Blizzcon Dev Interview, Character Re-Customization, Blue Posts, Blizzcon Pictures

[Yriel]

From the Podcast : "You see the gun shooting but you hear no bang." - perfect analogy for their WoD announcement.

[nekobaka]

Reforging was supposed to be something that let players customize their gear to change their playstyle a little bit. It ended up just being extra work (and math) that had to be done if you wanted the most optimal gear.

Well no shit if you want things to be optimal there is going to be extra effort involved. Might as well make gems and enchants only boost primary stats with that kind of mindset.

[Dizzy Praxis]

So, I quit the game in early Cataclysm and I am considering playingi t again because this sounds like it would be great. That, and I want to play with Divine Clarity on a Shadow Priest. With Mind Spike, Vampiric Embrace, and Shadow Word: Death as my Major Glyphs. xD
Shadow Mender Priest LFG!!

[Deleted]

I like the fact that they disable flying for a while
Looking forward to it!

[Nuvuk]

yea, because that works

When did I say that? I dont remember saying that about Enchanting and Jewel crafting.

[nekobaka]

When did I say that? I dont remember saying that about Enchanting and Jewel crafting.

They probably screwed up quoting by using the reply function to make a quote while not removing the user ID instead of just using the quote button.

[ringpriest]

Actually most women and many men think it's ridiculous to get your panties in a twist over whether or not the pixels on the screen are shaped like tits. it's the girls and boys that care.

Well, as long as you're speaking for the human race, mind telling me who's going to win the next U.S. presidential election? I'd like to get some money down while the odds are still long.

[Shudder]

"Flying mount access will be delayed as long as possible, maybe even past Level 100 until Patch 6.1."

Know what else will be delayed? My expansion purchase and subscription fee.

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"The encounter and art teams have become bigger since then, so more dungeons will hopefully be added in later Warlords patches."

If that were true we wouldn't have only 3 new dungeons to level with. All I'm reading are excuses.

[arcaneshot]

I get it. I was being unnecessarily harsh, I guess. It just irritates me that we go through this same song-and-dance every expansion, whereby Blizz creates a ground-based leveling experience that prohibits flying, rather than trying to integrate flying into the leveling process. Personally, I hate leveling: it's the part of the game I find most tedious, most time-consuming, and most annoying. So, I typically want to get it done as quickly as possible. I could get it done more quickly if I could fly, but every expansion, I'm relegated back to my ground mount. Now I'm being told I might not even be able to fly until the first post-expansion patch? That's really frustrating.

They disabled flying while leveling in every expansion save Cataclysm. The Cataclysm experience wasn't helped at all by the flying right off the bat-- since they knew you were flying, the most obnoxious garbage was put between quest nodes. Heck, in Hyjal, you had to fly across half the zone from that giant tree in the middle to Serthia's Roost to continue just one chain. That sort of thing wouldn't happen if you were confined to the ground.

[nekobaka]

They disabled flying while leveling in every expansion save Cataclysm. The Cataclysm experience wasn't helped at all by the flying right off the bat-- since they knew you were flying, the most obnoxious garbage was put between quest nodes. Heck, in Hyjal, you had to fly across half the zone from that giant tree in the middle to Serthia's Roost to continue just one chain. That sort of thing wouldn't happen if you were confined to the ground.

Part of my hate for Hyjal was it effectively being designed around helicopter questing and the zone just being too tightly packed for PVP to be of any fun as someone was going to pull a group of mobs no mater what and even when questing I was accidentally pulling extra mobs making it a bigger pain than had the zone been designed for ground mounts. It was just over packed. The other zones was not much of a problem while still designed around flying. Players complaints of pulling mobs on the side while riding was rarely an issue for me in MoP and previous expansions. More often than not if you are being reckless then it will have consequences or it wouldnt have been reckless in the first place.

[usiris]

Hey guys,

Made a small album on imgur for my blizzcon photos

http://imgur.com/a/eplVY

will be updating...soon(tm)

[rebecca191]

They disabled flying while leveling in every expansion save Cataclysm. The Cataclysm experience wasn't helped at all by the flying right off the bat-- since they knew you were flying, the most obnoxious garbage was put between quest nodes. Heck, in Hyjal, you had to fly across half the zone from that giant tree in the middle to Serthia's Roost to continue just one chain. That sort of thing wouldn't happen if you were confined to the ground.

I strongly prefer having flying at all times but I thought WotLK was a decent compromise. You could get flying at lv 77, there were some quests/zones designed for flying while leveling, and after a few months you could buy the book and your alts could fly from the start (I delayed leveling alts as I didn't want to do ground travel again). What they are considering for WoD isn't a compromise it's pretty much the anti flying people get everything those of us who love to fly get a few scraps tossed our way in a few months... yeah no thanks I won't pay for that, I'll come back later on if things change and enough features look interesting.

[Shudder]

Is sexism the new race card? Oh no they didn't put enough females in the story yet sexism. Get over it.

Come to think of it I can't recall any black characters either. All the humans seem to be white.

After watching the Blizzcon panels my wife asked me the following: "Are we going to get a heroic scenario where we discover the secret location Blizzard has hidden all of their female lead characters so we can liberate them?"

Take that shit to tumblr jesus christ.

Yeah take equality to tumblr.
We get it, you were born with a dick, how lucky for you.

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The problem is that EVERYBODY makes fruit salad with more apples than blueberries and then is shocked when people say that they'd like something with more blueberries. They protest, "But this is the way fruit salad has always been made! This is the way it's SUPPOSED to be made!" They never consider that many people are sick of the same apple-focused fruit salad that has been served to them for centuries and would like something with more blueberries for a change.

Not to mention the blueberries get paid less than the apples for the same jobs, have been oppressed for thousands of years, been denied education and basic rights, are treated like second class citizens. When the blueberries go to parties they have to worry about being raped, the apples have to worry about passing out and having genitalia drawn on their face. But the apples don't like to think about that stuff so it's best we just don't talk about it.

[FinalBlink]

Come to think of it I can't recall any black characters either. All the humans seem to be white.



Yeah take equality to tumblr.
We get it, you were born with a dick, how lucky for you.

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Not to mention the blueberries get paid less than the apples for the same jobs, have been oppressed for thousands of years, been denied education and basic rights, are treated like second class citizens. When the blueberries go to parties they have to worry about being raped, the apples have to worry about passing out and having genitalia drawn on their face. But the apples don't like to think about that stuff so it's best we just don't talk about it.

Claiming sexism where none exist makes people less able to sympathise when the real issues of sexism arise. The same goes for racism. Did I get wound up over the lack of white characters in Fresh Prince? Cosby Show? Keanan and Kel? What about the lack of Male characters in the Barbie range? (seem to recall they axed Ken altogether). My point is its easy to find "isms" in anything, the trick is to know when something is being intentionally sexist.

[mooikiye]

One thing that was talked about with GC after the show is someone notice on one of the slides shown of the Garrison at Blizzcon had one building called "Dance Studio". He played it off as they would never tease the player base with something.

Can be seen:

media.mmo-champion.com/images/news/2013/november/bconWoWRAD020.jpg

[xeku]

"Making big changes in the middle of an expansion is dangerous, as players log in and find significant changes that they can't keep up with. With a new expansion some bigger changes are expected, so it is safer to do larger changes for new expansions."

Yeah cause it's not like they did that as 5.4 came out and they completely gutted the warlock class and playstyle

[Phantasm]

The one thing that annoys me about the no free re-customization, is that I made a few of my characters with a backstory in mind. So one of my Forsaken is the pale grey, with no decay and the normal face, with black hair. I haven't heard anything to say that when the updates come out that she won't all of a sudden be green, with half her face missing and blue hair. Now, if the update just takes our characters and keeps them the same, but with the definition Pandaren have, then I'm ok with the no free re-customization.

[varkar]

Giving everyone one free Level 90 should help out returning players.

As illustrated by around half of all players online at a time being under max level (do random /who searches), around half of all WoW playtime is presently spent leveling.

Unless average lifetime playtime per player at max level doubles (which may be the dream but is highly unlikely), average playtime per player will drop after WoD level boosting and so will Blizzard's revenues in the long term.

Not all but most players don't play very long, too soon feeling done with the game, after no longer having new abilities or large yet-unexplored zones to look forward to. Sure, some may do such as a raid on normal mode, then repeat on hard mode for token blatantly artificial difficulty on what they already experienced visually and otherwise. But many will just do the former then be done. (PvP can help, but much depends on aspects of it down to whether level 90-100 health to DPS ratios are reasonable or just an insta-die fest spending most of the time coming back from the graveyard, something yet to be seen).

Unlike SoR (which applied only to a minority of players) and buying of accounts from gold farmers today (both bannable and costing an order of magnitude more), future Blizzard-supported level 90 character buying can become the dominate means of getting level 90 characters after WoD is out.

There is no 1/person limit when anyone can buy multiple CD keys and transfer the resulting characters to 1 account. If the cost was thousands of $, it would be irrelevant, and, if hundreds of $, it would be uncommon. But, as tens of $ presumably, it will be so common as to turn level 1-89 into a relative ghosttown.

MMORPG after MMORPG falls into the modern design assumption that faster leveling is the solution (as if a max-level gear grind in a few areas was intrinsically superior to a sub-max-level gear+ability grind visiting more areas), only to have that backfire horribly in what percentage of players leave a few weeks after release.

Almost anything different would be better than cheaply selling level 90 accounts, better than what the WoD change amounts to in practice. If really wanting, give RAF and BoA bonuses to new players for faster but not instant leveling. Or ease play with friends by scaling up stats when a lowbie is grouped with high levels (leaving the lowbie to still have ability gain over a long period of time to look forward to). But Blizzard shouldn't do this.

[Pantelija]

Come to think of it I can't recall any black characters either. All the humans seem to be white.



Yeah take equality to tumblr.
We get it, you were born with a dick, how lucky for you.

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Not to mention the blueberries get paid less than the apples for the same jobs, have been oppressed for thousands of years, been denied education and basic rights, are treated like second class citizens. When the blueberries go to parties they have to worry about being raped, the apples have to worry about passing out and having genitalia drawn on their face. But the apples don't like to think about that stuff so it's best we just don't talk about it.

This is a gaming forum not political scene for your agenda pushing, take your shit back to tumblr and other "social justice" sites.

[Estrellia]

Yeah cause it's not like they did that as 5.4 came out and they completely gutted the warlock class and playstyle

You're right, they didn't do that. I mean, I logged into my 'lock after months of not touching it, and it plays exactly the same.

And I noticed that the 'lock talents for level 100 would actually change your playstyle entirely. You can have a Terrorguard or Abyssal as a permanent pet, or if you're Demo you can be permanently in Metamorphosis form. Mages, meanwhile, got more clutter for their action bars, with nothing that really changes basic gameplay. =/

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This is a gaming forum not political scene for your agenda pushing, take your shit back to tumblr and other "social justice" sites.

Or, we could remember that this was originally a complaint about the game. If they had taken us back to Draenor of 100 years ago, and all 7 tribal chiefs had been women... that wouldn't have looked weird to you? It's a fantasy world that Blizzard controls 100%. There is literally nothing stopping them from making a majority (or even ALL) major new lore characters in an expansion women. Instead, it looks like zero of them are (to be fair, there is supposed to be 1 major dranei female... out of probably 10+ new major lore figures).

If you look at MOP, how many major lore figures it introduced were female? Again, a minority. If you're a woman (and many, many WoWers are), or if you're a man who notices this kind of thing (as many, many men do), then it's glaring.

This doesn't mean that Blizzard is actively sexist. But it does literally indicate structural sexism (which is an emergent behavior from a series of seemingly innocuous decisions).

If you didn't notice it, and you don't care, that's fine. But then clearly, you won't care if other people point it out, or if Blizzard does something about it. The other option is you're actively a misogynist, and don't *want* major female lore characters at all, in which case we all get to actively label you sexist.

Honestly, I suspect the people negatively reacting to calls for more women characters are just reacting. I doubt any of you care either way. So why not just let people who *do* care raise the point, and see what can be done about it?