So, Wintergrasp is officially a failure...

I think it's a little early for such a prediction based on the announced change to Lake Wintergrasp quests. We're looking into, and working on many different potential ways to keep Wintergrasp and our battlegrounds fun, engaging, and both great means of obtaining honor.

It was referred to as a failure and future ghost town before the expansion released. Clearly that hasn't been the case, but we've learned how the design and appeal of the zone can lead to performance issues if too many players are crowded into a relatively small space. Our ultimate goal is not to make the zone less appealing, but to increase the appeal of battlegrounds and change the way questing in Wintergrasp works to hopefully throttle the participation in any given battle.

We very much like the zone and we want it to be functional above all else. The game play inevitably suffers when performance issues arise and it's our goal to address this from as many different angles as possible, none of which include implementing solutions to ensure "no one will want to go anymore."

We encourage players to provide us feedback on battleground queues and team balancing (i.e. matches starting with uneven numbers on each faction), and Lake Wintergrasp performance and honor viability once 3.1.2 is released. :)

Q u o t e:


Ok, then please explain to us why you have neglected Alterac Valley for YEARS

AV is your first step fix to making BGs more appealing, please enlighten us. It was the one battleground that truly had some epic fights.

We did everything but neglect Alterac Valley. We tested and experimented with numerous changes until we got it to a point where we feel matches can be completed in a reasonable amount of time, while the overall zone is still enjoyable and rewarding for the time spent there. We do agree that some of the changes made have diminished the need to engage enemy players a little too much. We also understand that Alterac Valley matches are the most prone to starting with uneven numbers on either side right now, but that's an issue to be addressed via the queuing system and functionality.

There are ways we'll be looking to bring back some pretty epic battles in our next battleground as well as improve the queuing system, but there are no major changes planned for Alterac Valley at this time, particularly not for those who want it reverted to the original version.

Q u o t e:
Read: Too many people play WG for Blizzard's old servers to handle it, so they're going to make it so people don't even want to do WG rather than increase how many people the game can support.

It may be true that hardware support could help alleviate the performance issues in Wintergrasp. This is a process that can and will take several months. If you were around before Burning Crusade when our realms were upgraded to the best and most powerful server hardware on the market, the process from planning, purchasing, receiving, and installing that hardware took about a year.

Q u o t e:


Let me make this short and sweet

Do you not pay people to fix these kind of problems? If you answered yes then why is it taking so long to fix

MMO development is a complicated, lengthy process. Those who hold positions in development and programming have only gotten so far in this industry because they're absolutely passionate about what they do, love gaming, and have great talent. We're always looking for ways to improve the content that is currently available, but we're also always working far ahead on tasks beyond the current reaches of the community.

To keep it short and sweet: apathy, ineptitude, or lack of attention being paid to the concerns raised by players are not factors here.

Q u o t e:
Srsly though i never got an answer i heard the aerial battles were in the beta or what not....what happened to them? they are listed on the box? was anything ever said or were they just blindly dumped?

This was recently discussed with Tom Chilton in BlizzCast episode 8. I'll quote the relevant portion of the transcript here:

http://us.blizzard.com/blizzcast/archive/episode8.xml

Q u o t e:
Bornakk: The first question today is from Sneakysnakes on Wildhammer. Before Wrath of the Lich King came out there was talk of aerial combat in Wintergrasp and in the game in general with some goblin anti-air shredder being put in the game. Howling Fjord showed some footage of this as well. What happened with aerial combat and do we still plan to put it into the game?

Tom Chilton: Well the aerial combat that we had in Wintergrasp we just ended up feeling wasn’t really polished enough for the final experience. We gave it a shot with the vehicle technology that we had but ultimately it was a little goofy that you could crash your airplane into the ground and nothing bad would really happen. Then also the kinda sense of flying really wasn’t there enough.

If you look at a lot of games that have done flight simulation, there is a lot of care that goes into giving you that sensation of flying by having the world tilt and stuff like that so it feels a little less mechanical, feels a little bit more alive or more natural. So one of the things that we have kind of tasked ourselves with doing is figuring out how to polish that, how to improve on our vehicle physics, there’s still a lot of vehicle physics tech that we want to get in that didn’t make it into the first pass of Lich King.

So we have to make some tough decisions sometimes about what we are going to go forward with and what just isn’t working out well enough to meet our quality standards and that was one of them. So it’s still definitely on our list of things that we want to do, we have a lot of people here who are passionate about vehicle combat, passionate about making it more interesting, more fun, by increasing the number of things we can do with it – that would definitely include the possibility of doing aerial combat.

Q u o t e:
The wow community has become convinced that the rate at which things are changed/fixed is due entirely to the fact that if it takes one month longer blizz makes 150 million+ more dollars.

It's certainly not true, nor is that an action plan for chugging along. Infrastructure and wage costs dictate that we keep content in development and testing at a constant rate to get the quickest, most qualified additions and updates to the game we can. It's a win/win for the company and the players. While players may only see new content every few months or so, there are hundreds of developers here every day working a minimum of eight hours a day to improve and expand upon this franchise.

You even have people like Ghostcrawler, who is constantly in integral meetings or at his desk churning out improvements for the game throughout the day, take the time after hours to open a dialog with the community about game play. And he's just an example of someone with whom you're probably familiar due to his posting. Scores of us go home and spend our time as players giving every aspect of the game possible a great deal of play time to determine what we think is working, and what can be improved. We come in the next day to have meetings about such matters and coordinate with multiple departments to see what we can get done, and how fast it can be done. The community team is involved in all of this as well, as we're regularly reading the forums and reporting the common feedback we're seeing from players. When applicable, we try to bring some of this information back to those reading the forums to keep the conversation moving.

Q u o t e:
Perhaps the intelligent thing to do would be to make a video of the ongoing progress and meetings and let the community see behind the curtain. It would calm alot of the anxiety over these issues imo.

You have a good point. We have, over the years, slowly began to open the doors to our company so players can see "the man behind the curtain." It's ultimately a very rewarding place to work. There's a great sense of internal community within the company, and we try to share that with our player base as much as possible. I'm confident you'll see greater effort on our part in the future to give players an in-depth look at our work place.

I think it's really important to consider BlizzCon in this regard as well. While developing game content day-to-day, we also go to great lengths to show BlizzCon attendees as well as those watching from home a substantial view into the process through which Blizzard Entertainment products are created, from concept to release. It's the best way for anyone interested to get to hear straight from those who work very hard behind the scenes here every day to bring millions of people around the world countless hours of reasonably-priced entertainment. :)