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World of Warcraft: GDC 2011 - J. Allen Brack Interview
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
During GDC last week, MMORPG.com Industry Relations Manager Garrett Fuller had the privilege to sit down for a chat with World of Warcraft Senior Designer J. Allen Brack. Cataclysm was the topic and Jay had a lot to say about the expansion and its design decisions. Check out our exclusive interview and then leave us a comment or two below.
MMORPG: How has the reaction been from players? Are you now happy with where the game has been reset too?
It is definitely evolving. When we came out and the first decisions started to be seen in late Beta we realized that this is a lot harder. We got player feedback saying things like “Thank you for making my sap matter,” stuff that really made players start to play the game better. It felt like the early days of the game again. I think we will look at individual dungeons moving forward and say, hey this boss is a little bit too hard overall and we need to dial things back. It is a significantly easier decision to dial things back than to make them harder.
Read more of Garrett Fuller's J. Allen Brack Interview.
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Comments
mmm -- wish you would have addressed the issues really affecting the game.
- You didn't ask how they feel about LFD not caring about skill or performance + dungeons that require both. Yes these are difficult things to measure and chart, but there's no effort to do this.
- Why did they rally with players through Wrath about how bad gearscore was and make even worse version of "avg itm lvl"? This is worse because the ilvl looks at the gear in your bags and equipped. So yeah, a prot warrior in greens can condemn the heroic pug he gets because he's got blue or epic for arms. It also counts boe crafted materials as well. I'm not sure how gear you can't wear affects the ilvl though (like mages + plate).
- You didn't address the player backlash over over-homogenization of healers. Flavor was taken from healers. The most varied healer is disc priest and every time people start to use mitigation too much as disc, they nerf disc
- On talent trees, what they actually did is take most of the choice away. Some specs I've never played spec themselves.. Holy Priest is a good example.. You end up with 1 choice of interesting looking talents in the tree.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
I don't see how else they could modify the LFD. How do you quantify "skill or "performance"? The only real tangible data that can rank players is gear. Is it perfect? Far from it! You accuse the devs of putting forth no effort. Can you propose a constructive solution to the problem?
As for talents, each spec has always had the "one" optimized build. How is it really any different now? You have fewer choices but there is sitll only one best spec that the majority of the player base will use.
" We also wanted to make the game tougher with more reliance on class abilities, player skill, and crowd control, particularly in the heroics "
Maybe it is just me, but when Cata came out all my groups relied on Sap/MC/HEX/Morph in regular and heroic. It's been 3 months and in heroic random groups we plow through without CC. I haven't raided yet, but most Heroics aren't difficult at all anymore*. The speed everyone gears up at makes Heroics feel sort of m'eh already.
*I play about 12 hours during the week and quite a bit more during the weekends but doign achievements, not randoms*
@Aiken - Blizzard has some smart people working there so maybe they can think of something I can't but for one thing, getting into a heroic, imo, should require 1-3 clears of the normal version in any LFD pug. (So yes, a guild group could still carry a friend or whatever). The 1-3 clears should require the person alive at the end of the fight. especially if it only requires 1 clear.
@Angerbeaver - I haven't played in about 2 months honestly. I had a blast on my healer and tank for a month and a half plowing through, rarely getting bad groups and then as the hardcores all seemed to be raiding I kept getting nitwits that would do dumb dumb things causing us to wipe 3-5 times to the same boss. It probably is easier now with more people being geared but after the hardcores and skilled mid-core people then you just had special snowflakes eating bombs, elementals and anything else they could die to.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
It is much easier (at least as DPS).
Player skill? Okay you do need to know where to run, although I've had groups where 2 people (sometimes myself included) die and they still handle the boss fights.
Class Ability? Not really, I can mash any button that isn't on CD.
Crowd Control? Rarely if ever now. Soft tanks may ask for it.
I just think it is skill based for a very short window and then it's all equipment. Sounds misleading int he article is all. By the way, I'm loving it!
Get rid of the 'flavor of the month' cycle that WoW has featured since launch. Find balance. And have some testicular fortitude to do it outside of the concept that the game is an E-Sport. Stop excluding classes that people enjoy and forcing them to role as something else. Keep every spec viable.
As for 'player skill'. Now that we have all of these nice stats/metrics that are being gathered for players, why not put them to use?
How many times has a player run a dungeon or raid? Normal or heroic? 10 or 25 man? Not just on one character... on all characters on the account.
Example: Sure, someone shows up to a dungeon in greens, but you notice they have the right stats, right enchants, etc.,...And then they say 'this is my 3rd alt to run through here.. I know the fights'. Helps put your mind at ease a bit, doesn't it?
Blizz is absolutely lying if they say that gear score is the only 'data' they have at their disposal.
...
And really, on a bit of a diff level... when the hell are they going to address the overall lack of choices in character customization and the ability to make your character 'different' than the other 13,000,000 players? No, not a game-breaker apparently. But FFS, put the fit and finish on the game already...6-7 years later, lol.
No one fucking cares about WoW or it's players. Only Skilless fuckheads with shtity jobs like WoW.
heck all the things he's proud are the things that I dislike the most about the expansion, but I guess it's just Blizard telling us what fun is, just as they did while making this horrible excuse for an expansion.
I'm not your friend, guy!
On a serious note, I'm glad they're looking at Archeology; everytime I try to get started with it while I'm leveling, I feel like I level past the zones I need to be in for it. So I just have to leave it till I'm max level, which kind of sucks :-/
How much more of this are we gong to get? Non articles from Blizzard who are feeling the Rift pinch them? Hopefully a wake up call for Blizzard, who have rested on their laurels for far too long.
It is extremely entertaining to me to read all the haters constantly show up and trash World of Warcraft each time there's an article about the game yet the game is doing better than ever while the haters games are dead and gone, or at least close to vanish forever from the gaming scene.
I used to buy all MMOs that came out and got lots. But each time I bought a new game I got to play a couple of months before the game died. I'm done with wasting my money only to get to play a couple of months all by myself with everyone cancels their accounts. Enough!
I started playing World of Warcraft 6 years ago. The game is still around and has never let me down. Of course there are things I wish the game had but it doesn't. It doesn't pretend to be more than it is.
Don't like World of Warcraft? Don't play it. Don't like articles about it? Don't read them.
If it ain't dead you're not pressing 2 hard enough.
Oh joy! Another World of Grindcraft article.
Hard raids, or not the mass of the player base that's left playing WoW will be baddies.
Mhmmm