wow World of Warcraft BlizzCon 2018 Q&A

[Stan 5,240]

World of Warcraft developers are answering your WoW questions live on stage!

Q&A Highlights

• The 20% AH fee is currently a band-aid to prevent players from posting separate stacks of 1 and applies only to a handful of goods and the whole server structure needs to be reworked in order to remove it.
• WoW Classic & BfA are separate ecosystems and your Classic progress won't be transferred to the live versions of the game.
• Blizzard is not satisfied with the current stage of leveling. A level squish is a big ordeal.
• The game is full of RNG, any plans to remove any of it? "We're adding an Azerite Armor vendor in Tides of Vengeance."
• Can you put smart loot on the Mythic chest? They don't have anything to announce right now. The weekly cache pulls items from a gigantic pool of items, but something like "bad luck protection" to prevent you from receiving two boots for example could be implemented in the future.
• They'd like to add more depth to the Heart of Azeroth.
• Ignore Pain for Protection Warriors will be off global cooldown in Tides of Vengeance.
• They're pretty happy with GCD on offensive abilities, they don't want to revert the changes.
• Certain movement & utility abilities will be taken off GCD in Tides of Vengeance.
• No plans to allow gear tinting, it undermines the fantasy of the game.
• WoW Classic will have no cross-realm zones and sharding. They plan to use sharding as backup for low population realms. Sharding may be used at WoW Classic launch in a limited way (starting zones) to ensure a smooth launch.
• They want to loosen transmog restrictions for 1H weapons.
• PvP talents may be enabled in the upcoming PvP Brawl, where players fight literal reconstruction of players (Island Expeditions inspired AI).
• In Battle of Azeroth, they are trying something different instead of tier sets. It's fine to see raid-specific armor executed at a high level of fidelity. That said, it doesn't mean class sets will never return in the future.
• They're focusing on WoW Classic for now, no information about adding future expansions, but they're going to listen to the community when it comes to updates.

[Badadada 184]

The Metzen cameo was a fun part, but as always, they heavily moderated the questions. Well, at least Ion and Allen used to do live Q&A streaming too - I assume the next is due around January or February.

[jinsu2301 273]

1 hour ago, Stan said:

No plans to allow gear tinting, it undermines the fantasy of the game.

That's actually not what they said. It has more to do with how the textures look and feel. For automated tinting to work, the textures and models need to be designed with that in mind. You can't just slap it onto the existing armor. It's also hard to do with WoW's specific style. It works well enough with uniform textures (like the guild tabards) but once you add a lot of detail and material texture it becomes a lot harder to make it look good.

49 minutes ago, Badadada said:

but as always, they heavily moderated the questions.

You must not have seen the Diablo QnA...

[dartbodman 64]

A level squish would be good if they do it right. And also un-purge the abilities a bit. Just enough that you're getting a tangible benefit every level.

 

I don't get why the "1 item posts" on AH are such a big deal.

Edited November 4, 2018 by dartbodman

[tkioz 229]

18 minutes ago, dartbodman said:

I don't get why the "1 item posts" on AH are such a big deal.

It's due to how the AH is designed, if you search for say, Tidespray Linen, and someone numpty has put 800 single item auctions it lags the hell out of it.

It's also highly annoying if you want to buy in bulk, most people really really don't want to click buy, are you sure, 800 times.

Honestly I'm glad to see them admit it was a bandaid because the whole AH needs a complete redesign from the ground up.

Edited November 4, 2018 by tkioz

[Hagersen 34]

It was really good for him that he was enjoying himself there. But the Goblin-Boy really brought me to cringe

[Rhondis 148]

5 hours ago, jinsu2301 said:

You must not have seen the Diablo QnA...

Holy crap dude, this was a brutal Q&A. And honestly, I am glad it went that route, it was such a terrible decision to announce a mobile game that doesn't appeal to the true fanbase of Diablo. They practically implied that we don't care. 

[tkioz 229]

5 hours ago, Rhondis said:

Holy crap dude, this was a brutal Q&A. And honestly, I am glad it went that route, it was such a terrible decision to announce a mobile game that doesn't appeal to the true fanbase of Diablo. They practically implied that we don't care. 

While I understand and share the outrage I honestly felt bad for Wyatt Cheng, he's one of the people that turned D3 around from the total disaster at launch and I really doubt he had much input on the mobile game, it was most likely some suit from Activision who pushed for it. The dev's can be out of touch with the community at times at Blizzard, but not that out of touch.

Also there is a difference being legitimately disappointed and being a giant dick to people, one is okay, the other isn't.

[Rhondis 148]

3 hours ago, tkioz said:

The dev's can be out of touch with the community at times at Blizzard, but not that out of touch.

They were out of touch with the D3 fan base for the past several years. Otherwise we wouldn't have just recieved a mobile announcement on its own. They would have dropped hints of maybe D4 being in the works or somewhere along those lines (much like Bethesda who showed a brief TE6 trailer). There is absolutely no way they thought this announcement was going to go well. Especially since it was saved for last.

 

3 hours ago, tkioz said:

Also there is a difference being legitimately disappointed and being a giant dick to people, one is okay, the other isn't.

Well... duh? But when you barely get any real content for a franchise you are so involved in. You shouldn't be surprised by how the fan base would react. Also non of the people who were at the Q&A were dicks. 

Edited November 4, 2018 by Rhondis