Posts with tag budget

A lot of classes are pretty upset about some of the changes we've seen in beta build 8926. Shamans are dot shocking (what else is new), I'm complaining about Holy Priests (ditto), etc. In short, there were a lot of nerfs. Ghostcrawler has emerged to let us know that indeed, there were a lot of nerfs, and there's a reason for it: talents have a budget.

You may be familiar with itemization budgets. Basically, an item of a particular item level has a certain amount of "points" to spend on various stats; if you want to load an item up with Stam, it's not going to have as much to spend on Agi, for instance. This is also the reason why caster weapons have low DPS, because they borrow points from weapon DPS to spend on stats like spell power.

Wandering Goblin has a cool piece up entitled "25 Things You Didn't Know About WoW." Now, it's not really titled correctly, because many Blizzard fans will at least know a few of the things, and the truth is that they're not all about WoW anyway. But it is interesting reading, especially if you aren't super familiar with the background behind the Blue.

Fr'instance, when WoW released, Mike Morhaime says that every available employee was working on it. And production on Burning Crusade started about six months after that, when Blizzard determined that WoW was "stable." Other interesting tidbits (specifically from the recent WWI) include the fact that China is WoW's biggest market (people there pay by the hour, not by the month), and that Blizzard expects WoW to last them at least 10 years. So we may still be grinding murlocs in 2014.

It's also interesting that Blizzard says they don't plan budget limits for games-- either they're going to make a good game, or they don't bother making the game at all. Most companies probably wouldn't have ditched Starcraft: Ghost so late in the process, but Blizzard seems totally and completely committed to releasing a great game or not releasing a game at all. Interesting tactic, but then again it's worked for them so far.

[ via WorldofWar.net ]