BfA Patch Speculation thread (8.3 and later).

[Queen of Hamsters]

Oh, the items from repeatable content are less of an issue, it's the "Tier 3" I'm worried about.

Although it's weird how the Appearance tab doesn't properly list these sets, with varying results even between the two Warfronts, let alone the exact sources - nothing ingame explains how you get each Tier.

I know! Not sure if it's an oversight, or if they want the sets to be sort of "secret", because they DO appear in the tab once you've collected the full set.
Seems rather obscure of them though, since they're so clearly just the next step in the visuals of the warfront sets...

[rcshaggy]

I wonder if Nazjatar will have a Bikini contest?
All the different races set up in Nazjatar...

Also too...
I think either we might have a confrontation in Nazjatar with the two factions trying to deal with Queen Azshara and her royalists...
Blizzard might shove something out of their ass, saying that either faction did something and maybe Queen Azshara wants the war to kill us both...So there won't be any forces left to stop her...

Was hoping too to see some more of the TCG Warcraft Characters to appear in Battle for Azeroth, like some did in Legion...
Would make for both some good story and they could put a little bit of lore too...

[rda]

JH: [...] We are doing things today to make the game more fun for new players. That’s stuff that we’ll be talking more about later on in the year. It’s a lot of discussions now, there’s some development going on, but I think until such time as we’ve got things that we’re really happy with, we’re not going to make any announcements.

It definitely looks like he is speaking of a specific feature they are developing. I don't think this is world revamp, it's too much of a stretch to say that the revamped world is a service to the new player - at most that could be revamped starting zones, but if it's just that, it looks too small to mention (although who knows). Level squish - maybe, meaning that new players are intimidated by having to climb too many levels and reducing the number of levels would help here (not going into whether this is right or wrong here - just talking schematically). What else could it be? Voice overs? As in, WOD/Legion/BFA-style narration for quests before those expansions? Some kind of PVE / PVP (eg, a special type of BGs) where everybody is scaled to the same level so it does not matter what level you are? If I had to take a guess right now, I would bet either on level squish (which I really don't want, but OK) or on quest narration.

[MrExcelion]

By the way, I didn't see this being discussed here. https://www.mmorpg.com/world-of-warc...ght-1000013602

This was a really good interview, thanks for sharing. Sometimes you have to interview one of the guys at the top so they feel confident and candid about what they share. It's much more introspective than the QAs which are very contained and in the moment. John Hight is one of the 'bosses'. He answers to very few. Usually only get these kinds of interviews around Blizzcon when there's a new xpac to talk about.

I don't have time to do a full breakdown or anything, but it's always fun to read between the lines and PR on some of this stuff. Makes it sound like he was the main one pushing for the popular 77 day thing. The AP and lego grind those first months leading up to and the start of Nighthold was awful though. Was basically just on a treadmill with AK, but the AK didn't really do enough considering how OP the later damage traits were. They could have hotfixed the traits down from 5+.5% to like a smaller figure way before it was attainable. Doesn't sound he cares too much about what it takes to be optimal for mythic raiding (having the right legos and traits unlocked).

We heard. We heard about the “greatness that was the Artifact (from Legion)” and that Heart of Azeroth just didn’t feel quite as great. So we picked through all of that and figure out “ok what was it” because we were optimizing some things and we were removing some of the work and effort that players had negative feelings about in Artifact weapons...but probably too much so.

Unfortunately AK worked exactly as it did in Legion. 30% reduction a week -- just a change in optics really. Grinding out those defensive traits early on was awful once you got those 385/415 pieces. Should have been normalized like it is in 8.2, provided higher ranks don't have higher level unlocks too.

All that being said, we need to have new players coming in, young players coming in. One of our greatest opportunities is with families. I just go from my own experience. My youngest son and I started playing when he was 13. The Lich King had just come out and it was this incredible bonding experience for us. For anyone who has raised a kid up until 13, that’s the transition point where they want some independence, they want to do their own thing and they can start to move away from their parents. That’s healthy and natural but in an era where kids are using technology and forms of entertainment that are foreign to their parents, it creates a division between them. I’m so thankful we had WoW to play together. We still play today. It’s something we have together.

I think that’s a great place to start. For parents who love the game and see how fun it is -- WoW is, at its core, about meeting people online, playing and doing things together, it’s not heavily competitive. There’s a lot of content about cooperative play and each of us taking on a role. So we can start there.

We are doing things today to make the game more fun for new players. That’s stuff that we’ll be talking more about later on in the year. It’s a lot of discussions now, there’s some development going on, but I think until such time as we’ve got things that we’re really happy with, we’re not going to make any announcements.

So he's hinting at something about "making the game fun for new players". I don't know if that's as simple as the level squish, but we'll see what that entails.

Reading between the lines here, it does sound like 3-player Islands, and maybe Warfronts, were envisioned as one of those modes you can play with your 9-14 year old kid. Like it'd be good for long-term growth and health of the game. And they could reuse the Heroic Scenario system from MoP. Also as something to appeal to new players that just hit 120, so there's some casual form of PVE gameplay, like with random BGs for PVP. I totally get that they're trying to make content for all types of players. And that randomly queued content has to be easy, like random heroics/LFR. I just think Islands and Warfronts weren't enough as the flagship features of the expansion. Like I've alluded to in this thread for the past week, the creation of the Warfront zones/the scenario/story tie-ins were probably too resource heavy and feedback is largely negative, so we're getting just 1 more or none, and that buckled them down. I'm not really sure if Islands did, but probably. Creating all the random mobs, getting advanced AI and the spawning to work, all the cosmetics they made and assigning to them to all those individual loot tables.

Don't think Islands were the worst thing in the world, except the bribe to continually do them for AP, but when everybody kept continually asking if Warfronts were going to have a PVP mode at Blizzcon 2017, I could feel the devs answering thinking "yeah nobody really understands what Warfronts are even at a baseline level". That should have been a warning sign. They even talked about having several of them at a time and having them actively rotate which one was up. Maybe they saw the writing on the wall and bailed out after Darkshore. The lack of World Quests at launch was puzzling.

Nice that he raids in one of those 2 day guilds. Going to guess a 6 hour/2day on the weekends, doing heroic BoD and maybe the early mythics by the end of the tier.

- - - Updated - - -

If I had to take a guess right now, I would bet either on level squish (which I really don't want, but OK) or on quest narration.

That's all I could think of to start with. Giving myself a few more minutes to ponder, here's an idea: something like randomly spawning "Bonus Objectives" events in low-level zones. Like pre-Legion invasions, but on a smaller scale and a single thing to do in a part of the zone for about 10 minutes. Essentially they'd make a few for each zone that pop up once every X hours or so, so it's not like you have to go from zone to zone doing them all, just an incidental it might be up kind of thing. Something to gather a bunch of people in one spot that might be leveling, and they could use group finder or whatever. I guess that might entail keeping tabs on group finder and seeing which zones have events currently up, or they'd limit it to doing X per day in terms of whatever reward you get (once doesn't seem like enough).

It'd be nice if they could theme it towards the story/theme of each zone instead of a generic "void/death dragon invasion", and more of a permanent thing for leveling. And not necessarily just an invasion. When said event is up, they could spawn some vehicles and other stuff nearby to use or help you get to it (like the very fast ground speed mounts). Some toys for people to play with.

I know this sort of random leveling bonus sounds boring for us, but just trying to put myself in the mind of John Hight and what he thinks would be interesting for a 9-14 year old new player. So something with events for leveling. /shrug That's all I got. It allows them to just reuse current tech for it.

[Sondrelk]

So he's hinting at something about "making the game fun for new players". I don't know if that's as simple as the level squish, but we'll see what that entails.

Reading between the lines here, it does sound like 3-player Islands, and maybe Warfronts, were envisioned as one of those modes you can play with your 9-14 year old kid. Like it'd be good for long-term growth and health of the game. And they could reuse the Heroic Scenario system from MoP. Also as something to appeal to new players that just hit 120, so there's some casual form of PVE gameplay, like with random BGs for PVP. I totally get that they're trying to make content for all types of players. And that randomly queued content has to be easy, like random heroics/LFR. I just think Islands and Warfronts weren't enough as the flagship features of the expansion. Like I've alluded to in this thread for the past week, the creation of the Warfront zones/the scenario/story tie-ins were probably too resource heavy and feedback is largely negative, so we're getting just 1 more or none, and that buckled them down. I'm not really sure if Islands did, but probably. Creating all the random mobs, getting advanced AI and the spawning to work, all the cosmetics they made and assigning to them to all those individual loot tables.

Don't think Islands were the worst thing in the world, except the bribe to continually do them for AP, but when everybody kept continually asking if Warfronts were going to have a PVP mode at Blizzcon 2017, I could feel the devs answering thinking "yeah nobody really understands what Warfronts are even at a baseline level". That should have been a warning sign. They even talked about having several of them at a time and having them actively rotate which one was up. Maybe they saw the writing on the wall and bailed out after Darkshore. The lack of World Quests at launch was puzzling.

Nice that he raids in one of those 2 day guilds. Going to guess a 6 hour/2day on the weekends, doing heroic BoD and maybe the early mythics by the end of the tier.

I may have mentioned this before in this thread, but i personally think that Islands is one of the best new features Blizzard has made as it ticks several of the boxes i have been looking for Blizz to get to. It has (in theory) infinite content by reusing assets in creative ways. It has the potential to tell a story in a natural way and even just the simply fact that you go there by boat adds a feeling of exploration to the whole thing.
The problem with Islands is just that they designed it as a race instead of as an explorative mode, and i blame that entirely on the PvP mode.

Same as with Scenarios in MoP, which was a similar fantastic idea with a terrible implementation, i am certain that future expansions will further iterate on the idea and make something that fits the game perfectly.
And for those who wonder what i am talking about, just consider the massive quality boost in questing after the Scenario tech of organically updating quest markers was added. No more being spoiled by the quest markers telling you exactly what will happen. Not to mention solo scenarios for a more streamlined questing experience in important locations.

[MrExcelion]

Yeah I think the core concept of Islands is fine, especially as a system they can carry onto future xpacs. They might have been able to build a tighter experience if they were built as solo player experiences, but as the interview indicates they wanted more cooperative gameplay in the game (MMO genre, new player retention etc). It's pretty much a given that they will be coming back, since all those cosmetics will just be carried over to the new system without going on a vendor. Pretty much agree with what you said. They did turn out a bit too important for AP though, just feels like a bribe to do them (John Hight gets a report daily about what players are doing even though we're bribed to do them). Rabbit charms and some of the other items are interesting, but pugs can't be bothered to use the vendor. Many won't even click the nodes and just kill things, moving onto the next. Or they'll kick you to troll or whatever other dumb reason. I think Warfronts are a big waste of time though, but I guess I'm stating the obvious. Someone at Blizzard felt like they were recreating Warcraft 3 gameplay somehow, just like they how they sold garrisons at Blizzcon 2013.

My impression coming out of Blizzcon 2017 was basically, alright, Islands are okay as casual content, though I'm skeptical if Advanced AI is little more than a marketing term (ie: 'savage'). Warfronts are ???. Anything else? There was nothing else. Just talk of the return of the hellish AP grind. One dev in an interview even said that they'd use AK to reduce costs and nothing more, which was great, though he was concerned it might need adjustments. Turns out they changed it to work exactly the same as legion, only changing the optics to retain your current level. They changed it to decay the costs of traits, sure, but also a decay on all prior AP earned every week. They announced the removal of tier sets, but that's beating a dead horse to say anything on that front.

And then the class pruning, GCD, and gameplay changes hit to add more salt to the wound. Very little PVE class balancing has been done this xpac to bring the low guys up or the OP classes done. Just some random changes here and there.

[Sondrelk]

Yeah I think the core concept of Islands are fine, especially as a system they can carry onto future xpacs. They might have been able to build a tighter experience if they were built as solo player experiences, but as the interview indicates they wanted more cooperative gameplay in the game (MMO genre, new player retention etc). It's pretty much a given that they will be coming back, since all those cosmetics will just be carried over to the new system without going on a vendor. Pretty much agree with what you said. They did turn out a bit too important for AP though, just feels like a bribe to do them. Rabbit charms and some of the other items are interesting, but pugs can't be bothered to use the vendor. Many won't even click the nodes and just kill things, moving onto the next. Or they'll kick you to troll or whatever other dumb reason. I think Warfronts are a big waste of time though, but I guess I'm stating the obvious. Someone at Blizzard felt like they were recreating Warcraft 3 gameplay somehow, just like they how they sold garrisons at Blizzcon 2013.

My impression coming out of Blizzcon 2017 was basically, alright, Islands are interesting, though I'm skeptical of what all this talk about Advanced AI as more than a marketing term. Warfronts are ???. Anything else? There was nothing else. Just talk of the return of the hellish AP grind. One dev in an interview even said that they'd use AK to reduce costs and nothing more, which was great, though he was concerned it might need adjustments. Turns out they changed it to work exactly the same as legion, only changing the optics to retain your current level. They changed it to decay the costs of traits, sure, but also a decay on all prior AP earned every week.

And then the class pruning, GCD, and gameplay changes hit to add more salt to the wound.

A big unavoidable problem with both Islands and Warfronts is sadly that they were designed for several players. Though i think warfronts could have worked if they deisgned it as an alternative to M+ by making it 5 players instead of 20 (Even from an RTS standpoint, having 20 hero units is kinda stupid) this would also allow them to circumvent the tuning issue by organically making it so having the entire group is more important, 20 people just means that unless everyone is underlevelled, you never need all players to join in.

Islands definitely would have been amazing if it was a solo player explorative mode, but i guess that would undermine the premise of this being an MMO

[letssee]

By the way, I didn't see this being discussed here. https://www.mmorpg.com/world-of-warc...ght-1000013602

What does an executive producer do?

JH: I get to be the caretaker of the World of Warcraft franchise. So literally all things that we do, all decisions that we make, whether it’s new things we want to go about or old things we want to resurrect, I get to weigh in on all of that. But more importantly, I get to work with the entire team. As a Production Director, you’re pretty centered on the development team alone, which is still significant. As Executive Producer, you’re responsible for the brand, the franchise, new projects that we take on, the scope of what we do for WoW. I get to make decisions about who gets to make things, who gets to pursue things. I get to weigh in on how we present the game, how we market the game.

My job is to represent the player experience to see that we at Blizzard are making decisions that are in the best interests of our players and that we’re always taking the long-term view on that. It’s easy as individuals to want to do something, to add something or subtract something from the game to meet the needs of what we feel capable of doing now or if it’s something within our charter. But somebody has to step outside that and listen to all the different and competing ideas and weave the thread of what’s the right thing for our players. It’s something I learned from J (Brack) and something he, in turn, learned from Mike Morhaime, that if you take that long view, that you’ll always prevail.

Having to compete with Blizzard? Some companies that didn’t always take that long-term view or that care for their players -- it’s the timing of the game. We’ve been here for 15 years. I’ve worked on games that attempt to compete with what Blizzard does and, while we all remember them, we’re not all playing them today. And the big reason is just that: There were people given these responsibilities who knew they had to be responsible to the players first and everything else second.

Being a nearly 15-year-old game, it seems as if it would be difficult to attract new players. What are your plans to grow the community with a new influx of players and to entice returning players? What plans are there for retaining players longitudinally?


WoW has evolved over 15 years. We’re continuously upgrading graphics in the game, improving the look of the game, updating gameplay mechanics themselves to be more sophisticated and so that’s an important aspect. We have to keep adapting because our players are adapting.

When we first came out with WoW, there was no social media. The idea that you come together and you meet people online and you do a thing together was new and cool and it still is. But as WoW has developed, some really awesome games have also been developed -- some awesome RPGs, some cool games that are on the fringes of what WoW does, and so it’s challenged us to always make our game better. We invest pretty heavily in WoW. It’s not a game that we are putting in any kind of sunset mode -- if anything, it’s been the opposite. We’ve continued to build more and more.

All that being said, we need to have new players coming in, young players coming in. One of our greatest opportunities is with families. I just go from my own experience. My youngest son and I started playing when he was 13. The Lich King had just come out and it was this incredible bonding experience for us. For anyone who has raised a kid up until 13, that’s the transition point where they want some independence, they want to do their own thing and they can start to move away from their parents. That’s healthy and natural but in an era where kids are using technology and forms of entertainment that are foreign to their parents, it creates a division between them. I’m so thankful we had WoW to play together. We still play today. It’s something we have together.

I think that’s a great place to start. For parents who love the game and see how fun it is -- WoW is, at its core, about meeting people online, playing and doing things together, it’s not heavily competitive. There’s a lot of content about cooperative play and each of us taking on a role. So we can start there.

We are doing things today to make the game more fun for new players. That’s stuff that we’ll be talking more about later on in the year. It’s a lot of discussions now, there’s some development going on, but I think until such time as we’ve got things that we’re really happy with, we’re not going to make any announcements.

What are the biggest challenges being an executive producer on a game as huge as WoW? What are the biggest rewards?

JH: One case in point: When I came onto the WoW team for the second time (after working on Diablo console and Reaper of Souls), we were just about to ship Warlords of Draenor and as we got into it, we released 6.2, we didn’t really have much planned in terms of content updates for about a year. I kind of freaked out. I mean, as a player, I’m like, “What? Raid Hellfire (Citadel) and...that’s it?” I mean, I understand why. We had a lot cooking for Legion but it just struck me as, “This is bad.”

Jhahah that whole interview is one giant joke. Thats some bulls**t LUL

[rda]

My impression coming out of Blizzcon 2017 was basically, alright, Islands are okay as casual content, though I'm skeptical if Advanced AI is little more than a marketing term (ie: 'savage'). Warfronts are ???.

One lesson they should take away from warfronts: if you want to make choices strategic, they should matter. This sounds like a no-brainer and yes, on the surface this clashes with random matchmaking (long talk here about whether it's OK for a random big group to fail - in my opinion, failing but getting a stacking buff like in raids is a fine solution), but apparently this has to be spelled out.

What was promised in warfronts? Two things. The strategic layer giving them the RTS feel. And the AI. We talked that the AI failed (although I would submit that succeeding here is hard, I know that some disagree, too), we had plenty of discussions on how. But we did not talk about the strategic layer much - it failed, too, and that failure was also very important.

[MrExcelion]

New job posting up to manage the WoW design team

https://careers.blizzard.com/en-us/openings/ozFY9fw5

This is your chance, MMOChampioners

I have 11.5 years of forum posting at the top of my resumé

On topic, they added a Blacktalon Watcher outside Nel's Lair too

https://www.wowhead.com/news=291564/...ise-of-azshara

[Directionalk9]

On the topic of islands and warfronts... they’re features that have a lot of potential, but their launch wasn’t great... I don’t even touch islands. I’ve said it before (probably in this thread) that iteration on these systems is what’s needed, not wholesale dropping them. As they stand now though, make them scale from earlier on, especially at lower levels. That could be more diversity while outside of quests and dungeoning. Especially if they reward exp on par with doing a legion invasion.

[Eleccybubb]

New job posting up to manage the WoW design team

https://careers.blizzard.com/en-us/openings/ozFY9fw5

This is your chance, MMOChampioners

I have 11.5 years of forum posting at the top of my resumé

On topic, they added a Blacktalon Watcher outside Nel's Lair too

https://www.wowhead.com/news=291564/...ise-of-azshara

Ah yes the good old "if you think you can do it better then do it" nonsense.

Nobody thinks that. Stop pretending giving feedback and criticism is equatable to that.

[MrExcelion]

I was just being silly

https://twitter.com/Muffinus/status/1124360251623391232

So was Muffinus when he said it

[Eleccybubb]

I was just being silly

https://twitter.com/Muffinus/status/1124360251623391232

So was Muffinus when he said it

Sounds disrespectful to people with actual feedback if you ask me. Pretty borderline nasty thing to say to the playerbase who at this current time is heavily fractured.

[Alga]

Turning computer on and read that Eleccy still thinks he gives reliable feedback. Always a good laughter and brings some good Chris Chan vibes with it.

[Eleccybubb]

This is a big yikes coming from you.

At least Eleccy is a realist.

I try to be!

I still think WoW arguably one of my top 10 games. No doubt about that.

However as I've said in the past it's not showing that top 10 quality and I really want it to.

[Alga]

Realistic as the Atlantropa Project, sure.

[Dracullus]

Same here. I've played WoW since I was 15. It's easily in my top 5 games of all time.

Sad to watch it slowly be destroyed by a bunch of hacks though.

Cogratulations on your 68237th ban, sir. We all know you'll lurk here anyway. ;D

(why we don't have perma bans again?)

[Aeluron Lightsong]

He cannot be reasoned with. "Bunch of hacks."


He can't get out of his echo chamber(And b4 the suspects try and retort, my opinion on some things here isn't always shared, like Island Expeditions for example). I even had an idea how to bring Island expeditions(At least the system of going to an instanced area but using it over and over.



EDIT: Being banned several times is not a good look either. I've been banned at least once and that was years ago(infractions added up).

[Dracullus]

EDIT: Being banned several times is not a good look either. I've been banned at least once and that was years ago(infractions added up).

If you spend 95% of your time being banned, it certainly is.