Posts with tag Zarhym

I know what was said during the press tour, but don't be so sure yet that you know who the next warchief will be. The information provided during the press tour was... not entirely accurate.

We'll continue making adjustments as necessary to keep 10- and 25-player raids within a relative alignment, in terms of time investment, difficulty and rewards. It may never be perfect, but we still see interest in both raid sizes for different reasons. And ultimately we'll continue designing 25-player raids as long as there are a decent number of guilds interested in the format. We've seen no evidence as of yet that such interest is waning to any degree that should cause us great concern.

We tend to begin raid design around 25 players anyway before tuning for the various sizes and difficulties. That, when combined with our intent to carry on with 25-player Raid Finder group sizes, makes it very much worth our time to continue designing 25-player raids.

Regardless of what players' personal preferences or opinions are regarding the varied raid formats in World of Warcraft, we don't see removing options as a smart choice in the foreseeable future.

Hey guys, out of respect for their privacy, we don't discuss individual employees, but the speculation circulating about 'massive layoffs at Blizzard' is just a rumor.

This Thursday, October 27, we'll be hosting a one-hour live online developer Q&A with Lead Content Designer Cory "Mumper" Stockton and Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, beginning at 5:00 p.m. PDT. I'll be moderating the discussion to help facilitate a smooth and productive conversation. Given all the information revealed last weekend at BlizzCon 2011, we feel it's fitting for this chat to be focused on the next expansion, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria.

While we've held some developer "chats" in the past, we're going to be using CoverItLive for this event. We welcome anyone to join us for the chat, but in order to participate you'll want to visit the official CoverItLive website beforehand to create an account -- it only takes a few moments. The Q&A itself, however, will take place on the front page of our website with the CoverItLive platform embedded in a blog.

Once the chat goes live, all you have to do is log into the CoverItLive client embedded on our front page, ask any question relating to Mists of Pandaria, and read along as the developers field as many questions as they can. This will be a moderated chat, meaning your questions will only initially be seen by the developers. If selected, your question will be published for all to see, and an answer will be provided. We ask that you keep the questions as concise as possible and understand that we won't be able to get to all of them. We'll be choosing questions based on the information we can reasonably provide, and what kinds of answers we feel will be the most compelling for the entire audience. Questions can no longer be submitted once the chat ends, but you'll still be able to review a transcript of the questions and answers that were posted.

We'll be taking note of what works and what doesn't during this Thursday's chat, as we hope to make CoverItLive our standard tool for facilitating live developer Q&A sessions going forward. Join us this Thursday at 5:00 p.m. and let's all work to make this a successful discussion between players and developers!

I'll give you a bit of the lowdown on why the death knight set hasn't come out yet, even in the 4.3 PTR files third-party sites are looking through. As with all sets, a concept art piece was done for death knight tier 13. When that was translated to the actual in-game look, we felt it wasn't up to par with the concept, and ultimately wasn't nearly at the quality level of the other tier 13 sets. But, that death knight set was completed weeks ago.

So, after making a trip to the doctor and having some blood stolen, I stopped by Ghostcrawler's office to discuss this and other topics with him. We talked about some of the feedback in this thread, as well as the developers' latest thoughts on BoA and heirloom items.

Rather than potentially having my statements in this thread come back to bite me at some point in the future, I'm going to risk being confusing or sounding dumb. :p

In short, they agree that the process of mailing heirlooms around constantly is a little annoying. We'd prefer to try and work ourselves away from the method of mailing out BoA items in the future, like pets, mounts, etc. To that end, we have some design goals in mind that would improve this sort of item distribution system. And with those design goals have come some ideas for changing heirloom mechanics. This is sort of contrary to the idea I stated in this thread about just designing the system to allow players to mail their heirlooms all around their accounts without realm restrictions.

That's all of the information I can share at the moment, but I feel like it's worth pointing out that the design philosophy I stated earlier isn't so set in stone -- we're reevaluating these types of systems as we look toward the future. I apologize if I've caused any confusion.