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Warcraft Radio interviewed Chris Kaleiki, former PvP Developer and Game Designer for Shadowlands.
- The modern game has so many different ways to gear up, and the challenge for the team is that they want all of these sources to feel rewarding. However, not everything can be an upgrade or players would gear up way too fast.
- The only way to address this is by either random chance or breaking the system up with a currency for upgrades or supplemental gearing.
- Chris says that the feeling amongst the team was that BfA was too random, and they conceited that it went too far.
- The trick is to make sure you learn from past challenges and designs that didn't work out, but not to go too far in the other direction.
- Chris thinks that they have done a good job with this in Shadowlands for the most part.
- Chris says that the team would like to think that players are holistic and enjoy using all parts of the game to gear, but this isn't always the case and it's a challenge. Ultimately, it's a question for the players to answer.
- In Legion, there was a concerted effort to engineer comps in Arena with the PvP system, but it's now more reactionary.
- Originally, there wasn't a set designer for each class in PvP. When Chris joined, he and some others started to take on focusing on specific classes. Today, it's a hybrid of the two.
- Today, there has to be a consensus for a lot of changes in the game, which can often take awhile. It might seem like nothing is happening a lot, but behind the scenes there is a lot going on.
- Unfortunately, sometimes PvP balance can fall in priority. It rises when something is really bad or there is a tournament.
- You don't want to make too many huge changes before a tournament.
- In BfA there were a lot of items designed for PvE that affected PvE and the Chris says that the team was more reactionary in their efforts to fix it.
- A lot of the time it isn't the core classes that affect PvP balance. It's an outlying item. These are done by an entirely different team and sometimes the PvP team doesn't always catch it until it's live.
- Chris believes having spells do different things between PvE and PvP isn't always easy as you want the game to be easy to understand and accessible. This is a challenge when trying to address balance issues.
- Chris says the team wants the game experience to be enjoyable no matter who they are.
- The team really wanted to keep the soul of the original bg maps when they upgraded them. Keeping the same collision detection was a challenge.
- Ashran's inspiration was to be a PvP zone, and not a traditional PvP map.
- There was an instance after Ashran was removed where Mike Morhaime was emailed by a woman who's favorite activity in game was Ashran, and didn't want to see it go. There is a lot of different things players enjoy in the game, and they have to be careful when making changes because of this.
- Ashran was meant to be an endless battleground, and it didn't make sense to have the events in the epic bg rotation. This is why there was a separate brawl version.
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