Will 3.1 be a success?

Ulduar has a ton of bosses. While I'm sure some players would love for us to deliver an instance with that level of content every month or so (and throw in a 5-player run to boot!), it's not in the cards, at least not for the next couple of years.

Instead, what we tried to do with Ulduar is offer a lot of different ways to play the encounters. While the progress-oriented guilds may clear it quickly, we hope that some of the hard modes will offer them a lot to chew on. All of the players who are somewhere between barely being able to clear the instance and the "world first" crowd should be able to find a comfortable difficulty level as well.

Q u o t e:
Your old model towards end game was a success, it brought you eleven million players.

Most of whom never had a chance to finish a raid. They didn't get to see some of the best art in the game, hear the unique music or voice over, or in many cases even see the villain at the end of their quest line. From a production POV, instances are very expensive. It seems an odd choice to lavish all that attention on such a tiny percent of the player base.

At the same time, we know there are players who love a challenge and are willing to do almost anything to beat a raid-destroying boss provided they also have a shot at the best loot. They don't want the instances to be over too soon. They like banging their head against the wall.

And so hard modes were born. We tested the water a little with Obsidian Sanctum. We're going full bore with Ulduar.

A few things:

Players play WoW for *a lot* of different reasons. There are definitely players who aren't interested in raiding no matter how easy or difficult the experience is. We aren't trying to force them into raiding. We are trying to make it an option for players who want to see KT (or Arthas) but don't have the time, inclination or skill to spend weeks wiping on a boss. That's cool, as long as they don't get rewarded as well as the players who do make that investment.

You don't really need to invoke business decisions at all here. We just want players who want to see the inside of Karazhan, Naxxramas or Icecrown to be able to see it. They are awesome experiences. We don't want a sign saying "No admittance" on some of the coolest parts of the game.

Players always want more content. That's just a maxim of MMO design. No matter how quickly we offer it, some players will churn through it quickly. Hard modes and achievements are designed to let players get more use out of the content we do offer, not as a substitute for offering more content. Sure, in an ideal world I would love to see us add a new raid, Arena, BG, new daily quests, and heroic 5-player every month or two. We can't currently do that.

This is the first time we have offered parallel 10-player and 25-player content. We'll probably reflect on what worked and what didn't work. The intent was not necessarily to make the 10-player content more difficult, especially since we offer less powerful rewards for completing it. I would say the 10-player stuff was probably tuned correctly and the 25 stuff was too easy. But we'll see how Ulduar goes.

Ulduar is new content. Naxxramas was updated, but only to some extent. We never really got to see in the LK raids just what the dungeon artists, creature artists and encounter designers are now capable of . You'll see it in Ulduar and it's pretty amazing.