Greek Community Dev Q&A, December 13 Hotfixes, Heroes Developers Switching Teams

HGC and Heroes of the Dorm 2019 Cancelled, Some Developers Switching Teams

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World Of Warcraft: Greek Community Q&A with Ion Hazzikostas
Game Director of World of Warcraft, Ion Hazzikostas, answered some questions submitted before the expansion was released from the Greek World of Warcraft Community.


Mythic+ Dungeons
  • Ideally each path of endgame progression will have unique benefits and rewards.
  • Gear swapping in Mythic+ is something the team thought about changing during Legion, but didn't want to do in the middle of an expansion.
  • The team views a Mythic+ dungeon like a single boss encounter, which is why you can't change talents or respec in the middle of the dungeon. Choices are more interesting when you are weighing the entire range of situations that the dungeon is going to offer.
  • If you are just gearing for a specific boss or pull, those choices are fairly easy. You just collect the right gear and set up macros to swap as you go.
  • Your gameplay should be more important than having the right gear swapping macros set up.

PvP
  • The team would like to have space in the game for sustained pressure, with DoT classes wearing down the healers, giving a burst class a chance to jump in and get the kill. Weakness in one area should be made up with strengths in another. If you are less mobile, you should be harder to kill. If you have high mobility, you should probably go down more easily if people are able to focus on you.
  • The team would rather focus on increasing strengths rather than mitigating weaknesses. Always bolstering weaknesses makes everyone more average at everything.

Stat Squish
  • The team doesn't think they will need to do another stat squish for another expansion, and certainly not during this one.
  • With the work that the team has done for the Battle for Azeroth stat squish, it should be easier to do it in the future, with far fewer bugs and issues. The team did a one time rework of every creature and ability in the game for Battle for Azeroth, converting them to a system that allows an easy 30% nerf under the hood. Now it is just changing one number and everything should just work.
  • Stat squishes help to keep numbers from getting out of control while still providing for power gain over an expansion.
  • The team doesn't have a great solution to avoid having to do stat squishes in the future.

The Return of Classic Buffs
  • There is something nice about getting buffed up before a pull, it's almost ceremonial. It feels like you are powering up to go into a fight.
  • The buffs also have a social element and make people stronger in a raid than they would be on their own.
  • The buffs also gave some classes that could use some extra utility an extra reason to be brought.
  • Paladins and Druids traditionally had raid buffs, but in the Battle for Azeroth environment, they already had plenty of utility.
  • The team would rather focus on the unique and strong utility that Druids and Paladins already bring rather than adding more buffs if they feel that there isn't incentive to bring these classes.

Loot Systems
  • Loot used to be much harder to come by, with guilds clearing old bosses over and over because loot was rarer.
  • Drop rates are now higher, there is personal loot, trading loot, bonus rolls, and other opportunities to get loot. The team expects players will get the loot that they want from a raid within a couple of months of doing that tier.
  • It's very rare to actually go a meaningful amount of time into a raid tier without getting the items that you want.
  • Warforging and Titanforging add some level of interest to repeated clears of a raid.
  • You might have been doing Uldir for a couple of months at this point. There is still a chance to earn something interesting and gain more power to keep progressing in the raid.
  • The team doesn't want players to feel obligated to go back and clear lower difficulties every week for the rare chance that something might be an upgrade.
  • Most players aren't feeling forced to go back and clear lower difficulties anymore. In Legion, set pieces were a reason to go back to try and get upgrades, but the game has moved away from tier sets.
  • It's up to players to choose where to spend their time, and what is most rewarding. You are better off doing Mythic+ than going back to lower raid difficulties for a slim chance at an upgrade.

Personal Loot
  • Overall, the team is happy with how Personal Loot is working out so far.
  • The best geared raid groups are still the ones doing the hardest content.
  • The benefits to removing personal loot are three things:
    • On the lower end, there are lots of guilds that churn through a steady stream of trials. Historically, guilds wouldn't give trials any loot, causing them to not have any progression.
    • On the highest end, there are guilds running multiple groups in parallel that would funnel loot to specific characters using Master Loot. This made it 4-5x faster to gear up compared to regular groups that were just doing one run. This led to more and more guilds to start running split raids.
    • Split raids made it difficult to balance raids for everyone, as the top end guilds were overgeared compared to average guilds.
    • If you want to be competitive and try for the Top 100, you can just focus on gearing up your main roster and maybe some backups rather than running split raids.
    • The team is able to itemize differently with Personal Loot. With Master Loot, the team had to design loot tables that didn't have niche items that would only be useful to a spec or two. Now the team can better cater to a wider range of itemization, with more fist weapons, range weapons, shields, and more.
    • For tight knit social groups that weren't abusing any of this, there is something that was lost with these changes.
    • The change for the game as a whole is a step in the right direction. Once you are past the first few weeks of a new raid tier, tradability helps offset these changes.
  • The team is trying to make item level a better guide for what is an upgrade.
  • Personal Loot is here to stay, so let's talk about how we can improve it rather than rolling it back to Master Loot.

Ranked PvP
  • Battle for Azeroth Ranked PvP has worked out well so far, as there is a clear progression system.
  • Unranked PvP isn't a hardcore and competitive environment, it is more relaxed.
  • Solo queue isn't a great fit for WoW because the game is very composition dependent.
  • When you make a Heroes or Overwatch team, players can switch what they are playing to build the right composition.
  • Having good matchmaking with reasonable queue times, a good skill level match, and building reasonable compositions doesn't seem possible to achieve. It would either be very long queue times or wild mismatches in skill / compositions.
  • The team is focused on improving the social tools in the game to make it easier for players to join groups of like minded folks. This also is a more social experience, which is something the team tries to emphasize whenever possible as an MMO.

Raid Difficulties
  • The difficulty structure that the team has settled on is the right one for World of Warcraft.
  • For someone that does Mythic, both Normal and Raid Finder seem like they are the same, but they are serving very different audiences.
  • Normal is for a mix of friends and family groups, and pick-up-groups. There are plenty of groups that spend an entire tier progressing through Normal difficulty. This is a satisfying and rewarding experience for those groups.
  • Raid Finder doesn't provide a satisfying social or progressive experience.
  • In Mists, Normal was similar to Heroic difficulty today. Groups would find Raid Finder to be unsatisfying and asocial, but Normal was too difficult.
  • Raid Finder is for people that don't want to commit to a schedule or raid group. If you have some free time, you can jump in, check out the story, get some gear for your alt, finish a quest, and enjoy a bite sized chunk. It's not meant to be a lasting social experience, just a chance to experience raid content and an alternative progression path.
  • It isn't possible to merge both of those experiences without heavily disappointing one group.
  • Heroic is for more organized groups that value performance and class composition.
  • Mythic is for players that want to do that at the very highest level.
  • Hopefully groups feel like they can focus on two difficulties. Mythic raiders aren't going back to Normal.
  • 30 item levels per tier is the right number assuming players are doing two tiers. The gap allows for progression and getting meaningfully more powerful. Heroic of next tier has to beat Mythic of the previous tier.

Professions
  • With every expansion, the team has changed their approach to professions.
  • Delivery mechanisms for recipes and ways for crafters to differentiate themselves from each other change.
  • What makes one Blacksmith different from another? One can make something that the other can't.
  • A lot of the differentiation was accomplished through rarity. A lucky drop gave players a reward.
  • A world where everyone can make steady progress towards making everything harms the ability for a crafter to have an economic advantage. All crafters are basically the same thing.
  • If you never get the thing you want, that would be frustrating, maybe some bad luck protection would help.
  • You may not get Rank 3 of what you really want, but you might get Rank 3 for another recipe that will give you a different economic advantage.
  • If you spend time being better at a progression, that should come with some economic and power advantages. The team isn't quite there yet.


Hotfixes: December 13, 2018
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Classes
Items

Player versus Player

Quests
  • (With server restarts in each region) Fixed a bug that caused repeatable quests, such as Pet Battle dailies or Blingtron, to reset incorrectly.
  • Fixed an issue where Alliance players could not turn in "An End to the Killing" to King Anduin Wrynn in Stormwind if they were also on the quest "On Whispered Winds".
  • All NPCs related to “The Right Mech for the Job” should now be visible, even when a Faction Assault is active.
  • Fixed an issue where certain players could see multiple copies of Anduin, Velen, and Genn in the Stormwind War Room.

World Quests

  • Fixed an issue where Horde players could not complete the quest "Cease all Summoning" while the Nazmir Assault is active.
  • Fixed a bug where players were sometimes not granted quest credit during “Desert Crawl”.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented Blight Barrels from behaving properly on “Barreling Through”.
  • Baron Cloudsnipe will no longer chase players in Pozzik's Experimental Bomber to the ends of the earth on “Romp in the Swamp”. He's still a crack shot, though.

HGC and Heroes of the Dorm 2019 Cancelled, Some Developers Switching Teams
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker)
We’re constantly changing and evolving not only our games, but how we support and grow them. This evolution is vital to our ability to continue doing what we love to do—making great games—and it’s what makes Blizzard, Blizzard.

Over the past several years, the work of evaluating our development processes and making hard decisions has led to new games and other products that we’re proud of. We now have more live games and unannounced projects than at any point in the company’s history. We’re also at a point where we need to take some of our talented developers and bring their skills to other projects. As a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to shift some developers from Heroes of the Storm to other teams, and we’re excited to see the passion, knowledge, and experience that they’ll bring to those projects. This isn’t the first time we’ve had to make tough choices like this. Games like Diablo II, World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Overwatch, and more would not exist had we not made similar decisions in the past.

Despite the change, Heroes of the Storm remains our love letter to Blizzard’s worlds and characters. We’ll continue actively supporting the game with new heroes, themed events, and other content that our community loves, though the cadence will change. Ultimately, we’re setting up the game for long-term sustainability. We’re so grateful for the support the community has shown from the beginning, and the development team will continue to support Heroes with the same passion, dedication, and creativity that has made the game such a unique experience.

We’ve also evaluated our plans around Heroes esports—after looking at all of our priorities and options in light of the change with the game, the Heroes Global Championship and Heroes of the Dorm will not return in 2019. This was another very difficult decision for us to make. The love that the community has for these programs is deeply felt by everyone who works on them, but we ultimately feel this is the right decision versus moving forward in a way that would not meet the standards that players and fans have come to expect.

While we don’t make these decisions lightly, we do look to the future excited about what the decisions will mean for our other live games and all the projects we have in the works. We appreciate all of our hard-working developers and everyone in the Blizzard community, and look forward to sharing many more epic gaming experiences with you in the future.

J. Allen Brack and Ray Gresko
This article was originally published in forum thread: Greek Community Dev Q&A, December 13 Hotfixes, Heroes Developers Switching Teams started by chaud View original post
Published on 2018-12-14 09:45 AM
118 Comments
Comments 118 Comments
  1. Ophenia's Avatar
    According to Wikipedia, the only thing more dense than Ion is Osmium. I'm not even sure.

    I'm especially loving the "The team doesn't have a great solution to avoid having to do stat squishes in the future." part. Yup, we don't have any solution to this. We didn't need to Stat Squish anything until this Warforging+75 difficulties per dungeon nonsense, but we don't really see how we could change that.

    ... No idea sorry.

    That sounds impossible.
  1. Palapop's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by athrun7189 View Post
    what's wrong with pvp?
    everything.
  1. justandulas's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Projectmars View Post
    Fortnight is losing popularity while OW is still fairly popular. CS:GO is just an established name though so good luck dethroning that. (Although Valve certainly tried with their recent move that got the game Review Bomb'd.)

    uuuh Overwatch is practically dead, chief. I'm a fan, but we have to be honest with ourselves. Fortnite may be losing momentum, but Fortnite has more players that will play it THIS MINUTE than Overwatch will have in the next 5 years combined.

    Fortnite loses more players monthly than Overwatch has TOTAL players
  1. Eleccybubb's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Projectmars View Post
    Fortnight is losing popularity while OW is still fairly popular. CS:GO is just an established name though so good luck dethroning that. (Although Valve certainly tried with their recent move that got the game Review Bomb'd.)
    It really isn't.

    Fortnite usually tops the Twitch viewership and is gaining considerable ground these days. Partly because it's a F2P game, partly because it's on every platform including Switch and Mobile and other factors.
  1. Laqweeta's Avatar
    Just so out of touch.
  1. Coldfire989's Avatar
    Hey they got to get more Devs to the mobile titles right

    - - - Updated - - -

    Hey they have to get Devs over to the mobile titles right.
  1. ONCHEhap's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by ElDoorO View Post
    Blame the guilds that screw over trial people. I enjoy PL because it removes the ability to screw other people.
    People doing Mythic are still outgearing people who don't.
    Yup,instead we're just much harsher with trials and it's way harder for them to get a guild,since we don't want to give loot to people who won't stay

    A trial is an investment.They show what they can do,and in return we help them up.If they're good enough,they stay and can get their loot

    Now even a trash tier trial can come in,get loot without putting any effort in,leave,effectively wasting the time of the guild and robbing them of their loot.

    It has no benefits whatsoever,the only people who were using ML were people ML was made for,and PL was already forced in pug groups since early Legion so that's not an argument either
    It does nothing to help pugs,and it hurts guilds
  1. justandulas's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by ONCHEhap View Post
    Yup,instead we're just much harsher with trials and it's way harder for them to get a guild,since we don't want to give loot to people who won't stay

    A trial is an investment.They show what they can do,and in return we help them up.If they're good enough,they stay and can get their loot

    Now even a trash tier trial can come in,get loot without putting any effort in,leave,effectively wasting the time of the guild and robbing them of their loot.

    It has no benefits whatsoever,the only people who were using ML were people ML was made for,and PL was already forced in pug groups since early Legion so that's not an argument either
    It does nothing to help pugs,and it hurts guilds
    There's a flip side to this though. I'm a main tank in a mythic progression guild so i totally understand your point and don't necessarily disagree at all.

    The silver lining though, with PL, is if a new trial player comes in and something drops... and they are willing to give it away to raiders who need it more or who beat them on a roll... it proves that their "one of us" like they say in the movie goodfellas. What better test of a persons character and morality than PL. It proves who can put the group ahead of their own selfish desires.
  1. trapmaster's Avatar
    Fort nite is McDonald’s garbage level....I vomit in mouth a little when I watched the twitch of it.
  1. Redwyrm's Avatar
    I guess the old adage of "If it ain't broke don't fix it" is lost over at Blizzard.

    Let's fix professions...
    Professions were fine...
    Screw you, we like to change things for arbitrary reasons...
    **Breaks professions**
    We'll fix those next expansion...
  1. Sorshen's Avatar
    Personal Loot
    Overall, the team is happy with how Personal Loot is working out so far.
    Personal Loot is here to stay, so let's talk about how we can improve it rather than rolling it back to Master Loot.
    Yeah, the team, assholes... not the players. They're really not giving me any incentives to re-sub.
  1. mmoce16145715c's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Lei View Post
    The ML/PL part is a complete bullshit. Trials do have bonus rolls as well, they can get some loot if they're lucky, I mean doesn't "getting lucky" coincide with everything Ion said before this question? Yet, what did they do? They made it so you have only 2 bonus rolls and not 3 you used to have, yet keep mantra-ing the same bullshit about poor (possibly guild hopper?) trials not getting stuff in new guilds.
    That's in the past, now trials have full rights to the loot, and according to the quote, it will never change. Adapt.
  1. Lei's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by trajandreps View Post
    That's in the past, now trials have full rights to the loot, and according to the quote, it will never change. Adapt.
    Adaptation has nothing to do with challenging the "logic" behind a decision - which I did. They try to explain something so hard while with their other hand they're doing the tricks.
  1. ONCHEhap's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by justandulas View Post
    There's a flip side to this though. I'm a main tank in a mythic progression guild so i totally understand your point and don't necessarily disagree at all.

    The silver lining though, with PL, is if a new trial player comes in and something drops... and they are willing to give it away to raiders who need it more or who beat them on a roll... it proves that their "one of us" like they say in the movie goodfellas. What better test of a persons character and morality than PL. It proves who can put the group ahead of their own selfish desires.
    Yeah,sadly it's the WoW community we're talking about,for every person behaving like that,you'll see 15 trying to abuse the system
    If we were playing,let's say,Lord of the Rings Online,I'd wouldn't worry a second with trusting strangers with such things,but WoW is about as toxic as it gets outside of MOBAs
  1. Onikaroshi's Avatar
    "Ilvl is king" is boring, uninspired, bullshit. We need to go back to when we had more secondaries and gem slots and things actually took some thought to what you wanted to equip. Back when there was soft and hard caps. What is fun about "get new piece, higher ilvl, auto equip" (though its not even the case mostly).
  1. Appelgren's Avatar
    "If you have high mobility, you should probably go down more easily if people are able to focus on you."

    I guess they thought of this AFTER creating Demon Hunter...
  1. Shandita's Avatar
    Personal Loot
    Overall, the team is happy with how Personal Loot is working out so far.
    I guess That's the problem. The team doesn't pay for play. They are no WoW players. Otherwise would think different.
  1. Debased's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Onikaroshi View Post
    "Ilvl is king" is boring, uninspired, bullshit. We need to go back to when we had more secondaries and gem slots and things actually took some thought to what you wanted to equip. Back when there was soft and hard caps. What is fun about "get new piece, higher ilvl, auto equip" (though its not even the case mostly).
    Bitching just to bitch. I've come across MANY items that are 20-30 ilvls higher but weren't auto upgrades because of stat weights and gem slots. If you miss expertise, hit, and the plethora of other minor stats I don't know what to tell you. I always found it tedious and boring and it literally changed nothing. Now and then I sim my characters all the same.
  1. Jamie081's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Projectmars View Post
    Fortnight is losing popularity while OW is still fairly popular. CS:GO is just an established name though so good luck dethroning that. (Although Valve certainly tried with their recent move that got the game Review Bomb'd.)
    Fortnite is going incredibly strong whereas Overwatch is practically on maintenance mode with its rehashed events and their 6 legendary skins each, and no fresh content coming except 'quality of life updates' and 'features' that won't see the light of day until 2019.
  1. Debased's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by justandulas View Post
    uuuh Overwatch is practically dead, chief. I'm a fan, but we have to be honest with ourselves. Fortnite may be losing momentum, but Fortnite has more players that will play it THIS MINUTE than Overwatch will have in the next 5 years combined.

    Fortnite loses more players monthly than Overwatch has TOTAL players
    You people have literally ZERO data to back any of this up. Are you actually going off of Twitch viewership? That would be pretty fucking hilarious if true.
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