Battle for Azeroth Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[rda]

I'm sure there's more than that, I've only listened to the first 20 minutes on my way to work so far.

If that was just the first 20 minutes, then there's hope indeed. :-) (We'll see, maybe I'll have the time to listen to it later. No hatred towards Metzen.)

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OK, I found a transcript for those like me who don't have an hour for the interview (didn't read the transcript yet, just skimmed a bit), courtesy of Fruk, US-Blackhand (thanks, mate):

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My summary is larger than I wanted it to be, I numbered things so it'd be easier to read through my wall of text.

1. Talked about his spinal surgery and the aftermath, his doctors told him he pretty much couldn't lift anything heavier than a mug for 4 months
2. The beads Thrall wears around his neck were inspired by the character Wan-fu from Samurai Shodown II, which Chris says is the best fighting game of all time
3. Talked about how nerdy interests are at an all time surpless, talked about how no one would have expected Ant-Man or B-tier superheroes would have successful movies and nerdy interests to be so ubiquitous in our culture
4. Chris mentions that there's so much content to consume, that of course not all of it will be A+ content, and he feels he's seeing a lot of creators "getting mauled" by people disappointed in what they put out
5. Scott asks Chris if he thinks the strong reactions on the internet might be due to a "false ownership" type of thing, the example used is Star Wars and the newest movies; "I don't like what you've done to MY Star Wars", #NotMyLuke, etc
6. Chris says that there is a sort of "geek psychology", where when we consume the things we are passionate about, we want to talk about it, dissect it, what went wrong, what went right
7. Chris talks about the newest Star Wars movie, said he loved it overall, didn't care too much for the casino part, but he did enjoy Luke and Yoda's interaction, whereas many people did not
8. Said it rattled him when he saw the hate and disrespect for Rian Johnson as an artist, and not wanting to see what Rian Johnson was bringing to the tableau of Star Wars, but rather fans wanting things to go their way. Says its okay to not like the movie, but you shouldn't throw darts at the director for it.
9. Admits among friends he'll "throw poo" at directors, but he'd never go on the internet just to tear someone down. Essentially says that if a creator goes in a direction that he doesn't like (lists Transformers as an example), he'll simply stop consuming the content.
10. Chris brings up that sometimes creating content isn't always in the hands of a single person, how studios and producers and other factors can get involved, despite the actual movie makers being great at their job (he uses the Warcraft movie as an example). In big productions, you don't always get what you set out for and compromises are made all the time.
11. He talks about how when Diablo 3 launched, there was a lot of criticism and how the Diablo community rolled Jay Wilson over the coals. Said it was bizarre to watch him get roasted because he's one of the nicest and most hardworking people he knows, that Jay sometimes had to champion changes that even he wasn't 100% behind but the Diablo team was and that people were savages to him and it was hard for him to watch.
12. Scott asks Chris if he ever came under fire. Chris replies that he was lucky, and that the few times he got heat were because of dumb things he said, and that he "earned" it, lists redshirt guy as an example, but never got set up in serious hate
13. Scott mentions redshirt guy slept on his couch one time
14. Chris says that fanbases going after creators feels like it's at a feverpitch. Says that even though this may sound overly dramatic, he fears that the overly aggressive fanbases may be turning people, who just want to tell a story or entertain, away from art.
15. Chris brings it back to geeks have this innate needs to dissect content and that's healthy, and that fanart and fanfic is glorious and relational, but sometimes the dissection gets taken to a level that's devoid of empathy for the creator and their heart and their spin on things
16. Chris says if you hated Last Jedi, instead of trashing it, you should turn a friend on to an expression of Star Wars that you love. You should always take the opportunity to engage positively.
17. Scott shifts the conversation to Christie Golden and the heat she's receiving. Brings up the point that the plot is decided months, sometimes years in advance. Chris said that the game team will come up with a plot element, and come to the story team to help them express this idea. Says that Christie is not singularly in charge of the lore/story.
18. Chris said that the hate she received was so misplaced and unjust.
19. Chris said he doesn't have any current insight to the story, said the last thing he worked on was the cinematic where Anduin does the shiny gold dome thing, which was 2 1/2 years ago. (This would've been around Legion's release, for context) Now he's just fan.
20. Says this kind of happens every expansion with alarmists and people freaking out. Says people should have some faith, patience, but most of all empathy for your fellow human beings.
21. Chris says that negativity on the internet has a snowball effect, and will create a circuit of negativity
22. Scott wonders if some of the negativity for War of Thorns might be because people have a hard time separating the anger at Sylvanas committing genocide from the people who made her do it
23. Metzen states that he's hoping Saurfang takes Sylvanas out, and stands up for the old school Horde. Says he's having fun experiencing content as a fan for the first time.
24. Scott asks Chris if he's doing anything creative like comics and whatnot, Chris states he currently has no impulse for doing any creative stuff. He's been painting a Warhammer army, but at the moment he's just enjoying retirement and parenting.
25. Chris says he got the opportunity to voice someone else's character in a cartoon/concept cartoon. He made it sound like it was a side character, but he really enjoyed it.
26. He says he really enjoys "soft-jamming" ideas with his daughter. He really enjoys watching Avatar: Last Airbender. Says if he ever came out of retirement, it'd be to make a cartoon. Something that's high-octane and will build people up.
27. Interview ends with him just kinda talking about how he's enjoying life

I hope I did a good job of writing what Chris was trying to convey. He is very passionate about people having empathy for each other. I think a big point he was trying to get across is that creators are just trying to tell a story, to entertain, and to just put stuff out there, and even if you don't like what you see, you should always try to build people up, not tear them down.

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/...636885#post-10

[Lahis]

Is there any sign that Azerite is coming to EK? Considering that Azerite is going to be showing up on all sorts of islands in BFA, it doesn't seem crazy that it'll start seeping out of EK. When that happens, isn't Sylvanas just going to look like a big chump? A major reason she attacked Darnassus was to prevent the Alliance from getting Azerite.

If it shows up in EK, she pretty much can't do jack about it. EK was already a stronghold of the Alliance and she just depleted the Horde forces there and lost a big chunk of land. Unless it just luckily pops up in a small Horde area, the Alliance is going to have free reign to mine it all day long.

Since the Alliance seems to be a little bit more tech savy than the Horde, it seems like they'd win a weapons development war. The Horde might manage bigger booms maybe, but I see the Alliance as being able to utilize it in a wider range of items and produce more overall.

EK is old content, there won't be any Azerite there.

[Cosmic Janitor]

I want the Alliance to mana bomb Andorhal. It makes perfect strategic sense.

Mana bombs are for pussies, alliance can throw void bombs now.. would be kinda funny if the alliancce started leaving perfectly spherical holes everywhere .

[rda]

There was a different interview recently, given by Ion and John Hight (didn't know who he is, the interview says production director):

https://www.pcgamer.com/wows-game-di...cky-pre-patch/

It's mostly about lore, but there is a bit of info on gameplay in that apparently they consider leveling speed fixed, as in, the same as it was in 7.3.5. This is not the case, the difference depends on how exactly you were leveling in 7.3.5 (the difference with quests is smaller, the difference with instances is larger, eg, in 7.3.5 you'd get ~160k XP out of Stratholme doing it at level, counting all bonus objectives and mobs and everything, but now you stand to get about ~110k from the same thing).

[Marlamin]

There was a different interview recently, given by Ion and John Hight (didn't know who he is, the interview says production director):

https://www.pcgamer.com/wows-game-di...cky-pre-patch/

It's mostly about lore, but there is a bit of info on gameplay in that apparently they consider leveling speed fixed, as in, the same as it was in 7.3.5. This is not the case, the difference depends on how exactly you were leveling in 7.3.5 (the difference with quests is smaller, the difference with instances is larger, eg, in 7.3.5 you'd get ~160k XP out of Stratholme doing it at level, counting all bonus objectives and mobs and everything, but now you stand to get about ~110k from the same thing).

Leveling on quests is probably the intended way they want you to level, not by grinding instances and such. That might have been totally on purpose.

[Phinx]

If you think that we're doing something that's blatantly obvious and repeating itself, just stay tuned because we're probably setting you up for a surprise.

There might be hope for those that like to avoid Garrosh 2.0. But who knows.

[rda]

Leveling on quests is probably the intended way they want you to level, not by grinding instances and such. That might have been totally on purpose.

It's not on purpose, it's them not knowing the effect of their changes enough. They tested a couple of things, decided that it's fine and for everything else they have "this is a big game, do you really expect us to test everything" (to which the answer is: if you don't want to test everything, that's fine, but then at least react to reports with numbers and adjust accordingly, or, better yet, don't do sweeping changes like squishes if you don't have the capacity to follow up and clean the breakage). If Ion decides "ok, they are still crying too much, let's check what's up" and makes the devs look into the issues, we'll have another blue with "ok, we checked things more and we did another 14% nerf for this and that, it should now feel as it was in 7.3.5 [too]".

I am not saying this to be negative, this is just how things are.

The speed got universally slower and then they patched it to be kind of same-ish in some places but not others, that's all. There are numerous other things that they similarly didn't fix that I didn't mention: eg, raiding Ulduar as a blue 80 in order to get that title is currently impossible, you are universally lacking DPS and survivability, their changes were about half of what is necessary.

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By the way, that Kruithne girl that did PremadeAutoAccept addon yesterday to restore auto-invite (there's at least one more addon that does this that I know, plus, as I said, this is solved using a very low-tech macro), has a wonderful site where one can check which recipes his char is still missing. I didn't know about it until several months ago, so I figure maybe someone else might also not know about it.

Here it is: http://www.kruithne.net/recipes/

[Deleted]

With Warfronts not being unlocked for three weeks I hope that doesn't slow down my getting 7th Legion to exalted too much. I want to unlock Dark Iron and start leveling my new main asap.

[TheFirstOnes]

"Scott wonders if some of the negativity for War of Thorns might be because people have a hard time separating the anger at Sylvanas committing genocide from the people who made her do it"

"Metzen states that he's hoping Saurfang takes Sylvanas out, and stands up for the old school Horde. Says he's having fun experiencing content as a fan for the first time."

Good, good. Mah boi Metzen's sticking up for us, still. That's amazin'.

But yeah, no. I agree with Metzen's points here, and I also think that toxicity on the Internet against Blizzard writers/developers is a rather bullshit thing to do.

You can hate the story (Like me), but don't waste that negativity on the writers, please. It makes an ass out of you and me.

[rda]

With Warfronts not being unlocked for three weeks I hope that doesn't slow down my getting 7th Legion to exalted too much. I want to unlock Dark Iron and start leveling my new main asap.

As a consolation, you will have time to get the 5% XP gem, so I'd try to get an item with a socket that a level 20 can wear.

[infinitemeridian]

As a consolation, you will have time to get the 5% XP gem, so I'd try to get an item with a socket that a level 20 can wear.

What gear at level 20 has sockets? Do heirlooms?

[rda]

What gear at level 20 has sockets? Do heirlooms?

I don't remember, unfortunately, will have to check. (Looks like the answer is no.)

[Deleted]

With Warfronts not being unlocked for three weeks I hope that doesn't slow down my getting 7th Legion to exalted too much. I want to unlock Dark Iron and start leveling my new main asap.

what???????
please some tell me that we will be able to visti and see the updated arathi at 120, just for exploration. even if we wont be able to play warfronts. this is the thing I was most hyped for don't tell me ill have to wait a month for it

[Rhlor]

Why do people like a character that constantly screams about how everyone else is wrong when they do NOTHING?

because he is always right

[Raetary]

What gear at level 20 has sockets? Do heirlooms?

they don't.

only mops 90-100 heirloom weapons do.

[Nevcairiel]

What gear at level 20 has sockets? Do heirlooms?

No, Heirlooms are socket free. The gem also requires an item level 100 item, thats ordinarily wrath or so?

Are there any higher ilvl items that one can wear earlier?

[EbaumsTipster]

I hope people don't think "she won't be a raid boss and take over the Horde by force" means that "she won't be a villain and be punished for her crimes".

[Lahis]

Mildly related to thread, The Instance's Chris Metzen interview (2.0) is out; as it goes into what Metzen thinks about upright orcs and negativity towards people making things on the internet. Definitely worth a listen, imo.

That makes it feel like Thrall isn't coming back any time soon, or Metzen has really good NDA-Pokerface.

[EbaumsTipster]

That makes it feel like Thrall isn't coming back any time soon, or Metzen has really good NDA-Pokerface.

I mean he WAS planned, that wasn't a fakeout at Blizzcon, it's just that Chris got sick. Now that they got another character to fill his role (Rokhan I think? or Talanji) with the urn the Thrall ship has probably sailed for BFA.

[Deleted]

I hope people don't think "she won't be a raid boss and take over the Horde by force" means that "she won't be a villain and be punished for her crimes".

you know they will. youre going to see it EVERYWHERE as an excuse now. this is how it works. try to ignore them, the people who will do this are pathetic