Live Developer Q&A with Game Director Ion Hazzikostas

[trapmaster]

Reading all those bullshit coming from them make me stay unsubbed. Thanks goodness, i was this close coming back and realized and NOPE'D the fuck out. No regrets guys, it's all good.

[HordeFanboy]

Q&A with diablo devs

[Grizzack]

I recently decided to start playing ESO while still playing WoW and I think Blizzard can learn from them. The way they handle leveling, gearing, and scaling is really refreshing and intuitive. Also the way they handle alte is great.

[Depakote]

Stop squishing shit. No one finds that fun.

[Gadzooks]

Q&A with diablo devs

Not far off the mark, here.

[justandulas]

If they are going to do another big squish, i'd take it the extra mile and redesign the ENTIRE loot system. Even if it meant unbalanced, i'd choose fun.

What i'd do is kind of borrow a bit from Destiny 2, in that you can take any item you find/like, and make it max item level by 'sacrificing' an item of that level into the older item, thus keeping old gear relevant forever.

They could even go the distance and make all the legendary's useable forever as well. Not only would it squish the game, but it would dramatically increase content to do if they'd just rebalance all the raids into different tiers like tier D, C, all the way up to S class Raids that are mythic raids basically.

Content for all, the content remains relevant forever (thus making your gear worth grinding if its good and you like it) and people could wear what they wanted forever.

Sure, it'd be a nightmare to balance but again i take fun over spreadsheet design.

[Eleccybubb]

If they are going to do another big squish, i'd take it the extra mile and redesign the ENTIRE loot system. Even if it meant unbalanced, i'd choose fun.

What i'd do is kind of borrow a bit from Destiny 2, in that you can take any item you find/like, and make it max item level by 'sacrificing' an item of that level into the older item, thus keeping old gear relevant forever.

They could even go the distance and make all the legendary's useable forever as well. Not only would it squish the game, but it would dramatically increase content to do if they'd just rebalance all the raids into different tiers like tier D, C, all the way up to S class Raids that are mythic raids basically.

Content for all, the content remains relevant forever (thus making your gear worth grinding if its good and you like it) and people could wear what they wanted forever.

Sure, it'd be a nightmare to balance but again i take fun over spreadsheet design.

Sadly Blizzard don't take fun over that.

That ship of making a fun game sailed a long time ago sadly.

[Gadzooks]

I'm on the fence regarding level squishes.

On the one hand, having a number lower than 100 on my max level character panel would be nice.

On the other hand, I am 99% sure they'll also make the experience needed to level up go higher. I played through Cata and MoP, and despite all the praises I sing for MoP, going through those expansions' entire leveling experience while gaining only five levels (per expansion) made the leveling experience feel... slow and sluggish.

I don't think it solves the problem. The problem is the daunting, massive amount of content to slog through to level cap, made worse with a new expansion feature that requires it, to play. They're addressing the leveling issue too late, there's too much of it to deal with effectively.

I think a better solution would be to chop every up to Wrath out of the game. Make all of that content exclusive to Classic. Start the retail game in Cataclysm, when they changed the whole world, anyway. Drop the level cap to 60.

That's where they're headed with Classic, anyway. Bite the bullet, do it now. Start new players off in Cata. They could simply keep the Dreanei and Blood Elf and DK starting zones as instances, and dump them off in the capital cities with the breadcrumb quests into cata.

Expecting players to go through this many expansions is insanity. That train left the station, derailed and crashed into the canyon a long time ago. They might even get a tick in new players if they did that.

[zoenova]

The whole WoW Dev team needs fired...These Q&A and the "safe" screened questions are a farce.

There is zero passion out of Ion and Josh, and Josh is just plain hates the community his personal tweets prove that.

They just need to stop with the Q&A's seriously there is no point to it, they don't have a clue how to fix this game, if this is how they are thinking now...

Forgot 8.2 saving this game.

[eridil]

How long until they realize that the reputation they have gated behind the daily system, which people like me do not consider fun make it impossible to progress and is the major reason I am not subbed. Give the players the choice ... I get that you don’t want dungeons to be an efficient source of reputation, so make it an inefficient way, so people like me can actually progress.

That is only one reason that I am unsubbed .... we can speak about disliking RNG or titan forging, but you clearly do not wish to accept what I have to say about that

[Orby]

I would really like a level squish to leveling only because leveling right now is a tedious mess. You get a talent to choose from every 15 levels up to level 100 then for the next 20 levels you get nothing, an item squish could fix that problem although I think there should also be a bigger incentive to have more rewards from levelling up like the old talent system, leveling up doesn't feel rewarding anymore. Even if it's an illusion of a reward thats still better than nothing at all.

Also:

The team wants to put the emphasis of community back into WoW.

I'll believe that when I see it, WoW still feels like a single player game..

also can they make hunters fun to play again... I my alt hasn't been touched the last two expansions due to the changes

[Nightstalker]

Zealots and even more zealots. Keep drinking the kool-aid kids.

[BadguyNotBadGuy]

The whole WoW Dev team needs fired...These Q&A and the "safe" screened questions are a farce.

There is zero passion out of Ion and Josh, and Josh is just plain hates the community his personal tweets prove that.

They just need to stop with the Q&A's seriously there is no point to it, they don't have a clue how to fix this game, if this is how they are thinking now...

Forgot 8.2 saving this game.

though i personally believe BFA is fucking trash and have been unsubbed since late september, i definitely dont believe the whole team should be fired. They just need a change of direction.

I dont really care about Ion and Josh as personalities (as if they have any in these videos), but quite frankly the community right now, and especially those on twitter, are a bunch of fucking unnecessarily offensive twats, so anything Josh says about them (i dunno what it is, i have read it), is probably pretty fair.

[cuafpr]

level squish would be horrible without some MAJOR event happening to make an attempt to explain it away lore wise...

[tru]

hey Ilv squish could justify them not doing new talent rows for how many years now? lol Next xpac Ilv squish enjoy your "new" talents

[Sharby]

The ability to remove chest pieces instantly makes this expac good imo, as someone who only plays Male toons I've wanted this for sooooo long as a majority of the chest pieces in WoW quite frankly just look terrible on anyone who isnt Human.

[Toijin]

If they are going to do another big squish, i'd take it the extra mile and redesign the ENTIRE loot system. Even if it meant unbalanced, i'd choose fun.

What i'd do is kind of borrow a bit from Destiny 2, in that you can take any item you find/like, and make it max item level by 'sacrificing' an item of that level into the older item, thus keeping old gear relevant forever.

They could even go the distance and make all the legendary's useable forever as well. Not only would it squish the game, but it would dramatically increase content to do if they'd just rebalance all the raids into different tiers like tier D, C, all the way up to S class Raids that are mythic raids basically.

Content for all, the content remains relevant forever (thus making your gear worth grinding if its good and you like it) and people could wear what they wanted forever.

Sure, it'd be a nightmare to balance but again i take fun over spreadsheet design.

I agree with this. Have gear that can be infused with higher level gear to keep old stuff relevant. Even legendaries and cool old set bonuses. Like Destiny 2, have old raids also capped at a certain iLVL, so even if your gear is higher, going back to do it your ilvl gets placed at the max ilvl of that raid so the content still remains 'fun'. Not a cap that is so low that the content becomes a slog again, but so it's worth doing for fun and importantly a greater focus on mechanics and co-ordination wise for difficulty.

Squish the level cap down to 60, but instead of increasing or scaling the experience to be the same as 1-120, change the levelling entirely to be able to level from 1 to 60 in one expansion's content (eg. one catalysm expansion's quest chains) At least then new players wont find it super daunting to level from 20-120 but instead can reach max level quicker and enjoy the other content. Scale all the other expansions and provide an incentive for doing the quests other than experience. Eg. completion of wotlk even though you're already level 60 easily from catalysm levelling rewards a mount or I would even go as far as a 2nd rank to your abilities etc. Maybe even introduce paragon system where after level 60 cap, any experience gained goes towards very minor increases similar to Diablo. This creates a sense of progression on YOUR character. Outside of gear. Outside of farming the same WQs and raids for items immediately replaced. A long term increase to your own character.

As someone else also said. Blizzard has been trying to micromanage our player experiences for a few years now and it's gone to shit. You cannot micromanage experiences It'll feel fake and unrewarding or just plain straight up not fun. How many times has blizzard told us that it's FUN to do the quest chains to unlock WQs. It'll be FUN to add these shitty affixes to M+. Rather than micromanaging our experiences and shoving FUN down our throats they need to make good content again and we, the players, can determine for ourselves what is actually enjoyable. Example: AQ Gates Event, they didn't make that content to micromanage the players to do certain types of content and farming but created because it was a cool, large scale, epic event.

[MrKnubbles]

I would love to see a level squish as long as the time per level doesn't double. Cata's 80-85 felt terrible.

[Jshadowhunter]

Somebody needs to get the message to the Devs:

LOOT ISN'T CONTENT.

[Gasparde]

The team wants repair and consumable costs to be easily done through normal game play.

Oh, so that's why a single fucking stupid potion requires 20 herbs to make and, depending on server, costs anywhere between 200 and 500 gold. Unless their definition of 'normal gameplay' is 'farming herbs for 6 hours per week' or 'raiding for 1 hour and never using more than 5 pots per week', something isn't fucking adding up.

It's fucking ridiculous how a single raid night costs at least 10k these days - which is a very generously low number, 20k is probably way closer to reality with 40 300g pots per night, a bunch of flasks, food, repairs and maybe even runes/vantus. Add that up to 3 raids a week and you're looking at 50k+every single week. I fail to see how pathetic 2k gold emissaries twice a week, 5k gold paragon caches every other week and the super awesome 60g worldquests are supposed to cover that, like, at fucking all.

It's getting close to impossible to sustain raid nights without offering sellruns. They should've reduced the cost of pots by like 75% 6 months ago - they should've never got rid of fucking prolonged power potions in the first place. But I totally get it, giving people 2k gold every once in a while totally makes up for pots requiring 20 motherfucking herbs, totally sustainable through normal gameplay.