EU Content Creator Interview with Ion Hazzikostas on Patch 10.1 - Mythic+ Key Rerolling

Live Publié 26/04/2023 à 12:45 par Squishei

Zaralek Cavern

When building Zaralek Caverns, they wanted to make sure that it wasn't claustrophobic. You have a ceiling over your head, but it's a large cavern. It should feel like the world has grown with the addition of Zaralek Caverns.

No loading screen is something they hope to use in clever ways in the future. It's working around a clever restriction in their server architecture. Previously they couldn't have terrain above or below other terrain. The new tech is a very fancy zone transfer, and clever players will notice that the Zaralek Caverns aren't directly under the Dragon Isles but off to the side, but you're moving to a map off the side. This could lead to interesting uses in the future such as a Pac-Man style map on a raid encounter where you move off the map on one side and come back on the other.

Zserka Vaults

Zserka Vaults has been positively received. They don't necessarily want to repeat the exact same type of thing, but they definitely are inspired by experiences like the isle of Thunder treasure room from 10 years ago. In the future when there are stories they want to tell, there's a fantasy they want to chase, they do want to vary up the gameplay slightly. For what it was meant to be, they view it as a success but want to hear community thoughts to it.

Reputation

They do want to focus on the new Renown tracks rather than just updating the old tracks. For new players who need to rush through 25 Renown levels just to get to the new stuff in 10.1 didn't feel like the right pacing choice.

Account-wide Reputations is something they hear about a lot, but Account-wide things are the direction they're moving with most things. They're more likely to have account-wide things on new things as they can build them that way from the ground up. Most older reputations have hooks to things on a character level rather than an account-wide level. Down the road, they may want to figure out what Account-Wide means on a more global scale.

Mythic+

Regarding key rerolling, they're open to changing the rules for the 21+ range for Mythic+. At the lower levels, there's reason for encouraging a variety of dungeons. Once you're past 20, you're not doing it for more rewards, you're doing it to push rating, the leaderboards and prestige, but having to push score involves a lot of hoops to do so and is understandably frustrating. Nothing specific to announce at the moment, but definitely open to changes in the ruleset for the 21+ range.

Keystones will be depreciate by 10 levels when going to Season 2. With a brand new dungeon pool, there is steep learning curve compared to doing a Sanguine Depths 23 and a brand new Sanguine Depths 20 the next Season and a brand new dungeon that you've never run before on Mythic+. If they did a standard -3, most players would have experienced a lot of failure and a lot of depleted keys. If you want the top tier loot and you want your 20s, push your keys and prove it, or if you want to time a 30 in the next week, good luck!

The feedback from players were the affixes should be something that changes the experience but not the focus, and not the thing that wipes you directly. More emphasis on the dungeon mechanics is the goal.

Before they do anymore changes to gear upgrade systems, they first want to see how the current Patch 10.1 version plays out with Crests and Flightstones. They can use these items as more rewards and more places and it would make sense, but they're not going to start with that.

Transmog

High-Quality sets are definitely something they want to keep doing. They want to make sure that players who are limited to playing in the outside world have cool cosmetics. They want to provide a variety of cosmetics; some people want basic simple transmogs, but sometimes they have a really cool fantasy such as Black Dragon armor sets.

They have moved away from location specific class tier sets, and have moved back to class fantasy.

For example, back in Zereth Mortis, the outdoor sets would be more Progenitor themed, while the Tier Sets are more class themed.

TCG Mounts

Wouldn't say all of the TCG Mounts will show up back from drops. These were always promotional items. This is old promotion stuff becoming available to players who weren't around back then or who didn't have TCG available in their regions which wasn't fair. It didn't feel right that the only way to get these collectables previously was to go to a 3rd party side and buy them for a lot of money. There are a couple that they are going to take extreme care with, Swift Spectral Tiger is one of them. He wouldn't expect that one to drop randomly through some promotion. Ion would be surprised to see that coming back in any form, but if they did, they would think very very very very carefully about it as they know what players have put into getting them and how treasured they are and taking that away overnight would be wrong.

Trading Post

Things will cycle back, use the limited currency on things that you want the most.

Profession Updates

When they were taking about profession updates when the roadmap was announced, it was intentionally vague. They knew it was going to be new recipes, a new tier of gear. They don't want to add more depth or more complexity as the system is already complex and there are catch-up concerns if they add more. The goal is that Professions stay relevant each tier. No specific plans to announce for secondary professions.

There are one or two things regarding professions that haven't been seen on the PTR that should be a surprise come May.

Roadmap and Updates

They have been living through a bunch of great change and unprecedented times over the last couple years. The team has been doing incredible work and Ion is very proud and the team is very excited about what they have to offer for the rest of 2023. When they laid out their roadmap last year, it's something that haven't done in the past and it is basically a commitment to the players, and they are confident they can do this. They are on track and they even have some surprises that they didn't plan for at the beginning of the year.

Hardcore Challenge

Ion has not personally done the Hardcore Challenge, he wishes he had the time to. It's been fun to watch. Huge Kudos to everyone in the Hardcore community and inspiring to see rediscover the game and add a new layer to the gameplay.

Communication

Players have really good ideas and thoughts about the game and they want to make sure that they are listening and are more transparent. It's something they purposely tried to pivot to in late 2021, and have tried to embrace it. They are letting down their guard a little as they never wanted to let the community down by saying something that sounded like a promise that they then couldn't deliver on and that led to them not talking as much as they should. But without communication, it's hard to build trust. It's something they want to show; just how much the team loves the game and are trying to make as many of the players happy as possible. Everything they do, if there's a misstep or something, it is not because they don't care and the goal with all of it, is to keep the faith. They're not going to get it right all the time, but if they're listening and it's clear they're listening, they'll fix it.

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