#36 - June 13, 2010, 6:49 p.m.
Q u o t e:
I think a lot of people here feel the same way i do about PotT, that it was one of the biggest linchpins holding Cata together. Being able to really improve/customize your character outside of gear and talents (which lets face it is just a BiS list and an "optimal" build ) was something everybody wanted. Now all we get is a new secondary profession.
We still think it would be cool to add some kind of post-game progression to allow for player customization, but we would have to be very careful and do it right. Nobody wanted to see a feature that felt like it delivered on half its potential. Nobody wanted to be thinking about how we were going to "fix the flawed Paths system" in 5.0. If we can come up with a design we like, then we'll try again in the future.
A big part of game design is triage -- knowing when something is good enough, knowing when something can be good with just a little more work, and knowing when something is a lost cause... at least for now. There are very few WoW features that we kill outright. Most go into a design parking lot, and we get together every few months to review those features and consider what to work on next.
Q u o t e:
They really have no direction...their main team leads are gone and working on the new MMO
I know this is a popular sentiment among the tinfoil-hat conspiracy crowd, but it's false. We have almost the same team in place that we had for LK. We have many developers who have been working on World of Warcraft since its inception. Most of our leads have been leads for years.
Q u o t e:
You don't fix a system by adding more systems. Eventually the systems will just keep piling up and get too complicated.
We'd rather have fewer systems with a lot of content and depth than a lot of systems, many of which feel neglected.
Q u o t e:
It's a little too soon to start judging what will happen with archeology. I mean, they took away it's main purpose, so obviously they're going to give it a new one otherwise they would just scrap it too and not bother wasting the money developing a system that is only half-amusing to a small part of the population. Give it some time, Blizzard always comes up with something.
We have some end-game plans for Archaeology. I would compare it to Cooking, which isn't mandatory, but useful enough that nobody is surprised at the appearance of a Fish Feast.
Q u o t e:
1) To proceed with this feature would prohibit a 2010 launch. Marketing said cut some stuff to get it out on time.
2) It simply turned out so that it wasn't fun.
Fortunately, one of the benefits of being Blizzard is we don't have to ship a product until we think it's ready. Our marketing department works with us on the game, but they understand that when the game is ready is ultimately up to the team. We didn't cut it because we ran out of time. We cut it because we didn't think the design we had was fun. At the high level we still like the idea, and if we can solve some of the problems we might bring it back in the future.
Q u o t e:
Path of titans would have been broken in the first few days. The popular theory crafting sites would have came out with a BiS list of the talents to choose, And if you didn't have those you are a nub and need to l2p
I don't think that is necessarily true. I agree that talents and glyphs are both treated as the right choice vs. the wrong choice, but not every decision in the game devolves to that. The best profession for a class or spec is something that is often up to enormous debate. Raids use a diversity of talent specs to fill out their roster. Different classes choose to pursue different rep vendors before others. Even with some of the flaws in the glyph system, it's not always cut and dried. Healers in particular (whose performance isn't as much of a math problem as it is for the dps) often are perceived to have some options even for the major glyph slot.
