Warlords of Draenor Developer Q&A

[Patife17]

"The team has talked about putting a level 90 purchase option in the store, but it hasn't been decided yet. "

ROFL.

[varkar]

You can technically buy as many level 90s as you want if you buy another copy of the game, get the level 90, and then transfer the character to your main account each time. The team has talked about putting a level 90 purchase option in the store, but it hasn't been decided yet.

You could apply an analogous design philosophy with gear, like if you offered a button to click to give permanently-best-in-slot epics and legendaries for a few bucks. However, despite how most players would click on it, it wouldn't be best for overall playtime in the long term.

Fewer will level 1->89 themselves including with the psychological aspect of knowing one would be investing all that time for what anyone could just buy for tens of dollars. (Gold farmers may sell accounts now but only for around an order of magnitude more cost and with a ban risk, while SoR level 80s were mainly just a small minority of players who had already played and leveled much in WoW before anyway, a lot different from newbies getting 90s enmasse).

Nothing cheap feels valuable. I can understand some motives for making level 90 account characters buyable, including the desire to ease catching up with friends, but, with this real life money method, I'm not sure Blizzard learned the right lessons from Diablo 3.

Sorry about focusing on the negative, but I like WoW too much to want to see the indirect consequences of this happen to it.

You could ease leveling time without level 90 account buying by making non-RAF non-BOA newbies get experience bonuses more like what RAF players do now. You can even change what levels mean. For friends playing together, you could let lowbies grouped with high level players have their health, DPS, and other stats upscaled to be comparable, so they could contribute to a meaningful degree at least in casual open world content. But let them level to gain more abilities and for other reasons, to have that to look forward to over much playtime.

- - - Updated - - -

Leveling in WoD will be a fun and fast paced romp through the zones. The team is backing off the idea that leveling should be a long grind.

So do most MMORPG development teams these days ... and crash after crash has been happening (part of the widely talked about decline of the MMORPG industry) as most players in them quit too soon, feeling done with those games not long after reaching max level, after no longer having many new abilities to look forward to, after no longer looking forward to large non-instanced zones yet to enter and explore. Get past the usual near-release hype and high gaming magazine reviews from naive initial play (before those MMORPGs lose 90+% of their players a few weeks after release), and rather look at objective data in terms of third-party website traffic monitor site observations.

WoW is better at player retention than others. But even WoW, if one does variants of /who searches to see only half of characters online at a time are max level, can be seen to have presently around half of total playtime spent leveling, not by hardcore raiders but by the average player.

Take that away, and, unless you literally double typical playtime spent at max level before quitting (a nice goal but unlikely realistic), average future lifetime playtime per player will decrease, not good for a subscription revenue based game.

Don't render level 1-89 a ghosttown. Don't make the richness of WoW's history irrelevant. I get that new developers who weren't around in the vanilla-TBC era want to make their mark, but the following is the wrong philosophy:

Going forward the team will try to compartmentalize the systems added in an expansion to the expansion they were added in. A good example of this is the farm added in MoP. Once WoD is released, you shouldn't have much of a reason to go back to MoP and work on your farm.

An expansion shouldn't be about trying to render irrelevant (almost like delete) all the game before the expansion. I wish I could just look forward to an expansion, in additions, not wonder how many spells will be deleted for each one added, etc. (WoW may have too much past content, too much complexity, too much depth, too many abilities for those who assume every game should be like short-playtime games, but those often aren't the players who have the attention spans to play for long and provide much long-term subscription revenue anyway).

[Aberration]

I want a Shaman specific quest..

[lactose]

My concerns are that the expansion sounds like it is so far away with so many things still undecided (including how exactly garrisons will work) and also that there is going to be essentially nothing "new" in the way of systems and concepts, just the usual more zones etc.

I like the sound of Draenei etc, but really underwhelmed by the lack of change.

[stgeorge78]

PVP guys looked extremely angry. I guess it's true that no one cares about PVP anymore.

[Josiel]

"After explaining to Doomhammer the deception of Gul'dan, Durotan and Draka were sent away to safety with one of Doomhammer’s guards, but the guard betrayed them to the assassins of the Stormreaver clan. Draka was killed in the encounter." So it cannot be Draka. Also when i read book i read that she was killed. If it would be her then it wouldn't agree with lore.

That was quite some time after their arrival in Azeroth. The expansion occurs probably some years before the orcs even set foot on azeroth, before the massacre of the Draenei (that which created the "path of glory" in Hellfire Peninsula).