Messages From Hell: The Future of Diablo III

Site Updates, Forge Simulator, Uther the Lightbringer Emotes

Patch 5.4 Unannounced Feature
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
I just read on MMO champion that the 'unannounced feature' for patch 5.4 is essentially knifed in the belly. As I'm reading the tweets GC suggests that he wishes he never said anything about it or any features for that matter. Stating that when he announces a new feature or functionality within the game and it doesn't pan out or arrive in time the community gets upset.

My response to that is, "What .. are you going to just say nothing?"

*Patch 5.4 includes ... *

It may let down some yes, BUT its far better to tell us your plans, visions, direction and ideas and fall short than simply not saying anything. The first lets me know you guys are still creative, ambitious and still trying to push this game forward which has a greater chance to keep my subscription. The second makes me think you guys are lazy, don't give a damn and not confident in your abilities.

Here's the issue we run into regularly. If we share incomplete information or "hint" at something without proper context, some people end up being disappointed when what they had in their head isn't what ends up being implemented.

Things change while in development. That means that even if we do give advanced information, it could change, and for some, that change may be construed as "worse" whether they've actually experienced it pre-change or not.

You may not mind when things change. Many people don't, but from our experience, most people tend to be a bit happier when they can get a more complete picture. I can assure you, the implication that the development team in any way shape or form is being "lazy" is far from reality. We're still working on many things at current and will do our best to get the information out to everyone at what is hopefully the best possible time, with the most accurate information possible.

Upcoming Titan Runestone Drop Rate Change
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
We agree and feel that Titan Runestones drop too rarely. We are going to make some changes to Lei Shen.

For players that are on the legendary quest line, Lei Shen will now always drop a Titan Runestone. This is similar to what we did with rare drops in the past and will help players that have been experiencing really bad luck.

This change is still undergoing testing and is scheduled to take effect next Tuesday with the raid resets.

Patch 5.3 Hotfixes - June 5
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Raids, Dungeons, and Scenarios
  • Fixed an issue where players did not receive a Heroic Cache of Treasures for completing the first Heroic Scenario of the day if they had completed a Normal Scenario first.

Blue Tweets
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Reputation / Questing
I'm tired of doing the fkng dailies? We are all tired of doing this. We play game to have fun, not tired.
So don't do them? What is the specific reward that you feel requires you to run so many dailies? (Source)
Bad "professional" answer. you made your game revolve around them.(kind of sound naïve about your own game sir.
My point is if you earn 500 valor a week instead of 1000 a week, you'll still get gear or upgrades, just at a slower rate. (Source)
Been challenging for us when folks who play 2 hours a night and folks who play 2 a week want to progress at similar rates. (Source)
All guilds with some progression will require you to cap each week. You can't log only to do what you like.
I'm in a heroic guild, and the officers would never mandate everyone cap valor and charms. To each his or her own I guess. (Source)

crap answer. Maybe Mr. Heroic raider doesn't need valor gear, but some of us lesser fools do.
But why do you *need* valor gear? And even if you do, you can still earn it even if you skip dailies completely. (Source)
Valor gear = stronger and more powerful toon, gear is everything, higher the ILVL the better, correct me if im wrong
That sounds like a want, not a need. I'm just trying to understand the argument. (Source)
It's a need if you dont want to be barred from every guild or get kicked after you come up last in an LFR boss fight
If you are coming up last in an LFR boss fight, it's not the lack of valor gear.... (Source)
It seems to be "I need max valor to progress, but I don't want to participate in the most efficient avenues to accrue it." (Source)
When the alternatives to just accrue valor slower or less efficiently seem reasonable. What am I missing? (Source)
It seems to be "People always take the most efficient path so lets make it as boring as possible"
We think having lots of dungeons to run is less boring than doing Mechanar every night. (Source)

How was daily limit removal a mistake? Putting in 100 dailies was the mistake...
This is "don't nanny us" vs. "I have too much to do" conundrum I referenced the other day. (Source)

Realize you're telling me "WoW isn't for you" because every patch seems to be a rep grind and dailies.
You have to ignore a lot of content to say that is all our patches have been about. (Source)
I really don't get people harping on about it, there hasn't been a daily rep with useful gear since 5.1
Depends what other gear you have access to. It can't be rewarding for both heroic raiders and folks in blues. (Source)
5.2 had gear same ilvl as 5.1. Barrens has gear lower ilvl. Most of it feels wasted even on LFR players.
We heard from a lot of players who didn't want to have to raid or wanted catch up for their alts that wasn't 5.0 reputations. (Source)
You mentioned story gating working well (5.1, 5.2). 5.3´s story was over in a day. Way less interested in doing stuff now.
Part of our faster development cycle means that 5.3 was pretty far along before we could evaluate 5.1 and 5.2 player reaction. (Source)

We believe you will have more fun if you find a group of friends, and we will try to do more to enable that. (Source)
try that at 3am and you're the only one on the server
That's why we provide ways to play solo as well. We would just like to lure you into groups of friends. (Source)

does dynamic open world scenarios similar to public quests in warhammer online sound like a good alternate to dailies?
Potentially. We're dabbling that with the Battlefield Barrens stuff and plan to do more. (Source)

Random q: Have you thought about creating tech for "auto-grouping" if people are completing the same quest in a fixed area?
We've considered it. I think you'd have to be really careful not to force players into groups if they weren't interested. (Source)

What is designed to be the most effective/fastest way to level? Quests, Instances, PvP, etc.? I
Ideally doing a variety of tasks, but we always want to make sure questing remains attractive. (Source)
What is it about questing you find more appealing? Don't you think by 90 people are pretty sick of questing?
The question was about what we want to be the most effective way to level. The answer is 1) variety, 2) quests. (Source)
At max level, we want players to have a reason to go out into the world. Quests are one way to do that. (Source)
But we didn't have many alternatives to max quests at launch. Patch 5.3 and 5.4 have more outdoor options. (Source)
The Barrens has a lot of content, but not a lot of quests. The next patch will have an even more ambitious area. (Source)

How popular has Sunsong Ranch been this expansion? More or less popular than expected? Will we see something like it again?
More popular than expected. We'd like to do something again but not an exact clone. (Source)

The Music of Mists: an Interview with Russell Brower
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
The Blizzard Music section has been updated to include the soundtrack to World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria. When you visit the page, you’ll be able to read notes from the soundtracks’ composers, listen to song samples, and download albums and individual tracks directly through iTunes.

To provide more insight on the development of this auditory (pandaren) feast, we sat down with Senior Director of Audio Russell Brower to talk about the making of the Mists of Pandaria soundtrack and his views on the purpose of music in games. Read on for the full conversation below!

Q: The role of sound and music in games, even in our games, isn’t always clear. Is there anything you’d like to tell players about what your team does?
A: (Russell Brower): I believe our players already have a great appreciation for the role of sound and music in games. A healthy portion of our players can’t imagine a Blizzard game without what we do. Sound and music aren’t always an essential part of gameplay, but Blizzard wouldn’t ship a game without them, just like we wouldn’t ship a game without great cinematics.

We’re a visual society; we take our hearing for granted unless it’s taken away from us. It’s the first sense that’s turned on in the womb, and, unless something breaks with your hearing, it’s on for the rest of your life. Marty O’Donnell, a good buddy of mine who’s my counterpart at Bungie, has a saying: “the ear does not blink.” Sound is a constant immersion tool—voiceover has to be localized, but music doesn’t, and sound effects don’t—they’re a universal language.

Also, the team strives to keep people from turning their sound off. There will always be hardcore players who’ll never have sound on; they’re in voice chat, or they need absolute focus. I feel like that’s a frontier we have yet to conquer, but also, as social gaming continues to put people in closer contact with each other, the challenge of sound to remain immersive is only gonna get tougher.


Q: Do you find that players get bothered by game sounds with any regularity? Where does that concern stem from?
A: Well, for example, we’ve had to tone down our auto-playing sounds to be less startling. We found that some people will put headphones on, and after two hours of installing, suddenly the game will go “BOOM!!” when it finishes. People started to install games with the sound off.

Q: Right! When you hear one of those thundering installation complete sounds, it's like, “ack, did a bookshelf fall over?”
A: For our Cataclysm update, 4.3, you heard horns when the update was completed—it was a bit more easy-going. Another example: a LOT of people hated Sindragosa’s constant roaring on the Wrath of the Lich King title screen. So, when we were scoping out Cataclysm, we thought, “oh, man, not another dragon update!” We actually got the World of Warcraft team to keep him mostly quiet. It was a fight, but then we saw far fewer complaints. With the MoP login screen, I’ve seen a lot of grateful comments. I’ve had a lot of people on Twitter tell me that they actually waited and listened to the entire piece of music before logging in.

Q: What instrumentation did you use for the MoP soundtrack? It sounds very different from what we’ve heard in other World of Warcraft expansions.
A: We supplemented the usual palette of sounds rather than replace it. That stemmed from a conversation I had with Chris Metzen early on; we were looking at all the gorgeous artwork and art direction of Pandaria, and he said, “the artwork is telling us we’re in a different world, a place of wonder, but one that will potentially get conquered by the Alliance and Horde.” He felt that we needed an Asian overlay, but that the soundtrack was also an opportunity to remind us that we’re still in Azeroth. We shouldn’t go so far afield that it doesn’t feel like Warcraft.

So, we kept our usual palette of epic orchestral sounds, but we added some specific Chinese instruments. One is the erhu, which is basically a Chinese fiddle; it’s got 2 strings, and an almost vocal vibrato singing quality. We also added the guzheng, which is like a harp, but it’s long and laid out flat. It’s both strummed and plucked. The third instrument was called the dizi—you know how if you pluck a blade of grass and blow on it, you get that reedy sound? Well, the Dizi has a hole in it with a membrane that vibrates, and so it sounds like a flute, but it has this very buzzy overtone. We also included one more—the pipa, which is more or less the Chinese version of the banjo. Those four instruments, along with Chinese drums, gave us the overlay we needed to have a bit of Asian feel. We also changed the orchestra’s playing style—even when we were using familiar instrumentation, we had a bit more sliding between notes at certain times. In some ways, it’s what Hollywood has told us Asian music sounds like, but some of it’s authentic. Those Chinese instruments were all played by masters.

Q: Oh, so this isn’t you guys picking up an instrument for the first time?
A: Oh, no. Luckily, in California, you can get instrument experts fairly locally. Everyone was local except for the arhu player, who we flew in from the Bay area. In China, she’s considered a major star—she actually teaches, and also plays violin. So, she’s able to play in the language of Hollywood, but also with the personality of her instrument. We would typically say to her, “ok, play it idiomatically correct this time; ok, now play it like a violin.” In editing, we got to pick and choose, because there were times when the idiomatic version was so heavily vibrato or ornamented that it might actually call too much attention to itself. It’s the role of music to support and immerse, not to say “hey, listen to me!” We’ve actually failed if the music is calling too much attention to itself.


Q: Can you elaborate on that sentiment? What do you think the role of music is in gameplay? Guiding or instructing a player, providing cues—is that something you think game music should or shouldn’t do? Where does our music influence our gameplay?
A: It depends on the game, but in our games, certainly in World of Warcraft and Diablo, the music adds to the immersion. I think in Diablo it’s a little more about mood, where we want to enhance the creepiness, until we get to the cinematics, and then we get to character development. There’s a theme for Diablo, and there’s a theme for Leah.

WoW has even more of that—there are very specific melodic devices and tone colors for Alliance and Horde, and for some of our major figures. Arthas has an arc coming from Warcraft III, where a melody was first established more than 10 years ago, and that DNA is in the song "Invincible." In fact, it’s the chorus. There are new verses, but the chorus came from 10+ years ago.

StarCraft’s a different animal in that the gameplay is so fast—it’s very strategic, but there’s a little bit more ‘twitch’ gameplay involved, so the music needs to stay out of the way. The map music is really just there to make the game cooler—where the music gets critical in StarCraft is in the cinematics. Starting with the original StarCraft, each race had a very identifiable musical signature, and that carried over to the maps and played a part in cinematics. Wings of Liberty is where we really started establishing themes for characters. While Raynor is synonymous with the part of the Terran race that listens to space-cowboy trucker music, he ended up with his own theme in Wings of Liberty. We’d started some Zerg stuff in Wings, but it’s fully developed in Heart of the Swarm, and we’ll see that happen again with Legacy of the Void for the Protoss. We established a melody for Zeratul in Wings, and that’ll carry over and get developed, too.

So, the role of music, in WoW especially, is closer to its role in a movie, in that we can convey what would take too many words to describe otherwise. When you read a book, you can get inside a character’s head and hear what they’re thinking. In a game, we really don’t have that luxury—they’d have to talk too much, and we’d have to localize it, and it’d stop gameplay. We want to stop gameplay as infrequently as we can. Music doesn’t have to be translated—people say that it can tell you how you’re supposed to feel, and I suppose that’s true sometimes, but sometimes it amplifies what’s already there.

Q: Yeah. You see a sweeping vista, and the score emphasizes the grand scale of it all.
A: All rules are meant to be broken, though, so sometimes you play against type. There’ve been moments in StarCraft where a character has done something awful, and he’s listening to opera. It’s the classic gangster-movie juxtaposition. Similarly, some of the music in StarCraft, this space game, could be considered “spaghetti western.” It’s a nice genre flip, especially for someone who’s not expecting it.


Q: There’s a track on the Mists of Pandaria soundtrack called “The Traveler’s Path,” which sounds like it contains a conlang, an invented language. Is that accurate?
A: Yes. We went to our Creative Development team, and, for certain NPC responses, they’d already begun to spin a language, and we asked them to flesh out some words in English that [Lead Quest Designer] Dave Kosak had written. It’s the story of Liu Leng, and the turtle, Shen-sin-zu, and why Liu Leng left Pandaria and came back. I was inspired by a video of Dave doing what he called “story time,” where he told the story of Liu Leng, and when I realized that part of the player experience was that you weren’t necessarily going to realize you were on a turtle until you got on a balloon and went around the island and saw his face for the first time in a mini cut-scene. So I thought, “why not write a song that tells the story of Liu Leng?”

When I was a little kid in choir, we learned a Japanese song called Sakura—it was easy for kids to learn and remember, so I wanted to find the Pandaren equivalent of that—a melody so simple that it could be an ancient folk song, one where the words could change over the centuries. In this case, Lorewalker Cho would be singing the part of Liu Leng, so we asked Creative Dev to basically translate the story, and then we went through a process of vetting it with the localization guys to make sure we weren’t inadvertently saying something offensive in Chinese or any other language.

Dave was so excited that he made a whole quest line around the song. It only happens at certain times; you go out to a little beach where Lorewalker Cho’s waiting, you sit down in front of him and he sings the song, and places all these paper boats in the water, and it’s just this gorgeous thing. Yeah, we focus on gameplay first, but for those who care to venture off the beaten path a little bit, you’ll find this special moment.

When I worked at Disney they called these sorts of things ‘discovery places.’ At Disneyland, if you happened to go around the right corner, you’d find Snow White’s wishing well, a fountain, and her singing voice coming from the fountain. It’s a little thing, it makes no money, but they did it because that’s what that park does. Blizzard has a similar sensibility—we want to give our audience the little things alongside the epic ones.

Q: How does the inspiration exchange work for you and your team? You talked about being inspired by art—at what point during the development process do you usually get concept art?
A: As early as we can. Before production begins, we pretty much need to have done our homework. When production begins, it’s too late to be designing—at that point, we need to be implementing, because things move fast. During the time from when we first get a glimmer of the next expansion, patch or feature, we cast the voices, we go, “the next expansion is about zerg, so we need a lot more *glorp* sounds, we need to expand that vocabulary.”

Q: And then you begin casting?
A: For Mists of Pandaria, casting was a big-time effort. We went with the Screen Actor’s Guild for the game so that we could get access to the best actors and authentic accents. For the music, even though we hired master players for several of our instruments, we had to learn to write for them. The instruments were designed to play traditional Chinese music, and they have ranges that don’t necessarily hit all of the same notes as the instruments we’re more familiar with. We had to do some funky things, like the Arhu player would play everything but two notes in a given phrase; then, for those two notes, we would go to a different track, she would retune the instrument, and we’d punch in the missing notes. In the case of the Pipa, the Chinese banjo, most of it we were able to write around the range of the instrument, but there were a couple of things that I just wanted that were a little below its range. We [whispering conspiratorially] actually used a banjo for those. I defy anyone to tell.

Another instrument we used—who knew that the musical saw was a traditional Chinese instrument? It turns out it’s not, but I was looking for a very specific sound…

During Dave Kosak’s story time, he talked about how the Jinyu place their staves in the water to consult the river, which led to a piece on the soundtrack called ‘Go Ask the River.’ If you’re wondering what the high, wobbly melody note in that song is, that’s a saw. A Sears Craftsman saw. The saw player puts the saw down, holds the handle between his legs, and bends the blade, with the teeth facing him, and he uses a violin bow to bow the saw, then changes the pitch by bending and wobbling it. You may have heard of a theremin; this is sweeter and more vocal because it’s not made electronically, so there’s no static sound. I was a little worried that people would go, “oh, what’s a theremin doing here” and make Forbidden Planet jokes, but so far, no one’s mentioned the word to me, so it seems to have worked. In Mists of Pandaria, whenever you’re around a body of water that might be mystical or hold knowledge of the future or visions of the past for the Jinyu or Shaohao, you’ll hear that singing saw. We had two saws—a 14-inch one and a 20-inch one, and our saw player called them his “alto” and “tenor” saws.


Q: On the Mists of Pandaria soundtrack you blend several songs together and segue from one track to the next. Is that designed to reflect zone transitions in games, or did you compose it as one continuous piece?

A: We did seven-and-a-half hours of music for Mists of Pandaria—that brings WoW up to a total of 45 hours of music, including over 12 hours of ambient music (which is actually really fun to listen to in a playlist). Those hours are made up of many hundreds and hundreds of individual music cues. In fact, on Mists of Pandaria, I hit a personal milestone and I wrote my 1000th piece of music for WoW.

Our first soundtrack from brown box (original or ‘classic’ World of Warcraft) produced a lot of music that’s amazing and iconic, and we’re still building on it today, but it was arranged in groups—city themes, big moments, zone tracks—and they were more or less in alphabetical order. It was a ‘record’ in the sense of being a historical document, but it wasn’t arranged as an album. Starting with The Burning Crusade, we felt like we wanted to let our albums have a life outside the game.

The original brown box only had about 2 hours of music for the entire game. To make an album, they pretty much had to put almost the entire soundtrack on it. Now, we put out anywhere from 6-8 hours of music per expansion, and around an hour per patch. Ulduar was almost 2 hours. Not all of our 7 hours of music really works outside of the game—some of it is fairly ambient—but we can use a few notes to paint a mental picture, and put those tracks in a ‘story’ order that builds on related ideas and concepts. A given cut that’s several minutes long might be made up of anywhere from 1 to 5 or 6 cues from the game, and we spend a lot of time crafting nice segues and finding ways to get from one cue to another that take you on a journey without jarring you.

I also think about the album as a whole—making sure we don’t include too many slow or loud pieces in a row. Obviously, if everything’s epic and bold, then epic and bold begins to lose its meaning. Music is about contrast; a loud thing will appear louder if it’s preceded by silence. I literally draw a graph on paper, and go “with this lineup of pieces, we’ve got a nice rollercoaster going, then a big buildup, then right before the end it kind of gets slow, and then it ends at 11.” It’s a conscious decision to have the album stand alone outside the game, so people can play it in their car when they’re not playing the game if they want to take a piece of World of Warcraft with them.

When I cut the music together for the Burning Crusade album, I got the idea to put in just a hint of the ambience: our ambient tracks are really compelling in and of themselves, they’re beautiful and actually you hear them more than you hear ‘music’ in the game since the ambience never shuts off. The music kind of materializes out of the ambience and then recedes back into it. On The Burning Crusade, Derek Duke did this wonderful music for the Draenei. It was very pastoral, to represent the shimmering, glowing crystals that power their homes. It’s almost spiritual music. On the soundtrack, leading into it, I included a hint of the ambience from their starting zone, and then later the ambience from the Exodar, and it became a tradition after that. I did the same thing for the soundtrack albums for the other franchises, but it works best on WoW.

They’re all gapless albums—the only time there’s a gap is when it’s good showmanship. Going back to The Burning Crusade, the only gap is before ‘Lament of the Highborne,’ and the previous cut is ‘Taverns,’ which is almost out of left field. Then there’s a two-second gap, and then Lament of the Highborne. The album doesn’t end on a high, but with a reaching or yearning.

For Mists of Pandaria, Jeremy Soule did this piece which wound up being for the series of dailies you do when you’re riding a cloud serpent—the mechanic is like a bombing run mission, and you end up with a serpent mount at the end of the quest chain. I conducted the piece at Nokia, and it’s just really cool, so that became the capstone of the album. That’s deliberate.

Poll: Playing With Sound On
Do you spend most of your play time with the sound on?

This article was originally published in forum thread: Patch 5.4 Unannounced Feature, Titan Runestone Change, June 5 Hotfixes, Blue Tweets started by chaud View original post
Comments 104 Comments
  1. Imhullu's Avatar
    Unnannounced feature was probably a move like rift did last expac. Still have factions that have reasonable faction boundaries, but cross faction lfg, guilds, and grouping. Makes it easier on the playerbase to get stuff done in queues.
  1. lakhesis's Avatar
    Sound On - Yes, I actually find my gameplay gets worse without some of the audio cues
    Music On - No

    I'm in-raid on voice-com I keep the volume so it's slightly softer than voice-com. Audible through voicecom for cues, but so the softest spoken person on vent can be heard of it.

    If I'm soloing for an extended period, I tend to turn the audio up & I'm also 50/50 likely to turn the music back on. I'll virtually always turn the music on for a new expac.

    Prior to Cataclysm - and the goblin inn tune in particular - I would've been vastly less likely to ever turn the music back on even while soloing. I think the music has become richer and more pleasingly interwoven over the years.
  1. mmoc562e1aede6's Avatar
    Playing with all sounds on. Well, except error speech.
    To me it has always been an essential part of the game.

    In pvp its helps a ton to hear whats going on.
    And hows it fun if u cant hear when ppl do /train?

    And the music kinda enhances everything. It creates the environment. If its a creepy place, u hear creeoy music etc.
    All in all theres just so much that ppl are missing if they play without sounds.

    Also, I remember when I was in Brill once, really close to the bell. Damn did I get scared when it rang. Would have missed if Id played w/o sounds :P

    Its a fantasy world. A world with sound, not with techno playing 24/7 ;P
  1. mmoc37cfb5e035's Avatar
    I really wonder what kind of response they expected. If you get all "teehee we've got a major unannounced feature coming up but we're not telling you what is yet ))))" people WILL speculate and WILL blow it out of proportion. Doesn't take a smart man to realize that.
  1. mmoc9f738f0006's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by greyghost View Post
    .... you don't know what tranq shot is, do you?

    Additionally, the two things you quoted are not in relation to each other. The latter quote is in reference to people's MASSIVE OVERBLOWN HYPE, not in reference to himself announcing there'd be a new game feature in 5.4.

    Keep it in context in the future and you won't confuse yourself like this.
    You don't get it. They've been hyping this feature up themselves for months in interviews, and now all of a sudden they're like "guys, you probably won't think this is any good". Either they pulled it, seriously gutted it, or they were talking bollocks all along. Take your pick.
  1. darkwarrior42's Avatar
    Regarding the poll: Sounds on, but music off.
  1. quras's Avatar
    Sound on yes.

    WOW music on? Hell no.
    It's been so bad, I don't think that has been turned on since vanilla.
  1. Alopex Major's Avatar
    I keep sounds (and music) on during raids but while just questing or doing dailies/pet battles etc I listen to movies usually. MST3k is great for that
  1. Ogemaniac's Avatar
    "We think having lots of dungeons to run is less boring than doing Mechanar every night"

    I disagree. Running Mech over and over was more fun than sleep walking through the dungeons of the last three expansions over and over. Indeed, the whole semi-tier of content between dinging 70 and getting established in Karazhan was one of the best times I had in WoW, if not the outright best. It was fun and challenging, but progress was steady and clever play was rewarded. Also, the sky was the limit was for all but a few elite players, there was a lot of content in the game that lay in front of us. Contrast that with today, where everyone dings max level in a week, is facerolling "heroic" dungeons the next, and soon facerolling LFR not long after.

    There is another advantage to stretching out the heroic/crafted/rep tier and keeping people out of the first raid while - it allows subsequent raids to be held back a bit longer, and ultimately shorten the gap after the last raid, which is inevitably too long. Blizz should tune the first tier raids such that they presume you are more or less fully geared with heroic, crafted, and exhalted gear, make the heroics at least reasonably heroic, and set the expectation that most players won't be ready for the first raid for 2-3 months after the expansion starts.
  1. mmoc7b10e76725's Avatar
    I hope that the unnannounced feature be the forgotten revamped for old races!
  1. kenshinag's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by laserguns View Post
    You don't get it. They've been hyping this feature up themselves for months in interviews, and now all of a sudden they're like "guys, you probably won't think this is any good". Either they pulled it, seriously gutted it, or they were talking bollocks all along. Take your pick.
    I think that all the hype has generated a lot of theories and guesses as to what it is. A lot of people are convinced it will be something and Blizz reads the forums and knows it's not that. To keep us from getting disappointed, they want us to reel it back in. They realize that a lot of the things people are hoping it's going to be, are not what it will be and these people are so convinced that they will go into a blind fanatical rage if it's anything but what they want. I pick none of your choices.

    They need to generate buzz in interviews. It's called marketing. However this time they're reading the shit that people want and they think it's too much. Have you read all the threads people have been posting? The MOBA pvp/pve thing? Old raids in LFR? Scaled old raids? Cross faction LFR/LFG? Vanilla/BC servers? Updated old races? Free to play? There are so many other theories and every one of them believe 100% that this is what is the new feature in 5.4! All of these ideas are good, but obviously not even similar to each other so if it's not all of them, these people will be massively disappointed.

    So it's basically pre-emptive damage control that GC was trying to do. Just when he makes jokes to try and put it in a lighter mood, the terrible community jumps all over it with it's inability to comprehend anything it reads. Then they get all up in arms over nothing. Missing the point GC is trying to convey, even trying to speak to us in wow terms. I just feel bad for the guy. He has to get information out even to the grade school intelligence adults who will take their missunderstandings and spread it like wildfire.
  1. Siq1ne's Avatar
    When will Blizzard understand that by capping or limiting something that people will feel the need to get it done? I totally agree that you don't NEED to cap valor every week but that feeling wouldn't exist if it wasn't actually capped. I know I'm losing out on a little Conquest now but with the new system implemented I don't have an overwhelming desire to cap it. It'll come as it will. I like that system a great deal.
  1. mmocb54112e783's Avatar
    The Ghostcrawler that stole christmas!

    Only joking but the unannounced feature looked interesting, oh well.
  1. esdot's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Ogemaniac View Post
    I disagree. Running Mech over and over was more fun than sleep walking through the dungeons of the last three expansions over and over.
    They tried having "challenge" in the first tier of heroics for max level in Cataclysm. They wound up having to nerf them and lower the barrier of entry into the first tier of raiding because the masses who had previously complained about how heroics were too easy were now complaining about them being overly difficult.

    It's easy to look back and think fondly of the good times of TBC. The truth is, a lot of people hated that it was so hard to get into heroic (and initially non-heroic, max level) dungeons and succeed then too. The problem with this game is mostly centered around a community made up of entitled gamers that want it both ways. They want to feel elite because they have cooler/better/bigger gear/achievements/etc than other people. But they also (generally) don't want the work that comes with that sort of setup. I know you may be the exception to that, so I'm not saying you're in that category. But the gaming community in general likes to say they want challenge, but really what they want is to feel special with little effort. Blizzard's constant struggle to find a balance between those two has produced where we are today.

    I'm not sure if the old way was "better" or not, but I do not envy the position they are in when it comes to pleasing the community.
  1. Balazzar's Avatar
    Based on the mouth-running that 90% of the tweets seem to consist of, maybe it makes sense that Blizz thinks the community are brain-dead morons... Like seriously, how many QQs do these idiots have to waste on precious dev response time?

    There were maybe 20% of those tweets regarding dailies/content that even warranted an answer. Crapiness of the WoW community at full force, in under 140 characters of course.
  1. hobbsey's Avatar
    I love WoWs music, and couldn't imagine playing with the sound off.
  1. Ferrouswheel's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Seahnjin View Post
    Yeah the poll should definitely be about music. I can't understand people who never listen to the music, they're missing out so much on game immersion IMO, but whatever floats their boat.

    And I don't even know how people could play without the sound. I mean... boss abilities ? Stealth sound ? Aggro voices ?
    Because it's an mmo and I talk in vent/mumble with my guildies. If I want to listen to music I can go listen to actually good music from bands I like. As for the poll, I chose without sound only because I assumed they meant music not sound, since that's what the article was about. I was surprised by the poll results, I'm guessing not everyone interpreted the misleading poll the same.
  1. Luneward's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Siq1ne View Post
    When will Blizzard understand that by capping or limiting something that people will feel the need to get it done? I totally agree that you don't NEED to cap valor every week but that feeling wouldn't exist if it wasn't actually capped. I know I'm losing out on a little Conquest now but with the new system implemented I don't have an overwhelming desire to cap it. It'll come as it will. I like that system a great deal.
    And on the flip side if they don't cap it, there will people they feel the 'need' to run every ounce of content that provides valor/conquest every week so they might get the most they can, and prices of items will reflect that possibility. Much worse burnout. Back in Wrath, prices were built on the possibility that someone was running their daily dungeon, and doing both 10 man and 25 man in the same week.
  1. Blayze's Avatar
    I only play with the voices on. I'd rather not hear CLANG CLANG CLANG and the HURR of the human male aggro noise.

    And it's weird as hell hearing Uther and knowing he's also the Necromancer.
  1. lazzy's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by kenshinag View Post
    I think that all the hype has generated a lot of theories and guesses as to what it is. A lot of people are convinced it will be something and Blizz reads the forums and knows it's not that. To keep us from getting disappointed, they want us to reel it back in. They realize that a lot of the things people are hoping it's going to be, are not what it will be and these people are so convinced that they will go into a blind fanatical rage if it's anything but what they want. I pick none of your choices.

    They need to generate buzz in interviews. It's called marketing. However this time they're reading the shit that people want and they think it's too much. Have you read all the threads people have been posting? The MOBA pvp/pve thing? Old raids in LFR? Scaled old raids? Cross faction LFR/LFG? Vanilla/BC servers? Updated old races? Free to play? There are so many other theories and every one of them believe 100% that this is what is the new feature in 5.4! All of these ideas are good, but obviously not even similar to each other so if it's not all of them, these people will be massively disappointed.

    So it's basically pre-emptive damage control that GC was trying to do. Just when he makes jokes to try and put it in a lighter mood, the terrible community jumps all over it with it's inability to comprehend anything it reads. Then they get all up in arms over nothing. Missing the point GC is trying to convey, even trying to speak to us in wow terms. I just feel bad for the guy. He has to get information out even to the grade school intelligence adults who will take their missunderstandings and spread it like wildfire.
    GC made the hype himself.

    I don't know about you but I've been playing since launch. People have talked about all the stuff you've listed above thousands of times. Why the hell would Blizzard be phased this time?

    Blizzard is a shady company anymore there is no denying it. You don't hype the hell out of a "Unannounced feature" all x-pac than try to kill it last min. Not the first time Blizzard didn't deliver. Hell go read the WOTLK box we never seen the "aerial dogfights".

    This just falls in line with why GC is a terrible Dev and is a perfect example of why WoW has gone down the drain since he joined the team back in WOTLK. "let me just say we have a feature coming that I'm going to give zero information on. The community will never speculate amiright?"

    Sounds to me like the feature is either not done or they scrapped it. The entire "Guess what it will be when the patch drops" is a joke. That's a cop out if I ain't ever seen one.

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