Continuing from the Arena Junkies interview in Part 4.
In terms of map balance, Brian acknowledges that Blade’s Edge and Dalaran were not made with knock-offs in mind. In the future for WoW, they might make arena similar to battlegrounds where you can choose two to not participate in.
Due to WoW’s RPG nature, it would seem a bit out of place with the overall design to have a permanent arena server. Brian thinks that it would not be the best thing for the game.
WoW PvP might end up getting more incentives in the future for players to participate. One of these was actually added in this patch by giving players another way to get elite gear by accumulating enough conquest points instead of reaching a 2200 rating.
Rating inflation was added in to counteract the standard where the team that gets in first during the first week usually finishes first at the end of the season. It was also done to let players who normally stay at 1600 climb up the ranks later on in the season.
If Blizzard spends the time and money on it, Brian thinks PvP can be a pretty big e-sport. It’s just difficult for WoW since there are 34 different specs and 1100 different spells in the game.
Twizzcast interviews Tom Chilton, lead game director – March 8th?, 2013. (Date uncertain.)
When Blizzard is able to get to it, they will try to implement the ability to scale down armor and skills to run old content ala the challenge modes that came out in WoW: MoP.
When it comes to planning an expansion, the staff has a pretty good road map of what will be going on with the game and its future, although it is not exactly set in stone. Blizzard plans around 3 expansions out in advance, though it is more or less just general concepts. Isle of Thunder was planned out around a year ago; it was put into development about 5 months ago.
In order to make it easier to get alts geared and give players the ability to catch up on their main, they increased the drops in LFR and changed the valor gear around.
Tom Chiltin acknowledges the comparisons between Thunder King and Ulduar, but he thinks that the raid mechanics are different enough to where there’s definitely not going to be a “this is the Flame Leviathan fight” sort of feeling.
Blizzplanet interviews Tom Chilton – March 2nd, 2013.
In this interview, Tom once again states the same thing that has been stated in other interviews: the only thing that would be changed about Mists of Pandaria is how mandatory the dailies felt for some people. Otherwise, they would keep everything the same.
In addition to confirming that this is hopefully going to be the slowest they will be releasing patches, Chilton further states that the odd numbers are content patches and that the even ones are raid tier patches. He also says there might be a WoW patch 5.5.
Blizzard would love to make more class quests like the new green fire one for warlocks, but it boils down to whether or not there will be enough time and if it won’t take away resources from other WoW content.
The technology that is used for the Sunsong Ranch and the ability to purchase the ranch means that we are a little bit closer to finally getting player owned houses. This is only if Blizzard decides to ever go through with it.
As time goes by, it will become much easier for a server to unlock the Isle of Thunder. However, it’s not quite like AQ in that there will not be a pre-set timer to unlock the rest of the isle automatically.
Tom says he is satisfied with the way challenge modes are going. It’s working the way Blizzard had intended them to work. They will continue doing it in the future without much change unless a lot of negative feedback suddenly comes in out of nowhere.
Ghostcrawler’s unannounced feature should be landing somewhere in WoW 5.4 if they can get it done early enough. “As far as hints, a lot of players in the past have suggested that they be able to do older content so it’s probably something that goes along those lines.”
More interviews in part 6!
