wow MrGM's War Within Pre-Patch Interview

[Staff 1,488]

MrGM had the opportunity to sit down with Game Producer George Velev and Principal Software Engineer Peter Hodge to discuss the War Within pre-patch and here's a recap of the interview!

Interview Highlights

Warbands

• There were significant challenges in data conversion from character-specific to account-level.
• Achievement conversion was a major task, involving around 20,000 achievements.
• Simultaneous character login and data integrity were key challenges.
• Warband banks feature was implemented to handle multiple character access.
• More account-wide features planned based on player feedback.
• Potential future expansions to include more quality-of-life improvements.

Hero Talents

• Introduced without an in-game tutorials, players will get a pop-up window notifying them about the first Hero talent at level 71.
• Continuous iteration and potential redesign post-launch.
• Community feedback from Beta testing has been crucial.
• Hero talents will be adjusted based on feedback.
• Focus on maintaining class and spec identity.

Pre-Patch & Launch

• The team is excited for the pre-patch and full launch of the expansion.
• Class balance and Warbands are key focuses for the pre-patch.

Reputation

• There are plans to make reputations account-wide, starting with Dragonflight and moving backward.
• Character-specific reputations will remain as such for specific cases.

Class-Specific Items

• The current stance is to keep class-specific items unique to their classes.
• The team is open to player feedback on making some of these items account-wide in the future.

Class Balance

• Wide variety of content (raids, mythic+, PvP) poses challenges for balancing.
• Hero talents offer a new layer of complexity but also provide tools for easier tuning.

Class & Race Combinations

• Future updates will expand Dracthyr to more classes.
• Considerations for balancing racial abilities for new class combinations.

Here's a link to the developer interview.

[TheRagingwolf 258]

The only question I want an answer to is, "Why do you guys hate regular flying so much?" Blizzard owes us an answer, especially given how they just give away skyriding/dragonriding.

[Ken007 97]

9 minutes ago, TheRagingwolf said:

The only question I want an answer to is, "Why do you guys hate regular flying so much?" Blizzard owes us an answer, especially given how they just give away skyriding/dragonriding.

They don't. After 20 years, flying evolved. You can still use the old flying if you want. They give away the skyriding because they didn't want players to have to go back and do old content to unlock it. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it or engage in any of the races, etc. Old flying is better for some situations still.

[TheRagingwolf 258]

1 hour ago, Ken007 said:

They don't. After 20 years, flying evolved. You can still use the old flying if you want. They give away the skyriding because they didn't want players to have to go back and do old content to unlock it. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it or engage in any of the races, etc. Old flying is better for some situations still.

Except they do hate it. There is no reason to force a pathfinder achievement on regular flying anymore. Every expansion we have to re-earn the opportunity to use it yet, skyriding is just tossed out there. They should either be making pathfinder a requirement for both types of flying or get rid of the achievement altogether.

Quote

They give away the skyriding because they didn't want players to have to go back and do old content to unlock it

Yeah, that doesn't play. Just like everything else, if you are going to gatekeep something, you can adjust how you gatekeep it. There is nothing to support your claim, you just have no argument for why skyriding is getting preference over regular flying.

And yeah, no one has to use skyriding, except initially in TWW because we have no regular flying to use and, after leveling multiple characters on beta, I can tell you that you 100% need to fly to be successful in TWW right from the start.

[Ken007 97]

57 minutes ago, TheRagingwolf said:

 

Yeah, that doesn't play. Just like everything else, if you are going to gatekeep something, you can adjust how you gatekeep it. There is nothing to support your claim, you just have no argument for why skyriding is getting preference over regular flying.

 

Except they did adjust how they gatekeep it, they decided not to. That's an adjustment from requiring the unlock- so they did exactly what you said.

I agree about the having to relearn flying thing, I think it was tedious and pointless. I disagree about them hating old flying though. I think old flying is easier from them to manage tech wise and I am sure they had a lot of headaches trying to get all of those old mounts to work with the new flying. I still mostly use old flying. I only use the new flying if I want to cross a lot of area quickly. I do not participate in the races.

[TheRagingwolf 258]

3 hours ago, Ken007 said:

Except they did adjust how they gatekeep it, they decided not to. That's an adjustment from requiring the unlock- so they did exactly what you said.

So, you just contradicted yourself there. And you do again in the same post:

Quote

 I think old flying is easier from them to manage tech wise and I am sure they had a lot of headaches trying to get all of those old mounts to work with the new flying.

From a "tech" perspective, the only difference we are talking about here is whether or not skyriding is subject to a pathfinder or not. The two types of flying are simply "states" which a mount is placed into via player action. From a development standpoint, it's as simple as:

 

check_flying_state(flight_state_variable)

     {

        pathfinder_needed = false

         if (flight_state_variable == static_flying)

             { 

               pathfinder_needed = true

              check_for_pathfinder()

             }

         elseif (flight_state_variable == skyriding)

            {

             pathfinder_needed = true

            check_for_pathfinder()

           }

      }

 

That's a very simplistic way to do it but, it's truly that easy to deal with this situation. Blizzard, for some reason, does not want players to fly through regular flight and has even developed completely different method of flying, which is restricted, just to encourage people not to use regular flight. Lick their boots all you want, but Blizzard is wrong with what they are doing and they are not listening to people with regard to the pathfinder achievements.

Edited July 24 by TheRagingwolf

[Ken007 97]

On 7/23/2024 at 10:58 PM, TheRagingwolf said:

. Lick their boots all you want,

Ik, since i don't agree with you about flying, I am "licking their boots." Go back to pre school. Conversation over

[TheRagingwolf 258]

2 hours ago, Ken007 said:

Ik, since i don't agree with you about flying, I am "licking their boots." Go back to pre school. Conversation over

I have yet to see you post anything close to critical of Blizzard. More often than not, you argue against people when they have a legitimate issue. So, yeah, that's a solid indication of a shill or someone that is blinded by fandom.

And how nice that you completely ignored my explanation of the coding involved. I killed your entire argument and you have no way to refute the explanation, because you don't know what you're talking about, so you just pull the "bootlicker" line out of my replies to try and shift the focus. You're really not equipped for this conversation young man.