Portal Room Q&A with Senior Game Director Ion Hazzikostas

Posted 14 hr 29 min ago by Archimtiros

Eight Week Content Cadence

The eight week cadence is brought up a lot, and it's not ironclad on Blizzard's end. The idea was initially a goal of Dragonflight, coming out of expansions with long stretches of content drought, which players were clearly unhappy with. Every two months felt about right, both from a content and bug-fixing perspective, though they acknowledge that it has grown to feel overwhelming for others.

They tried staggering content out more during The War Within, which of course players hated the "timegating," so they've tried to move away from too much time gating. Currently, data supports the idea that this cadence fits the majority of their players best, though it's a tricky balance between players who always want more and players who are easily overwhelmed.

Based on their surveys, 50% think it's just right, 25% think it's too fast, and 25% think it's too slow. If that shifts, they'll certainly adjust their approach.

Developer Communication

Communication is sometimes about informing people about what's going on in the game, other times it's about sharing philosophy, and sometimes it's just about hearing from the passionate people shaping the world. There are hundreds of developers, and it's unfortunate that players tend to only hear from a few select individuals. Blizzard has tried to expose players more to the specific artists and developers who create the world, and Ion would love to find out who you want to hear from next. More Q&A's are absolutely on the table!

Unfortunately sometimes when they try to fix an abusive there's collateral damage that breaks accessibility tools. They've been trying to invest in meaningfully improving the baseline experience, so that you don't need to download as many addons for the sake of accessibility - the one button rotation, more text-to-speech options, auto-unlocked steady flight, ping system improvements and mouse-over voice elements in 12.1.

12.1 is also improving the addon API in ways that increase security, but also restore functionality for tying sounds to gaining/losing buffs.

Guilds and Player Agency

Guilds are an important aspect of World of Warcraft; there are millions of people out there and they want to make it easier for players to connect with each other. Ion is very excited about the Discord integration coming in Patch 12.1, which starts with chat-integration, but they hope will grow into much more. The goal isn't to simply try to copy what Discord already does for players with it's own in-game tool though, so they'd love to hear what other community features players would like to see.

Player agency has been a touchstone of Blizzard's design philosophy for the past 5 years or so. Giving players the freedom to play the game they want to, such as not requiring them to do specific pieces of content in order to do the thing they actually enjoy. If you're not enjoying it, it won't feel like Blizzard is respecting your time. They've put more effort into parallel progression tracks with things like Delves for solo players to supplement dungeons and raids. There's still value for players who want to engage in multiple, but each should feel fairly self-sufficient.

Individual narratives are much harder in a shared world. There's a powerful fantasy in feeling like your choices affect the world around you, but that's extremely hard to do for millions of players simultaneously. They try to add custom text and NPC reactions based on player choices, but at the end of the day, it's a shared world with the same quests/bosses/cinematics, so that's a major limiting factor. The developers would love to find more ways to build content where individual choices matter, but it's just an aspiration for now.

One of the things they've looking to do is make it easier to find and visit each others homes and add more reasons to do so. They're working on a "housing showcase" where players can list their homes in a browsing / search way. They're releasing pets in 12.1, they want to do mounts and mannequins to show off transmogs in the future. They're considering adding profession hooks, but they want to be careful about that in case it feels mandatory. There's a lot of challenges with Hunter Pets due to the system being Warband wide, whereas Hunter pets are tied to a single quests.

Changing other reputations to be Warband wide is a very manual painstaking process, and so it would take a lot of time. They're working on improving the workflow here. It's taken longer than they would've hoped and they're still committed to it.

There's a balancing act to making class changes that feel impactful and "meter moving" but not so large or unexpected that they cause a player to log in and no longer recognize their class.

Growing the PvP Population

Ion admits there have been some inconsistencies with MMR. They think it's working out pretty well now, but they could have reacted to concerns much quicker and will try to in Season 2. Queue times are also an eternal challenge for most PvP games with multiple roles - most players want to pay DPS and solo shuffle matches tend to be longer than 2v2 or 3v3, so there's are some internal math to work through,

At a high level, the developers want to serve their PvP community better, but they also need to grow their PvP community in order to justify it. WoW has a very passionate core of PvP players, but it made up a much larger percentage of the player base 20 years ago than it is today. The focus with things like Training Grounds/etc is to get new people into PvP, but it's not going to be a process that happens overnight. While that feels like they might not be doing enough for players already at the high-end, growing the overall population will help everyone in the long run.

PvP is long overdue for some PvP talent updates, which isn't something they'll get to in Season 2, but is on the horizon.

Overall, the team is happy with the pacing of PvP rewards, though they'd like to improve the visibility - perhaps with something like a renown track to make it more obvious what players will earn and when. As far as the effort that goes into earning them, the nature of PvP is rewarding continued success: proving that players can continue to perform at a specific level. They don't want it to be too easy to play for a bit and then park at a level, or come in very late and very quickly jump to a high level of rewards.

Collections and Remix

Collector's Bounty is certain to return eventually, but it's something they want to use very sparingly. It should feel special and impactful when active, but if it comes around too often, they know it would start to feel like it's pointless to farm outside of it, which would be counterproductive overall. When it's around, it should feel tangibly different, which demands that it be rare.

They will also continue to do more Remix experiences, it's a great time to experience an expansion story at a faster pace, while being distinct from just going back and max level and steamrolling everyhting.

When it comes to collecting, they always want to be careful about making it feel like players can never be done. They don't think it's a problem if people are "done" farming an old instance, which is why they didn't add new housing items to old Dragon Soul bosses.

Exclusive Rewards

There's a fraction of a fraction of a percent of collectables that are planned to remain exclusive, mainly things that were originally cited to have a limited availability, though it's not something they plan to use much going forward either. There are tons of things that are unobtainable by accident - such as a a piece of content that was changed or removed - in which case they're happy to bring them back in some way.

Outside of a very short list of things like original Challenge Mode or Mage Tower appearances, they'd love to hear examples, so that they can find new ways of making them available again.

Professions Updates

Primary professions will continue to evolve, in the long run there should be more approachability and simplicity to at least some of them. The original goal of adding depth and player identity to crafting in Dragonflight was a success, but while depth can be valuable for Blacksmithing rare and coveted pieces of end-game gear, there's a little too much complexity to just picking flowers and making potions for yourself.

Secondary professions are overdue for a closer look and the team is currently discussing improvements for The Last Titan.

Archaeology in particular has a great fantasy and lore, but relatively few players were excited by the actual gameplay of it. They'd love to find a new way of delivering the fantasy of researching and discovering lost civilizations, with more fun moment-to-moment gameplay.

Remarks from Ion

Everyone loves a good troll patch and raid! Ion is excited for everyone to jump in and see where the story is going to lead next. He's seen players speculate that it's a complete side-story, a distraction from our main goal of pursuing Xal'atath, but there's more in store. He's also very excited to see everyone again at BlizzCon and share a lot more information about all things Warcraft at that time.

He'd also like to thank players for their passion, taking time to spend talking about Warcraft with us. Everything the development team does is for the players, and to make a game that's worthy of the passion players put into it.

When asked if the Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron will ever be opened, Ion replied "well yeah, it has has been. If you play Hearthstone, it just fires off 10 random spells, I thought everyone knew that?!"

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Comment by Nirvanna21This is why I hate questions getting upvoted by popularity. They were too long in many cases, not to the point.

Will remix come back? No $%^& Sherlock, its a popular mode. What we needed to know was WHAT remix it would be.

What a frustrating waste of time and energy. If I wanted these responses I would switch on parliament tv.Comment by CorpselanceMake Archaeology part of Delves Blizzard! I'm begging you!Comment by KabookiejoeHow to fix archaeology

let us farm any zone we want without having to fly all over the place to spawn itComment by KerathrasI love how after all these years Ion is still pretending that there are only two options when it comes to the content release cadence: rapid fire or timegate. When in reality all they have to do and what players want is for all the content that is available to be released all at once whenever it is ready, not for it to be rushed and unpolished and certainly not in timegated drip drips.Comment by nantesfranOutside of a very short list of things like original Challenge Mode or Mage Tower appearances, they'd love to hear examples, so that they can find new ways of making them available again.Comment by FlanellCollector's Bounty is certain to return eventually,Comment by FlanellHow to fix archaeology

let us farm any zone we want without having to fly all over the place to spawn itComment by Dhisan3rd "interview" in a row with more or less the same questions and the exact same answers.Comment by PeacemoonMehComment by AsarkhadonHow to fix archaeology

let us farm any zone we want without having to fly all over the place to spawn itDraenor CuratorComment by Setsuna665Outside of a very short list of things like original Challenge Mode or Mage Tower appearances, they'd love to hear examples, so that they can find new ways of making them available again.Comment by AerogosaCollector Bounty or no, they need to just add Bad Luck Protection to all raid and world rare mount/pet drops. The number of low drop rate mounts/pets in BFA and SL is ridiculous, with some like the Kongthroz mount in Korthia being a pain in the ass to farm. Even someone with an alt army that cycles alts through that absolute slog of a zone may never see that mount, and that goes for a lot of them across the game (the BFA N'zoth Assault mounts come to mind).Comment by AlaskanDruidStill refusing to address the glaring missing advertised allied race feature (bio paint). WTF Blizzard, it's Wrath all over again.Comment by sapiens25 - 50 - 25 arent those numbers lovely?

can we QA UX* or at least have some insight in their methodology of behavioral (user) analysis and its influence on design decisions?

how r user preferences sorted, qualified and quantified? whats UX and overall behavioral datas role in WoWs production?

/edit how is user data aggregated, categorized and interpreted? is it anonymized? (can Blizzard stalk my personal ingame profile?) etc.

also specifics like how CNs Make Loot Great Again came live?
Choreghasts timer?

personally i would love to hear from UX about the internal process on the (former) "flight issue"
(imagine Ghostcrawler advsising users they need to be grounded, cuz world designers poured their heart into worldbuilding...
i think UX somewhere came to the conclusion not just exploration is prone to nugdes via achievements and rewards /s - they obv did, as not just the Dragon Isles are immersively great from above (too).)

*aka Psy-OpsComment by AlustrielPlayer agency has been a touchstone of Blizzard's design philosophy for the past 5 years or so. Giving players the freedom to play the game they want to, such as not requiring them to do specific pieces of content in order to do the thing they actually enjoy. If you're not enjoying it, it won't feel like Blizzard is respecting your time. They've put more effort into parallel progression tracks with things like Delves for solo players to supplement dungeons and raids. There's still value for players who want to engage in multiple, but each should feel fairly self-sufficient.Comment by CentiasProbably like 20 very good questions between two very good communities for players with disabilities that are being completely abandoned by the developers over their need to cater the entire game to the RWF players, and they condensed all of that down into a single question devoid of any meaning or substance, so he could quickly brush it aside with an answer equally devoid of meaning or substance. Blind and deaf players are begging to just be able to play the game again the way they could with addons, some made by others in the community, some they made on their own, but instead it gets brushed aside immediately by "Look at all this stuff we've added!" When nearly all of those things are designed so poorly they meet the needs of NOBODY. You can't seriously tell me the combat text to speech is acceptable. And most people with disabilities DON'T want to use the One Button Rotation (my blind friend legitimately does insane damage on his own, he doesn't need it, he just needs to be able to make things in the game that don't have sounds, make small sounds so he knows where they are and what they are).

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