Ion Hazzikostas Interview, Patch 5.3 PTR Build 16954, Blue Tweets, The Daily Blink

[ganush]

"It would have been nice to have more dungeons while leveling in Pandaria, as there wasn't enough variety. This is something that can be improved upon in the future."

It's so comical when they say it like it's something they had absolutely no control over.

This is what makes my head spin. They had a really successful formula with using dungeons as a catch up mechanism, and most people I know enjoyed the ability to use this path to gear up alts, but they decided not to have any extra 5 man content post initial release in MoP. So I ask myself why did they make this decision? All I can come up with is that they wanted to prove how successful LFR is by forcing people to use it if they want to gear up, then they can say "Look how many people are using LFR" and pat themselves on the back for coming up with a great idea. It's easy to say it would have been nice to have more dungeons while leveling and it would have been even nicer to have more dungeons in one of the patches.

The result of these decisions for me was that I leveled my alts for professions and have them all sitting, basically unplayed in 463 gear. I raid on my main, I have no desire to burn myself out on that content by doing it on alts in LFR. It's not fun for me and the people in there aren't enjoyable. With 5-mans, I could go in to content with 5 friends anytime I wanted and do something. There's no content available right now that I can do with a few of my buddies....sorry Heroic Scenarios aren't what I'm looking for. So how do I play WoW now. I log on to raid and log off. I have no interest in doing more dailies or one of the original heroic dungeons yet again that I've seen 30 times already. There is NO reason for me to play other than my 2 nights of raiding.

I'm fine with the existence of LFR, but did it really have to come at the expense of a catch up progression system of JP and dungeons that in my opinion worked very well for two expansion? I'm gonna argue no and I think sub numbers over the next year will support that argument.

[Rorschachs]

It's not "a bit" harder than intended. It's actually much more than that. The gap between lfr and normal is HUGE. He's ignorant and willfully ignorant of his own game it seems. What I said remains true. They have no idea how to design content and build a game for their player base and they have no idea what made their game(s) successful in the first place.

Considering he said both normal modes and 10 man in general are harder than intended it doesn't mean that there will be little tuning. Expect nerfs for normal modes and nerfs for 10 man on top of that.

And you are exaggerating. Its not like the %98 of the players wait to be able to raid one day or anything..
The dedicated playerbase both in pve and pvp are %5 of the playerbase at most but they are more likely to stick around so there is nothing wrong in trying to make the experience better for these players considering they are trying to make the experience better for EVERYONE. They are not saying "screw you nm raiders, we are retarded so we are only going to design things for the %2 of our playerbase."

Competitiveness is important. Do you know how many people watch lol tourneys and play the game because it is a big esport but aren't even good players? End game is important in an MMO even more than other games because you spend a lot of time to even be able to participate in the end game events so please stop QQing everytime the devs say they give a shit about hardcore pvers and high rated pvp.

edit : there is a reason that %90 of the lol playerbase is male. Males tend to be more competitive ... Not everybody wants to play farmville.

[MrExcelion]

In a nutshell, Blizzard needs to put engaging social content back in WoW. Too much focus on solo play this expansion. My long-time guildies that quit always say it was the people that kept them subbed. I make friends when pugging normals, but not in LFR.

[Deleted]

It's not "a bit" harder than intended. It's actually much more than that. The gap between lfr and normal is HUGE. He's ignorant and willfully ignorant of his own game it seems. What I said remains true. They have no idea how to design content and build a game for their player base and they have no idea what made their game(s) successful in the first place.

And may I ask, what made their game successful in the first place? This game is more casual friendly than ever before.

[MikHaven]

Is IT me, or joining LFR for World of Warcraft as a group, with loot sharing and what not, a GREAT way to bring back small groups and family oriented guilds to feel like they can improve as a group. If its premade you can share loot, if your join solo still separate loot.

---------- Post added 2013-05-16 at 07:11 PM ----------

GC: "I'm not saying there weren't alts before, but the average player having 4-5 happened in Dragon Soul."

IN RAID FINDER, GC your such an idiot sometimes. Gearing up alts in Raid Finder was unbelievable cool. Before you were stuck with one toon. When LFR came out you had a choice of what toon you wanted to play, now its ONE toon or nothing. I think its sorta the Do the dungeon gear up, do the LFR gear up more. Rinse and repeat per patch. Taking away Dungeons was also a TERRIBLE idea. Although I am not sure of the viability of continuing to LFR to gear up. Sounded like an interesting idea. IT seems debunked by all the comments, and personal experience. Lack of gear upgrades probably killed the whole system. Struggling in DS to get that last upgrade, now can even get more than 3.

[Glorious Leader]

And may I ask, what made their game successful in the first place? This game is more casual friendly than ever before.

NO it's not.

---------- Post added 2013-05-16 at 07:17 PM ----------

Considering he said both normal modes and 10 man in general are harder than intended it doesn't mean that there will be little tuning. Expect nerfs for normal modes and nerfs for 10 man on top of that.

And you are exaggerating. Its not like the %98 of the players wait to be able to raid one day or anything..
The dedicated playerbase both in pve and pvp are %5 of the playerbase at most but they are more likely to stick around so there is nothing wrong in trying to make the experience better for these players considering they are trying to make the experience better for EVERYONE. They are not saying "screw you nm raiders, we are retarded so we are only going to design things for the %2 of our playerbase."

Competitiveness is important. Do you know how many people watch lol tourneys and play the game because it is a big esport but aren't even good players? End game is important in an MMO even more than other games because you spend a lot of time to even be able to participate in the end game events so please stop QQing everytime the devs say they give a shit about hardcore pvers and high rated pvp.

edit : there is a reason that %90 of the lol playerbase is male. Males tend to be more competitive ... Not everybody wants to play farmville.

If the raiding player base is only 5% then were still backwards in all of this. Creation of raids takes up far more time and effort than almost anything else in the game and catering to the 5% is almost as bad as catering to the 1. Competitiveness is the least important aspect of wow and it was the least important aspect of sc and diablo 2, in fact I'm not really sure how competitiveness can be the mot important aspect when so few players participate in the raids anyway. Not everybody accepts kill or be killed. Not everyone is a barbarian. They are exactly saying screw you to the majority of their playerbase WHO SUBSIDIZES the creation of raids they have neither the care nor the desire to participate in at the expense of content they may have enjoyed in the past (i.e Dungeons). It's BACKWARDS.

For the majority of the player base (and I would argue raiding base as well) Competition DOESn'T FUCKING MATTER. THey aren't playing this game as an arms race. Theiy're playing to chill with friends in an easy raid environment. Not be competitive in some pve esport which is lawl btw.

[nekobaka]

And may I ask, what made their game successful in the first place? This game is more casual friendly than ever before.

Depends on your definition of casual. WoW was casual compared to EQ by the vast gutting of grinds. Lowering the challenge difficulty was not part of the casual equation at the time.

[Rorschachs]

NO it's not.

---------- Post added 2013-05-16 at 07:17 PM ----------




If the raiding player base is only 5% then were still backwards in all of this. Creation of raids takes up far more time and effort than almost anything else in the game and catering to the 5% is almost as bad as catering to the 1. Competitiveness is the least important aspect of wow and it was the least important aspect of sc and diablo 2, in fact I'm not really sure how competitiveness can be the mot important aspect when so few players participate in the raids anyway. Not everybody accepts kill or be killed. Not everyone is a barbarian. They are exactly saying screw you to the majority of their playerbase WHO SUBSIDIZES the creation of raids they have neither the care nor the desire to participate in at the expense of content they may have enjoyed in the past (i.e Dungeons). It's BACKWARDS.

For the majority of the player base (and I would argue raiding base as well) Competition DOESn'T FUCKING MATTER. THey aren't playing this game as an arms race. Theiy're playing to chill with friends in an easy raid environment. Not be competitive in some pve esport which is lawl btw.

HOW ON EARTH ARE THEY SAYING SCREW YOU TO THE MAJORITY? explain me that first.

And for the majority of the playerbase, competition does matter because it gives you hype. I hope you know how important hype is in games in general. People play this game to chill yes ; but that doesn't mean that people spending years on this game should be unhappy with that decision and like I said they are trying to cater to everybody.

No game on earth created the majority of the content for their casual players because then games would be boring and pointless. THERE HAS TO BE AN END GAME. Even if people won't be seeing that end game its important that it exists because if players could just chill and do every single thing to do including things like heroic raiding and getting gladiator titles there would be no point to playing this game for so many people.

Just giving away everything to everbody is not a sign of a good game so please understand that first.

[mag07]

And we get the usual: everything is working as intended, lfr is great, tier is great, disregard people dropping out by millions and keep on paying, don't forget to realm transfer all your toons as we live in denial and we will not merge servers but we'd like to see more organized raiding. Jolly

[Salech]

It's not "a bit" harder than intended. It's actually much more than that. The gap between lfr and normal is HUGE. He's ignorant and willfully ignorant of his own game it seems. What I said remains true. They have no idea how to design content and build a game for their player base and they have no idea what made their game(s) successful in the first place.

And yet it's not even THAT hard if you know what your doing, but most people have been doing LFR it seems where falling asleep still gets you through.

[Raone]

Honestly the the best solution for them is to add a 3rd raid difficulty and make it harder (and make mechanics matter) then LFR, but easier then Normal. Then they won't have to nerf normal by 10-15% anymore because there is already a nerfed mode. Also pugs/alt runs would be happen more, and guilds who hit brick walls can turn the difficulty down to clear ... kinda like you do when trying to kill heroic bosses and time is running out for the week.

The only flaw is people will be able to clear content faster, but you already can in LFR, so gate this "easier" difficulty the same way you gate LFR. Tons of positives and no negatives.

Going back to the Wrath models (10's being easier) will piss off a lot of 10 man radiers and make a lot of people quit (including me), but adding a 3rd difficulty harder then LFR will make people happy without upsetting anyone. Plus I would probably log on more and run that with my alts/friends.

[Deleted]

NO it's not.

---------- Post added 2013-05-16 at 07:17 PM ----------




If the raiding player base is only 5% then were still backwards in all of this. Creation of raids takes up far more time and effort than almost anything else in the game and catering to the 5% is almost as bad as catering to the 1. Competitiveness is the least important aspect of wow and it was the least important aspect of sc and diablo 2, in fact I'm not really sure how competitiveness can be the mot important aspect when so few players participate in the raids anyway. Not everybody accepts kill or be killed. Not everyone is a barbarian. They are exactly saying screw you to the majority of their playerbase WHO SUBSIDIZES the creation of raids they have neither the care nor the desire to participate in at the expense of content they may have enjoyed in the past (i.e Dungeons). It's BACKWARDS.

For the majority of the player base (and I would argue raiding base as well) Competition DOESn'T FUCKING MATTER. THey aren't playing this game as an arms race. Theiy're playing to chill with friends in an easy raid environment. Not be competitive in some pve esport which is lawl btw.

The game needs carrots on sticks to keep people playing.
Its not about how many actually see exclusive content, its about how many want to see it. This game badly needs more of it.
What is wrong for people who are better/put more time into game getting more out of it? It works everywhere else in life why not here?

[Glorious Leader]

HOW ON EARTH ARE THEY SAYING SCREW YOU TO THE MAJORITY? explain me that first.

The majority of the player base doesn't raid and yet the developers insist on making content that they don't do, effectively robbing peter to pay paul. In addition to this they make 2/3 modes of that content unavailable for people who would potentially be interested in it. It's a massive fuck you.

---------- Post added 2013-05-16 at 10:08 PM ----------

The game needs carrots on sticks to keep people playing.
Its not about how many actually see exclusive content, its about how many want to see it. This game badly needs more of it.
What is wrong for people who are better/put more time into game getting more out of it? It works everywhere else in life why not here?

Because people are exactly looking to escape from life when they play warcraft. Not replicate the experience they have in doldrum and in tedium at their jobs. World of Warcraft: The McDonalds Crew Trainer experience would never fucking work and nobody would buy it.

[Calaba]

Well there's 2 ways for them to go - either nerf 10's to a sensible level, whereby you don't need to basically outgear them to kill half the bosses, OR add a new difficulty level, which you can switch on and off for different bosses (to suit your raids composition).

The "correct" difficulty setting was BT/MH/Uld/ICC. Easy bosses early on (first few bosses should be free kills more or less), but a gradually increasing difficulty curve (RoS, Archimonde, Mimiron, Professor, etc). It's nice to see they realised their mistake with Horridon's crazy dps requirements in the first few weeks, but this really needs to not happen again. It was the same mistake as Garalon, which took FOREVER to be fixed. How can they possibly make the EXACT same mistake 2 raids in a row?!

[ihyln]

This is what makes my head spin. They had a really successful formula with using dungeons as a catch up mechanism, and most people I know enjoyed the ability to use this path to gear up alts, but they decided not to have any extra 5 man content post initial release in MoP. So I ask myself why did they make this decision? All I can come up with is that they wanted to prove how successful LFR is by forcing people to use it if they want to gear up, then they can say "Look how many people are using LFR" and pat themselves on the back for coming up with a great idea. It's easy to say it would have been nice to have more dungeons while leveling and it would have been even nicer to have more dungeons in one of the patches.

The result of these decisions for me was that I leveled my alts for professions and have them all sitting, basically unplayed in 463 gear. I raid on my main, I have no desire to burn myself out on that content by doing it on alts in LFR. It's not fun for me and the people in there aren't enjoyable. With 5-mans, I could go in to content with 5 friends anytime I wanted and do something. There's no content available right now that I can do with a few of my buddies....sorry Heroic Scenarios aren't what I'm looking for. So how do I play WoW now. I log on to raid and log off. I have no interest in doing more dailies or one of the original heroic dungeons yet again that I've seen 30 times already. There is NO reason for me to play other than my 2 nights of raiding.

I'm fine with the existence of LFR, but did it really have to come at the expense of a catch up progression system of JP and dungeons that in my opinion worked very well for two expansion? I'm gonna argue no and I think sub numbers over the next year will support that argument.

They neglected dungeons because it required "too much work". Then they shove dailies down everyone's throats as "content". Dailies = low effort, low quality content from Blizzard.

[ganush]

They neglected dungeons because it required "too much work". Then they shove dailies down everyone's throats as "content". Dailies = low effort, low quality content from Blizzard.

Pretty much. Instead of dungeons which required dev time, they gave us LFR which could be scaled off existing content. Then they tell us how great it is and that if we wanna gear up alts, that's our path to do it. Sorry, but it sucks. Not only does it diminish my enjoyment of my regular raid if I'm doing the same content on alts, but there is zero interaction and when you are one of 25 people facerolling content that is designed to require no skill, you don't feel like you're playing a social game. It also requires a longer time investment than dungeons did, and one that is much more open ended. If I had 45 minutes to play, I knew I could log on, hit up guild for a group and do a quick dungeon with people I enjoyed the company of before I had to log off. Now, if I wanna do something that has a chance of upgrading my character I can do the same damned dailies I ground to death on my main, or hope LFR queue pops and maybe we get one boss dead before I have to call it a day. Not to mention that I'm a faceless nothing in a group of 24 other faceless nothings in an LFR group. No one chats, rarely is a positive word spoken and if anything goes wrong the faceless mob turns angry in a hurry.

What made WoW strong was the social aspect, yet every move Blizzard makes seems to take the requirement to make friends out of the game. What kept people coming back was the people they knew in game, not that quality of the content, and if you remove all the content that requires you to get to know your fellow players, you lose the people who play for that reason. For example, I hadn't done the Isle of Thunder dailies yet and it was a couple of weeks in. I had a friend who I hadn't seen for a very long time log on, so we decided we'd go explore together. After an hour of getting queued for solo scenerio after solo scenario, we both had to go and our time playing together consisted of "gee, I hope this is the last one". We got to accept the quests together...woohoo. If Blizzard insists on making the game a solo experience (and even tho LFR requires 25 people, it is solo content imo), then the game is dead as far as I'm concerned.

[Deleted]

The majority of the player base doesn't raid and yet the developers insist on making content that they don't do, effectively robbing peter to pay paul. In addition to this they make 2/3 modes of that content unavailable for people who would potentially be interested in it. It's a massive fuck you.

---------- Post added 2013-05-16 at 10:08 PM ----------



Because people are exactly looking to escape from life when they play warcraft. Not replicate the experience they have in doldrum and in tedium at their jobs. World of Warcraft: The McDonalds Crew Trainer experience would never fucking work and nobody would buy it.

That's the kind of thinking that helps remove all immersion from the game for the sake of convenience.
Its not tedium,its giving people goals to aim for and rewarding them for it. Its progression and its critical to RPG's.

[Mekh]

There is a group of players that wants to do group raiding, but they aren't well served by the current difficulty choices. This would include the friends and family type guilds that don't remove players because they aren't performing at their best. In Wrath of the Lich King, 10 player normal difficulty raiding served these players well, but there is now a gap between Raid Finder and Normal difficulty.

This is exactly what I was saying to a guildie just two nights ago. Our raid eventually broke up for exactly this reason.

[Duster505]

The devs would like to see more organized raiding, such as the organized PuGs that existed before Raid Finder.

What's this I don't even......

Ye - exactly. Few months back they were saying they SPECIALLY focused on making Normal raids harder and less pug friendly They change their opinions on things more often than they blink their eyes at this point.

---------- Post added 2013-05-16 at 11:40 PM ----------

This is exactly what I was saying to a guildie just two nights ago. Our raid eventually broke up for exactly this reason.

The real issue here is that BLizzard made NORMAL raids harder (they admit to that) and then leave no real content for more social - less hardcore guilds to do other than the least social cotent you will ever see.... LFR.....

This was pointed to them WAYYY before MOP that this would lead to social aspects of the game dying down within few months. They yet again ignored that like with so many other things in this expansion. They thought they knew best - and ignored every person that dared to point out all the flaws. Thats why WOW is now down to TBC sub numbers and there will be much bigger losses seen this year just because of the general ignorance and arrogance of the dev team.

Normal raid content in the game should be so that every day player can enjoy it with friends. It doesn't need to be lower 10 man ilvl for that. THEN we have Heroic content if ppl want to push it furhter. Thats for the more hardcore and "less" friends type of gameplay. Not complicated.... but BLizzard yet again managed to screw it up.

[Durandro]

I suspect they may consider making normal modes (10 and 25 man) slightly easier - or at least take much more care scaling the dungeon bosses in order. ToT was all over the place, with some rather large roadblocks for many people.

Also, they won't remove LFR. Despite many claims, it was never the reason for the 'death' of PUGS. They still happened during Cata for Baradin Hold. The main problem is the difficulty - most pugs in Wrath only did ToC and the first wing of ICC, and most pugs in TBC did Kara and maybe Gruul/Mag. Many pugs would fail in normal Mogu'shan Vaults, even with ToT raid finder gear!

I suspect their overall plan will be to make the first half, third or quarter (depending on size) of each normal mode raid (or tier) considerably easier then the rest of it. Thus it gives social guilds a benchmark they can farm until they have the gear to go further, pugs won't be overwhelmed with roadblock bosses and more serious raiding guilds won't be effected since they tend to blast through most of normal mode bosses anyway.

In ToT terms, this would mean up to Council would be easier and after that the difficulty ramps up. Just as an example.

Some people might complain that 'casuals' are being catered to, but honestly why should people care what others are doing when they are still far below the benchmark?

Finally having a 'Looking For PUG' function in the UI might be nice, where you can advertise and search for raids on your server being formed, with class requirements/requests and handy quickcheck functions for seeing people's achievements and gear, and status on the loot system and progression the raid is current at. And being able to invite Real ID friends from cross server would make this much easier also. Thus its LFR with more control over who is in your group, higher difficulty and superior loot along with a more social feel since it'll be with people on your server or friends list.