Reforging
First, we looked at the recipes for Cataclysm professions and decided we had plenty of content already.
Second, we were concerned about making players feel at all dependent on reforging for income. Reforging is an unusual feature because it's never going to make a best-in-slot item. If we linked it to crafting professions, players would then rightly expect to make some kind of profit off reforging and in turn we might feel pressured to prop it up into a bigger part of the game than we really think it should play.
Third, the idea behind reforging is largely as a convenience feature to players. Forcing them to go to the AH or use trade chat or find a friend or roll an alt to get a specific item reforged would have added at least one more step to a process that is supposed to be pretty quick. Consider that you already have to enchant and gem most end-game pieces of armor. We didn't want reforging to over-complicate that process even more. (
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More Badges in 25-Man Cataclysm Raids
We're still messing around with the numbers because we want a system that works not only at launch but once there are multiple raid tiers and perhaps weekly raid quests and the whole nine yards. A very general idea (meaning it could end up being different) is that a group that can clear a 25-player raid can earn all of their points that way, while a 10-player group may need to supplement that income with more Dungeon Finder runs. We also recognize that badges are attractive early in a tier but that they lose their luster once you've earned a few pieces, so they can't be the only incentive. (
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25/10 Man Raid Achievements
Will there be a single achievement for killing a boss or will it be divided into 10/25 achievements? It'll really suck if it's the latter and you can't run both weekly.
Single achievement. (
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25/10 Man Raid Drops
I think this is one of those cases where it's not going to be possible to please everyone. Setting aside some of the folks in this thread who want to run both 10s and 25s every week to maximize reward potential, most players either prefer 10s and have no use for the 25s or want to run 25s and don't want to feel like they are being inefficient for doing so. In other words, half (I don't know if it's really half, but it makes the sentence easier to read) the community wants an incentive to run 10s and no incentive to run 25s and half the community wants the opposite. On the other hand, we feel like we need to offer both raid sizes in order to make raiding attractive to a broad swath of the community. As a result, I think it's likely that no matter what we do, proponents of each raid size will feel like we're not being fair enough to their side. It's going to be one of those hybrid vs. pure or PvE vs. PvP ongoing debates that never really get resolved because each party wants virtually the opposite of the other. (
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Maximum income (gear) per week and shared 10/25 raid ID
We balance around the maximum income possible per week because we know plenty of players will strive to achieve the max per week. The solution in our minds then is to not design a model where you can raid the same content that much. ToC was particularly troublesome because it had four independent lockouts. Yuck. We went to two lockouts for Icecrown based on that experience and are now eager to go down to one. (
Source)
[...] Some of you guys are coming from the angle that players should take responsibility for not playing more than they want to. I agree with that of course, but I also think the game design should not be something that puts that kind of pressure on you. We don't want to make a game full of traps or temptations that you should have to resist. It's more fun, I think, if what the game asks of you is reasonable. Killing the same boss twice or four times (as in ToC) or an unlimited number of times (as in the "no loot" model) doesn't seem reasonable. Neither does having to play Alterac Valley hundreds of times in a weekend to get a prestigious PvP rank. Neither does having to grind for consumables for hours every week before raid night. All of those things are theoretically "features" that players could have shown some common sense and opted out of, but realistically they were just boneheaded design decisions that we needed to fix. (
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10-Man Difficulty
Remember that in LK the 10s were specifically designed to be easier (with a couple of exceptions where we messed up) and many players ran them with the loot they earned from their 25s, further exacerbating the problem. Given the complexities of some encounters, realistically it's probably not possible for every single battle to be of exactly the same difficulty in both 10 and 25, but we have a lot of room to bring them closer together. (
Source)
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