Posts with tag battleplan

World of Warcraft's lead producer Shane Dabiri has jumped in with a new battle plan today, outlining the present and future of our favorite game. I don't personally see much (anything?) here that I didn't already know, but I'll outline Dabiri's points below.

• New features since the last battle plan...
• Naxxramas
• New PvP and PvE sets as well as a legendary caster weapon
• Paid character transfer service
• Cross-realm battlegrounds
• Before the Storm, coming soon to a realm near you...
  
• A new PvP honor system
• The Arena PvP system
• The Burning Crusade...
• Hellfire Citadel: A four-wing dungeon with varying difficulty per wing
• Heroic difficulty: The ability to play expansion dungeons on either "normal" or "heroic" difficulty settings, with better loot rewards for more difficult content
• The Black Temple: To be the most challenging dungeon in the expansion, and still under heavy development
  
• Further down the road...
• A team-balancing feature for battlegrounds, likely to be seen in a post-expansion patch
  

It's been months since the second edition of the World of Warcraft Battleplan had been released, so it was certainly time for an update.  Here, lead producer Shane Dabiri gives us a look into the future of World of Warcraft's technical development path.  So what's in store for the future of our favorite MMO?  More servers and migrations to keep the population evenly dispersed, hardware upgrades for older servers (in order to handle increased load from the expansion), paid character transfers (some time this summer), continued performance improvements across all realms ("we feel its unacceptable when even one player cant enter the game, gets unexpectedly disconnected at a key moment, or experiences any other interruptions while playing"), an improved authentication (login) platform, and improvements to the hardware and software running the website and the forums.  There's nothing here about in-game development here - but I expect to hear a lot about that at E3 very shortly.