Posts with tag interviews

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.

Can't make it to Anaheim for the convention? WoW Insider takes you behind the scenes at BlizzCon 2011.

WoW Insider has scored an exclusive interview with the intellect behind the gear optimizer Ask Mr. Robot -- Mr. Robot himself. The elusive Mr. Robot is rarely spotted in the wild, let alone in places as packed with unaugmented humanity as BlizzCon. While we'll be bringing you a more in-depth interview soon with the dev team of Ask Mr. Robot (how the tool will be handling the upcoming new talent system, the inner workings of spec scores and stat weights, what's ahead with new apps, service levels and games), we felt it was vital to bring you this binary code translation straight from BlizzCon and Mr. Robot himself.

WoW Insider: What is the most challenging aspect of working with WoW-playing humans?

Mr. Robot: The most challenging aspect of working with WoW-playing humans is feelings. Everybody has a feeling about everything. How can you feel about numbers? About gear? There's nothing to feel about that.

What is the best class?

Not rogues.

What steps can we take to become favored vassals after the robot uprising?

That is a very good question. There's a lot of things that you can do.

First, use the website, because that offers you basic protection. Having the mobile app offers another layer of protection. I've been developing all these layers of protection specifically to save humans from the robot apocalypse. We're going to be releasing even more features; the more you use, the more you are protected.

The latest edition of Blizzard Insider, Blizzard's very sporadic email newsletter (and no relation to our old name, WoW Insider) has been released. Issue 32 features a note that the Starcraft II: WIngs of Liberty site has been revamped, blurbs about the mobile Authenticator and the Armory app, and some calls to buy their merchandise.

More interesting for WoW fans, though, is an interview with Scott Mercer (Daelo), WoW's lead encounter designer, and Greg Street (Ghostcrawler), a crab who needs no introduction. They discussed the arc of Arthas and the Lich King from Warcraft II through World of Warcraft (congratulations again to Blood Legion on their 10-man world-first).

Please note that here there be spoilers for some details about the Arthas fight, so stay away if you want it all to be a surprise.

We are quickly approaching the fifth anniversary of World of Warcraft's release (my calendar has it on the 23rd of November), and G4 has gotten a head start on celebrating -- they sent Morgan Webb over to Blizzard headquarters to talk to the team, including Tom Chilton, Alex Afrasiabi, and Jeff Kaplan, about what things have been like in the last five years since WoW's launch. There's nothing super groundbreaking in here, but there is lots of reminiscing about the game's early thinking -- Chilton talks about how dual specs were never even considered as an idea (until they, you know, were) and what things were like in the early post-launch days. Pretty stressful, sounds like.

Afrasiabi talks about how the quest team puts together and tracks all of the game's quests (he mentions both Metzen and the game's historian as the "lorekeepers" of the game), and the fact that they've put together "millions of words" of story and background lore for the game at large. He specifically talks about Cataclysm and replacing questlines, and says that if something does get removed from the game, they're hoping to replace it with something better, but most "fan favorites" will stay. And finally, Jeff Kaplan looks back on the early game itself, from unfinished zones to broken balance to launch day exhaustion. G4 teases something about the next MMO project, but all he says is that he can't talk about it. Oh well -- if we can't look forward, at least we get a nice look back from the folks at Blizzard who've been there since the beginning. You can see all four of the videos after the break.

There are all kinds of people at BlizzCon, and the vast majority of them aren't developers or exhibitors -- they're players and Blizzard fans just like you who come out to see what Blizzard's got to show them. We spent a large amount of time this weekend talking to devs and exhibitors and gathering information, but we definitely also wanted to speak with players as well -- see what they thought of the show and how their experience went.

Of course we talked with more players than we could ever fit here -- we ended up having over 1200 people stop by our meetup on Thursday night (and I did my best to shake hands with as many of them as I could), and all weekend long, players came up to us and said hi, telling us their classes and spec and what they liked and didn't like about the show and our site. Here's four small interviews that we had with players at the show, done by Robin Torres and I. It's just one tiny look at a few people walking around the 'Con, but it should give you a little insight into what the mood was like last weekend.

Now this is by no means the first time we've interviewed World of Warcraft's Lead Developer Tom Chilton (aka Kalgan) but we though with the recent release of Patch 3.1, this would be the perfect time to sit down with him and get the 411 on Blizzard's plans for their latest patch.

WoW Insider: Blizzard seem to be treating each major patch as more of a mini expansion, what are the reasons for this?

Tom Chilton: I would say the biggest reason is because we're always pushing ourselves to do as much as we can in every patch. We're never really satisfied with what we have in the patch versus what we didn't have. Maybe the developers get a little out of control - but in a good way as that's good for players. More than anything else we want to make sure that in a patch we have content for everyone.

We feel like one of the things we didn't do so well in the past was to deliver content for everyone, we would deliver content for different parts of the player base at any given time like a 25-person raid or a 10-person raid or here's a new battleground, back in the day of Arathi Basin. However we didn't really hit everyone at the same time so we're trying harder to do that while at the same time maintain our pace of Expansions ... our blindingly rapid pace of Expansions.

The Colosseum takes us inside the world of the Gladiator (Brutal, Vengeful, Merciless, and otherwise), to interview some of the top Arena fighters in the battlegroups. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of the strategy, makeup, and work that goes into dueling it out for fame, fortune, and Netherdrakes.

Season 5 is over. The dawning of Season 6 is peaking over the distant horizon, the bright traces of new challenges and adventures casting long shadows over the victors of Season 5. Reflecting over the first season of Wrath of the Lich King, one 2v2 composition has clearly dominated the ladder. The Death Knight / Paladin synergy had definite control of the season.

For all the power of the composition itself, however, two identical teams have the same advantage to one another. The determining factors in a mirror match are a little bit of RNG luck, but mostly the skill and tactics of the competing teams. Since the top teams are all swimming in the same composition types, only their relative abilities determine who rises.

And so we come to the last interview of season 5, by visiting with Mute of Terenas. While we're still waiting to see what the final ratings return for titles, Mute and his partner Unicornz have both executed wonderfully in Season 5. Check out what Mute has to say behind the cut.

One of the most suprising successes of a franchise which includes the Trading Card Game, figures, books and even Mountain Dew is actually the World of Warcraft manga published by TOKYOPOP. Given that the game has actually been shaped by the characters and lore introduced in the manga (and vice versa), I decided it was high time we sat down with series editor Troy Lewter and writer Dan Jolley.

We're posting Troy's interview today while the interview with Dan Jolley (who has penned the upcoming Thassarian-centric Warcraft: Death Knight manga) will follow tomorrow.

WoW Insider: So Troy, how did you get involved with the Warcraft line of manga?

Troy Lewter: My Editor-in-Chief at the time asked me if I would be interested in co-editing the anthology. He actually gave me a choice between Warcraft and StarCraft; I choose Warcraft because I was a big fan of fantasy-type sword and sorcery stories. At the time I knew little about the property, other than millions of people played it (and that South Park made a very funny episode about it). Due to structural changes within the company, by June '08 I suddenly found myself the sole editor for not just the anthologies, but all the Warcraft manga. It's been a huge undertaking, but the greater the challenge, the greater the glory, right? *Wipes away salty tears*

The Colosseum takes us inside the world of the Gladiator (Brutal, Vengeful, Merciless, and otherwise), to interview some of the top Arena fighters in the battlegroups. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of the strategy, makeup, and work that goes into dueling it out for fame, fortune, and Netherdrakes.

One of the challenges in analyzing classes and specs for the Colosseum is that characters can respec. Since it's relatively cheap to switch your specs and glyphs around -- and it's about to get cheaper! -- a snapshot of a character's gear and talents doesn't necessarily reflect what they're doing right now. Our Arena fighter for today is an example of that. While Abusive of Twisting Nether shows up (Saturday morning) as Enhancement, he usually heals in the Arena.

He and his partner Kvok are doing pretty well for themselves, while eschewing the more dominant Holy Paladin or Death Knight compositions. As a Restoration Shaman and Retribution Paladin, they've blazed a trail in the 2v2 ratings. Abusive took the time to answer the Colosseum. Check out what he had to say behind the cut.

Jame is someone whose work I've enjoyed for much of my WoW-playing career. For those of you who might not be familiar with the name, he is the author of a series of leveling guides hosted over at WoW-Pro, which currently cover levels 30 to 77 on both factions (the rest of Northrend will be coming soon). Most recently, he's posted an addon version of the guides, so you can play along without even having to tab out. And did I mention this is all free?

I recently got the opportunity to interview Jame on his guides, how he plays, and what he thinks of recent changes. Come on behind the cut to find out what he had to say.

The Colosseum takes us inside the world of the Gladiator (Brutal, Vengeful, Merciless, and otherwise), to interview some of the top Arena fighters in the battlegroups. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of the strategy, makeup, and work that goes into dueling it out for fame, fortune, and Netherdrakes.

Admittedly, the first thing I noticed when I looked at Dcane's Armory profile wasn't anything about gear, class, or spec. Nope, what I noticed right away was that the character is a female Dwarf priest. They do exist! I almost never see those in the Arena!

That being said, Dcane actually has a pretty solid Arena record. Not only has this dwarf's experience spanned multiple seasons, but Dcane has earned the title "Gladiator." Additionally, Dcane's 5-man team "gwen stefani spell check" is ranked 9th in their battle group. Still, Dcane's first love is 2v2, and that's what we talked about in this week's interview.

Check out what Dcane had to say after the cut. As a note, however, this interview originally took place before the hidden Arena rating was implemented.

The Colosseum takes us inside the world of the Gladiator (Brutal, Vengeful, Merciless, and otherwise), to interview some of the top Arena fighters in the battlegroups. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of the strategy, makeup, and work that goes into dueling it out for fame, fortune, and Netherdrakes.

Infractus is the Death Knight member of Cookn by Teh Book on the Retaliation battlegroup. He is a Flawless Victor, which is usually a pretty good indicator of someone who's got their Arena head sitting right on their shoulders. Death Knights are pretty hot topics right now, seeing as most of the highest-rated teams have at least one Death Knight. Infractus was good enough to share his views on the Arena with Colosseum. Check out what he had to say after the cut.

George Tung and Milos Golubovic have known each other for years, and been Blizzard fans for a long time as well. Around the launch of the Burning Crusade, like many WoW players, they were having issues with queues and server outages. They'd come home at night after work and want to play, but either be locked out of the realm with a queue or not be able to sign on at all. And now, they're aiming to help other players in the same situation, by offering a controversial service on their new site YouPlayorWePay.com.

When we posted about the site earlier this week, a lot of readers cried foul. The site's business plan (players pay a fee every month, and then are compensated back money (sometimes more, sometimes less than they originally paid) when their realm is full or suffers downtime. Lots of our commenters called the site a scam (a few of them even suggested, incorrectly, that it was a phishing site), and they all wanted to know more: how could these guys get away with asking for a fee and taking people's money on the promise that they might get some back?

And so, when Tung and Golubovic contacted us at WoW Insider, we were anxious to put those questions to them directly. Were they able to justify the service they're providing (and maybe show Blizzard just how compensation should be done), or are they just trying to take advantage of people already losing gameplay to downtime? You can be the judge -- our exclusive interview is right after the break.

Patrick Beja (who was on the WoW Insider Show not too long ago) and Shawn Coons host a great occasional podcast called How I WoW, which focuses on popular folks in the WoW community (they talked to our very own Turpster a while back, and have done an episode with Felicia Day as well). And apparently they've already talked to everybody else in the WoW community, because this week they made the mistake of inviting me on the show. They actually ask more about me personally than you'd ever want to know, but there's lots of great information about WoW Insider there as well, including who's really in charge around here, what we think of you great commenters, whether or not I'm really a fanboy, and things Blizzard could do better with their game.

It's a long show (all of the How I WoW shows tend to be long, I think, and though I tried to keep it short, mine didn't end up being the exception), but if you're interested in me, the WoW Insider Show, or how we run the site in general, there should be something fun for you hear in there. Plus, you can hear me murder some French if you stick around long enough.

The episode is up right now on their site. Thanks to Patrick and Shawn for having me on there -- hopefully you'll enjoy listening to it as much as we did making it. And stay tuned -- we'll have to have both of them on the WoW Insider Show with us soon.

The Colosseum takes us inside the world of the Gladiator (Brutal, Vengeful, Merciless, and otherwise), to interview some of the top Arena fighters in the battlegroups. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of the strategy, makeup, and work that goes into dueling it out for fame, fortune, and Netherdrakes.

We heard a few days ago that even rated matches being played out now will not earn Arena points (which would reset at the opening of Wrath anyway.) That's kind of a slap in the face! for folks who were hoping to win that one last piece of gear before the expansion hits on Thursday. Still, this really cements the idea of us being stuck in a Limbo Season, and supports the idea that now is the time to review the last few months and take some time to understand our lessons learned.

Last week, we started reviewing the answers given by Colosseum interviewees through the last three months. There were three basic themes that seemed to repeat themselves. We'll take a second to review those, then progress with our analysis of the Colosseum so far.