Difficulty Changes, No Account Wipe With The Next Patch, HC and the 'Lower Difficulty' Feature, Affixes and CC, Item Discussions
Opt-In Beta Invites Wave, Hearthstone Wiki Updates, MG Interviews, Community Spotlight: Cake
Flex Item Levels
Watcher commented on the item level requirements of many PuG Flex groups, as well as sharing that usually people who do Wing 1 and 2 are somewhere in the 530s and Wing 3 and 4 are in the 540s.
Patch 5.4.2 Hotfixes - January 14
Classes
Raids, Dungeons, and Scenarios
- Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
- General
- Snake Trap now uses the same version of Mind-Numbing Poison debuff as Rogues; reducing the target's casting speed on player targets by 10% (down from 25%).
- Snake Trap now uses the same version of Mind-Numbing Poison debuff as Rogues; reducing the target's casting speed on player targets by 10% (down from 25%).
- General
Raids, Dungeons, and Scenarios
- Siege of Orgrimmar
- Paragons of the Klaxxi
- [Requires a realm restart.] Resolved an issue that could cause tanks to be unable to interact with a fallen Paragon.
- [Requires a realm restart.] Resolved an issue that could cause tanks to be unable to interact with a fallen Paragon.
- Paragons of the Klaxxi
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
WoW Customer Loyalty Program
This has been a topic of constant discussion and debate for years now, both within the community and internally here at Blizzard. It's a surprisingly controversial subject on all fronts, but I'm sure tagging this thread with blue won't kick up any dust... (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Leveling and Arena Ratings
We're working on a hotfix for this issue right now. The intention is that only players at level 70, 80, 85, or 90 should be able to queue for Arenas, and that as soon as a player levels up, their ratings will be reset.
lore can you guys reset the people that have leveled to 90 with level 89 ratings
Yep, that's the plan. It may not happen at the same time that the hotfix applies, but we'll be resetting ratings for those characters. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
A Day in the Life of Blizzard
We had a short run of something similar to what you describe with our "A Day in the Life" series, released during Blizzard's 20th anniversary: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company...nterviews.html (Even our team's own Bashiok is featured!)
There's definitely some value to opening up our doors a bit more, so to speak, and giving the community an opportunity to get to know more of the names and faces within Blizzard, and the work-related responsibilities those people have.
That said, it does take a fair amount of resources from multiple departments to put features like that together. When possible we like to couple them with other announcements or initiatives to provide more background and context for what we're working on.
One thing we do fairly often as well is sit various developers and other Blizzard content creators down with fan/media sites for interviews. Ideally that allows for more community-driven questions to be answered, as opposed to any of us rather aimlessly talking about our day-to-day operations. They're also easier to pull off given that we're not publishing the content ourselves -- meaning much fewer resources on our end are required. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Legendary Questline
I posted about this somewhere before, but I can't find it now...
I'll largely avoid the tedious vs. challenging conversation as I'm not feeling very eloquent right now, but I will say that it's about variety. There need to be a wide variety of things to do with a wide variety of requirements to build a whole experience and appeal to any particular player at any particular moment in their schedule, knowledge, or skill with the game.
Ok, in any case, with the Legendary questline in Mists we wanted to have a reward that everyone could follow along with as the expansion progressed, and to create a story and gear-upgrade thread throughout the expansion, ultimately leading to a Legendary item of some kind. Also while developing the expansion it was important for us to support this fairly new system called LFR, and so for the Legendary to also be accessible regardless of the raid difficulty you were involved in. Obviously both have been really successful, and we're happy with hitting the goals we set for ourselves. That said we definitely learned a lot of lessons, and definitely agree on the 3000 VP step being wholly un-Legendary in particular. We think there's certainly room to improve for a future Legendary or Legendaries, and bigger goals to set to provide a challenging and rewarding experience to appeal to and be accessible by a wide range of players - to be completely vague about it. Overall I'd say we're on the same page. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
This has been a topic of constant discussion and debate for years now, both within the community and internally here at Blizzard. It's a surprisingly controversial subject on all fronts, but I'm sure tagging this thread with blue won't kick up any dust... (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Leveling and Arena Ratings
We're working on a hotfix for this issue right now. The intention is that only players at level 70, 80, 85, or 90 should be able to queue for Arenas, and that as soon as a player levels up, their ratings will be reset.
lore can you guys reset the people that have leveled to 90 with level 89 ratings
Yep, that's the plan. It may not happen at the same time that the hotfix applies, but we'll be resetting ratings for those characters. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
A Day in the Life of Blizzard
We had a short run of something similar to what you describe with our "A Day in the Life" series, released during Blizzard's 20th anniversary: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company...nterviews.html (Even our team's own Bashiok is featured!)
There's definitely some value to opening up our doors a bit more, so to speak, and giving the community an opportunity to get to know more of the names and faces within Blizzard, and the work-related responsibilities those people have.
That said, it does take a fair amount of resources from multiple departments to put features like that together. When possible we like to couple them with other announcements or initiatives to provide more background and context for what we're working on.
One thing we do fairly often as well is sit various developers and other Blizzard content creators down with fan/media sites for interviews. Ideally that allows for more community-driven questions to be answered, as opposed to any of us rather aimlessly talking about our day-to-day operations. They're also easier to pull off given that we're not publishing the content ourselves -- meaning much fewer resources on our end are required. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Legendary Questline
I posted about this somewhere before, but I can't find it now...
I'll largely avoid the tedious vs. challenging conversation as I'm not feeling very eloquent right now, but I will say that it's about variety. There need to be a wide variety of things to do with a wide variety of requirements to build a whole experience and appeal to any particular player at any particular moment in their schedule, knowledge, or skill with the game.
Ok, in any case, with the Legendary questline in Mists we wanted to have a reward that everyone could follow along with as the expansion progressed, and to create a story and gear-upgrade thread throughout the expansion, ultimately leading to a Legendary item of some kind. Also while developing the expansion it was important for us to support this fairly new system called LFR, and so for the Legendary to also be accessible regardless of the raid difficulty you were involved in. Obviously both have been really successful, and we're happy with hitting the goals we set for ourselves. That said we definitely learned a lot of lessons, and definitely agree on the 3000 VP step being wholly un-Legendary in particular. We think there's certainly room to improve for a future Legendary or Legendaries, and bigger goals to set to provide a challenging and rewarding experience to appeal to and be accessible by a wide range of players - to be completely vague about it. Overall I'd say we're on the same page. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Hearthstone Beta - Opt-In Accounts Flagged
The majority of the final round of invites to the Hearthstone closed beta test have now been completed - We have now directly flagged most Battle.net accounts that have met both of the following criteria:
If your account was successfully flagged for beta access, your account was also sent an email with instructions on how to download and install the game. If you cannot find this email for any reason, please go to your Battle.net Account Management page - The Hearthstone license should be visible under “Summary” - “Your Game Accounts” if your account was flagged for beta access. If your account has not yet been flagged for the beta test, we are still going through all of the accounts and we will provide another update at a later time.
The Battle.net desktop app is required in order to play Hearthstone, so make sure to install the Battle.net desktop app first. If you run into issues with downloading or installing Hearthstone or with the Battle.net desktop app, please visit our Support site for more assistance.
- The account was opted into the Hearthstone beta test before January 7th.
- The account does not have a Hearthstone license already attached to it as of January 7th.
If your account was successfully flagged for beta access, your account was also sent an email with instructions on how to download and install the game. If you cannot find this email for any reason, please go to your Battle.net Account Management page - The Hearthstone license should be visible under “Summary” - “Your Game Accounts” if your account was flagged for beta access. If your account has not yet been flagged for the beta test, we are still going through all of the accounts and we will provide another update at a later time.
The Battle.net desktop app is required in order to play Hearthstone, so make sure to install the Battle.net desktop app first. If you run into issues with downloading or installing Hearthstone or with the Battle.net desktop app, please visit our Support site for more assistance.
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