The Firelands - Not enough content?
Yes, Firelands is the raid in 4.2, and 7 is the total number of bosses.
We think 7 is our current ideal for number of bosses in a raid. (We launched Cataclysm with two full raids of 4-6 bosses each.) We're also spending a lot of time making the Firelands bosses as awesome as possible - - creating unique models, animations, effects, sounds, etc. etc. Previously a lot of bosses were larger versions of existing models, which was fine, but that tradeoff is made somewhere. We shift to making fewer but more epic boss fights and there's a tradeoff somewhere. We're concentrating our efforts into a smaller number of fights so that each fight is bigger and better, they're still obviously going to be extremely challenging, but once it is on farm you're not having to spend two, three, maybe four nights just to clear it because the raid is so huge.
Our ideal situation would, of course, be to launch as many raids as possible with this current ideal number of around 7 bosses, but that's not something we're ever going to promise. We'd love to be able to produce unlimited amounts of content anywhere, not just raids, for that matter. We think one raid per patch with around 7 bosses is a super solid experience, though, especially with how much effort is going into Firelands. We don't think anyone is going to be disappointed.
On a side note, the whole daily quest thing hasn't sparked much excitement yet, but with the preview going live here in a few hours (and BlizzCast 16) hopefully we can impress how awesome that's going to be, too.
Again, there's a pretty aggressive development cycle for 4.2, so it's not going to be very long before we're on the PTR, and not very long (comparatively) before release. (
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Firelands Raid - Only 7 Bosses?
Yeah, I mean that's a tough situation because our feeling is simply that people shouldn't be forced to play the game more than a couple nights a week to keep up on progression. We realize though that some people legitimately like playing every night, and having real reasons to be in the game and playing with raid groups and such. There's obviously things like alts, professions, achievements, PvP, to keep people busy, but it's ultimately something we'd like to get a better handle on. Having content that isn't forcing people to log in every night, but still offering something that's meaningful for those that do. Understand though that by definition those types of things can't lead to player power or else everyone will be back to having to log on every single night to keep pace. Anyway, it's something we very much want to get a better handle on, but it's not something we're going to solve easily. (
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[...] I think the thing to probably take away from this is that content is not infinite, and so we have to look at everyone who plays the game and try to be smart about where we focus this finite pool of development resources we have.
As someone else very astutely mentioned earlier, Sunwell had 6 bosses, and I remember people being outraged that they were gated to unlock over time to stretch out that content. Firelands has 7 bosses and they aren't gated. We hope people enjoy them as much, and will be able to look back as fondly on it as they do on Sunwell. (
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Molten Front Dailies and Rewards
Well, someone doing the dailies every day will certainly achieve the rewards faster than someone who doesn't... But there's no comparison between coordinating 10 or 25 people to put all their concentration into the game for many hours a night, multiple nights, and someone choosing to log in and do a few quests by themselves every day. (
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Dungeon Journal
If you're speaking at all about boss encounters, I think you'll dig the Dungeon Journal (formerly referred to as Encounter Journal) coming in patch 4.2. Once we're able to catalog more of our dungeons in this journal, you'll get a lot of essential information for each boss fight. It's not going to tell you how to beat the fight, but it's going to tell you what kind of abilities the boss will be using against you. You'll just have to figure out with your party or raid how to deal with those abilities when they're used. Dungeon Journal will also help you find the loot you're looking for from each boss ahead of time, so you have items in mind you hope to get before even setting foot in the dungeon. (
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Engineering - Rocket Fuel Leak
"Rocket Fuel Leak" was specifically meant as an alternative failure for dungeons, raids, and battlegrounds so we weren't launching people up into unknown invisible (or otherwise) roofs and getting them stuck or allowing content exploitation. In 4.1 it was fixed so that this failure was actually properly going off in these specific types of content.
Reevaluating the damage though, we're going to apply a hotfix to bring it down quite a bit (it won't be able to kill you outright anymore). (
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New Content - Quality over Quantity
I think you're right, though. We've trended toward choosing quality over quantity with some of our content creation, and while that isn't usually a bad thing, it's rarely a good thing from a perception point of view. I think that's something we realize but - - and this is sort of a difficult concept to get across sometimes - - is that the game is... really big, and by the laws of physics really big things don't change direction very quickly. Depending on which part of the development team or individual developers you're talking about, they could be working on content we won't even announce until six months later. Maybe longer. That's just the necessity of our development to ensure we're getting patches and expansions out. So these types of evaluations of what direction the game is in and any changes or general philosophy we want to alter, we may begin making a course correction, but we're just not able to hit that new heading until the entire ship finishes turning. It's also not too rare that in the middle of altering our direction, we change our minds.
Anyway, I don't want that to be discouraging because it's not true of all things, but it is generally true of things like planning patch content which takes many, many months of development. And even then, like I said, things can change midway, but that's not always a bad thing. (
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Goblins and Worgens missing /roar sound
You don't like it when we take stuff away from you!? ;P
So the actual issue was that there was a bug where emote /attacktarget for goblin and worgen played the sounds associated with both /roar and /attack at the same time, which sounded broken. Since no other race but goblin and worgen have roar sounds, the fix for the bug was to make them behave the same as all other races by removing the sounds.
I know, I know, but it's done. OR IS IT!?
Obviously people miss their roar sounds. What we're going to do is hook the goblin/worgen roar sounds back up in a 'future patch' (it's not hotfixable), hurray, and then attempt to record /roar sounds for all the other races to add to the game in a patch after that.
Goblin/worgen, unfortunately lose their roars for a short while, but in the end everyone wins! Or at least roars. (
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Cannot /dance while in Combat
Dancing while in combat was disabled to fix some unfortunate animation bugs. For example, several races do a torso twist as part of their special attack animation, and that would go haywire when the character was also trying to dance.
Part of what makes WoW a compelling experience is the sense of immersion in this alternate world, and that is a sense that can be disrupted by graphic glitches.
We definitely hear the outcry over the dancing in combat. Our tactic is going to be to try to let characters dance while they are in combat, and always break the dance when a foe is engaged (so you could dance while in combat, but only when your character is idle). We are just starting to investigate this solution, but I can assure you that it is being evaluated. I’ve heard that directly from the mouths of the devs.
Having said that, we realize there are plenty of other areas in the game where the art can get into a less than optimal state, and nobody should assume that we just don’t care about those – they are all on the radar. (
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