ty for the insightful interview ! can’t wait for more SoM content !
That last answer about the tournament realm is awesome. People who just want to sit in instances should try modern wow or private servers
if i showed up to my 9-5 every day as clueless as this brian dude, i'd be fired on the spot
He's pretty much clueless, sad story. He's missing everything.
I can't believe the RMT problem is due to people buying gold and not the game's economy that forces people to buy gold in the first place. Do these Devs play the game or design the game off of feedback?
What about Wotlk Classic with graphics upgraded and ultra progress like 1-60 content, 70 content and 80 content every 3 months.
A few questions and/or points that seem noticeably absent:It has not been remotely addressed or mentioned how a one year timeline (noticeably shorter), combined with more difficult/longer raids (which require more consumables and time), and immediate honor system (with Alterac Valley giving more honor than before with the added NPC's), has created an environment where individuals are rewarded for engaging in RMT rather than making/farming gold with profession alts, collecting resources in the world etc. This becomes exacerbated by having valuable items like Black Lotus, Arcane Crystals, etc., being much more available, therefore dropping in value immensely at the beginning of the server, followed by obtuse inflation due to RMT and botting. It seems to me that players have found it to be more worthwhile to buy gold and risk a ban rather than sink time into creating profession alts and actually farming gold in the world (this subsequently becomes even more heinous when you're on the less populated faction and are outnumbered at least 3:1 when out in the world). In a similar vein, the decision to not allow world buffs into raid seems puzzling, as it created and encouraged cross faction interaction/pvp much more heavily in contested zones with buffs like Felwood, and encouraged pvp. With changes to raids, leveling, hardcore leveling, and a battleground that largely rewards avoiding pvp (Alterac Valley) it seems that the pvp community has been largely left out of the discussion of SoM. Whether or not a tournament server, or a supported war game system, is "in line" with "classic" seems to be a strange argument when the idea of SoM was to make changes to "shake up" the game. The only changes that seem to be considered are for pve, which, by and large, reward RMT, piloting, and botting due to the shortened progression of the server. Even when discussing the changes to the honor system, in terms of the time it takes to get rank 14 getting cut in half, the majority of players seem to be ranking with the sole intent of getting weapons and then raiding. I guess the big question is, when you shorten the progression timeline, make raiding more expensive, and release a pve focused battleground that gives the most honor by far during the week at the start of the server--allowing for pilots and bots to farm more honor than players-- which then incentivizes and/or forces players to buy gold to keep up with the increased speed of progression, why is there no discussion over the servers' economies? Within two weeks of launch prices skyrocketed, which seems to continue to incentivize RMT over anything else. It seems that every answer, with its incredible opacity, has been "we're working on it" or "we're thinking about it" until it comes to the issue of server economy, consumable farming, and player engagement outside of raids and ironman gameplay. As a post script and possible summary: with all the changes to SoM there has been little to no support for any pvp engagement outside of reducing the time it takes to get rank 14, especially when the server economy seems to be fabricated to reward RMT to an extent that the amount of players being banned is extremely noticeable.
1. Bring back the old classic raiding content and cap the players to 25.2. Increase loot for current 40 man raids.3. Increase honor from AB/WSG to slightly less than or equal to AV.4. Rated Battle Grounds or some iteration of it (stop queuing premades vs pugs)5. Remove RP decay or reduce it back to 20% -Reduces impact of toxic bracket mafias/breakers/breaking -Respects the players mental health and sanity, life etc.. -Still gives incentive to reach top standing for max RP gains6. Maybe instead of tournament realms just add vendors to the WARGAMES mode so that it can be for practicing and skirmishing.7. Same Faction Battlegrounds, it seems to be a success, where is it for SOM? 8. If we can't have SFBG, then there needs to be some active server balance.9. Maybe a little class balance for PVP just to freshen things up? Don't get me wrong, the rock paper scissors is definitely unique but i just got one shot by a shaman's lightningbolt-chain lighning-nova totem-earth shock all doing 1.5k+ crits I think the biggest elephant in the room is the wow coin and why we don't have it yet. The current player trends have proven that we want classic content but not these antiquated systems. The status quo is to swipe now and just enjoy the content then deal with the ban later. Especially in classic where consumables are meta. TBH I'd rather not have wow coin and just be able to have more surplus of consumables i.e. increasing gathering nodes and resources even more which could accommodate the pace of SOM. gg and keep yourself safe!
I think an easy fix to the AV thing (if they aren't going to give us Patch 1.5 AV) is to just make the Lieutenants in AV give +20 Rep or something instead of +200 Honor
We know the dream of 1.5 Alterac Valley is something a lot of players are excited about. Frankly, we are, too. But it’d also be quite challenging to accomplishyou mean like when they did it for retail?
lol it wouldn't be a WoW dialogue without some mean spirited and fatalist comments. Everyone's got the perfect conception for how things should be I guess :eyeroll:Awesome interview; I'm a little concerned that low playerbases will mean the seasons, or classic+ initiative will eventually get shut down, since Blizzard has increasingly revealed itself to be "all about the numbers". I know for a lot of us SoM is the coolest thing happening in Blizzard. Reading through this interview I'm impressed that the devs do seem to be in-touch with the experience and the community. Of course people will yell and complain things aren't the way they personally want to see it. Those people probably aren't career game designers either, and their posts are usually very emotionally charged, maybe due to something not working out for them. Part of what makes classic so cool is the size of the community: act like a total toxic, malignant troll? Well, people aren't gonna want you in their guild, or to group with you.Can't wait to see what the next season will be about. Would definitely be cool to see a better PvP system implemented; that's clearly a huge weakpoint for Vanilla. I personally think it would be cool to do away with battlegrounds altogether and build some new systems to revitalize world PvP (without it being a toxic mess for players trying to level), and to create a more approachable reward system (without making it feel like everyone gets handouts). Another hard challenge, that I'm sure many keyboard warriors could easily fix /sAnother one of my favorite ideas is to have level gating like in the original classic beta; having everyone locked at lvl 30 made for some hilarious and organic gameplay that you would never see otherwise.
Wow! I'm so happy that I was able to experience Classic, and its authenticity to the Vanilla game I loved as an adolescent. Coming from that perspective I was cautious of Season of Mastery, but I have to say the Classic team has knocked it out of the park!With each expansion WoW's feel changed in very minor ways, but after so many expansions the difference in game design between current Retail and Vanilla is vast. They are hardly comparable games at this point. So long as the Classic team can maintain the game design philosophies of Vanilla, I fully support them tweaking and adding to existing content. The brilliance of the Seasonal approach is that it allows deviations from the standard game without promising permanent changes to the experience. At the time, Molten Core and other raids were groundbreaking, but compared to modern gameplay they are very rudimentary. I commend the changes made so far in Season of Mastery for bringing a much more intriguing raid experience without deviating from the feel of the original lore and ambience.
-AV from launch ruined the game, bots and afkers jumped on the fact that you can literally afk and not interact with enemy players all the way to r14. No one q’d WSG or AB which actually encourages PLAYER VERSUS PLAYER to achieve PLAYER VERSUS PLAYER rewards.-People still have r10 gear to this day that did not rightfully earn the ranks. This was a huge fumble, from a person who was playing 7 days a week farming honor for b1, actually waking up to people who barely played have better gear than me at the time LOL.....-A large portion of the vanilla community actually plays for the premade BG scene. Not having a ptr where you can copy characters and have a wargame setting/tournament realm is hurting the game. You guys would like to see that people farm their own consumes for these games but have clearly don’t realize how much consumes are being burned on CD. I can’t see a reason why you wouldn’t let people have a ptr/tournament realm. - Majority of the media releases I see from blizzard regarding SOM is PVE based. How can you guys even talk about PVE and say you are happy with AV ranking from launch in the same sentence? Most of the diehard PVE’ers have already quit the game because of the effort and gold it takes to clear MC basically just for peoples off pieces to rank gear. Not to mention the game is just no longer fun without world buffs. IMO the dad gamers that cried about world buffs quit the game 2 weeks after launch and now you have a game with a stale PVE experience and AV rankers (xD). 9/10 people you ask in game say they would rather have world buffs.-The ranking system is supposed to be competitive and push different groups to be better at the game. If group X has the best players, consistently beats the best enemy premades, and plays over 12-16hrs a day, don’t you think that they would have secured the bracket 1 slots for the entire 10/15 people in their group? What the AV meta does, you have people playing literally 24 hours a day 7 days a week soaking honor from LT’s, enabling people to pay for piloting/botting services. If getting honor is that easy, how does that contribute to the foundation of the game? Seems like blizzard is rewarding piloters and punishing actual players IMO. -Banning people for swiping. In classic, players had a chance to farm gold and consumes in WPVP phase before their ranks, if someone is competing against like 10 different bots and pilots a#$%^& 24hrs a day I do not blame them at all for swiping, point blank period. Nerf AV honor, release ranks in phase 2, allow copy character on ptr, bring back world buffs, and maybe actually consider deleting AV and put the rewards in ab/wsg vendors. AV RUINED SOM
"We want you to see your character as a real person in a real world doing what they need to do to live their best life, and if you (and by extension they) want to compete at the highest level of Warsong Gulch matches all day, you need to figure out how to get your consumables fix. The risk of running out, or the hesitation to use one because they cost money, is something we want you thinking about as you play. If they were meant to be unlimited, they wouldn’t be consumable items in the first place. They’d be class abilities"In terms of this: How about adding a feature in wargame mode that restore all consumes that were used in the wargame BG, after the wargame is over? It would force people to actually farm the required consumes to play in wargame mode, but at the same time being able to spam wargames against other teams and not run out of gold. I get the point that a PTR realm is not likely, and that consumes weren't meant to be unlimited. I completely agree that consumes should be something you'd have to think about and be cautious with using for the right purpose. They should be used when you need them when you are doing World PVP / Raids / BG's that give honor. However for a feature like wargame mode, i believe it makes totally sense for consumes to be restored after the wargame has ended. Wargames has already worked as a tournament mode for blizzard, so why not give the playerbase a super nice feature that they can use to compete against eachother all the time. It doesn't affect anyone in the game that wargame mode restores consumables used in a wargame, and it gives incentive to practice, compete or play tournaments in either Arathi Basin or Warsong Gulch against other teams without it costing a fortune.Sorry for the bad english, just my two cents on a super cool feature that blizzard could implement for the playerbase that enjoys playing bg's against each other.
Great interview, I don't play SOM as it's "Too Soon Executus" for me, but it's really cool to read stuff like this, see the thought process.It's almost funny how some people are going to be toxic no matter what gets posted. At the point when I see someone being toxic on wow boards, I skip your post because youre either a troll or you prolly don't even play the game, just some final fantasy shill trying to spread your misery around.
cool interview, i'm excited to see what will happen in the next season. My biggest dream is a scarlet crusade raid sometime in future as classic plus.
Re: The Classic Era Tournament Realms question...I understand his answer but he missed the issue that the question presents. When talking about the consumables needed to compete, Rokman says "this can make it very difficult... just to play " especially when trying to organize community events. His answer? "You need to figure out how to get your consumables fix." Uhhh, that's why people are buying gold because they don't want to spend most of their time having to farm gold instead of being in the Gulch. I don't think he understands the consume meta of WSG and how critical the consumes can be for a push to be successful or unsuccessful. When he talks about "the risk of running out, or the hesitation to use one because they cost money" it's evident that he's not familiar with competitive WSG. There's zero room for that line of thinking if you are trying to be competitive. None. That doesn't exist. You do what you need to do to win. If you're in a 2-2 match, your defense is having trouble and you need a successful push up banana, and you have someone on your team worried about the costs of the Free Action Potion he's using... That's straight up bad for everything about the WSG competitive scene. The best way to get better is practice. More practice means more games. More games make for a healthier competitive environment. One of the most common barriers for more games is the amount of consumes needed to play at a high level. Currently, you're either spending more time farming (less time practicing, less games, less competition) or you're spending less time practicing because you don't have enough consumes (again, less games, less competition). If you're practicing without consumes, that's only hurting your team by not playing the same way you'd play in a real match. By removing the barrier of farming consumes, Blizzard would be helping the WSG PvP community in so many ways.The Blizzard sponsored WSG tourney proved there's interest in these types of events. The line that "free access to unlimited consumables... is antithetical to Classic" is the type of closed-mindedness that took them so long for Classic to be released. Big "you think you do, but you don't" energy. There's a big community of WSG enthusiasts that would come back and play just for a tournament realm. I know I would. It's been successful in the past. Blizzard took a big step in adding wargames to classic, and that was great. This is the next step for competitive Classic PvP and would help preserve the Classic WoW PvP community so they keep playing the game.I love WSG more than WoW. WSG is the most fun I've had playing any video game ever, WoW or otherwise. As Rokman put it, "for some... the entire game is WSG." Blizzard is missing a good opportunity here. I just wanna be in the Gulch.