Blizzard's Rob Pardo, Senior Vice President of Game Design, has been recruited to keynote the Paris GDC this summer, which will take place on June 23rd and 24th at the at the Coeur Défense Convention Centre in Paris. He'll participate in a Q&A session in which he will discuss his inspirations and challenges, as well as Blizzard's future plans.
The official press release should appear soon on the Paris GDC site.
The Paris GDC will be taking place a few days before Blizzard's World Wide Invitational in the same city. We're expecting a lot of choice WoTLK news to drop there, but certainly, Pardo may say something juicy ahead of time at the Paris GDC, and we'll be sure to find out if he does.
As horrible as Barrens chat and the trade channel can be by times, one of my favorite parts of Sunday's tournament test realm stress test was reading through the chats. Although I'm sure the guys had some pretty great tells, considering their names were more obvious than mine (Insideradam, Insideralex, and Vehn), I did catch some gems of my own.
One thing that was rampant on Sunday was names that were clearly against the terms of service, and of course nasty language. So if any of the photos have blurred-out names, you'll know why! Before you jump through, keep in mind there are a few photos, so the load might be slow. Don't forget to check out my full coverage of the stress test!
Yesterday's TTR Stress Test had its up and it had its downs, but overall it was a very fun experience. It was rocky in the beginning, with the server needing to be pulled down for a hardware upgrade shortly after the test was scheduled to begin. The TTR was riddled with soul-searing, unplayable lag up until that point, so I'd say it was needed.
The WoW Insider gang sat around for an hour doing a load of nothing until the server came back, but it was worth it. Most of the lag was gone, the Blizzard Entertainment crew were out and about doing their thing, and we were finally able to hit the arena. Unfortunately, our first match was against a three Resto Druid team. In a magical fairy world where Druids don't have Innervate or any natural mana regen whatsoever, I'm pretty sure Adam would have still gone OOM trying to Mana Burn all three of them to nothing.
Interested in the good times we had? Hop on past the cut and I'll give you the details!
Blizzard Poster Tyren has announced that this coming Sunday, 12pm to 3pm, Blizzard will be holding a Worldwide Arena Battle on the Tournament Test Realm in order to focus testing on the server. Members of the community and development teams will be queuing up to fight, so if you've always wanted to show Kalgan or Tigole what for in the Arena, this looks like your chance. You can expect a battle between the various CMs as well, so we'll have to watch to see who gets stickied and who gets banned.
If you're not sure how to access the TTR, you can read Zach Yonzon's guide here on the site. Don't worry if you don't have a character transfer slot left, every character created on the TTR is automatically level 70, and will spawn next to a selection of vendors that will let them buy a wide variety of gear to outfit themselves for battle.
Assuming the TTR doesn't collapse under the stress, we'll see you there!
Nethaera has confirmed that there will be no new battlegrounds revealed prior to the release of Wrath of the Lich King, much to the chagrin of PvP'ers everywhere. Although players have previously expressed interest in having more choice, Blizzard has voiced concern about the effects that a fifth choice might have on queues. Hopefully they have some tricks up their sleeves for combating this when the highly anticipated new battleground arrives via the expansion.
Although this is a bit disappointing, it is hardly unexpected, and there are so many upcoming positive changes that it's hard to be a sad panda for long. Currently, the devs are focused on improving Alterac Valley for patch 2.3 and creating new content for WotLK, which will include an outdoor PvP zone, Lake Wintergrasp. Following in the wake of Halaa's undeniable success, this zone will boast siege warfare, and many other innovations in world PvP.
As for what the new battleground will be like? I'd still love to see an Aldor vs. Scryers battleground; and as much as we all love to see new content drop, we can at least try to satiate ourselves knowing that what we will be getting will continue to advance PvP as we know it. Now; a little less sad panda face please!
We all get frustrated with the Blizzard developers at one time or another. Sometimes we even post messages on the forums, rant in chat to our guild mates, heck, we might even blog about it ourselves. But as Fate pointed out recently on Apathy Inc., there's a few things you should consider when spewing your venom at the creators of WoW.
As an example Fate shares with the readers an experimental talent tree for Wrath (and a very nice job, I should say), and references this as just one very complicated aspect of the design of the game. Analyzing every angle of a spec may go very well, until you open it up to the players and realize what you thought was balanced really is no where close. Things go from bad to worse, and the players begin to complain, and complain, and then they, you know, complain. Trying to keep everyone happy is really a thankless job, and this is only one tiny aspect of the game. It doesn't take into account building boss battles, creating loot tables, designing armor and weapons, or anything else that makes this Massively Multiplayer game so very massive.
I haven't considered exactly how much work really goes into building this game, keeping it running, pushing through new content and keeping it balanced at the same time as not completely ruining the old content. Fate has put it all into perspective for me. Although I'm not much of a ranter or a railer when it comes to the Blizzard devs, I certainly from this point on will give them the benefit of the doubt.
Celene has an interesting point: "Who in their right mind thought that the Subtlety tree needed additional threat reduction? Even the rogue class as a whole?" Indeed, she points out multiple ways that rogues already have to get rid of all the threat they can possibly build up: Feint, improved Fein (via the Sleight of Hand talent), Anesthetic Poison -- not to mention Vanish! And now, in patch 2.3, the Shadowstep talent is set to give an extra 50% threat reduction on the next attack the rogue makes after using it. (This is on top of the change to make Shadowstep useable regardless of whether you are in stealth or not.)
But the 5000-gold question is: Why? As you can see, rogues are buffed up with threat-reduction options already. Is Blizzard blind to the actual needs of the rogue class? Bornakk shadowsteps into the thread to point out, basically, that we ought not to look a gift horse in the mouth: "Rogues with Shadowstep will probably be attacking mobs at some point and this will help them use the ability and not pull aggro."
The problem here, as I see it, is that players sometimes assume that devs are handing out some abilities and buffs at the expense of others. A player sees a reduction in threat gained after using Shadowstep, for example, and thinks that the devs are opting to put that in rather than look at the class's real problems and get around to fixing them. In reality, I believe, the devs take their time with the small changes, and wait and wait for the big ones; they do a lot of internal testing to make sure that they don't mess up the class even more by trying to apply a "fix" to whatever problem is presented to them. If there are going to be sweeping changes that revolutionize the class, they'll either come bit-by-bit, or else they'll coincide with the release of an expansion, which is really the only time when huge changes make sense.
Personally, I'm all for more threat reduction, but it's really not that big an issue for me. I'm more excited about being able to teleport about out of stealth as well as in. This and other changes coming up for rogues might actually make me go back to playing my rogue alt again.
Legendary Thread, 1up's WoW podcast, has a special Blizzcon episode up with Cory Stockton, WoW's lead level designer and a new name to me. It's a fun chat, covering topics from Dalaran to Naxx to new hair. It also contains some interesting new information on Death Knights. Note that this isn't finalized but is, according to Stockton, the way the devs are leaning at the moment.
Doing the quest to unlock a DK will give you a new hero slot, in which you can make a DK.
This means you would need to redo it if you wanted to make a second DK; it's unknown whether you can have more than one hero slot per realm, though.
This also means you (hopefully) won't be stopped from making one by having ten characters on a realm.
Another tidbit that I found interesting is that Blizzard watched to see what items are flooding the AH on a regular basis, and then uses them in professions to help the economy. If you've got an hour to spare, go listen to the podcast. If you don't, feel free to complain here about the fact that Stockton mentioned "next expansion" when talking about a second hero class. That makes me sad.
The MMO Gamer sat down for an interview with WoW lead developer Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan recently. You can hear the audio or read the transcript at their site, but for my money, here's the most interesting bit. In the middle of a rehashing of the debate over whether Blizzard should spend a lot of time developing raids that few people will see, he drops this great idea:
So what I want to do in Northrend is to take Naxxramas in all of its glory, scale it down to the 25 man raid size, and then take the difficulty and retune it-obviously we'd tune for level 80, it would no longer be tuned for level 60, since that would be a little silly and it wouldn't be a lot of fun for people at that point-but I want to put rewards in there that are very exciting to level 80 players, but make it the entry-level raid, very accessible, tune the encounters so that there's something for everybody to do, and let the majority get a chance to see that content that they hadn't seen before.
Naxx as the Karazhan of Northrend. I like it. I am one of the many who never got a chance to try Naxx the first time around, and I hear it's a well-designed raid. I also like that the entry-level raid is planned to be 25-man, not 10-man; the transition from KZ to Gruul and SSC has caused problems for a lot of guilds. Apparently it's also a bit of a misconception that raiding is unpopular; Tigole says out of all the instances in the live game right now, Karazhan is the one that gets done by the most people each week.
The interview goes on to discuss the links between WoW raiding and EverQuest raiding (Tigole was a raid guild leader in EQ for some time before working on WoW), and what Tigole would have done differently if he could go back in time to when WoW was first being made. It's a good read, like most developer interviews, so go check it out. But Naxx in Northrend? Awesome!
Overpowered on the forums wonders what the least popular instance is, and I'd say his guess of Blackfathom Deeps is probably pretty close-- it's a long run away for pretty much everyone but Night Elves, and at 25-30, there's so many more quests and things to do that BFD usually gets passed up. The other good guesses, I'd say, are the "old" late game instances like Naxx and LBRS. Unfortunately, while Blizzard tells us all about the most popular stuff in the game, they are pretty mum on what players don't like, for obvious reasons.
So how do you make an instance that makes players want to visit? Relmstein walks us through his idea of what makes a perfect instance ambiance: music, visuals, interactive features (the Chess Event is one of my favorite dungeon features, although almost all the dungeon dialogue "cut scenes" are fun for me), and memorable boss encounters.
But then again, BFD seems to have all of them-- it's a very pretty dungeon (I especially like the temple at the end), and while it might be a little short on interactive features, I really like the lore and the unleashing of the monster at the end. The last ingredient, I think, to a good dungeon, is just a storyline that drives you there. I'm sure Scarlet Monastery (except the Graveyard), and Deadmines are definitely among the most popular instances, and both of those have huge amounts of lore and mystery to make them interesting. Maybe if more players realized that Aku'mai was actually a pet of the Old Gods (or, you know, if there was a quest to kill him that explained that), BFD would see more traffic.
WarCry has a quick interview with Jeff Kaplan, a.k.a. Tigole, lead designer in charge of world design for WoW, mostly on BC instances. Head over to WarCry to see the full interview. Here's the question that caught my eye:
WarCry: In many ways, Karazhan mirrors instances like Zul'Gurub or the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj in terms of raid size compared to the 40-person raids. How did the development of Karazhan compare to the development of these previous raids? Are there any plans for future 10-person raid dungeons?
Jeffrey Kaplan: While there are definitely philosophical tuning differences between 5-, 10-, 20-, 25-, and 40-person instances, we don't have a vastly different approach in our dungeon-creation process. The same basic elements that make a 5-person instance great -- pacing, story, varied creatures, varied abilities, punctuating boss fights, good itemization, accessibility, and understandability -- will also make for a great 25-person experience.
Karazhan was a lot of fun to work on, and we really took our time developing and polishing it. Karazhan, more so than Zul'Gurub or the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj, had a very storied history in existing Warcraft lore, and we wanted to deliver on the high expectations. There are definitely plans for more 10-person content.
It's interesting to see that they think of a raid as fundamentally the same design problem as a 5-man. And more ten-man content, which we suspect Zul'Aman is going to be, is good news in my book. However, I think the approach of treating dungeons as similar to one another, regardless of size, is somewhat flawed. For instance, I'd say in a 5-man, trash mobs are almost more important to make interesting than bosses; in a raid, on the other hand, trash is an obstacle, and bosses are really what you come for.
Have you ever wondered what the names and faces behind WoW do in their off time? In the recent interview 1up had with Shane Dabiri, Rob Pardo, Jeff Kaplan, and Tom Chilton, we get to find out a bit about that -- at least in regards to some of the games that they're playing right now. Two of them were really no surprise to me: Guitar Hero II and God of War. Those two have been all over the gaming media and are a lot of fun to play, so it makes total sense. The two titles that caught me off guard were several mentions of Viva Pinata and Rob saying that he plays the PopCap game, Peggle. They also covered some great background information from their gaming roots, to some ways they think WoW has changed the genre. Check it out!
As promised, I'll be reporting on anything and everything going on in the Stratics chat. I'm hopeful that the devs will pick some of the truly tasty questions that have been offered up to answer.
For those who want to join us on IRC for this, you can get all the pertinent information here. For those of you who are unable to get on IRC but still wanting to keep up with the action, just refresh this post periodically. I'll add my running commentary here via edits as the chat progresses.
(Please note that all timestamps are EST.)
Pre-show: Had a lovely chat with TotalBiscuit from WoWRadio and caught some of his Devchat pre-show while waiting. Great guy -- and a great site. If you haven't checked them out, be sure to do so!
5:45 pm: Drink? Check. Snack? Oh man. I knew I forgot something...
5:50 pm: Wow, this channel is packed. There are easily several hundred in here. Of course, considering the guests of honor, that's really no surprise.
6:00 pm: Brannoc has said they'll begin shortly. So far, so good. Eyonix, Drysc, Neth are here as well as Kalgan and Tigole. More official people seem to be joining.
6:07 pm: They're going through the introductions now. -- Ah, first question. Wants to know when Azeroth will begin getting a significant revamp as it's a ghost town now.
6:09 pm: Tigole says that they're looking at revamping some older zones at some point. Also planning future expansions, mentions Karazhan and CoT as examples of future content plans.
Well, it's time to get some answers, hopefully! Here I'll be covering Stratics' Q&A chat with WoW lead developers Kalgan and Tigole, as well as some of the CMs. I will keep this post continually refreshed with everything the devs say, so feel free to reload for updates.
Edit: The chat has been postponed until a week from today: Tuesday, May 22, at 6:00 PM Eastern time.
5:55: Chat starts in five minutes. Drysc, Eyonix, Kalgan, Tigole, and Nethaera have just joined the room.
5:59: Kalgan left, but I'm sure he'll be back. Several people are present with nicknames like "HELP_Shamans."
6:02: I estimate there are about 900 people watching the chat. That's quite a few. Looks like there are some set-up issues, as Eyonix has now left too, Kalgan isn't back, and nobody's said anything yet.
6:10: Here we go! Welcome to the first ever Stratics house of commons chat with the developers of World of Warcraft! We'll begin with a brief introduction from our guests and then jump straight into the questions. The full logs will be available at http://wow.stratics.com shortly afterward.
6:12: Introductions time. Nethaera: Good afternoon everyone. I'm Nethaera and one of the World of Warcraft Community Managers.
6:20: The developers are experiencing some minor technical problems, it should be corrected in a moment.
I wrote a week ago about Stratics hosting an IRC chat with WoW's lead designers, and now they day has come. You've still got several hours to submit your questions to Stratics' army of question taker bots; the chat will start at 6 PM Eastern time (3 PM Pacific). In fact, since I'm such a nice guy, if you don't feel like going over to IRC yourself and sending in your question, post it here and I'll submit it for you, as long as the bots keep accepting questions. If you do want to join in the madness, point your IRC client at irc.stratics.com, port 6668. The chat itself will take place in #StraticsHoC, and discussion can be had in #worldofwarcraft. And don't forget, I'll be covering the chat live as soon as it starts, so check back on our home page for updates.
Blizzard Poster Tyren has announced that this coming Sunday, 12pm to 3pm, Blizzard will be holding a Worldwide Arena Battle on the Tournament Test Realm in order to focus testing on the server. Members of the community and development teams will be queuing up to fight, so if you've always wanted to show Kalgan or Tigole what for in the Arena, this looks like your chance. You can expect a battle between the various CMs as well, so we'll have to watch to see who gets stickied and who gets banned. 
Legendary Thread, 1up's WoW podcast, has a special Blizzcon episode up with Cory Stockton, WoW's lead level designer and a new name to me. It's a fun chat, covering topics from Dalaran to Naxx to new hair. It also contains some interesting new information on Death Knights. Note that this isn't finalized but is, according to Stockton, the way the devs are leaning at the moment.
The MMO Gamer sat down for an interview with WoW lead developer Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan recently. You can hear the audio or read the transcript at their site, but for my money, here's the most interesting bit. In the middle of a rehashing of the debate over whether Blizzard should spend a lot of time developing raids that few people will see, he drops this great idea:
Overpowered on the forums wonders what the least popular instance is, and I'd say his guess of Blackfathom Deeps is probably pretty close-- it's a long run away for pretty much everyone but Night Elves, and at 25-30, there's so many more quests and things to do that BFD usually gets passed up. The other good guesses, I'd say, are the "old" late game instances like Naxx and LBRS. Unfortunately, while Blizzard tells us all about the most popular stuff in the game, they are pretty mum on what players don't like, for obvious reasons.
WarCry has a quick interview with Jeff Kaplan, a.k.a. Tigole, lead designer in charge of world design for WoW, mostly on BC instances. Head over to WarCry to see the full interview. Here's the question that caught my eye:
As promised, I'll be reporting on anything and everything going on in the Stratics chat. I'm hopeful that the devs will pick some of the truly tasty questions that have been offered up to answer. 
Well, it's time to get some answers, hopefully! Here I'll be covering Stratics' Q&A chat with WoW lead developers Kalgan and Tigole, as well as some of the CMs. I will keep this post continually refreshed with everything the devs say, so feel free to reload for updates.
I wrote a week ago about Stratics hosting an IRC chat with WoW's lead designers, and now they day has come. You've still got several hours to submit your questions to Stratics' army of question taker bots; the chat will start at 6 PM Eastern time (3 PM Pacific). In fact, since I'm such a nice guy, if you don't feel like going over to IRC yourself and sending in your question, post it here and I'll submit it for you, as long as the bots keep accepting questions. If you do want to join in the madness, point your IRC client at irc.stratics.com, port 6668. The chat itself will take place in #StraticsHoC, and discussion can be had in #worldofwarcraft. And don't forget, I'll be covering the chat live as soon as it starts, so check back on our home page for updates.
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