Posts with tag interview

We know Blizzard has a lot planned for patch 5.3, which could go live any time now. But to keep us busy while we wait for the next batch of new WoW content, Blizzard Insider has posted an interview with Game Director Tom Chilton. Though the interview mostly summarizes what we already know about the upcoming patch, it provides a great overview of what's coming with a bit of added insight Blizzard's development thought process. Covered in the interview are how the devs felt patch 5.2 performed, the storyline of patch 5.3, PvP changes and the new battleground, new scenarios (and heroic scenarios), gear and the ability to choose which spec you'd like gear for, and visible pet battles.

The patches are certainly coming our way quickly. Are you looking forward to patch 5.3 or still working on patch 5.2?

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The Call to Auction podcast, which features our own Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, recently had the opportunity to send a big batch of questions about WoW's auction house, economy, and professions to developers Greg Street and He-Rim Woo. The devs gave out some great info, some highlights of which include:

• There are no plans for a sweeping auction house redesign
• Due to the popularity of the cooking and blacksmithing catch-up mechanisms, similar mechanisms for herbalism and mining might be on the way
• The Guardian Cub experiment was just that, and it's unlikely there'll be another item like it
• Splitting items off of a stack in the auction house is also unlikely going forward
• It's possible that buy orders will be implemented for high-cost items like Mechano-Hogs, unlikely for stuff like flasks and enchants
• The mailbox as the AH delivery system doesn't feel quite right and may eventually change

You can read the full interview on the Consortium forums.

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Take your time, pace yourself, and enjoy the variety of the tier. It's a large one. There are fights that focus on different skills, and if you're struggling with one encounter, it's quite possible that a fight that plays to your group's strengths, and which you'll have a much easier time with, lies just over that hill.

If your guild runs into a roadblock on Normal mode, consider revisiting any 5.0 raids that you never finished, or trying some of the 5.0 Heroics for more gear upgrades to complement the ilvl-522 and -528 gear you'll be getting from your Throne of Thunder kills each week.

At the Mists of Pandaria launch event in Irvine last week, I had the opportunity to talk to Ion Hazzikostas, lead encounter designer for World of Warcraft, about Mists of Pandaria's raids and dungeons, lessons learned from Cataclysm and beyond, and the road ahead.

WoW Insider: State your name and position!

Ion Hazzikostas: My name is Ion Hazzikostas and I am the lead encounter designer for World of Warcraft.

What does that job entail?

I'm the lead on the encounter team, which is self-explanatory; we make the dungeon and raid content, primarily. We're specialists in multiplayer PVE combat. On top of the dungeons and raids, we also help with outdoor raid bosses, scenario bosses, things like that.

What would you say that your biggest goal going into Mists of Pandaria was?

Particularly on the dungeon and raid front, to provide content for everybody, for all kinds of players. And we recognize that there's a massive spectrum of millions of people who are playing and enjoying World of Warcraft - a huge range of skill, frankly, and time commitment, the whole casual-hardcore spectrum people always talk about. And one of the things that we've been doing over the evolution of the game is to add additional difficulties, additional ways of consuming that content. So, you know, we now have LFR, normal, and heroic raids, and now we've introduced challenge modes, a sort of new tier of actually legitimately difficult five-player content. It's one of the biggest differences from Cataclysm at launch; one of the things we heard from people who were in guilds with friends and they'd say "these dungeons are awesome, we're having a lot of fun" ... but the people who queued up in Dungeon Finder would have a miserable time.

I don't know about you, but I sure am feeling validated after watching John Seely Brown explain why he'd rather hire a WoW leader over a generic MBA. While his bold claim might sound cheesy to those of us in the know, his logic presents the same, sound argument we've been making for ages.

Essentially, everything about building a guild, succeeding in WoW, and accomplishing anything in the game mirrors corporate challenges. Build a group structure, measure, adjust, and incorporate thousands of new ideas every day. Brown even quotes a favorite gamer line: "If I ain't learning, it ain't fun."

While this is probably an old argument for most of us around here, this will be a favorite video to bust out for new job interviews in the future.

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here.

One of the developers' design goals in World of Warcraft is ability parity between PvE and PvP. The problem with this strategy is that it becomes very difficult to buff a dominant PvP class if it's performing poorly in PvE. Beast mastery hunters and frost mages have long been maligned in raids while being feared in PvP combat. No spec knows this story better than the subtlety rogue, which has simultaneously been the best PvP spec and the worst PvE spec in the game.

Most active subtlety rogues are quite content, as their main focus is PvP. Due to the stringent requirements of most raiding guilds, there are only a few raiding rogues that have stuck with subtlety through the years. In order to get inside the head of these persistent shades, I spoke with one of subtlety's most stalwart champions, Haileaus. He currently maintains the amazing subtlety PvE thread on the official forums and was the rogue who inspired me to try out subtlety raiding on more than one occasion during Cataclysm.

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 time table. 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 evolved 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 decided to have two more zones. So it's like, OK, 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.

Blizzard recently released a blog from Dave "Fargo" Kosak that acted as a post-mortem for Cataclysm's quest design. Following on its heels is this entry from Scott "Daelo" Mercer, the lead encounter designer for World of Warcraft. In it, Scott talks successes (Dungeon Journal, Raid Finder) and failures (difficulty level of launch heroics) in the dungeons and raids portion of the game's third expansion and shares what he's looking forward to with the release of Mists of Pandaria. I'm definitely with him in anticipating challenge modes and PvE scenarios.

Read the full interview after the break.

Scrolls of Lore poster Curll has just linked to an interesting series of answers from the Blizzard Taiwan and Blizzard China forums about Mists of Pandaria and future developments coming to World of Warcraft. Do note that these translations may be questionable, but Scrolls of Lore hasn't steered us wrong on these things yet. Some of the highlights include:

• 4.3 content is not expected to last a full year.
• Focus is definitely on the mortal races, the Horde vs. Alliance conflict, and trying to get back to the feeling of Warcraft: Orcs vs. Humans.
• Outland and Northrend revamps are not coming any time soon. Blizzard wants to fix the timeline issues, but that's not on the top of its lists.
• For lore enthusiasts, a new faction called the Lorewalkers will be introduced, allowing players to travel the world to find and bring back historical artifacts to found a historical archive. The faction will be story- and lore-focused, not a means to grind rep for gear.

If you want to take a look, the forum thread has plenty of details. It would be very interesting if these things came to pass.

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World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria is the next expansion, raising the level cap to 90, introducing a brand new talent system, and bringing forth the long-lost pandaren race to both Horde and Alliance. Check out the trailer and follow us for all the latest MoP news!

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Each week, WoW Insider and Mathew McCurley bring you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which spotlights the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots along with info on what mods you're using to readerui@wowinsider.com, and follow Mathew on Twitter.

Oh, Reader UI of the Week readers, we have a treat for you today. I've wanted to do more interviews on the column for awhile now, and Vhei was a perfect candidate to start this whole thing off with. If you haven't seen Vhei's UI, it's been featured on the column twice, both beautiful revisions of great setups with amazing art and slick settings.

Not only do we have a fun interview with Vhei, but we have a UI update from reader Shamonkey, whose UI was profiled here at the end of 2011. Shamonkey was looking for some help setting up his WoW UI on a 13-inch laptop. Let's see what suggestions that he took from the commenters and the article itself to see how a UI can transform with just a few simple changes.

Dave "Fargo" Kosak, lead quest designer for World of Warcraft, recently confirmed in an interview with Videogamer.com that the recent content patch 4.3 will be the final content patch of Cataclysm. We will not be getting a Sunwell- or Halion-esque final patch before Mists of Pandaria. However, this does not discount the patches and updates that will most likely be coming to add Mists content or prepare for the next expansion's in-game launch events.

While the confirmation that there will be no more content patches for Cataclysm was definitely the big news of the interview, some other nice tidbits are buried within. Kosak confirms that the Raid Finder is something players are really taking to, and he discusses the community's response to transmogrification and the number of ancillary sites have popped up because of it.

Also of note is Kosak's response about subscription numbers. After reading his sincere "we don't obsessively track subscriptions" sentiment, I couldn't help but remember that in the back of my head, no matter what goes on with the numbers, what works, and what doesn't, these guys are real people who believe in this game.

You can read the whole interview on videogamer.com.

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Brace yourselves for what could be some of most exciting updates to the game recently with patch 4.3. Review the official patch notes, and then dig into what's ahead: new item storage options, cross-realm raiding, cosmetic armor skinning and your chance to battle the mighty Deathwing -- from astride his back!

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J. Allen Brack, the production director for World of Warcraft, was interviewed by Wired.com about the upcoming expansion Mists of Pandaria, why Blizzard's introducing the Pandaren now, and what the future holds for the increasing number of expansions needed to be purchased in order to play an up-to-date version of the game.

Brack says that the idea for the first neutral race actually was rooted in the Goblins for Cataclysm, since the Goblins would have made an excellent neutral race, but the team was adamant about giving the Alliance a more sinister race to play. The Goblins for the Horde filled the whimsical role nicely.

The Pet Battle system coming with Mists of Pandaria is going to require a lot of tuning, according to Brack. The feel of the system is going to be much more "rock, papers, scissors" than "all-powerful rare pet wins the fight," giving a lot of hope to collectors out there who want to use some of the more esoteric companions in battle without having to always pull out the best pet.

Finally, Brack made an important point about the "expansions every year" comment and goal of the development team. Brack explains that the concept is nice but not something feasible in the present time and that Blizzard has not been successful with rapidly turning out content. Cataclysm, it turns out, took longer to develop than any other expansion.

You can read the full interview on Wired.com.

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World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria is the next expansion, raising the level cap to 90, introducing a brand new talent system, and bringing forth the long-lost Pandaren race to both Horde and Alliance. Check out the trailer and follow us for all the latest MoP news!

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On Warcraft, Metzen waxed philosophical on creating a meaningful story for 11 million fans who are each carving out their own individual stories on their own characters, and on translating that story culturally as well linguistically between all the different cultures of the people who play WoW. As Metzen observed, a story that goes over well in North America may fall flat in China. He also talked about making lore decisions and balancing the needs and wants of the players and the writers. Sometimes the players want you to go right when you want to go left, and it is a challenge, he says, to decide which way to go.