, spiritually. And that's gonna play out in ways I think people don't expect yet, which is really exciting to me.

But I definitely think we're coming with some Alliance love. They'll be proud to be Alliance by the end of this thing.


In the past couple of expansions and even going back to vanilla WoW, you guys have employed neutral factions a lot as a way to get the Alliance and Horde to work together. Has that historically been a development timesaver or a story decision to make everybody cooperate?

At its root, it's probably a little bit of both. When the time is right ... you know, I would argue that things like the Argent Dawn and Crusade, with Tirion up in Northrend, felt right to me. Tirion had to deal early on with the whole "the Russians love their children too" kind of thing -- you know, orcs are just like us, only meaner and greener, that kind of thing. So in so many ways, that certainly fit the game design, but that certainly was the right concept, and I loved that all these armies, like in Warcraft 3, needed to come together under a specific banner to stand against the Lich King.

Sometimes, examples like that get a little more mechanical. I don't remember having an emotional attachment to, like, the Shattered Sun Offensive. It was well conceived, it was totally cool, I love their tabard, gravy gravy. And there was nothing wrong with that, it was really cool, it just didn't really sing to me, you know? It didn't feel like franchise-defining moment, it was just totally cool and facilitated what we wanted to build. Where something more like Argent Crusade was more like Warcraft at its best. Sometimes one leads, sometimes the other leads.

The draenei and blood elves had their own world, their own expansion to themselves, but they've been kind of in the background since then. Goblins feel like they're a part of the horde proper, the worgen maybe haven't felt as connected to the Alliance as some other races. Is there a place for pandaren after Mists is over, and are there any plans to bring some of those previous-expansion races not necessarily back into the spotlight, but into the players' eyes?

There's almost like three answers to that, or there's three vectors of that. One would be that, in a weird way, it depends on the racial kit and how harmonic it is to the faction kit. Goblins are a no-brainer; they feel like Horde even if they weren't part it. And their starting zone is two feet outside of the capital city, so in pretty much every way, that feels right.

Worgen and draenei are a harder sell. Worgen have no homeland, they're currently squatting in the night elf tree. And they're werewolves, right? It's not exactly an easy fit into the Alliance spectrum of broad fantasy vectors. Draenei are maybe the weirdest fit for an Alliance race, and their homeland's pretty far away. So there's a lot of factors in how races feel closer or further away from the core of their faction. And that's always gonna be a weird space for us.

And pandaren, relative to that, well, there'll always be the Wandering Isle and everything. But those pandaren that have joined red or blue really live amongst red or blue now. They have their cities out there, but they've really chosen to be red or blue. And they're about as weird as werewolves or draenei.

I'm trying to think of Horde races. I guess only blood elves feel like the odd man out for the Horde. I hope that we've engineered that into it as deftly as we could, but you know, it's the equivalent of a bunch of white chicks hanging out with goblin or tauren. It's weird. The Alliance races are a little pushed, but I think we're finding that balance with pandaren running around Stormwind, you know. Like "hey, it's those guys!" We just think it's cool they're hanging around with us.

The other part of it was older races getting time in the spotlight. We've got all sorts of story vectors for draenei, blood elves ... them in particular, for ... down the road? We'll see how those play out, but their big moments may not necessarily be a big part of Mists of Pandaria. But there's definitely mega-stories to tell for both of those races. We're keenly aware that there's inherent cool in all of this stuff, all of these characters. It's the same argument that could be made, you know -- Thrall was front and center in Cataclysm. Garrosh and Varian are gonna have some awesome moments in Mists. Even other characters like Vol'Jin are gonna have some cool stuff to do after all these years.

We know there's inherent cool in all these guys, but it's not always the right time to bring all these flavors to bear. But we're committed to the races and doing things with them, and all the other characters that don't have a lot of screen time.

So, you guys have essentially wrapped up the Warcraft 3 loose ends, in terms of Lich King, Illidan, stuff like that, so much so that WoW sort of now has freedom to tell stories that aren't necessarily tethered by Warcraft past. Is this a relief, an opportunity to create bigger and better, or more of a concern, not having the cushion of those loose ends?

I think it's always a balance. I think what's wonderful about Pandaria is that it's not necessarily standing on the pillars of the past, at least the box product. It's really taking its own shape; it has its own vibe. It's certainly a new place that's not encumbered by EK, Kalimdor, etc., so I think it's a breath of fresh air. And it's definitely needed right now, after stuff like Lich King and Cataclysm, that were rooted in the past and in familiar characters.

But I wouldn't count classic themes out! I think where Warcraft has gone is as important to the franchise as any new hook we could put in for the future. I think the success of the franchise is gonna hinge on a deft balance of both, because I think there are still themes in play that people have seen but haven't seen the true face of. For instance, Outland. Who was the bad guy in Outland? Was it Illidan? Was it the Legion? Did we really whomp the Legion, or did we just whomp Illidan? Was he really Legion, or was he more a mob boss just trying to stake his territory? There's still just tremendous content and stuff to pull from. Lich King, you know? That ended with a real cliffhanger, Bolvar on the throne and all that. There's some equity there! Deathwing and Twilight's Hammer, we averted the Hour of Twilight, but there's ... arguably still an Old God out there, right?

I'm just gonna cause some shenanigans, so I'll just say that embedded in the past of Warcraft is a lot of really, really fertile ground. I don't see it as going over the same stuff. Like, not necessarily talking about SWTOR here, but just as an example, does it really feel like Star Wars if there aren't any guys in stormtrooper armor running around in one permutation or another? It's totally cool to beat on a stormtrooper, and if you rip all that out, it doesn't feel quite the same. So if you go, "Well, we did that before, it's all used and done," and just write off classic themes -- well, maybe that's a mistake? So Mists is taking Warcraft and pushing it boldly forward, and hopefully over time, a balance between legacy issues and totally new looks at the content can be met, and everything will be perfect.

[chaos5061]

Mists of Pandaria: UI Updates

From WoW Insider:
If you've been nervous about how Blizzard intends to handle the item squish that Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street discussed in a developer blog back in November, worry no more -- we saw the solution in action first-hand at the press event. We also saw a few other notable UI updates and additions, such as the full implementation of the new talent pane, a new buff tracker, and a revamped character creation screen.

Mega Damage

Rather than compressing item levels and retuning seven years' worth of content, the developers appear to have opted to go with the concept of Mega Damage, replacing a bunch of spare 0s with a K or an M where appropriate. When killing mobs in Pandaria, my four-digit damage was not compressed. If I hit something for 3,000 damage, it displayed as 3,000 damage. However, five-digit numbers and higher were compressed. 30,000 became 30K. It's a very simple solution and should have very little impact on your gameplay overall.

Here's Ghostcrawler's explanation of the Mega Damage solution from that old dev blog:


Ghostcrawler
The first solution could include changes like adding commas and the like to large numbers. We could also compress all of those 1000s to Ks and all of those 1,000,000s to Ms, much like we do with boss health today. Internally, we have been calling this the "Mega Damage solution" because instead of your Fireball hitting for 6,000,000 damage, it would hit for 6 MEGA DAMAGE (queue the Arcanite Ripper guitar solo).

If we can make numbers such as floating combat text and boss health and item stats a little easier to read at a glance, then maybe we can endure numbers increasing exponentially for many digits to come. Now there are some very real computational limitations. PCs just can't quickly perform math on very large numbers, so we'd have to solve all of those problems as well. Even today, tanks can hit the ten digit threat cap on some encounters.


Talent pane

Observant readers will know the image above is not from the Mists of Pandaria game client but rather from the official World of Warcraft website. That's because we weren't allowed to take our own screenshots. However, the in-game talent panels matches it exactly, besides a few talent updates that the site does not yet reflect.

To respec, you no longer return to your class trainer and pay a lump sum of gold. You swap out talents exactly the same way you do with glyphs right now. You purchase an item, spend that item to clear a tier of talents, then pick the new one. If you only want to change your level 45 talent, then you only change your level 45 talent. Forgetting one does not cause you to forget them all.

Buff tracker

The buff system has been simplified to eight core buffs. At all times, all eight buffs are collapsed into one icon that notifies you how many of them you have. When playing a mage solo, after casting Arcane Brilliance on yourself, your icon will display 1/8. If you're partied with a priest who casts Power Word: Fortitude as well, your icon will display 2/8. If you need to know precisely what you do or do not have, you can hover over the icon and a dropdown window will show you a list of each buff with a check mark next to the ones you already have.

All eight buffs are labeled as follows:

Stats
Attack Power
Spell Power
Critical Strike
Stamina
Attack Speed
Spell Haste
Mastery

In Mists of Pandaria, even without mods, it will be easy to tell if you're missing a buff in a raid. If your icon displays 7/8, simply hover over the icon and yell at the slacker who didn't cast Attack Speed.

Character creation

When you create a character in the current game, you choose your race and class and then you choose your physical appearance by scrolling through the various options with the arrows you see in the image to the right. That isn't quite how it works anymore.

In Mists of Pandaria, you choose your race and class the same way as you always have, but the appearance options are broken down differently. You choose a category (such as Hair), and then that category expands into a full-sized bar on the screen. That bar is filled with thumbnails displaying the various options. So rather than scrolling back and forth through each individual option, trying to find the one you want, you simply click on the thumbnail that looks best to you. It makes the process much more user-friendly.

Additionally, in the bottom right-hand side of the screen, there is a small gameplay video for your chosen class so you can see a little bit of how the game plays in action before you settle on it. This system is likely familiar to those of you in the Diablo III beta, because Diablo III currently has the exact same system.

[chaos5061]

Mists of Pandaria: Dave "Fargo" Kosak interview Pt.1

From WoW Insider:
Dave "Fargo" Kosak, lead quest designer for World of Warcraft, sat down with us at the Mists of Pandaria press event for an interview. We talked about the Horde/Alliance conflict, voice acting, pop culture references, Mists' accelerated production schedule, and more. Check it out!

WoW Insider: I guess I'm just gonna start off with some basic stuff.

Dave Kosak: Basic stuff is good!

Let's start with your overall philosophy for Mists of Pandaria.

Well, we're constantly experimenting with quests, and in Cataclysm, we created some pretty linear zones, as I'm sure you might've noticed. Some really big story arcs and big finishes. Certainly like in Mount Hyjal, we phased a huge amount of the zone, which worked because it was a pretty linear zone. A couple drawbacks, though: It was a shame that on your second or third time through, you had to play it exactly the same way. You know, you kinda lose some of that open-world feeling, you lose a little bit of that exploration when it's linear like that. But we loved the storytelling, so what we wanted to do with Mists was keep that kind of storytelling but make sure that you have the opportunity to go out and explore and experience the expansion differently, so ... let's see.

We have kind of a lot of non-linearity in the zones that are in the middle of the expansion, particularly Kun-Lai Summit and Valley of the Four Winds. We still have very strong storytelling, and we try to do it with groups of quests that share this main plot arc, but you can do those quests in almost any order. They're all thematically related to each other, so the zone has a really strong theme, but you can kind of pick and choose ... if you're playing on another character, you can do just the ones you really like, or if you want to explore, you can run around and find some stuff. You haven't been able to do that in a while, you know? It feels really good.

I think another one of the big things we're trying and tweaking is when and how often we use phasing. We have a lot of powerful storytelling tools, and phasing is what I like to call our "story sledgehammer," you know? That's the big bomb, right? The downside of phasing is that it splits up the players; the upside is that it changes the world when you do stuff.

So looking at that, we really wanted to split up players less in Pandaria, so we're reserving phasing for those big, huge story milestones that really matter -- so, like with the big dragon statue in the Jade Forest. Alliance and Horde war in that zone really climaxes there; the statue gets destroyed, and there are consequences from that clash that really ripple through the entire continent. So we're using phasing there for sure.

But for your day-to-day questing through the zone, we try to avoid phasing because it makes your experience a little janky, particularly in your max-level zones with your questing and dailies; we like to keep people together so you can group up and do those. We have a lot of tricks up our sleeves when it comes to cosmetic phasing, which we employed heavily in, for example, patch 4.2.

The Sentinel Tree in the Molten Front.

Yes, exactly. You saw the whole hub kind of change around you as you progressed, but we never kept you from interacting with other players.

Right, you had your own little "you place."

Your own progression! We liked how that felt a lot and we didn't separate players there, and we do a lot of that in Pandaria, where the world changes but you're still out in the world, not alone.

A lot of other triple-A games have embraced lots of voice acting for quests. What's your take on that for WoW?

Sure, yeah. One of benefits of our "ancient" text-based quest interface is that we can iterate right up until the very last second, and we're constantly iterating to make sure the quests flow well and the stories play out in a way that feels right, and voices make that difficult because of the turnaround time.

I also like that our questing is very fast-paced. We build our quests under the assumption that you can not read the quest text if you want and you can still complete the quests just fine. That's fine, right? That's just how you wanna play. My team, we make sure we still have really good writing, that if you take the time to read the quest text, you're getting a lot out of it.

But our game is a really fast-playing game. You can zip through a hub, particularly if you played through the zone before. You want to play it again, we want to have all the replay value of the combat, but you don't need to read the text all over again. And WoW lets you do that really quickly, very fast-paced. Other games that do the voice acting and lots of decisions in the dialogue, well, you do a lot of standing around. It's a different kind of game -- nothing wrong with it, but we like what we have, with the ability for players to engage with the story as much or as little as they want or skip it entirely if they want and get to the combat.

People who play the game have strong thoughts either way on the amount and variety of pop culture references while doing zones and questing. What's your take on it? How do you find the balance?

The thing about pop culture references is that, more than any other Blizzard game, we can get away with it in World of Warcraft. People spend a lot of hours in World of Warcraft, and after a while, you're on there with your guild and your friends and it's not so much about being immersed in the world, it's about being immersed socially with your friends. So if there's something we can reference with kind of a nod and a wink, it's fine, because the game is just about you with your friends. So we have a lot of flexibility.

So I try, with references, to make sure that it fits perfectly in both ways. It has to describe what's happening perfectly, but it's also lyrics to Duran Duran's Hungry Like The Wolf -- but it's about hungry wolves! We always try and make sure it makes total sense so it isn't immersion-breaking, it's just a little extra jolt of something.

So, in the case of Uldum, a lot of players felt that just playing through the plot of an Indiana Jones movie was a little different or maybe less fun than just playing through a more original WoW story.

We got a lot of different reactions to Uldum. Players overwhelmingly named it their favorite zone ...

Yeah, we saw that poll!

Yeah! It's because you can totally relate to it. Harrison Jones, adventure, and all that. We used a lot of tricks in Uldum I feel we may have overused, cinematics and stuff, enough that it didn't really feel like WoW as we know it after a while. Going through, it felt like Harrison Jones was the hero, too, and not your character, so we're making sure when you're playing a quest line, your character is the hero, not someone else. I think people who respond negatively to that are like, "Wait, I thought I was the hero here?" And that's Harrison Jones' schtick, where he thinks you're his sidekick.

So going forward, we're putting more the focus on the player, but we do definitely like the experience of having an adventure with a particularly cool character. Like in Valley of the Four Winds, there's Chen Stormstout, you do a lot of adventuring with him. You do a lot of stuff, you get to learn a lot about Chen, meet his family, and all that. But you're the hero of the story.

You were involved in creating some player-favorite characters like Mylune from Hyjal. Quite a popular gal!

Someone dressed as Mylune at BlizzCon! It made my day!

Do you have any characters you created for MoP that are personal favorites or that you became very attached to?

Well, you know, now that I'm lead quest designer, I don't get to do a lot of hands-on character creation anymore, so it's my job to get down in the trenches with my team and make sure that lots of cool characters are making their way into the story. So, I had an idea for a character you might have seen in the Wandering Isle: Jojo Ironbrow, until you bring him the item he cannot smash with his head and that becomes his new, beloved weapon. So I didn't get to personally make him, but I made sure he got in -- "Hey! I got this guy, with a head! And he smashes stuff!"

We have a lot of really interesting characters. There's a comic coming out called Pearl of Pandaria, and in it, we meet Li-Li, who's Chen's niece, and in the comic she goes out into the world with Uncle Chen and starts exploring with him. And in MoP, you get to meet her and adventure with her and her uncle.

Prince Anduin has always been a really compelling character -- his whole history and development and just how much is asked of Prince Anduin so early in his life. I just thought it was really compelling, you know: In vanilla WoW, you walked into the throne room, and there's this kid! Who's this kid, you know? So I did quests with him in the Alliance part of Twilight Highlands. He's actually a major character in Pandaria; he's shipwrecked there, and the Alliance characters are looking for him.

[chaos5061]

Mists of Pandaria: Dave "Fargo" Kosak interview Pt.2

The "White Pawn"?

He is the mysterious White Pawn that everyone's looking for! The king's son, lost on Pandaria. Anduin gets to do some really cool stuff. And he's a priest, so we get to see him do a lot of cool priest stuff. At one point, he uses the priest Mind Control spell to "Jedi mind trick" himself out of a bad situation. We had a lot of fun with that character.

It's been pretty clear from the level of content that's done today, and even based on what we saw at BlizzCon, that this expansion was created a little faster than previous expansions. How did you deal with a more accelerated process?

We're being smarter and more efficient and we're developing our teams so that we kind of piggyback off of each other. So while some of our teams were working on the outstanding dungeons and raids that were in 4.3, the others were working on the content for Pandaria. We have this patch plan so that all of our teams can roll out content faster, and we're just trying to be really smart about how we build content such that we can provide more content. We're committed to providing more content to players, so we're being smarter about our development time and our man hours.

A main focus we saw for MoP was the Horde/Alliance conflict. Can you tell us about how we can expect that to play out while questing?

It's interesting because in the box product -- you know, you probably saw it -- but you're not arriving on Pandaria with a huge army. It starts with a shipwreck and a small crew that you kind of adventure with, and you're trying to make use of everything about you. Most of the Alliance/Horde conflict is about that, small groups using the environment to the best of your ability, biding your time.

And in the patches that follow, in the patch plan, that's when things really start to accelerate. In the first patch, that's when the ships roll up on the beach, and then the tanks roll out of the ships, and then there's open warfare. And there'll be other events building up to this -- what's happening with Wrynn, with Garrosh, such that in our final raid, everybody has a reason to kick down the gates of Orgrimmar and take down Garrosh.



And that's exciting! There's that whole story arc we have planned, and I'm not sure how it'll take shape, with how many patches it'll take to come across, but we have these plans to tell this story about the Alliance and the Horde and the pandaren and their cultural exchange and what happens to Garrosh, leading up to the future.

The Cataclysm zone revamp ended up being a bit more exhaustive than you first intended.

(laughing) Yeaahhh.

Slightly more! Some zones still didn't quite find --

Wait. Is this a Silithus question?

No! No. You can keep Silithus the way it is forever; I don't want to go back there. But in terms of zones like Theramore, Arathi Highlands, stuff that has real story hooks, do you ever plan to go back and touch some of those?

(laughing) Theramore will be touched. But we're not really eager to jump back into Arathi Highlands at this point. Maybe in the future. There's still a lot of story hooks dangling there in the old world. Sometimes we have the opportunity to revisit it, like in Twilight Highlands with the Dragonmaw and Grim Batol. So when an excuse comes up to do that, we're happy to. But I wouldn't expect many old-world revamps for a while.

This is about you, really. You're a fairly new addition to the team ... fairly?

Kind of, sure. I joined during the Wrath patch cycle. Two, two and a half years now?

When you joined, what was your goal with the WoW story? What did you want to accomplish with it?

I certainly wanted to become more involved with the WoW story, and certainly with Pandaria, I'm involved heavily with Metzen. I'm involved with making our stories playing out across all of our comics, web stories, and in-game. What's important to me is making sure that our external books and stories are tied into our game heavily, that there's a tighter connection there. That's my main goal.

I also want our franchise to develop this overall story arc that makes our games compelling. I love what we're doing with Garrosh. I can't take credit for it, but we set up that character in Outland when we first met him. You helped him find himself, and then by Northrend, he's a war leader, and then we saw him take command in Cataclysm and take advantage of the Cataclysm to kind of drive the Horde forward. But he also started to alienate certain parts of the Horde. And now we'll see him alienate even more of the Horde, kind of drive a wedge in it, and we'll see him reap what he's sown. And that'll cause all kinds of trouble world-wide until finally we take him out. And that's really compelling, that arc, and we think it'll keep people coming back.

[chaos5061]

The new LFR roll system - Please explain Pt.1

From the WoW Forums:
There are so many ways this could work based on how Blizzard explained it.

Does a boss drop multiples of the same item and attempt to pass them all out to the highest rollers, with gold given as booby prizes to the absolute highest that can't use an item?

Does it just take the 4 highest rollers and pass out an item to those that can use and give gold to the remainder, potentially passing out less than 4 pieces of loot?

Does the boss have a "pool" of items it can pass out? Say the raid kills Madness of Deathwing, and it chooses to have the ability to pass out Titahk (caster staff), Gurthalak (2h STR sword), Rathrak (caster dagger), and Maw of the Dragonlord (healer mace).

Say the 4 highest rolls are 3 warrior DPS and a mage.
Does it give the 3 warriors one Gurthalak each? How does it pick what to give the mage? Maybe he wanted the staff, but the system gave him a dagger...can he pick, or is he stuck with the random thing the system gave him?
What if one of the warriors is already using a heroic Dragon Soul weapon? does it still give him a Gurthalak, or can he pick the gold?

Let's pretend one of the 4 highest rollers is a hunter, who can't (practically) use any of the above. Does the system then pass out 3 items to the remaining players and the hunter gets gold resulting in fewer than 4 pieces of loot being rewarded? Or does it go down the list until it finds someone that can use an item that "dropped"? Does it go down the list rewarding gold to ineligible players? How many players can it potentially reward gold to if it does this?

Maybe the boss doesn't "drop" anything at all, and the 4 highest rolls just get something from its loot table if they want, or choose gold if they don't want an item?

SO MANY QUESTIONS!

A few salient points here:

First, other players will not affect your loot in any way. Another player winning will not cause you to lose. Another player winning a mace will not mean that she took your mace. If there are many rogues in the raid, your chance of winning a rogue item is not diminished. We may decide that each player has an X% chance to get loot, or we may decide that X number of players get loot, and then randomly determine who those lucky players are.

Second, the item you win will be “useful” in the sense that it’s potentially usable by your current spec. This does not mean that warriors will get leather because warriors can equip leather (at a huge stat loss). It also does not mean that the game will always give you an item you want or an upgrade for the items you have. It just looks and says “You are a Holy priest, so here is a random item chosen from the Holy priest-appropriate items that this boss can drop.”

This system is a different feature from the “bonus roll.” When choosing to cash in on your bonus roll, you will always win something, but it may only be gold. If you win an item, the game again looks at your spec and only awards you an item appropriate for your current spec (using the priest example above).

Finally, this loot system will only be used in Raid Finder, and possibly for world bosses. We might consider using it for Dungeon Finder depending on how it works out. However, we still like the basic design of organized groups of guilds or friends deciding who should get loot. We will also no doubt iterate and refine the system once players can try it out in beta.

This sounds far too complicated for the average player.

That isn’t our intent. We’re providing details here because players want to understand them. In the game, the experience will just be “You won this.” You will either be happy because it’s an item or really happy because it’s a big upgrade for you. You may be jealous of other players who won great items, but you hopefully won’t hate them since they didn’t take an item away from you.

When gear becomes so hugely important to your progression that you start to feel the need to muse over how to create new systems that "fix" the way loot is gained...then maybe the problem isn't the looting system, but the importance of the gear.

this is why we wanted the squish

derp whatever happend to that Idea.... patch 6.0 or 7.0 or sometime next decade.

The main reason that they need to "fix" the way loot is gained is because people are too greedy/stupid and roll need on things they don't really need.

this is why we wanted the squish

derp whatever happend to that Idea.... patch 6.0 or 7.0 or sometime next decade.

The main reason that they need to "fix" the way loot is gained is because people are too greedy/stupid and roll need on things they don't really need.

There’s probably some of that, but overall it’s not strictly a problem of players being malicious or uninformed. Raid Finder just feels different from a normal or heroic raid. The experience a lot of us have in Raid Finder is an item pops up, but the raid may already be pulling the next boss, and there isn’t time or inclination to sit down and discuss who should get the item, so you just hit Need if the game lets you. Often times you don’t even realize which items you won until the run is over. We think Raid Finder is a streamlined way to raid so it needs a more streamlined loot system. Reducing loot drama among strangers isn’t a bad goal either, but it wasn’t our only concern.

Sounds good so far.

On that note however, if the tech is being added to determine specs and rolls in raid to that detail though, can that system at least be used to have a boss not drop rogue items for a group that has no rogue, 8 weeks straight? WTB a system that doesn't drop holy plate when you hava resto shaman and resto druid, etc. You get the idea Something for guild/normal mode groups to at least filter so many wasted drops that are useful to no one.

Perhaps, but our concern was that if players have too much control over what loot dropped, it invites a lot of group engineering. You might be able to force the game to drop druid items if you formed a raid of nothing but druids. Both Valor Points and the new bonus roll design are intended to partially offset the potential for just having really bad luck.

[chaos5061]

The new LFR roll system - Please explain Pt.2

one of the other big questions is since this is a random item...how is it handling duplicate items..

Boss drops Tier chest token..Bob wins it, next week boss drops same token and bob wins again...is it possible for him to get the chest token again, even though he is wearing the one from last week.

Same idea but with weapons... say souldrinker, Bob wins it this week, is it possible for the loot system to give it to him again next week if he wins his roll?

The new system won't have a record of your loot history or check your inventory. In your example, Bob might win the same item off of the boss every week (assuming he's running as the same spec each time).

The only thing the system looks at is 1) if you are eligible for loot (have you killed this guy already this week?), and 2) what your current spec is.

so how does someone save up on gear to change spec?

I mean if an arms warrior wanted to respec prot, how can he get a decent shield before respecting? I mean if all shields are tank items and since he's not tank specced, does he have to respect to tank and then get run through an instance and contribute next to nothing as a prot warrior due to not being able to use alot of key abilities and doing less damage than with his arms spec?

Before this I would try and keep an eye out for good items for my off-spec assuming no one else needed the item in the group. When you do the same instance several times you're bound to get a tank that already has that item and so on

Ideally, you would gear up through dungeons or other sources of loot and enter as main spec. One of the sources of current loot frustration is when a player who isn’t in a role earns gear for that role. We also don’t want to give DPS players a bunch of tanking items that they don’t want. In Mists, the one way you can communicate to the game what gear you want is through the role you're filling in the raid.

We're confident there are enough alternate means to obtain viable loot for your off spec in Mists that you'll be adequately equipped to perform in that role when you want to.

So you can win the same item over and over? Doesn't this seem like a waste of loot?

Loot gets wasted today if someone needs it who already has it (probably because they need everything), or if the game just keeps dropping the same stuff over and over. Some amount of loot wastage is okay -- we don't actually want loot accrual to be too efficient or players finish the content too quickly. On the other hand, we don't want it to be so frustrating that players give up. Slot machines need to pay off once in awhile, but not every time.

[chaos5061]

The new LFR roll system - Please explain Pt.3

There seems to be a fair amount of confusion about this system, so let me clarify some of what I'm seeing. Before jumping into it, just know we have plans to do a developer blog on Mists of Pandaria looting soon. We'd like to cover some of the larger questions/concerns in a more visible way, rather than further burying them in responses here.

Will the items that we win be trade-able?
You can’t trade loot if the game assigns it to you in LFR. That would defeat the whole purpose. Imagine it works like completing a quest – here is your personal, soulbound reward. If you enter with a full pre-made group, then you can use Master Looter or the loot system of your choice (just like today) and can trade items as normal.

You have a personal slot machine to play, and so do each of the other 24 raid members, and no ones personal slot machine affects the outcome of anyone ELSE'S slot machine.
This is correct. The only reason I offered that the game might decide how many players get loot in advance, is we thought it might be weird if sometimes 25 players or 0 players got loot -- that might feel broken to participants. However, for the sake of argument, just assume that other players won’t affect your loot. That is the whole point. It won’t matter whether you killed the boss with 1 player or 25 players, and it won’t matter what the spec or class is of those players. The loot is per person and not per raid.

If you are in a 25-player group, can people "pass" and increase the chance that other players will win, by reducing the number of people rolling in the group?
No. There is no concept of rolling in today’s sense (again, only when using this particular LFR looting system). A boss dies and the game says “You won this,” and gives the item to you… hopefully with a little more ceremony than that.

What's going to happen with bows?
In Mists of Pandaria, bows, crossbows and guns would be considered hunter-appropriate weapons. In LFR, a rogue or warrior would never be offered a bow as a loot reward. Rogues and warriors will still be able to equip ranged weapons, but they would be very sub-optimal for doing so (sort of the equivalent of a warrior wearing cloth). We left the ability to equip weapons for role-playing reasons and because some existing rogues and warriors have epic or legendary ranged weapons, and it would be mean if they could no longer equip them at all.

The way I understood it is:

Everyone rolls - after everyone rolls, the top rollers will be eligible for loot - the boss then releases its random loot and whoever the top rollers are (who are able to use the items) wins the item
The new system is more different than that. Players aren’t asked to roll. The game just “makes the roll” behind the scenes. The game then picks appropriate loot for each of the winners. This is an important distinction because you aren’t competing with other players for specific items – all of the Arms and Fury warriors could win the two-handed Strength sword, or two could win the sword and the third could win a plate Strength helm, if that were also on the boss loot table.

Can't you guys just make the obvious: Make all the drop items unique?
Sure, we could do that, but it seems like all you are really asking for is for the loot system to be more efficient so that you have to run the raid fewer times to get the items you want (since you won’t “waste” a roll on a duplicate item). If we need for raiding to be more loot-efficient, there are many ways to do that, but we don’t want players to gear up too quickly or they run out of things to do. (We also don’t want them to gear up so slowly that they could lose interest.) Also consider that some players may want more than one copy of the same item for different spec or gemming purposes.

This still doesn't really address the problem of people rolling when they really don't need anything. What if those top 4 or 5 rollers all don't need anything off the boss and just receive gold? Completely unfair to the other 20 people who could have made use of the boss drops.
There is no roll like you are describing. A boss dies, and some players in the game will receive loot. They don’t have an option to pass or to get gold instead. But that’s okay, because what they do won’t affect what happens to you. Imagine everyone entering the raid gets a lottery scratch off card for each boss, and after a boss dies, everyone scratches off a card. Some players win. Some don’t. The game then pushes loot to the winners. Then you kill the next boss and scratch off another card.

This just seems like a waste of time and energy. There has to be a better way of making it fair.

I don't have a problem with someone winning a role if they can use the item even if it is offspec. I just don't like people being inconsiderate and rolling need when they don't need it or already have it.
We don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a group of strangers who may never play together again to be considerate, especially at the pace at which most Raid Finder groups progress. Often, there is barely time to hit Need or Pass, let alone have a discussion about who gets what loot. The goal of the system isn’t really to be “more fair,” but to make a more streamlined system to match the fast pace of Raid Finder, and to cut down on the number of arguments over loot, because the game will now be making all the decisions about who gets which item instead of the players. Life may still feel unfair sometimes, in that a player who contributed less than you wins a good item, or the player running the raid for the first time gets an item that you spent weeks to get, or someone may have six trinkets to your one. We still want random loot to be random, though the bonus roll system will help a little with being terminally unlucky.

If you have additional questions or concerns we haven't already addressed here, feel free to bring them up in this thread. We'll take your posts into consideration when crafting the developer blog.

[chaos5061]

Mists of Pandaria: Ray Cobo interview Pt.1

From WoW Insider:
Ray Cobo, one of WoW's senior producers, sat down with us at the Mists of Pandaria press event to discuss the development process, new game features, and more. Check out how an expansion like MoP gets made quickly!

WoW Insider: Mists of Pandaria, from everything we've seen, is on an accelerated timetable. How do you, as a producer, make sure the process is going forward?

Ray Cobo: We 've learned a lot over the years about how to make expansions and how the game development of WoW has kind of evolvd over the years and so with each expansion we get better at what we do, our tools get better, our muscle memory from the team gets better in terms of how to make stuff. We have such a huge library of things now that we've built and content that we've made that we can actually pull from and figure out how to make that better or how to not do that again kind of thing and learn from those pitfalls or successes and try to get more efficient every time. I think that's something the team has done for this one specifically is that each time it seems to get a little bit faster and get a little bit easier to some degree. There are still a lot of challenges in terms of curve balls that you get halfway through, like in this one it was recently we decided to have two more zones. So, it's like, okay well, didn't have that in the plan but we'll figure out how to kinda get that in. Everyone on the production side and definitely on the dev team is very committed to make sure the content is great so we want to make sure we give the devs time to iterate and explore and try to figure out what's going to make this game great, and going to make the expansion great, because that's a core philosophy at Blizzard.

How do you divide the work between working on live content like patches and working on an expansion at the same time?

It can be tough sometimes, but we know the number of patches we want to do sometimes, or most of the time I want to say. Sometimes we will get a patch thrown in where it's like "we really need to put something out that's really cool," but in general we have a good sense of here's the scope of content that we want to do for the patches so we can block out time for that and we kind of have a good sense of what the scope of the expansion is as well. So, we try to carve out chunks of time. We do a bit of hopscotching between different types of content, so we'll work on patch content for a little while, or some of the team will work on patch content and the other parts of the team will work on expansion content. And then we have an even different set of the team that is working on live content, making sure things are running well, things are bug free, and addressing any issues that come up that are live at the moment.

People who like to complain on forums --

Wait, wait wait wait. We have people who complain on forums?

I know, right? They say that there is an "A" team working on expansion stuff and then a worse "B" team working on live stuff. I take it that that's not the case at all?

That's not the case at all. It's the same team. It's a very, very solid team that has a lot of experience making this game and they are able to flex between current live content and future content and near and far future content. So, it's all the same team, it's just a question of shifting gears between different segments of the team. It's definitely a pipeline, to some degree. You have to have an order of operations -- you have to have certain things done before you can move on to other things. I think it just kind of varies along the way during the process. You might have the level designers who are working on a particular zone or something and the quest designers are working on either modifying quests that are existing in live or existing in very close patch content is coming out, because they can't really work on what the level designers are doing until those guys are done. It's kind of an order of operations thing. So we try to move people around so that it makes sense that they are working on the most important thing at that time.

You had sort of convenience features introduced in Wrath and then refined in Cataclysm, like you went from Dungeon Finder to Raid Finder to building up Dungeon Finder into something not only worth doing but kind of a core component to the game. In Mists, you have an absolute ton of features being added, way more than we've seen in previous expansions. How do you decide what features get tabled and what features stick around?

It's tough because we fall in love with just about everything that comes up. With that said I think we are also our biggest critics, I think that we strive to make sure the thing that we're putting out fits into either the philosophy of a particular expansion or the general philosophy of make it awesome, make it great before it goes out, that kind of thing. There are a lot of features our design team, you know they're complete rock stars and they're very smart, so they come up with some great ideas and we look at each on of those and try to figure out how they fit into the expansion that we're trying to make. But it can be tough, I mean, it can be hard to say "well, that's an awesome idea, I don't know if we're going to actually be able to fully bake that, or give it the love that it needs to get that out there into the world so we might want to wait. But hte beauty of this whole thing is that WoW is a snowball, right? It's getting bigger and bigger the farther it goes down and if you can't put it in now there's definitely an opportunity to put it in later and the evolution of the game makes it one of the most incredible games ever.

Features like Dungeon and Raid Finder weren't even core expansion features, they were stuff that were patched in later, which bodes well for the production process.

Yeah, and I think it speaks to the fact that Blizzard has a very strong relationship with its players and the fanbase, right? Some of those ideas come from the players and they're like, wow, wouldn't it be cool if we had this kind of thing, or if we had the ability to do this, or if I could play with my buddy that's on a different server that'd be awesome, kind of thing, you know? So we listen to all that and we try to figure out how to make that work with the technology that we have and how can we make that work in a way that's not going to disrupt the culture and the style of gameplay that we have, and really try and give the players the things they feel are going to bring them more enjoyment.

I tend to read WoW forums as part of my job, to see what people are talking about, ideas for articles, content for the site. When we were talking about this press event, not "we," not me, but other people had bets going about what feature talked about at Blizzcon was going to be cut before it got to press, and a lot of people said Pet Battles. You know, they figured that was something that would end up Dance Studio'd, whatever. I was pleased to see it was still on the table and apparently functional. That's a pretty big undertaking -- it's less using in-engine assests and more like creating something out of whole cloth for use in the game. Cory said that this is really the first minigame, so how have you guys handled that process?

[chaos5061]

Mists of Pandaria: Ray Cobo interview Pt.2

We look at the scope and the size of WoW and there is definitely areas of wow that are not widely utilized as other areas, and we felt like pets was one of those things because everybody collects these things, everyone has pets of some degree or another, and it would be great to associate some sort of gameplay with those, so what did we have to do to make that happen? Our designers sat down and came up with some cool ideas and we started to flush that out and the more we played with it the more fun we started to have with it and so we thought "this is going to be awesome," and it's not something that is required for players. It's something that people can do on their side time, or if they're waiting for a dungeon to start up, or sitting around waiting for a guy to respawn, then i think its a fun little side minigame, and its something that we havent ever really done before, but it could be something players really enjoy and if it is we will look for more ways to do something like that in the future.

What do you think about WoW's staying power? Obviously, a game that's around for almost 8 years and in development for much longer than that, there has to be challenges and gamers are fickle types -- why do you think WoW has managed to be as big as it is for so long?

That's a great question. There's over 10 million people playing this game and that number has definitely grown over the years, and I think that the strongest aspect of WoW is that not only the qulity of the game and the fact that Blizzard really wants to make the content amazing and fun, but also just the player community and the relationship Blizzard has with the players and that sense of communnication and relationship in terms of making sure we're listening to what they want and they are aware of what we want to bring to the table with this new stuff.

So I think the biggest strength is that sense of community between Blizzard and the player base and then you layer on top of that just a great game, I think that's really the key to success overall.

What's your favorite addition to WoW in Mists of Pandaria?

I'm really looking forward to running some of those dungeons. I think they are going to be a lot of fun. I've felt like up until now, it's every expansion that I've played is save the world, everything is coming to an end, we have to kill this guy, this dungeon boss is gonna take us all down... I'm kind of looking forward to maybe saving the beer on this one. Kind of getting the brewery back working again and doing some of that stuff. I think the tone is a little bit different. There's plenty of conflict, there's plenty of vicious enemies that you'll run into in Mists of Pandaria, but I think exploring the new continent and the tone that we took with some of this is going to be a lot of fun to play through.

I was just recalling that my favorite part of vanilla WoW and especially in Burning Crusade is that sense of adventure, somewhere totally new, being able to explore and interact with these new cultures and new architecture, stuff like that, and it really looks like Mists of Pandaria is delivering on that. That same old-school adventuring.

We hope that's the case. We learned a lot of lessons coming out of Cataclysm too, and I think that we want to help players adventure and explore the way they want to do it so we've opened up the questing world too, so that you don't have to do things as linearly, we took out a lot of the phasing stuff we did in Cataclysm. It feels like the players will be able to go at their own pace and choose your own adventure thing along the way, so it'll be a lot of fun. Players will have a lot of fun doing it.

[chaos5061]

Apparently all the interviews are different. SO I will be posting the Wowhead interviews tomorrow. Unless WoW Insider posts more interviews that will be all I post. For all the rest of the info like interviews that have been translated into foreign languages check this page that Blizzard put up: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4216984069 It has links to all the fansites and their posts about the Press Tour.

[chaos5061]

Wowhead Cory Stockton Interview Pt.1

From Wowhead:
Question: I noticed that Prime Glyphs were removed while playing today, and there were some new fun glyphs--like the one that turned druids into a ridable stag. What's the direction for Inscription in MoP--and can we plan on seeing more fun cosmetic glyphs?
There's definitely going to be more cosmetic glyphs in general. It's something we wanted to do more of initially--and even more important now. Major glyphs have more prominence without primes, so minor glyphs take on more cosmetic stuff to feel more cool and meaningful--almost like a form of transmogrification. It's really cool for druids--if they want to be in tree form all time, you can now. I think we made a few glyphs for mages to modify polymorph too.

As far as it affects how it hits the profession--I don't think it will change too much, with specifically how major and minor glyphs align differently. Most things we're doing is fixing gaps and holes in places that it was too hard to get the next skillup. We changed the skillup system a little bit in Cata by items that give multi-skillups.
And also the Darkmoon Faire profession quests too now…
Yeah, the Darkmoon Faire has been great--those final five points can be really big for people.
Q: I guess that tied into one of my other questions--everyone is looking forward to pet battles, but we haven't heard much about the other professions at the press event. Archaeology was cited in one of the post-mortems as needing some reworking, so just curious if the other professions are having any cool perks on the way--BlizzCon mentioned a jewelcrafing mount--and if there are any concrete solutions to spicing Archaeology up. The Lorewalkers seem to have a lot of promise.
Yeah, we're actually looking for a way to hook the Lorewalkers into all Archaeology. There's a concept of doing Lorewalkers and getting faction reputation there there could give you skillpoints--we haven't figured out how to completely do it, but it makes sense.

We have new factions and lore in general for Pandaria--it will help archaeology feel very specific in linking in to the history. It's a way for players to learn more, if they like learning about that kind of stuff. It will feel more specific than just finding a random area, and bring some focus to the profession.

In regards to some of the other professions, Cooking got a lot of work here. There's different types---steaming, frying, broiling, for example. So there's different types of cooking, and you can work down the recipes, kind of like a sub-tree, with one specific type of buff. the way we've set it up, if you max-level in one sub tree, you can make max level food for a group. Rather than learning all of the recipes (which you can still do and get an achievement), you can pick one--say for Agility stats--but then if you max it, you can get the recipes that work for a whole group. Cool way to give it more flavor, but works for everyone.
Q: Bit about mounts--everyone loves them, and I liked hearing about the Wintersaber-esque Cloud Serpents today. Will there be more PvP mounts besides the Gladiator ones? Also, when I interviewed Dave Kosak back in October, he talked about a potential quest to modify your mount's appearance--any updates on that? What cool mounts are in the works in general?
Yeah, if you like the Wintersaber mounts, you'll really like the Cloud Serpents.

We have a ton of mounts that we're planning to give out--more than in Cataclysm as far as what we can give out across the game. There's mounts from rares, achievements, and dungeon bosses. One thing we're adding is world bosses--raid bosses--we're bringing that back, and one plan for the rewards is that each boss will have a unique mount in their loot table.

However, mounts are sacred--one of the only things left that's visual prestige. So we do want to make sure we give them out for the right things, like the Challenge Mode achievements Tom spoke about. That's one we think will look super epic and cool and we want to make sure it stays just for that--you can't get that look anywhere else in the game.
Q: Is there going to be a new level cap, and if so, any examples of perks in the works?
Well, there's a couple things that are going on with guilds. We're still figuring out if we're raising the cap or not, to be honest, Still figuring out if we want the cap to be at 25 or not. I think it really comes down to it, it's if we feel there's enough perks that feel right at the time. If we felt there weren't any additional perks that felt convenient without adding 'player power,' we'd leave it as it is, but continue to add other features we'd been talking about for guilds, like new rewards. We're also going to have challenge modes and scenarios play into guilds.

We've also been looking into changing how quest/guild xp works, so you get flat amount of xp on quests that are green at a minimum. A complaint we've had is that lower-level players feel that they can't contribute much to a guild, since you get such a small amount of xp then. So something we thought about doing, if that if it's green minimum, all quests contribute the same amount.

A lot of work has gone in, even though we can't show the new results yet--but the guild system is one we really liked. For cataclysm, we felt that people loved the rewards and that feeling of a group.
With some many people playing with real ID friends now across servers, it's good to know that people in guilds feel there's something exclusive there as well.
For sure, one thing I can say is that we're removing the cap--no weekly reputation or daily XP cap. That will all be gone.
Q: It's been mentioned a few times that mounts would possibly be BoA in the future, as well as achievements. Any word on titles and details on that in general? A lot of people want to have old titles so they don't feel they've lost anything if they reroll Pandaren. As for achievements, will past ones count retroactively, or just moving forward in the future?
That's a great question. We're talking about a whole bunch of different ideas. For titles, what we're thinking of doing--nothing final--when you reach the level at which the title could initially be obtained at, then you can use it. For example, let's take Kingslayer. If you got it on one character, you couldn't show it on your other characters until you reached the min level of 80.
So basically, no bank alts.
Exactly, so you still own it--we haven't made the decision, but what would the game be like if everyone ran around with Kingslayer? It wouldn't feel as cool anymore.

As far as things like rewards, those are always going to be shared. So 5 players could contribute to A Long, Strange Trip--and they'll all get the Violet Proto-Drake.

As far as mounts go, it's the very next thing we want to do. We've learned a lot from making the pets account-wide for the battle system, which we're pretty deep in right now. The very next system to get this treatment will be mounts. We're not sure if it will make it in for launch, but if not, then definitely a patch right away.
Q: Back up to titles for a sec--what will be your policy on BoA server first ones, like Death's Demise?
Server-first titles are something that would probably not be shared across an account, specifically because that's something you want to keep as rare and to the name of the exact character as possible. But again, one of those decisions that we'd need to talk about a little bit, figure out where to go.

[chaos5061]

Wowhead Cory Stockton Interview Pt.2

Q: Moving onto Transmog--something we've loved doing site features on at Wowhead--back at BlizzCon, you guys were talking about different cosmetic enhancements such as Paladins with visible librams or Hunters with staves. Has there been any progression on that?

Also, are there also plans to keep introducing new hooks for players that already found their 'perfect' mog outfit--things like bringing back old sets such as Tier 3, or lifting some weapon restrictions? There's a ton of gorgeous BC fist weapons, but hardly any current weapons. And will monks get any unique class-specific sets to make up for the fact that they have no previous tiers--kind of like Death Knights at least getting distinctive starter-zone armor to mog?
Let's start with monks--they'll have tier sets starting forward in Tier 14, and challenge mode sets, but nothing from the past. We're probably not going spend a ton of time going back to balance things out--but we have some fun looks for the future.

As for restrictions, we are planning on opening up some transmog restrictions in the future, perhaps weapons--we prefer to start narrow and open up, rather than adding restrictions and taking stuff away from players. We're also looking into having some of the guild items be moggable.

As for the librams and the quivers--that's totally something we've been working on, it's come up a number of times. What we've been talking about is how it will actually fit in--how you'll acquire these items and how they'll be displayed. Would this end up being another armor slot, or would it just be an item that would appear on your character thus forward? Feature is still definitely in the works, but the biggest question is will it make it in time for Mists? Hard to say, right now it's a lower priority.

Transmog is so new, if you add something or lift one restriction, it's still huge and opens up so many more new options.
Q: Tier 13 was the test run for LFR--what do you think worked and what could be improved upon? There's been a lot of discussion about the early exploits, and also guilds thinking they legitimately had to farm LFR in order to have the set bonuses to seriously progress.

Also, how do you show players new to raiding that there's more to raiding besides the loot? Some players think that LFR is impersonal, but those that already have existing communities like queueing up for it with friends. How do you keep everyone happy and refine it in the next tier?
LFR has been huge for us--one of the most successful features in the game, similar to when we implemented the Dungeon Finder. We can watch the numbers exponentially grow--the number of people that are raiding now, compared to before 4.3, is incredibly dramatic--it's so much more. We can't tell you the exact percentage, but it's massively larger. And not only that, they've continued to raid, and these are players that have never raided before.

We feel awesome about the feature. That said, there's a number of issues to tinker with as we move forward. The biggest one is loot--we feel that some players think the loot rules aren't completely fair. So the biggest change is that we're moving towards an individual, per-player loot system. Quite similar to how loot works in Diablo 3, roll loot for each player and you have a chance. Now, this doesn't mean everyone's going to get a roll each time--you'll win a roll, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll win an item. You might just get gold instead. But I think it will hugely impact the feeling of LFR.

One other thing going into LFR--a bonus roll. That concept is, when you do things in the outside world, such as daily quests, you'll essentially get a buff. And when a boss drops something in LFR, you have the option to use a bonus roll. which give you an extra roll, even if you haven't won anything on your per-player loot. If you win an item then, it's generated from the bonus roll and doesn't impact anyone else. A lot of people just roll need on everything and I think a lot of the issues stem from people feeling things are unfair or that they didn't win anything. If we can solve loot issues, LFR can be even more successful, especially because we're putting it on every raid and have so many bosses next tier.
Q: One last question. Watching Arthas fight Illidan today for pet battles was awesome--but the battle itself seemed kind of short. What's still in development for pet battles? Also, at BlizzCon, you were talking about complex ways to get pets--some only spawning in cities, some in the rain? Is that still in the works?
All of those things are still planned. What you saw today is what the actual battle will look like and working in game. But we're currently totally in development on the abilities and how everything works in the back and forth. We just got the game up and running in real time, but what you're not seeing is all the gameplay. We've actually been playing a paper version--we cut it out and that's how we've been tuning it for things to be in the game.

As far as depth goes, it's a pretty deep game if you really want to get into it. There's different abilities you can pick and stats--those stats can be random when you catch the pets.
Will TCG and Blizzard store pets also work?
Absolutely. We plan to have the majority of pets work, almost all of them.

As far as your questions about PvE, all your details are making it in. There's a number of pets you'll just find in the world, but some will only spawn when it's raining, or the winter time, for example. I just put one in the other day that only spawns between 9 pm and midnight--during that time he pops every 15 min. It's a really limited period, and you can imagine people in town talking about it when it spawns.

Pet battles are something we look at as totally optional content that's also really deep if you want to get into it.

[chaos5061]

Wowhead Tom Chilton Interview Pt.1

From Wowhead:
Question: To start off, previewing a monk today was awesome--their abilities looked great and distinctive. Any plans to update animations for other classes or even racial abilities? Monks, as well as worsen and goblins to a certain extent, have more interesting racials, then say, a tauren with herbalism.
We have traditionally done a little bit of incremental changes on the racial abilities each expansion. Honestly at this point, we're so focused on getting the talents set up and really good for every class--they're at varying levels of quality--that is consuming most of our time. There will probably be some time left over for incremental changes, but after everything else is done.
Q: In addition to the linear nature of Cataclysm questing zones, many players felt that it was hard to feel completely engaged in a zone due to heirloom/guild xp bonuses. They'd outlevel a zone before completing a lot of the major plot arcs. The revamped 1-60 content is complete, but was there anything to learn from this in designing future zones? Especially now that Pandaria has more zones than we first heard about at BlizzCon.
Well, actually, we are very deliberately trying to set it up so you can skip some amount of content on the way to 90. We feel those decisions make the World of Warcraft seem like a world. If you look back to original WoW, we had Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, for players to quest in at any given time. There was an amount of choice in what you did--sometimes that choice diminished somewhat, but generally speaking, there were different options.

We'd like to capture that as much as possible, so not only is the quest flow itself a bit less linear, but also your zone choices is a bit less linear. That inherently means you won't get to do all the quests on the way to 90, but it does mean that if you play the game on an alt, you have an option to do something new.

I think the problems you've described with heirlooms or guild xp bonuses and everything stacking becomes worse when it's linear, because when you end that linear experience before you're supposed to, it's a lot more noticeable.
Q: A lot of players loved the Isle of Quel'Danas and Darkmoon Faire, but found the dailies in the Molten Front more of a grind in spite of the more subtle phasing allowing you to quest with friends. The Molten Front has been referenced frequently as a model to reuse in Mists--what do you feel worked in this zone and what do you plan on tweaking in similar future hubs?
Well, I think that what has worked was the concept of having a large area--where it's all about the daily quests--and that there's a progression through the daily quests. You don't just unlock them all on day 1 and do them all for however long.

What didn't work is that it's staged out to take too long for the number of quests you need to do. I think that to get all the marks you needed to get was excessive amount of time. It's really just a question of tuning--I also think that it shouldn't be a one size fits all solution. If the Molten Front is the only daily thing that's available, then it's not as good as if you had a combination of a better-tuned Molten Front along with stuff like other factions--like Tillers or Brwemasters. If we create a wider breath of different content for daily quests--which we're doing on a huge scale, compared to other expansions--then it will feel much better.
Q: We've seen some new directions for battlegrounds today at the presentation, it seems you're really committed to finding new types of gameplay--are there any further developments on world pvp and/or battleground scenarios with that? Will PvP play a role in upcoming patches as things ramp up?
With world PvP, what we're trying to accomplish is identifying what will naturally emerge with world PvP and then have the game support that better. In the past, I feel our attempts to create an area for world PvP haven't been particularly successful, at least from the standpoint of them actually feeling like world PvP. Wintergrasp was a neat zone, and it was cool for the first time to go knock down a fortress with a tank, and Tol Barad was…alright, in that it gave players things to do as far as going out there in huge numbers and taking over these bases, but it didn't really feel like world PvP. Really, what it felt like was a big battleground, and as you saw, kind of over time, it became more and more like an instanced battleground, because that's the direction things take when you have a natural push for objectives.

World PvP is kind of best when it happens on its own, when the conditions of the game naturally encourage the PvP to happen. What we're hoping to do is identify places where that naturally happens, and then give players a bonus for winning those areas--the conquest point cap will be raised. An example is, back in the day with vanilla wow, we would have done something along the lines of 'oh hey, if you take over Soutshore or Tarren Mill, we'll give you an increase to your conquest point cap for the week.' It gives you a reason to engage in world PvP without being really heavy-handed. Instead of 'ok this is the only way to get your awesome armor,' it's 'hey, taking over Southshore is fun.'
Q: As for scenarios, some large ones were compared to battlegrounds at BlizzCon--is there still a PvP angle to them, or are they more for PvE now, tied to NPCs like the wandering Brewmasters?
The scenarios are really mostly for PvE--they're just an extension of PvE group content, it's a way to do group quests in a more elegant manner.
Q: I was really happy to see the revisions to Scholomance today, especially Lilian Voss appearing. I was curious how you went about updating an old dungeon for a new remake. Lots of people really loved Deadmines and SFK, but not so much Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub. What's your goals and philosophy when redoing content, and what have you learned from the hits and misses of Cataclysm?
Well, we've learned quite a bit. When we revamp a dungeon, we look at it to determine what worked, what was popular about it--and identify what wasn't popular about it. And then really try to make sure we retain the soul of the original--keep what's magical while fixing what's goofy or didn't work very well, or just was downright crappy.Aan example would be Scholomance--Mercer this morning gave the example that as soon as you enter the first large room in Scholomance, everyone completely skips it. We're subtly changing the flow so you can experience all the same rooms, but in a different order. The cool bosses are still there, but with new and updated mechanics that we've developed years later.

With Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub, they got a worse reputation than they deserved. A big mistake was going from a tier of content that had 9 instances to run, down to a tier of content where you only have 2 instances to run and no raids. If you run people through the grinder of the same two instances over and over, it ends up feeling much worse. If you take any instance and say 'these are the only two instances you get to run for many months,' then that ends up feeling pretty bad.
Q: As a side note, how do you plan to transition these instances--Scholomance and Scarlet Monastery--into the context of Pandaria? When Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep were redone, they had Worgen lore and updated Westfall for context--but revising 1-60 content is pretty much complete now.
The story connection is pretty loose--there isn't any direct connection to the events of Pandaria. Really, more than anything else, we're saying that these instances are the after-effects of Cataclysm, which changed the zones that the instances are in. As a result, as time goes on, things evolve and the changes in those outdoor zones eventually affect those instances. But really, mostly we're doing it just because those instances are really cool, and players love them, so we'll do it.

[chaos5061]

Wowhead Tom Chilton Interview Pt.2

Q:What do you feel was the most successful encounter from both a designer and player point of view in Cataclysm? What lessons from Cataclysm's dungeons & raids will you be taking into Mists of Pandaria design?
Interesting question. It depends sort-of on how the question is being asked, because if I think in purely in terms of high concept, I'd go with the Spine of Deathwing. It's the most epic concept that we've ever gone after for an encounter, but I wouldn't argue of course that it had the most interesting mechanic of any encounter we'd ever designed. It really depends what way you're looking at it. I think there were a lot of aspects of the Sinestra encounter that were cool, but part of that was due to it being a hard-mode only encounter. Overall, I guess if I looked at the grand scheme of it all, I'd say the coolest encounter that we did, including both mechanics and concept, would be maybe the Ragnaros encounter--that was pretty awesome.
Yeah, I remember Atramedes being cited in some blogs as being a cool encounter, but it went through several iterations on live before players experienced it correctly, so it wasn't successful from all standpoints. And I also thought Conclave was a neat concept, but the RNG loot for Justice Point slots made new raiders less motivated to go in there and try something new and intimidating. Rag was a good mix of making old content cool, like the Sons of Flame, with new abilities--and the loot also had a fun tieback to old instances and memories.
It's interesting how much of a direct connection there is to players about the quality of content and loot--sometimes the loot distorts the quality of the content in either direction. If the loot is bad, it can distort the encounter so players think it's bad as well--if the loot is incredible, it can make the encounter seem better than it actually is.
Yeah, when an encounter has items with flavor text, that definitely stands out--like Reforged Sulfuras or the Lich King encounter having loot with quotes that referred back to parts of Arthas' lore.
I love items like that--definitely lumping that in with the 'awesomeness' of the loot, beyond itemization. I think the original Blackwing was memorable particularly for things like that, such as Ashkandi with its flavor text.
Q: Last question--about community in WoW. There's been a lot of changes with people coming back and playing together, and using tools like Real ID and Looking for Raid across servers. How do you balance player-created communities across servers with pre-existing raiding guilds, that are facing challenges now like downsizing from 25s to 10s or dealing with real life and scheduling conflicts among older members?
I think that is an important balance to try to achieve. Over time, we've gone in the direction of making the game accessible to a lot of different people, such as queueing up for dungeons and raids with friends--which have impacted these guild ties and such. So I think that for us, one thing we're hoping to do is get guild community back with challenge modes, without excluding your average player from content. Certainly with challenge modes, we don't plan for you to queue up. We feel that if you queued for a challenge mode in Dungeon Finder, that would cause a lot of problems. That guy being yelled at by his wife for 15 seconds will make everyone else pull their hair out and panic that they're going to miss a medal. It's an interesting opportunity for us to really emphasize both playing with your guild and friends without it feeling like the average player is missing out on seeing an instance.
Challenge modes also seem good for former raiders like myself that no longer have the time to consistently raid, but still want something that can test their skills.
Yeah, that is precisely the idea.