Asmongold Reacts to the WoW Live Developer Q&A With Ion Hazzikostas 12/14/2018

this is the Kuna so I don't want to listen to all right let's go first question here actually you know what let me see what they say at the beginning that's what I'm kind of curious about what they say at the beginning here we go hello everybody and welcome to another world of warcraft live developer Q&A our camera has frozen give me one second wait what are they not sitting down oh is this a green screen although they're just not standing there wow this is like my stream oh my god this is the edge this is great I love this okay all right round two okay all right here we go world of warcraft live developer QA this is not a chair stream fortunately we're we're actually here my name is Josh Allen aka community manager large welcome to hat man with the hood over the hat ian has a Costa seein things oh come on no all right guys listen shut the [ __ ] up about the technical difficulties let me tell you something all right whenever you're doing stuff online you're doing it live you don't know what's going on there's gonna be stuff that goes wrong alright and that's just a facts of life and I'm sorry to say that but it's [ __ ] true alright that's the way it goes we're as always Josh yeah so we have a lot of questions to get toca you might as well just go ahead in freshman rules of tides of vengeance a couple days it's been fun seeing everybody running around catching up in a war campaign murdering each other in war mode doing assaults yeah and of course everyone's very happy about absolutely everything so we're gonna jump right into how happy everyone is about okay great this is at least they're admitting it all right I'm glad they're it's better that they're admitting it than pretending like well we really appreciate how happy there's some people are and then they read a comment wow how is the game so good how did you guys do such a great job and they explained how they did a better job at communication this time right obviously it could be a lot worse than that this is the one where I actually get fired first question for today first question how are you so amazing yeah exactly how amazing it comes from GME BIA GM mia GM mia BIA I believe is how I would prance that saying this is a classification why were so many changes undocumented in 8.1 ie professional requirements on crafted gear and the altitude of mythic plus mob changes so we've been talking about communication for a long time and that's been everyone likes surprises like it's your birthday so the patch is like your birthday we make sure that we actually have there it is ability to get answers out to you guys how are you simple thinking about this today so I think this is better doesn't a Selene perfect it's a continuing process of improvement I think frankly you know just just like a lot of other people we're also on reddit I never much champion other places reading the undocumented past changes thread our goal is to actively make that smaller every time and truth understand reach a point where there's nothing of any seriousness or importance in there but if you're reading the undocumented patch changes here well meet let me show you guys do something okay okay all right so undocumented changes okay and this is going to be let's see stuff that did work doesn't work so this is what you would do right is you would take it from this one right here and then you would put it over to here which would be the patch notes so if you literally have somebody that is doing the work for you for free and you are admitting that you were you're paying attention to that because people are looking at that on the PTR they're not doing it after the patch comes out they're looking at it on the PTR why wouldn't you just take the notes that you say that you're reading and put them into the patch notes if your goal is to make sure there are no undocumented changes exactly wait what am I did I am I confuse am i confuse I don't think I am I'm not we think that these patch notes overall were thorough they weren't complete there were things that weren't in them I would say there are three categories of things that that didn't make the patch notes one set are so the professional requirements and crafted gear for example that wasn't really a fully intended change in the form it took something you know we have a few have some different processes for they making changes the game sometimes we sit around we say hey we need to change the system we need to create something new we're going to create a new feature we're going to create new content in this case we also are fixing hundreds thousands in fact of bugs that are entered by our you know Quality Assurance analysts track through our system every patch and the casein profession crafted gear was hey about God entered this is smart yo Josh whoever thought of this smart idea so what they did here is they went over to OBS they use to stream deck to switch the [ __ ] frame over to the next question what they fix the camera this is really really smart good job guys that is professionalism oh here from all past expansions smart did Bo P gear does not for that you have that progression that's that profession and that wasn't necessarily like a team wide deliberate conscious decision it was just something that was fixed as an inconsistency and done quickly without full realization that hey this change will make it so that people are gonna log in without pants and they might not have any pants and that's that's not an acceptable thing so there was just was confusion in our end and then as soon as you really mean what had happened we rolled that change back and so yes we want that requirement to exist in seasons to going forward and I was plainly visible we don't want to change a gear out from under you so that type of change wasn't documented because it wasn't really an intended change that's also why it was reverted okay category number two great um really minor changes you know like I spend we fix literally thousands of bugs every patch it isn't practical and in fact I think it would just clutter the overall patch notes if all right we corrected an issue where this belt clips into this other asset or you know we well we all know that's not true because the belts always clip into everything the shoulders always clip into everything and we've been dealing with this for ten years okay like let's be [ __ ] honest alright if you put in like that you know I mean that's the worst thing all right I'm fine it is okay I'm just saying that it's kind of an example that you know extra type liner like there's there's a wide range of issues and I think looking through some of the threads some of the summaries yes a lot of these things listed there are changes they're also very minor they're not going to cause confusion or surprise or distress if they're not fully documented that's not true I was very upset larger and they're important so that when you look at the patch notes what you see there feels relevant and it's not just 50 pages of stuff to wade through to find the important stuff that you care about I agree that's why they should just delete monk changes from the patch notes because nobody cares about him what's be honest just get them out of there who gives a [ __ ] we'll just get to the real important thing so get PvP changes raid changes dungeon changes mount changes new mounts transmog and warrior changes that's it nobody gives a [ __ ] about the rest of it and that'll save everybody a bunch of time the third category I think are things that we just missed and that's where we're continuing to improve our communication process let's go some of the changes like stealth detection and the mobs the sort of under OTT that was a reflection of those were changes that were made way back in September when people first started running the dungeons and we just failed to properly capture those changes in their internal tracking there were a kind of offer radar by the time we got to November and assembling the patch notes we're gonna do better about that in the future so oh it's the goal really is to get to a point okay our patch notes all right come okay record and anything that's not in there everyone can agree is minor so what they're gonna be doing is they will be doing a better job at communication with patch notes so it's very good obviously Thank You Ian I appreciate that over the years they have gotten better at communicating that they will be better with communication yeah I know we've been talking a lot about patch notes and we've been doing a lot of work on our end as a community team to try and make them better all the time and even when we get feedback like here's here's a shoes that you had with the patch notes even still that's the sort of thing that we can take forward and try to find better ways to improve on and I rest it's not it's not an excuse because we owe it to you to do better but as an explanation I think one of the challenges for the world of warcraft team has been evolving some of our processes as the team grows in size as the game grows in scope I think a lot of the things that we are accustomed to doing worked when everyone working on a feature or a piece of the game was you know it was literally five or six people in a room who had full visibility into everything everyone else was doing now and you have dozens of people scattered across multiple offices communication it just becomes harder and it's something we need to work more to accomplish yep okay I'm moving on we actually have another question along this general topic here is comes from illa danke who said could you possibly add rationale for changes to patch notes and/or hot fixes this would be a huge step in communication there's no like do you want to actual like a five paragraph like essay behind why they decided to change a mob and Freehold I mean that no there's no way they're gonna do that because here's why they're not gonna do it I'm gonna tell you right now is because if they [ __ ] do this then every single person is gonna pick that [ __ ] apart and figure out every single way that they're wrong even if the change in itself wasn't that bad that's why they're not I mean like obviously they should have some rationale for big changes yes of course but for every change or even for a lot of changes probably not through your eyes so from from my end I can say yeah absolutely that's something that we want to we want to sort I do that more often we do occasionally yeah but I think it's something that we could do a lot more often is just make sure that we you know the little developers notes that we'll have in there from time to time in patch notes or in how fix notes yeah a tend to do it a lot more for class changes where it's like we you know change the scaling here and buff this and nerve this and here's why we're trying to do that to kind of contextualize the package but when you look at a change like myth the Keystone's can no longer be deleted there's a lot of questions without some context on our part and that's something we should do better yeah and that's not gonna mean every single change doesn't necessarily need a developer's note attached to it if you say like reduce the health of some trash mobs by 20 percent or something like that I mean the focus for that change is that that yeah that's fine too much health you can kind of infer that there but I that is something that we are gonna be doing a lot more often going that's actually a good thing I'm glad about that I like that on let's see next question hopefully it happens from for pod DRV on Twitter who said the recent patch 8.1 pro broke a popular ad on cross RP which gave players and opt-in means to communicate in game across faction barriers was this intentional and if not can it please be fixed you're not supposed to be able to talk to the opposite faction if somebody's a [ __ ] orc and you're a gnome you're not supposed to understand each other because one dude is a [ __ ] green big Arnold Schwarzenegger lookin [ __ ] and the other guy is a three-foot piece of [ __ ] of course they broke that okay so there was no deliberate intent to break this addon it was using the change we made in ties of engines was that add-ons can no longer directly parse and do things with the chat that occurs in communities this was done to tighten up a bunch of we're actually pretty large security loopholes and other things that could be used to harm our service they were used by malicious authors I know the add-on author in this case was doing it's fully aboveboard not run you know bad intent so education is something that has a complex history you know cross world of warcraft history there's value in you know the it exists to create and reinforce a certain barrier between the factions the alliance is the enemy the Horde is the enemy there's also also some concerns about the potential for toxicity where if somebody you know killing you is corpse camping you communication there isn't necessarily likely to be the greatest it's something and so that's something that we've tried to reinforce throughout the years now the reality is it's very different when there's consent as Roth is a safe space you must consent to be trash-talked I mean certainly ever since the integration of battlenet into our game if you have a friend who's alliance in your horde and you want to speak to them look for your battle tag friends you can talk to them if you're in a bee net community you can talk to them and so we have no illusions about trying to restrict communication between people who are really fully open and consenting to it so we do not mean to break the addon that said that we can't restore the functionality what we're looking to do and we're working on a hotfix that should give the RP community some recourse okay is actually adding an in-game solution to this problem we're looking at adding something that we're gonna call probably the elixir of tongues where when you drink it you can understand the opposite faction for a period of time what speaking their language so that the key thing there is you can't force someone who doesn't want to listen to you to listen to you what the [ __ ] you want to understand what they're saying then you can drink these and so if you know their role oh my god gather and Wow cross faction scene they can watch Daleks it's in game external add-on server no awfully it's it's a simpler no I know it's not let me see just a second I mean long boy I'm gonna want boy real quick Brutus or I'm gonna get on it right now it's called the elixir of tongues are you [ __ ] serious let me go ahead and take a look at it okay uh tou and GE tongue okay um it's and uh oh it's from a vendor okay um let me just look it up right now I want to see it uh Wow head alrighty and elixir of tongues mixer of tongues okay let me see if I can find this dude that's actually [ __ ] insane elixir tongue six days ago it's sold by fizzy um live zapper for only twenty gold holy [ __ ] Wow um I never expected I would see this that's incredible the [ __ ] I don't know like I don't know how to feel about that that's kind of like a really core feature of the game that you can't talk to inner faction but I guess you've got like thrall and Varion arguing and like the old cinematics so why not process overall working on it right now I it's a possibility we might get it out before the weekend if not then likely early next week okay and keep an eye on the hotfix notes for information on where it'll be available I think we're currently thinking like a vendor the dollar on underbelly and this is something that's meant to be a little bit out of the way but for those who who want it Wow are the audience for it you'll know where to get it and spend a few dozen gold kind of like the inky black potion or I just stock up and this is something you want to do it's there that's actually really really just hot fixing that in it's not gonna require a patch or anything like that correct perfect all right moving on next question comes from metal ish who asked wondering why the change to deleting mythic plus Keys seemed like a great quality of life change made in BFA only to be removed quickly here we go dude all right reason but here we go so this is obviously talking about before types of engines came out you were able to if you had a key that you didn't want to run you were able to just delete that key and get a new one okay now you can yeah this is a good question literally cannot delete a mythic key stone literally Legion right lonely in Legion you could delete the key you just never get another one and so you could just delete your key and just be a deluxe I can attest that's true I did it every week the week okay so no one ever did that yeah this is one of those changes that it was a quick change that wasn't fully thought through in our part frankly it was a hotfix that we okay so no one ever did that yeah this is one of those changes that it was a quick change that wasn't fully thought through in our part frankly it was a hot fix that we made actually the day that the first with ik+ season began about thank you make you Ian Thank You Ian just [ __ ] say it like if you guys just say like hey y'all listen like we thought this was gonna be a good idea that [ __ ] was stupid like I was a bad idea actually like we don't know what we're doing we [ __ ] up all right my bad sorry guys like if they just honestly I legitimately feel this way I legitimately feel that Blizzard every Monday afternoon maybe Tuesday afternoon they get some of the lead devs in there they get Ian in there they get maybe a whole inka in there they get a few other guys in there and they crack open some cold ones they get drunk as [ __ ] and they talk about the game and they take questions from a poll that you can go on the website and they just sit around and talk about the [ __ ] game they don't worry about all well is this is this good for the company no just [ __ ] say it man and they don't even like just sitting there chilling having a good time crack an open some cold ones talking about Wow and I can guarantee you people would get some answers and that QA they would piss them to [ __ ] off but at least remember you got that answer you know that you were getting real [ __ ] not some sort of PR [ __ ] not some sort of spin you were just getting real [ __ ] real logic there it is I would generally think they should do that just get drunk with the devs on Tuesday afternoon it'd be perfect álvarez Roth it wasn't a baseline battle phrase Roth change like in the a dough pre patch when you were still running Legion mythic Plus you still couldn't they didn't work this way you couldn't delete your keys and reuptake them when there were some problems with the with the keys from history caring forward from the last Legion season into the first VF a season that left players with some wacky key stones right someone might have got a 21 from their chest or yeah this is like the first week that mythic plus dungeons were available exactly and so someone says yes because everyone needs to be getting drunk on Tuesday in the middle of the day listening to me man if you don't need to be drunk to deal with the state of WoW right now you don't care we changed it so that you could repaint your Keystone after deleting it as a way to allow players to sort of self-service and to solve that problem for themselves if had gotten into a broken or bad state where they failed to obtain a Keystone or they'd gotten one that was unusable and this is a case of we just didn't fully think through the consequences it introduced a handful of bugs and as many others who deleted their key stones and then found that they got a much lower level key stone than expected the following week discovered but it also led to you know emerging social issues where yet players would increasingly try to use the word that I use dungeons which also led to even if we made changes to dungeons like temple of south release or King's arrest Oh once there was already the self selection towards dungeons like free holding at all those are it was very okay to shift out of that pattern I mean really since the beginning of formal dungeon and game gameplay I'm actually talking about Burning Crusade here we've just ever since then we've you know tried to point players at different dungeons recognizing something that we saw him bring grew saying which we actually at the time kind of called the Meccan our problem where there was like this one dungeon that was the easiest dungeon in the game yeah and it's what everyone ran and they ran it every [ __ ] day Jeff would go into Mecca Noor and he would try to get the sun-eater he finally got the sun-eater after a month of farming mekin our and his guild that wanted a tank caravan for one day said you know what we don't need you to tank anymore go DPS Jeff Jeff vendors the sun-eater to this day I do not understand why he made that decision but the day that he decided that he didn't need to tank carries on again after a [ __ ] month of farming at every single day after school he vendored the sword that he had spent all that time on for seemingly no [ __ ] reason I owe and then by the way guys they asked him to take again and you know where he went back to Mecca nor he never got a second sun-eater not because it was the most fun it wasn't like the best dungeon in Burning Crusade but it was the best place to go if you wanted to get five badges with the minimum of fuss yeah and so when even in wrathful literature a for group finder existed when we had the you know heroic of the day that was a random heroic quest I'm the NPC and dollar on and sometimes it would be you know just sometimes would be halls of lightning sometimes it would be guns rack whatever ever since then okay we've wanted some randomization there all that said the you know it's it's also important that there actually be some parity and if they're not the dead Keys that they're not being right yeah large discrepancies you know some with certainly certainly from week to week some ethics as we'll make some dungeons easier than others and that's intended but we've been keeping a close eye on the data we're continuing to make adjustments with the goal of truly ending up in a place like we did in Legion especially by the end where maybe there's some dungeons anymore familiar with some dungeons that you prefer slightly but same ways you would do dark heart or halls of valor or a mob souls that's that they're all the same and there are no dungeons that are very very difficult that did not happen at the end of Legion there was no dungeon it was just maybe extremely hard there was no dungeon at all it was like that never it's the pattern we want to settle into you with metal for Azeroth this is really just returning to what mythic plus was throughout Legion yeah we actually have another similar question along these lines that kind of ties in here as well it comes from Jackalope on Twitter who said why were the dungeon changes not in the patch notes and why were ones made to increase challenge and change strategy with addressing pain points of other dungeons so I would say we've talked a little bit about it wasn't in patch notes okay talking about the the other side of it at though as well what why were these dungeon changes actually made yeah so so this the small handful didn't make into the patch notes were just initial changes made not how fast back in September since then we've actually ha fixed a ton of changes mostly nerfs to a wide variety of boss mechanics and things in dungeons and that was really where our focus was like if you look back at the changes made in I would say late October early November there were it was a large number of them across a range of dungeons and by and large we're all designed to make the experiences a bit less punishing looking at major here's a problem with the dungeons there's too much trash how many mobs you need to kill to get to the boss how many trash mobs you need to kill a there's too many trash mobs that's the [ __ ] problem like it's not about the mechanic so if the other mechanics are stupid right boom the difference is that you look at the way that people could pull mythic plus dungeons in Legion they could do every [ __ ] mob in a lot of dungeons all the way up to the first boss now there's no [ __ ] way that's gonna happen it's very very rare per dungeon you think about like maw of souls right you've got the two guys at the beginning you've got the guy that walks back and forth you've got the buzzards that are up at the top you've got the group of three guys and a group of five guys and that's it you compared that to Freehold where you've got like 800 [ __ ] mobs at the beginning and it takes you ten minutes just to get to the first [ __ ] boss obviously that's the issue if you'll feel like they're wasted in their damn time because there's too many goddamn pirates they've got to beat their ass through to get over to a [ __ ] parrot you go to under rot you've got to kill ten different mobs to get over to the second boss this weird ass piece of [ __ ] thing that's got a giant ass tail and you've got to clear out the entire room now at least that you can do it at your own pace that's interesting but there's just too much [ __ ] trash man that is the with a mythic plus in my opinion there's too much trash pain points there it's something we're continuing to do we actually in fact have hopefully coming out at the beginning of next week a large other set of changes mostly focusing on a range of trash abilities and trash packs and I think this week that we have going on right now origins have more travel my desk the twelve affix combinations right and that's that's for a couple of reasons I think overall there are there's more going on with non boss mobs in our dungeons and there wasn't Legion I think in Legion there were some packs that were notoriously tricky to deal with why whether it was you know double bear pulls in dark heart or the packs the top of the stairs and halls of Valor that had casters that you wanted to lock down feels like a lot of Poe a lot more polls in battle for Azeroth often that sort of challenge we overall think that's a good thing dungeons have historically you know unlike raids which are really all about boss encounters in dungeons the whole thing is the encounter and figuring out how you approach dungeon enemies and how you crowd control them and what you prioritize what I really think they should change the way they evaluate this in a way they look at what dungeons are because what they're saying right now is the fact that they want dungeons to be an entire encounter now I don't know about you guys but a 30-minute raid encounter is fatiguing and it's not something I want to take part in okay I hated doing heroic Regnerus I hated doing her look Shaun fear for those exact reasons they take forever the idea that the entire and gather the entire dungeon should be an encounter all in itself with no sense of like reprieve or you know a resting period or anything like that I think makes it an unenjoyable and unfun experience for a lot of people that do it's one of the reasons why I don't like doing mythic bosses just so stressful constantly you interrupt that's a lot of the depth and interesting decision making that goes into dungeon gameplay and we consciously approach battle for Azeroth wanting to get away from the default solution to 80% of your problems being AoE stun cleave them down run to the next but that's meant having to take a fresh look at things like teaming and fortifying and how they play out so in tides of vengeance we actually got usually the last few days we've got a whole bunch of extra analytics and log from her dungeons because I think the systems that we had set up to monitor dungeon difficulty really were derived from legions and mostly focused on boss encounters we had a lot of good information on you know average white counts encounter different duration etc from week to week on the different boss encounters but much less visibility into what was going on in between them we realized that that was that was kind of a blind spot for us we had anecdotal feedback from her own experience playing and from feedback we received from the community but it's tricky to act you know to directly and to readily purely based on anecdotal and subjective feedback but now for the time even the last few days we have detailed breakdowns of the most lethal mobs and dungeons outside of bosses you know which stretches of dungeon someone says your argument is contents too hard which means it's not fun yes it's exactly my argument a certain point whenever content is just extremely difficult and you have to be on your toes every single second for like a half hour it's fatiguing and it's not enjoyable III think the people play games it's enjoyable having a game be fun and enjoyable is the most important thing and I think difficulty comes hand-in-hand with that but it's a scaler and it doesn't mean that the harder a game is the more fun it is that's not true it doesn't mean that just like oh the hardest game in the entire world is the most fun game ever it's not the fact is that you want to have enjoyment fulfillment and fun and you don't want to be fatigued after you finish playing the game there needs to be a balance between difficulty and being able to just enjoy yourself in the game and difficulty is not synonymous with enjoyment or fun and take the longest to get through which have the highest wipe counts especially with teaming and play we can look at the difference between teaming and non teaming weeks and see we're teaming is introducing an artificial difficulty spike that exceeds what we're seeing elsewhere anyway Dark Souls is not a good example at all it's not at all so basically on Dark Souls you pretty much go through and you're fighting these mobs that many of them have one or two different mechanics so you have to watch out for and many times you just killed them in one or two hits and then you get to a boss fight where it's very intense maybe two to seven minutes fight and then after you kill them it's over right so you don't really have this huge long period of intense concentration that you have to have you have bursts of concentration and focus and then you have more relaxed periods in between the mythic quest dungeons don't have that it's all super super focused and you don't have that period of relaxation so Dark Souls is not an example what you guys / gonna say it's an example of what I'm trying to say so that's leading to us rolling out a bunch of changes including removing some mobs that were added in teaming making some mobs he's a ball that warrants removing infested as a possibility from some lieutenant mobs that are overly punishing when they have it a range of changes along those lines and so this is aimed at exactly addressing the pain points in a wide variety of dungeons hopefully getting closer to an experience where you know there are challenges but there's nothing that feels frustrating yeah that's actually really interesting to think about you look at it from an analytics perspective it's easy to go on the forums and see people saying like okay this Trash Pack is this Trash Pack feels too hard or this one I hate dealing with this one I always want to skip this Trash Pack and so on but once you actually have like logged hard data from several thousand dungeon runs you can then look at that and say you can see exactly how much more difficult that trash pack is than everything else rather than just looking at it and going okay I guess this feels like maybe 10% to art you can look and see okay yeah this was this people wipe on this trash pack 11 point 17 percent more times than yeah every other trash pack in the dungeon so that's actually really really interesting something else that you mentioned right the start of answering this question as well that I thought was interesting talking about changes that were made back in September and I think that's an interesting bit of perspective on how we end up with a lot of the changes that actually go into the patch guys a lot of times what you're seeing when we actually release content is stuff that we working on months ago this is like well before we were actually able to think about things like you know how hard are these individual mythic plus dungeons and so on see the video got frozen again and they win over to the question so that way they could fix the audio and they're resetting the camera right now that's what they're doing I guarantee it so that's that's something that I found really interesting as well I'm just thinking about ya know the video was to get changes into the game yeah exactly and that's we're always bouncing back and forth between especially with how much we can ha fix these days making changes in real-time to the live game working on the next upcoming milestone working on the next one after that and okay not an excuse but sometimes things do slip through the cracks in that process and we just need to get better at tracking them internally even so that that doesn't happen anymore more analytics alright probably a good idea to move straight on to the next question this one comes from hatefull who asked are there any steps being taken to improve the mythic plus pug experience currently dungeons are extremely grueling and punishing for the casual player it feels like without voice chat and coordination groups just fall apart this is true so I mean this is absolutely shocking croaking to dungeons as a whole will make them a bit more very true in some cases that's that I think especially higher-end mythic Keystone's are intended for coordinated groups I think it's it's meant to parallel and game raid progression and you know coordinated PvP where voice chat is the norm I guess actually a question I asked to both both hateful and the community as a whole I'm actually curious what we can do to improve the integrated voice chat experience because I recognize we don't see it being used a whole lot the first time we introduced voice chat back and see that's not gonna happen see this they have this with xbox live now is that back in the day in Halo 2 if you guys ever point halo to an xbox live you knew that every [ __ ] person and their mother was on Xbox Live a talking [ __ ] calling each other in Words that it would get me banned on Twitch if I said them over Xbox Live and your boy asmin gold was the one leading the charge on that I did that every [ __ ] day whenever I came home from school and I [ __ ] loved it all right it was amazing nowadays you go on Xbox Live nobody talks nobody has a mic the reason for that is people are just less likely to do that because you have more casual less invested players nowadays because the novelty of playing with somebody in a different country or whatever is gone because you have so much more interconnectedness with like social media and everything and I think because it's so more so much more common now it's not as a it's not as common for people to go out of their way to pursue things like that 2.2 or whatever it was it was admittedly a train wreck like it was it was difficult to set up very poor voice quality a lot of other problems where you know if you disconnected then you also couldn't tell anyone you disconnected etc this this point we're using integrated battlenet voice chats the same system overwatch uses and other Blizzard games voice quality is pretty high it has standard push-to-talk functionality is integrated into parties and I think that is designed to be that exact solution for pickup groups like we didn't implement voice chat with the goal of getting guilds that are happy using discord or mumble or whatever to stop using those and use our system if you have something that works for you use it go for it okay in terms of lowering the barrier to entry so that when you join a pug it's not like oh I have to go download this or connect to this server and make sure you know what these people I'm only going to play with possibly once ever what can we do to make that clearer is it lack of visibility I think we were in some ways you didn't want to push it too heavily in your face with like a prompt that pops up every two seconds asking if you want to join register chat we didn't want to default people into voice chat because that could be jarring is it that people aren't aware that it's there or you just don't want to use voice chat period and well in that case I think that there are going to be some challenges when you're looking at some higher ends content that requires real-time communication and coordination even if it's like as simple as an interpretation being able to call on okay like hey my interrupts on cooldown you need to get this one that's not going to work with text but that's you know I think something we are designing the experience around at least it's very very high-end certainly baseline heroic dungeons raid finder the rest of that experience is not designed for real-time communication but I think that's one of the that ability for cooperation and coordination is one of the cooler parts of MMO gameplay and so something we embrace when we're looking at our high-end content yeah exactly and that's a huge part of like how guilds end up being formed and how you end up making friendships in in games like WoW is you hit this difficult content you think to yourself okay yeah I want to push a 15 this week or something like that okay and then you end up having to actually coordinate with other players and sort of make friends that way so I think that is important but yeah the in-game voice chat oh I also would be very interesting she's reading chat guys sorry I have to strike yeah and if you've used it and you think it sucks let us know that to you because we want to improve that our goal is to make that an easy convenient functional solution moving on next question has anybody actually ever used the in-game voice chat because like I never have I've never looked at it at all I've never been interested in seeing it or anything I've just never there's never been a reason for me to try it so maybe it is popular I have no [ __ ] idea comes from Destructo who says why do we have to wait until the opening of the battle for DES our allure for the new mythic plus season to open and in what do you mean you dumb [ __ ] [ __ ] idiots because they're gonna introduce the new gear and the new mythic plus season is gonna scale up all the different dungeons to match with the new gear and the new mythic Plus dungeons are gonna give you better gear what a stupid [ __ ] question why are they gonna answer this one this is so dumb same boat why do we have to wait an extra month for the new as awright traits to be available I'm so obviously right tides of vengeance because it's not cloned around that's not done for season two to start at this plate that's looking to the new the new raid yeah mythical season new azurite traits new PvP season all that sure's what we need to do okay just get a few questions so the biggest dip shits on Twitter we'll post them up there everybody will know they're dumb will answer it will make perfect sense we're gonna look the best alright they're gonna love eight point one after this you can just imagine that's what they're gonna say right those days are lore it's a couple of pieces here one I think we think that cutting old er short at this point would be be a bit too soon I think old ear just opened three months ago it's a healthy because at the 21st the subs after 8.1 would expire and you need a new one to play oh really so 8.1 came out this day right it was the 11th and so if you bought it come out the 11th of the 18th I don't even remember it must have been the 11th yeah it had to have been the 11th okay so and then you have one week eight boss tear Rickey many guilds are still progressing through it pushing for ahead of the curve pushing for cutting edge as we look at pacing out our raid content over and over the entire expansion looking to minimize droughts three months for the first rate tear would be would be too short we feel Knight whole didn't open until you know I think four and a half months or so into Legion for example so that's why that's there now and I don't know really good whenever I think back on it was really really progressive probably the best rate comes in parallel you know mythic plus as a system is designed was the desecrater Legion rating as an endgame yeah smaller group progression track similarly we have our PvP season that has rewards that will progress in parallel there it's not really pasta like when we introduced new mythic plus oh you're right we did have trial of our so I think so we did have two ribs by now okay tio vo I'm not saying T of you is better to the night hold it wasn't better than night hold T of Y was an incredible raid it was amazing but it's just not better than night hold Tod was a three boss raid I don't think you can compare a three boss raid tonight hold then although the item level cap is going up by thirty if we had that open today ICC started with delayed content wrong actually toc servant delayed content there right well here's the way it's gonna work so the first week you're only gonna be able to kill the beasts of northrend and then what were draft is gonna come out in the second week you can kill him so they only introduced literally one boss a week and after the five weeks obviously you were able to do I think one on heroic or whatever but it took five weeks for all this [ __ ] to come out it was so [ __ ] stupid man people would be able to get gear that was equal to and better than everything from elders our lore before me elders our Lord was there it would unbalance the PvP season unless PvP gear is also on that part and on that same level and so on and so forth so I would view you know seasons as a new raid tier new mythic plus season new PvP seas and all those will happen at the same time as battle for Azeroth unfolds a second question why wait for the new traits that's something that we've you know tied into the battle design I'm doing them and the parallels they're not you know doing the trace we just say it again we're not hitting added them to existing old ear gear people would have logged in and everything they previously had with okay go get new copies of this gear go get new stuff no that's gonna happen anyway to some extent when season two begins that's a natural part of a new season beginning and a new raid to your opening you just you're gonna get higher level stuff you're gonna replace what you have versus this has all changed out from under you and the thing that was best in slot yesterday no longer is today well then also you wouldn't necessarily want to have to replace all of your gear today and then a new raid comes out in a month and a half and so you just do it again excite afterwards that would just be a lot of extra stress it makes a lot of sense moving on next question comes from Sami 832 who says it'd be nice to have a source of tightened residual cue Sami you dumbass piece of [ __ ] suck a [ __ ] fat dick Sami 832 you dumb [ __ ] now listen to me right now the tightness idiom being a limited finite resource is the smartest thing that boy xored has done in a long time everybody wanted everybody wanted everybody wanted some sort of currency that was finite that you could cap out every single week because the amount of sources of as right gear are finite and you can farm them out and the as right gear can be turned in the tighten recipient they effectively created a currency system with a vowel cap just the way that we wanted it and Sami wants to ruin it all by creating another open-ended [ __ ] system that's gonna make people feel like if they're not farming at 24/7 or getting behind that isn't finite I know you don't want us farming so job make the end of dungeons at least have a chance to drop some or shards of it it'd be nice on 0as right drop raid weeks I'm sure there is a way to add a repeatable source of this that doesn't lead to a large chunk of the community just grinding their faces off on that source it the key here is that the residual system is viewed it is a delivery system primarily for mythic keystone dungeons it was designed to solve the problem oh yeah yeah okay getting as right only from your weekly chests was frustrating and fuse questions are so [ __ ] stupid it's got me agreeing with Blizzard the [ __ ] is going on like a deprived players of any sense of control in a raid you could bonus role-specific boss you could focus on a specific boss that dropped a specific piece for you in the dungeon context was this wide range of items and you might only get one every few weeks and when you did it might not be the slot you wanted and so forth so the system we have set up is as you're running method class even if you nothing else even if you get no other sources of Asura key or you never blow anything up roughly every two and a half weeks you'll be able to afford a piece of gear that matches the tier of content that you're farming so if you're doing submit um I think sevens every week two and a half of those will give you the ability to buy currently in 370 and you can pick the slot so if you're looking specifically for a shoulder you're looking specifically for a helm you can get okay yeah and so in the current setup that's actually probably the most one of the most efficient and reliable delivery systems for azurite armor good job of anything in the endgame and so good job Sam you're hesitant tonight a good job or lucrative in that book Sammy um that said we just rolled out the system so it's certainly possible we'll look at adding more sources of residuum in the future but for now it's a dungeon focused experience and something that we want to see how it plays out before we before we build on and potentially transform okay good cool great makes sense right I'm just gonna drop a sound good make sense we'll go ahead and get right on next question comes from kappa kappa kapppa 10 kept it capitain tor poll on Twitter I don't know why I'm having so much trouble actually pronouncing names today this is a this is a problem it's never watching too much ever no not in the history of q and A's should be the center of every Q&A bingo Lord Lord Lord rise to pronounce the question whose name of the app how do you plan on handling the transition from season 1 to season 2 regarding Titan residual so this is a really good question and this'll this'll make me decide whether I want to abuse my viewers to force them into trading me that are as right here by doing normal mode and heroic mode LD or community runs or not so can you just stop pile a bunch of Presidium right now and then just have a ton of it and buy all the mythic gear on the first [ __ ] day that'd be amazing but I mean I don't think that'd be a good idea we'll see what happens so we're trying something a little different this time around compared to some of our past currencies like this when we've had these in-game currencies like valor or nether shards and we introduced a new tier of content Oh just hard cap what you could carry over into the next season or we'd introduce an all new currency effectively resetting your old progress we don't wanna go down a road of having four different tight and resumed currencies by the end of the expansion we also dislike caps it's kind of it's where there's awkward experience where you feel like okay season end is coming up we should hoard okay so what we're gonna do is actually just continue to inflate as we have there's no resets every tier of gear costs roughly three times as much as them as the previous one so going from you know preset 385 token is roughly three times as expensive as in 370 token a mythic ten chest gives you roughly three times as much as a mythic seven chest when season two begins well there's just two new tiers being introduced so it's four hundred and four 15 Tier four hundred is gonna cost roughly triple of what the 385 does 415 will cost roughly triple of that so it's basically like 10x cost going from three to five to four fifteen but also the rewards from disenchanting are sharding for hundreds and for 15s we proportionally higher also what you get out of your season two weekly chest will be proportionally higher so if you got you know sixty out of your mythic ten today that number is gonna be closer to six hundred when you do a season to mythic ten which is of course harder gives you better loot you I can get them all so here's what we do is soon I can do it on my way or I'll do all deer on every difficult to get every single piece of as right gear that I possibly can melt all of it down the titan recipient and on day [ __ ] one I'll buy all four 15s man all four 15s no big deal that's a great idea so that means that the general ratios to you know continue to hold it'll take you you know Josh does buy every individual piece of gear good idea and it's up to players to decide what they want to do with their currency now you know if you really if you've been struggling method Josh your three crafter listen to me man Josh does a great idea but let's not forget who invented community runs on the first day what was it called how to use personal lutes to your advantage let's see Esmond gold maybe this is it here let me check if this is up y'all it's me it okay let's see if I can find it this was the first day that the personal changes came out and I immediately started talking about ways yeah there it is that's the old asmin gold right there look at me man look at all that hair that I used to have this is exactly what I was gonna do so I came up with this idea wait what the [ __ ] 7.00 no no no this is from this is from a way way long ago forced personal loot how the [ __ ] where's the video umm what was it called 6.0 personal personal how about this personal loot as mongold maybe this is it what would system is best this video was from like six years ago or something like that five years ago it was never I first started making videos I came out with the idea of having people do loot raiding the day after the patch the allowed personal to trade allow you to do personally literally the next day I figured out a way to use it to my advantage and abuse people again and that's how I got my Tesla Mannoroth back then and warlords of draenor I believe I remember even when it was it was like the next [ __ ] day I'll off to show it to you guys and and and find it somewhere I don't think it was the video that I showed before though ok let's go back to this I thought I'd be able to find it it was my idea willing to find a good mythic there to find a good azurite helm the system's right there for you you can you know fill that hole in your character's gear if you want to hoard all of your residual from now until the 22nd when battle does our door opens might give you like a one week head start on the season but it's up to you whether you you know we'd rather have something now or a fraction of an item then ok that makes a lot of sense it would be more than one week hind in if it was increasing by thirty percentage we probably make a lot more sense to just go ahead and buy a piece for that slot right now because at the very least that means you go into season two with a better piece of gear ok if you're somebody if you are you know you're trying to you're pushing to complete the mythic plus feats of strength you're trying to do in time tens or 15s you want to get your gear a bit better you're looking to get cutting-edge and you want that now it may well be worth it for you and it's gonna be something for everyone to decide based on their own play style their own preferences you know alts will view it differently than mains that are already fully decked out and so forth ok cool so TL DR buy pieces now if you want them if not that as or that Titan resent you and will still be useful yeah no cap no reset it's just costs go up but here's how it works guys cuz people don't understand what a number is let me explain let me notepad here and I'll show you guys what the numbers are cuz obviously nobody knows how to [ __ ] math now listen so let's say let me open it up let me open up notepad there we are ok it's [ __ ] but it's fine is this working here ok it is alright so we've got all right so 30% is gonna be the 370 and let's say it's a hundred ok and then let's say 30% more is going to be a 385 so that's going to be a hundred and thirty so then thirty percent again which is going to be the 400 and that's going to be a hundred and what does let's see one hundred and thirty one hundred and six was one hundred and sixty-three I don't even know 166 let's see is 36 35 what's so you have the 15 and then the 60 okay all right so basically it's gonna be fine and that's what I was trying to say exactly but the rewards will also go up nice next question from wonderful heaven who asked the purpose of artifact knowledge is to reduce the gap between players who play a lot and those who do not yeah with a K on hold for six weeks there will be a massive gap going into next year that won't be easily closed for several weeks what are your plans to prevent this in lieu of art ignore it because who gives a [ __ ] if some sweaty nerd wants to sit in their goddamn mom's basement and farm out island expeditions for 14 hours a day so it can have an item level but 3:41 or however level 41 necklace let him do it let him [ __ ] do it it's not a big deal acknowledge so it's not a big deal that was increasing basically increasing the rate at which your heart of Azeroth would level up so this is this is effectively the same way it worked in Legion if players you know who played through Legion may recall initially artifact knowledge now at the time it was more transparent because you were researching it manually via work orders in your order Hall but when Legion came out the cap on knowledge was 25 and then I think want to say in in 72 we raised it to 40 and then I just stopped there and there might have been you know you know you might have had more concordance levels to work towards but knowledge had gotten you far enough to be competitive with the content that was available so similarly knowledge here is paced to match the available content and the needs right the most powerful piece of gear available today requires a heart of Azeroth level of 33 to fully empower I think that's a mythic shoulders the shoulders yeah and so this knowledge will get you there now season two's gonna come out and okay I assume that I think if we had knowledge scaling in the background between now and then in a lot of ways you'd actually see a larger effective gap when the raid comes out there are some people who are done with the tear and they're taking a break and they'll be back for you know battle of desire lore in season two and that's totally fine but a rover knowledge continued past what season one really required would lead to people who had you know been grinding AP for the next month and a half starting out the raid being able to fully unlock all the powers or their armor or most of them while others who taken a break why not just let them do that because you're gonna get rid of the system an eight-point-two already you said you were gonna get rid of the system why wouldn't you just let people get a little bit farther ahead and not have to worry about doing a system that you yourself have admitted multiple times in multiple different ways is flawed and broken use any fair I even even in yes that gap would shrink over time but that's a more jarring place to begin things than I think where we're going to end up okay once knowledge resumes accruing that capital shrink and that is ultimately its resulting the goal on the undocumented patch changers front by the way I know K don't excite me skepticism here you should be clear this actually wasn't tides of vengeance change this was something that we when paddle fries Roth launched we had you know okay we're gonna have fifteen weeks of knowledge that increment and unfortunately the last week of knowledge just happened to fall on December 11th now of course we should have made this clear upfront but going into the next season just to say it now I forget off the top of my head exactly when the end date is but we will announce that knowledge will begin accruing on January 22nd I'd expected somebody said Sammy's and Chet you'll send me what up bro [ __ ] idiot to you know pick up for maybe three months or so and then I will assume in koalas until season three begins also that's that's the system that we're currently looking at which again matches how this worked in Legion okay and just to be clear we're not saying that we somebody give them a subsequent ban on to tell you about this it's more that it's not that we forgot to tell you last week is that we forgot to tell you exactly and that's the reason why I didn't make any of the patch notes was we didn't think it is a patch change we didn't think of it as like oh we're gonna consciously choose to get stopped increasing knowledge as part of tides of vengeance let's just not tell them it was oh right there's this system that we made six months ago yeah it's just kind of been taking along in the background yeah all right next question comes from Night Stalker three one four who said any plans on y'all we know him y'all we know that guy is this guy dude it's this [ __ ] guy that always he always criticizes me on Twitter all the [ __ ] time man look at him this is the guy we legitimately got someone from our community to have a question answered we got a real question through man holy [ __ ] dude this is amazing Wow we made it making the heart of Azeroth more relevant or engaging during Legion we had weapons to look at and actually use be it just for a new attack many players didn't hide the artifact skins via transmog they liked them so why must the heart of Azeroth feel so bland okay so okay so okay so I I just love how he said that okay okay dude okay dude a lot of a lot of aspects to unpack here a bunch of a bunch of points so yes we have a lot of plans to make the heart of Azeroth more engaging and we agree that you know I think on several levels this fell short of what Legion artifacts offered baseline some of this on the story side the Magni and corruption of Azeroth the storyline was more of a be plot at least initially it was a side plot be hurts the central heart an alliance people want and while yes this substance azurite is part of the war between the factions what you're doing from agony and the power of your heart isn't a central element of the plot in the way that your artifact weapon was a key to how you're able to overcome the Legion that's something that's going to change as we move forward into rise of a Shara and the and so the heart of house earth will become a much more central story elements and plotline involving Magni will become much more central okay and so that that's that's part of it neck is inherently less visible than a weapon at the same time we I think we wanted there to be something that a price or a permanent slot that you carry forward that you imbue with power that you upgrade over the course of expansion didn't want to go back to weapon a second time in a row I think there's something because this should have [ __ ] done is it should just made a new slot but people are mad because there's no new salon why not make it at a bird why not make it some sort of like a tertiary item for each different class so paladin's have libres hunters have a quiver mages have a spellbook warriors have a I don't know like a shield or something like that and I'm not sure what that would be the decays would go back and have sigils again why not give each individual class something special that mattered that wasn't necessarily visible except on a cosmetic level they didn't change anything that you can level up independently and it wouldn't cannibalize existing current slots like there's no rule that says these are the only slots that the character can ever have yeah a [ __ ] ring slot let's think outside the box I think TV people are enjoying being with again it could also think outside the car has always been one of the most probably I'll be really the most prominent aspects of your character and so you didn't want to write off the weapon slot permanently on the system side we know we have a lot of work to do where's if you use a battle stance or make because every system is a whole lot better a lot deeper a lot more satisfying I think reflecting classic our thoughts reflecting on the system that we launched battle for Azeroth with I think was one one Blizzard like one thing I think is really bad right for the game and I'll be honest like I'm just gonna be like completely real right now is that I feel like they're afraid of complexity I think that they're afraid of adding any sort of complexity to the game because they think that's gonna alienate their their audience right and they think that if the game is too complex people won't be able to understand it and if they're not able to understand that they won't play the game and quit I think this is very flawed perspective they have and I also think there are a lot of games that are very very complex some on a surface level and some on a on an under level right a secondary level that are very fulfilling and fun for players to engage in because the mastery over those systems is fulfilling because it's player driven and it's driven by knowledge and understanding and some sort of catharsis that the player receives once they are able to overcome and master a system now because there are none of those systems in the game now the amount of actual self fulfillment that you get out of understanding your character or do anything it doesn't exist anymore so we've lost the glyph system we've lost the old talent system we've lost all these different systems for the sake of streamlining and transparency and making things easier to understand and removing the illusion of choice and in a lot of games of course there's always going to be a best way to do them but the illusion of choice at least fool some people and not having any choices doesn't fool anyone at all really one central flaw that's at the heart of a lot of what feels bad about it all reports do that so on the one hand we wants artifact power to be relevant and it's cool I think to have goals to work towards I think one of the nice things but I'll pause one more time okay I want to read something stupid and check somebody's quoting me twice they said dungeons is new hardened complex and the game isn't too complex in the same hour yes that's right so once upon a time there was a girl and she broke into a house with three bears now she was hungry and there was porridge on the table and there were three bowls of porridge she took a drink out of the first bowl of porridge and she said wow this is too hot she put it down doesn't want that then she took his sip out of the second bowl of porridge Wow this is too cold I don't want that and she finally got to the third bowl of porridge and she drank it and she said mmm this is just right there is a worid grey area between something being too hard and too easy and certain things can be hard in some ways and that's good and certain things can be hard in other ways which is bad it's not that simple TOC power in Legion was that it was yes and then the Bears came downstairs and they killed her so what happened so it gave you a sense of steady progression the complimented the random spikes of itemization right you could clear your raid for the week and not get any upgrades or running dungeon you don't steal a bear what sometimes you wouldn't but you'd always be progressing towards these meaningful goals and what it felt best about the artifact system especially early on was when you had I'll say a new gold medal talent to work towards something that was you know flashy that would meaningfully change your gameplay and give you a big boost of power and we saw even in Legion once players got past that they desire to you know the desire for artifact power and really the appeal of the artifact on a lot of levels faded significantly whether you were just you know leveling up concordance or getting 0.5% to your overall staffs from getting a miner trait here there when people were in that mode you didn't really care about artifact power either so we okay on the one hand though certain works best when there are exciting goals to chase yes other hand because we are relying on armor and items that you replace to deliver those powers and to unlock them it feels really really bad if you get a new one you get a new item you get a new piece of armor from a raid from a dungeon from your PvP chests and the power is on it that are interesting that are exciting are locked and you can't use them yet and in fact that would likely lead you to just keep that item in your bags and not feel like it was an upgrade right away and not feel like it was something you were supposed to use okay so that led us to give you the most potent spec modifying abilities up front you know we've tuned the system at this point where they're almost unlocked by default if you're keeping pace with the heart progression overall I'm not what that means is all you have to look forward to by getting as right I'm getting artifact power is these utility abilities and while those are those are handy they're not they're not exciting they're not you know the sort of power that's going to motivate you and excite you as you achieve these goals and so we're kind of you guys ever scratch your dick and smell your hand dr. between those two challenges as we're trying to shape the system so where that leaves us is as we look ahead to rise of a char and beyond oh you want to pretty significantly rise of a shara oh [ __ ] was that leet 8.2 rise of a shara [ __ ] yeah okay dude how we're approaching the system I think battle Bazaar lore and season two is likely the last tier of as a right Armour that you'll really have to work to unlock the powers on thinking is from rise of a char and beyond you'll just get new pieces they'll be fully unlocked based on your heart level and you can just make the choices you want to make on them you can dial them in customize them and it's just armor that prevent the presents choice and at that point we'll shift the meaning of artifact I want to replay that just so you guys can hear that okay cuz alright just one second listening battle does our lore and season positions likely the last tier of azurite armor that you'll really have to work to unlock the powers on thinking is he said really have to it doesn't necessarily mean that you won't have to we'll see what this is gonna be right Ian as a lawyer he speaks very specifically and so I think there was a reason why he added really have to work rather than have to work and then have to work doesn't mean that you can do it passively and how much is past and we haven't should you define work ian obviously is thinking through all of these things as he's choosing his vocabulary and explaining these answers in order to off you skate the actual goals of what he's trying to do but this is a good thing and we've only wanted this since beta from rise of a char and beyond you'll just get new pieces they'll be fully unlocked based on your heart level and you can just make the choices you want to make on them you can dial them in customise them and it's just armor that prevent the precise means and in that order for people 215 of artifact power and the evolution of the heart of Azeroth into something that lies in the heart itself in two ways of demising and selecting powers that you're not reading that you're just permanently unlocking and augmenting and choosing among within the heart we'll have a lot more details of this system as mushara gets closer and something we also want to use to add some more flashy visuals even potentially some active abilities good good good I remember every single time I would go on the beta I would shift-click the heart of Azeroth hoping that they would actually do this and they're finally doing this good awesome Thank You Blizzard guys why the [ __ ] does this have to take to half the expansion for you to get it right this is what the problem is we need more community iterative development like beef be more [ __ ] open with this [ __ ] man like why do we have to go through months of a [ __ ] system that it's gonna take I mean like when did I do the mountain climb last year I don't even remember I did this mountain climb and I got up to the top of the mountain it was a great time etc right I did this thing and now it's just so [ __ ] ridiculous man like y'all need to fix this [ __ ] before people start hating it like it doesn't need to take until the second major patch of the expansion for you to fix something that should have been fixed and [ __ ] beta thank you but god damn like this needs to be faster next time that start to feel closer to the connection that you have with the artifact weapons in Legion and something we're excited about but where it's a little too early it against the details of the design but in the months to come we'll have a lot more to share on that front so just want to kind of lay out the general philosophy for how we're approaching the challenge ahead nice that's definitely something interesting to look forward to I'm excited to learn more about that so they release it broken on purpose so they can fix it later on for content you because if they make a bad system people will be mad that they made a bad system but then they can fix it later on and then everybody is like wow they're listening it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission there it is I'll have to be me well we will make sure to share more about that as soon as we possibly can you might even find its way into the patch notes let's not get ahead of ourselves the next question from silent crits who says do you plan on increasing gear reward IP levels of war fronts and world quests as time goes on a little disappointed that the new war fronts still refer Rope still rewards report to say I jog out this did I could not speak today decrease incentivize just say shouldn't the gears scale up with new content so I guess trying to reiterate that way yes it should scale up are we planning on increasing the rewards from more fronts and world Road quests so ok so this is what I was talking about with the drunk streams apparently they're already doing it they're different pieces there Bharathi the Iraqi war fronts that is going to remain at the level that it currently Awards door what a bad decision like what an absolutely bad decision why do you just want nobody to do it like nobody's gonna do war fronts if they don't give you a good gear like what are you gonna do in the third third major patch whenever a wrathy war fronts are still giving you eight 40s and the new zone that we go to just [ __ ] dicks you down with earth 340 right I know the guys at eight forty right but like three 40s and the new zone dicks you down with 400 item level loot nobody's going to do a wrathy war front why are you gonna invalidate the content whenever you could just scale it up and it would be fine you have to make it competitive but at least make it relevant actual war front it's actually since it came out in advance of season two once season 2 starts the rewards from that are going to bump up another 15 item levels to better match the stuff from battle desire like we didn't want to have we wanted there to be enough to do the tides came out like really in terms of our reward structure the default would have been the warfront also waits until season two but think of this as a preview and so the rewards are a little bit suppressed so they're not completely breaking our item system in the mean time but that's how it will go forward now not everything scales up right like old ear rewards aren't getting better when season two starts I think when we have we have certain pieces of content that you progress through you out gear you leave behind if you go back to them you can go back there are intrinsic and unique rewards that come out of old deer that are that make all deer compelling for people to go after right you have the mythic Cahoon title you have the transmog sets and you also have the fact that because you have better gear you can trivialize all deer and complete it faster war fronts are completely time gated which is y en actually has already admitted that you're not able to go in there with the pre-made of 20 people because then it would just have people sitting around because war gate were war fronts are fundamentally time gated so you're gonna get into a system where like old deer is not a good example because old deer has a bunch of other reasons in ways that people can go in there and get something out of it and they can also expedite the process with gear and gear doesn't necessarily have to be the motivating factor with war fronts gear is the only motivating factor back to them for alts for achievements for you know cosmetic collection if you want to finish out your set but it's not just automatically scaling up now world quest rewards over time will continue to go up in terms of their ceiling that's based that's derived however from your own personal item level and as we've discussed in the past some of the overall difficulty of the world also scales up a bit to match your own progression and so there that's just keeping world quests and keeping the outdoor world relevant but that's based on gear that you've gone from other sources and is reflected but so here's the other thing is that all deer being invalidated right is a bad thing but at least it the matically makes sense if it's going to be battle for Azeroth then the Horde and the Alliance are going to be fighting over a wrathy Highlands for the entire time so fanatically it would make sense for all deer to diminish and relevance because the story progresses forward the Iraqi war front does not have the same logic behind it in the narrative storyline that would make sense for it to diminish and relevance in the same way that all deer would it doesn't even make any [ __ ] sense like all of these like did none of this makes any [ __ ] sense dang some increased challenge there but war fronts review more like raids were there something that this was the war front for this tier now here's a new one now as we mentioned it but why why like why not just make all the war friends the same like there's nothing innate like there's no difficulty it's not like the dark shore war front like obviously you can't make all deer the same as battle of desire allure but they're not progression systems for gear these are like ancillary content systems that are basically an experience it's not even about the gear like who here that you know what cuz everybody's gonna say I do let's be honest with ourselves if they scaled up the yer a theme or front nothing would change there would only be a positive outcome because more people would be able to do the irathient and feel like their time was not being wasted I really don't like this answer let's come though in Razov azshara we're looking at adding heroic war fronts and who would I do that it's likely that both war fronts would once again become relevant in that tier and so for organized groups that want to go in and tackle them that'll be a relevant reward at that time okay so what he's saying is he's going to make the heroic war fronts scale up on the same level III mean like at that point it's like why like III just I feel like if you carried the logic to its conclusion it would not make sense and I wish that maybe I should make a post about this about how like they diminish content so fast and they're not like because this is like another really really bad example of this is in warlords of draenor and 6.2 whenever they know six point two point three I think whenever they added in the vow or upgrade system where you could get Valor points and you could use the Valor points to upgrade your gear so you were not able to upgrade gear from Blackrock foundry in hellfire citadel which created an artificial gap between Blackrock foundry and hellfire citadel the initial 6.0 raids and the new 6.2 raid hellfire citadel right I say black are founded in highmaul I'm in black are found in highmaul and you were not able to up go to upgrade those items at all now why were you not able to do that no [ __ ] reason they basically made the previous content even more invalid than it already was by the artificial system in an artificial exclusionary tool that made it to where you were not able to upgrade the previous year from the previous raids there's no region reason logically that would be the case unless you just want everybody to do the same raid over and over and over and if that's the [ __ ] case how is that fun to spend all goddamn day all goddamn week and some green ass [ __ ] castle trying to kill a dude that you've killed 10 years ago and gold Dan who's supposed to be dead so the the wrath you war front one season two starts the Iraq war front will be something that you probably don't really if you're keeping up with your gear progression at least it's probably something you're not gonna want to do for a while but once we get around to heroic war fronts then it might be something that you want to go back to later yeah and again for alts collectors a whole whole wide range of reasons why you would do it but it'll be more similar to what old ear becomes once season two begins okay makes sense question here from Ariel and six somewhat related asking can we get war front rotations to speed up a bit once a month to particularly to participate in a particular war front it's kind of lame so in practice that ends up being more like I think once every three weeks or so and we looked at the rotation rate I think the the what they're gonna do is they're making it to where the war fronts they're gonna add more war fronts okay these are just the first two they're probably gonna be like four at the end so are probably three actually so there's always going to be a war front up and so at the beginning you only had the wrath e1 right it's only well sometimes and now we have two of them that both have independent schedules and those schedules kind of complement each other and then whenever we get the third one I don't know what that's gonna be now we're gonna have a bunch of these war fronts that we can just do and there's never gonna be a point where you can't do war fronts that's what they're gonna do big change that's why they're not going to be there it is actus there will be a war front up pretty much half the time and you know every week week and a half or so you'll have a different war front to q4 we're trying to balance giving everybody a chance to participate with the speed of the overall rotation I think you know we when it pops it's up for a week because many people only log in on weekends many people you know log in at different times during the week you want to avoid such a central piece of content the sense that oh you just missed this war front sorry come back later Oh different pieces of content have different levels of availability you know on the other end of the spectrum we have assaults that are you know up for six hours then off for 12 or 13 or yeah if you miss it it might happen while you were at work there'll be another one tomorrow that's hopefully at a more convenient time so how does that work front the the like a wrathy sometimes being available dark shore sometimes being available how does that factor in with the Gear Awards being there because obviously like once the season 2 starts especially I think most of the people who are really keeping up are gonna only want to do the dark shorefront good question Josh up two weeks later isn't doesn't really that's nobody care it depends on it great question types of rewards for the system as a whole though to write whether you there's artifact power from turn-ins there's war resources from doing the outdoor content that's not all but yes self you're just looking for that one piece of gear then the best stuff in season two is going to be you get to alternate you know doing the dark shore war front getting what will be a guaranteed I 400 piece and then killing the dark shore world boss for a chance of another 400 piece and that will be every other week ultimately you know I think clearly obviously will be great to get the rewards more frequently but the they reward the way they do in part because there is infrequent as they are yeah I think if you could do a war front so you have to wait an entire month for a piece of 340 year every you know three or four days we probably wouldn't be able to give you to let you get an eye level 400 piece let's say from it in season 2 because that would obsolete large swath some other content like mythic plus and rating in terms of relative availability okay let's go ahead and move on to the next question this one comes from headon who has a horde player on a horde dominant server I will never see the dumb [ __ ] piece of [ __ ] idiot it's not a horde dominated server because war fronts are dynamically populated based off of who else is in there you don't even understand how it works why would you even ask this question [ __ ] [ __ ] 30 percent war mode bonus this is a problem I guess it's also not really a question it's more of a fair so I guess the one clarification so there's nothing server specific about this system war mode and war mode balance or region wide so the entirety of North America the entirety of Europe doesn't matter whether your server is hoarder alliance dominated the way the system works is every weekly reset so Tuesday mornings in North America Wednesday mornings in Europe Thursday mornings in Asia the system looks at what the relative balance was in participation between the two factions in war mode during the prior week and will dynamically adjust the bonuses so as hopefully if more lines participate it's likely that we'll see the alliance bonus actually start to trickle down a little bit from thirty to twenty five to twenty its I would be surprised if we ever saw a 30 percent horde bonus but it's possible if more alliance them it's not going to happen are participating in war mode in a given week horde will have a larger bonus to participate than Alliance will obviously we're at the other end of the spectrum I don't know why it's only a snapshot on this system as a whole of course is we're looking to address and to restore overall balance in the system I think when wormwood first came out an early battle frezzer auth ratios and participation were actually pretty good however that works with the way we were setting up for war mode and balancing the shards that led to sort of snowballing effects of Alliance feeling outnumbered by horde turning off war mode yeah and that becoming more and more of a self-fulfilling prophecy I think looking at the initial interest in participation in war mode there is enough interest and demand on both sides to make for a healthy balance across our shards and it's been awesome actually you know we've seen a lot of that in the last couple of days even you know assaults have done a great job of bringing people in war mode who were looking for world PvP together and more we're seeing more and more lines turning on what brings me together with horde players that want to kill me just doing it nice yeah I mean I wouldn't do it for 300 percent bonus I've been playing alliances expansion and sorry Josh and actually enjoying going out there and war mode [ __ ] getting beat on extensively [ __ ] so we're gonna go ahead and move on to the next full [ __ ] [Music] sorry about that so next question comes from Karina who says in 8:1 we will be able to acquire some rewards from Island expeditions with currency but this doesn't include the items that were available before 8.1 to the vendor this is important so I think Island rewards or something that will continue to evolve over the course of the expansion okay so we recognize that there are a few as time goes on for collectors you may come down to just wanting a small handful of specific things to complete your collection so it's likely that we'll use this vendor or another system to allow for more specific targeting of the last few pieces that you need before the expansions over but right now it's more they're just overall acquisition and as time goes on it's likely will will evolve that focus but nothing specific to announce right now they don't want to say yes because then people stop farming they don't want to say no who's and people criticize the distribution method and why are certain items in the war fronts through the islands and not others they say it's very likely so everybody is just guessing and nobody can pin down anything to criticize just add the vendor for every item and just make it more expensive like it's a PR answer like no trust me like bra like you ever read my tweets like okay read my tweets do I commit on anything hopefully I don't end up dying so this opens up the window that if I don't feel good I can in the stream going to try to stream again today try implies a non non definite commitment let's go down here had a great time killing back to Dark Souls I'm not sure if I'll be on tomorrow unclear ok I'm not dead but that means I'm going live not feeling 100% but I'll do the best I can do that means that if I in this stream early nobody can be mad hair cut stream very soon what is very soon it's an undefined term that excites people while still not committing to anything still have my coffin I'm a bit better I feel like a piece of [ __ ] but it's not really much I can do I'll be live tomorrow even if I'm still sick that was one commitment that I've made I'm really [ __ ] beep I can't promise the stream tomorrow but I'll promise I'll strike I'll try non commitment I'm planning on stream tomorrow unless it gets worse that opens up a window that I can leave okay the current plan is to be back on Monday I think I'm close to finishing darksouls okay that was actually I did commit to that one um let's see here welfare Wednesday for a bit then maybe Dark Souls maybe whenever it comes to not committing on anything and using language to make sure that people are simultaneously excited but not promised anything I'm very good at it I know what they're doing because I do it I mean just as a side note I do want to apologize for the camera issues that we're having for what it's worth I do have a long list of improvements that are coming for the studio a new camera just moved to the top of that list so we will be making sure that we do not have these issues in the future moving on to the next question this one comes from Rick Rose who said it was previously mentioned by iThis ins yeah you know I don't actually I don't think I've ever actually tried to pronounce his name before I've read it but I don't know I've ever tried to pronounce it Haydn license whatever uh it's kind of disrespectful whatever previously mentioned back in September the new ways to obtain vicious saddles were being worked on 48.1 what are they see straightforward answer here in season two yes you have your overall participation progress bar that shows your progression towards the seasonal amount in season two once you fill it up and earn the season 2 exclusive mount the bar will just reset except at the end this time will be a vicious saddle and you can refill that as many times as you want during the season getting vicious saddles by doing that so just earn your specific season specific mount that's only available during that season first and then continue playing for saddles cool gray peasy straight for audition from coils asking kind of a broad question here the question is are you satisfied with the state of class design as a whole the community seems to have a negative opinion on this topic lately so we know we're never truly satisfied for the state of class design it it's hard to imagine a world where we say like can we say never truly satisfied which simultaneously admits that the current state is not acceptable but also eludes the fact that you're a perfectionist and you always want to improve and it doesn't necessarily admit that the current state of class design is necessarily worse than any other state or point in time of class design because you are never truly happy with it well he's a tricky one he's a real tricky one yep we're done mission accomplished right walking away actually you were done you were done whenever you created arms warriors in patch 5.4 you were done whenever you created night hold fury warriors and you were done whenever you created warriors in siege of Orgrimmar and probably also the beginning of mists of pandaria you were done that was it it didn't need to ever get better everything was perfect it was finished and then you did WOD and just [ __ ] me right with the classes it's it's tough something we grapple with in a lot of levels macro level I think there was definitely a change in our philosophy on class design as a team really about eight years ago I would say I think as we started for the first time looking to streamline looking to manage the scope of what a class entailed you know for the first few years of world of warcraft every expansion was right here's a bunch of new spells and talents there's a bunch of new spells and talents and then we were starting to get to a point where on a few levels like literally action bar space key buying space you notice the conceptual of this the scope of a given class those things are trying to hit their limits we were you know approaching class design for an expansion saying all right we need to add three new things to this class because they're getting five you levels or whatever and it wasn't clear what the class is actually needed and like they're actually to have all these tools we can start giving them more things that are directly eroding at the uniqueness of other classes just in the name of piling on more abilities and we recognized the harm that was causing start to pull away from there I agree with that I think that there are a lot of classes that have unique abilities and unique utility and are interesting in their own way and I don't think that should be eroded that doesn't mean that you shouldn't add any new abilities I think that what they should do is they should look at the philosophy and what does each class mean right warriors for example this is like a this is like Maximus from gladiator all right this is Spartacus you're going around and you're killing people you look at paladins this is like Uther the Lightbringer paladin's can heal whenever you start giving warriors heals and paladin's mortal strikes then you lose that they need to look at what is the mythos behind each class define the class fantasy define what the limitations of the fantasy are define the classes advantages and its disadvantages and then create abilities that build into those advantages and disadvantages and philosophy behind the class that doesn't mean just don't make any abilities because you're worried that they'll Road each other like yeah you did they need to define what is what is a warrior what is a paladin what is a warlock what is a mage and after you know that then making decisions on what to do is simple now recognize from the perspective of an individual player of an individual class getting new stuff is is cool it is exciting yeah and we lost something big by pulling away from it from a from individual players perspective I think for the state of balance in the game as a whole from a sense of class uniqueness spec uniqueness there's really in a lot of ways increasingly these days we effectively have 36 distinct classes I think 10 years ago it was a question of like are mages good dispatch are rogues good this patch or as now it's well it's frost good is fire good is subtlety good is outlaw good and or is it fun and so it's a more common why that happened is simple basically I mean that's always been the case there have been some made specs that are better or worse but I do think that's kind of a good point it's because there's so much more modernization behind gear right back in Burning Crusade if you were a frost manager you were a frost mate for example you would create the nether winter not another one another one was here two four majors but you would create the the shadow we've said or whatever the hell it was for level 70 and it would give you increased frost damage those types of things taury you couldn't just switch over to the spell fire set and play fire so now because you don't have fire damage you don't have frost damage you don't have shadow damage etc you only have these specific things and it's harder to get gear that matches in the right way and it was hard to get gear the matches in right way and now it's a lot easier so people have much more options of switching back and forth to different specs did solutions goes and you know this is part of what we've settled on the last couple of expansions is all right we're not going to add a ton of baseline functionality to classes we're gonna have deep expansion specific systems that add new modifications to your class abilities give you some new toys to play with but aren't permanently growing that space and that I think part of what we're seeing is that that's not as satisfying as we'd hoped in a long-term sense but a lot of times we grace they admit it and this is you know our perspective in working on a game that's entering its 15th year we are grappling with short term excitement versus long term cohesion and sustainability and you know if there's a little bit of you know gun shyness from being burns from past mistakes and we did this thing that was super exciting at the time but wow this how this is having long-term challenges to balance how do we clean this up where do we go from here that often makes us more conservative and in practice we realize that that's you know that can lead to short-term dissatisfaction and that wouldn't happen if they had already planned out ahead of time what the classes are supposed to be good at so like shadow priest or really good at multi donning warlocks are really good at multi donning but they also have a healing component to it shadow priests have OnDemand healing to the multi dotting which makes them unique in that way shadow priests are not very good at a OE damage warlocks are better at AoE damage with like seed of corruption and then you have things that were really good at AOE damage like demon hunters and and warriors I don't think there should ever be a situation like in in Legion where Shadow Priests almost had no AoE utility or at least it felt to me like they didn't it was much less than other classes I don't think that should happen there just has to be more they have to they have to predefine it and then it will be easier for them to make new abilities that's something we are continually talking about continually grappling with you know the so called pruning that happened in warlords and legion was was I think very very controversial very contentious at the time Oh people didn't like it battle fries are off we taking a step back from that we certainly weren't looking to contract further we if anything riad 'add pieces of utility whether it's you know tools like enrage dispels things like raid buffs and we don't we're not sitting around parallel honking oh wow class isn't that part of human abilities too much going on we need to simplify that's not where we're at the separate piece of it that I think we also grapple with a law is keeping keeping up with the dynamic nature of community perception and the metagame that these things dictate which is some much of which is driven by our content design much of which is driven by the PvP meta you know when this all it takes is a couple of raid bosses that very heavily emphasize a certain ability or a certain damage profile whether it's you know burst AoE or split cleave or whatever and suddenly these classes become much more favored in representation that carry that metrical down to what pug leaders are looking for and at the end of the day a lot of the core complaints are driven by a sense of individuals just wanting to find a home in groups wanting to find a spot in pugs and being turned down all of that is stuff we need to work on and here's a way to indirectly work on that so if the problem is people are not able to find groups and pugs then a way to indirectly solve that problem and work towards minimizing that problem because you're never going to solve it is create more social systems in the game that allow people to play with other people that they trust so that same expectation of flavor of the month gameplay is not as strong so if you indirectly create more social systems that keep people together the concerns of people in pug groups would be less important I'm not saying it wouldn't be important this is important what he's saying but you should come at it from both directions and so it's a mix of class specific issues where you know we can say okay feral druids are they feel very weak when it comes to a OE damage he says no that's that that's [ __ ] that enables elitism in-game attitude listen buddy if I looked at your armory I bet you've cleared normal old dr0 times if you think having to interact with other people is elitism you were a bad lazy anti-social player and you're not even really play like just go play a single-player game it's not elitist for people not to want to play with you because your shitty and let's go ahead and take this a step farther what is elitism it's not wanting to play with people based off of preconceived notions that you are superior to them or they are inferior only accepting certain classes is a form of elitism in a way because classes are elite it's not innate to the player but it's innate to what the player is doing or what the player is controlling so even by your own admission getting into guilds and people that trust you as an individual would remove elitism because you wouldn't have the same expectations what class you were playing it's like you're wrong in like every way and that makes them undesirable in dungeons and while we don't want any damage to be a strength for that stuff it can't be you know a prohibitive weakness let's address that those are in many ways the easier problems to solve the tougher ones are just the overall challenge of keeping thirty six packs feeling distinct and unique but also relevant and so you know that's where utility comes in that's where you know it's also an ongoing conversation between class and encounter design as we look to actively create situations you know raids in our dungeon oh that's a good one light and emphasize the ability I'm ready for this specs or certain classes so that they can feel valued and it's not just a question of who's bringing the most damage because there's always going to be someone no matter what we do balance wise there's always gonna be some bar that's at the top but if people are all bringing different tools and those tools were all valued in different situations that feels like a more sustainable state that we can hope to hope to achieve okay the next question which I actually went to accidentally went to a little bit early there it comes from foresee who asked can we expect any form of Legendary's throughout BFA for example miss appender this is what we've been waiting for it rings with okay guys it was it was very different here we go well obviously very different from how legion legendaries worked where those were just everywhere but then even legendaries prior to that where this the those were more of a quest line that you comes up to okay I should land right now but it's impossible where it makes sense I think we have that bonus legendary from Argos and n-torus that was you know just a rare little surprise that some people could surprise wow oh my god I got the best trinket in the game wow I'm so surprised [ __ ] you Ian you said we'd be happy and we'd be surprised to see what it was gonna be like remember the Pantheon trinkets came out and then we got this [ __ ] [ __ ] that's a random drop of one a thousand for Armin Thor's vision nobody [ __ ] wanted that and the reason why you didn't announced at the beginning because you [ __ ] knew that and the reason why you had to get rid of master loot because personal it was [ __ ] nobody would [ __ ] use it unless you forced it on us all players are gonna be surprised to see how they get the Pantheon trinkets oh it's gonna be completely [ __ ] random wow the [ __ ] break us I think where fits the story where it fits the content we're doing it's something we're always open to but nothing specific plan right now alright and I believe we've got time for one more question just one better not be stupid and we'll grab this one here from mamaia who said what's the status on uncoupling artifact for transmog I really want a mug shield and sword oh yeah yeah they do need to do this so unfortunately nothing new to announce on this right now we did a bunch of work to let artefact transmog iing work at all and run because there's something it's a wide range of things that break the normal transmog rules like we want you to be able to transmog into your two-handed mace if you're a holy pallet and even though in practice you're probably using a one hander and shield with different animations a different overall look and a key part of that to say nothing of things like the demonology borlaug skull a key part of that was just in terms of how it was designed and implemented the artifact is a single thing that just kind of stomps on both of your equipped sloths right and that's what lets it override a lot of these restrictions so it's not clear how we'd roll that back without also breaking some other parts of it it's something we'd like to do we totally recognize that you know during Legion if you were an enhancement shaman just fix it just fix it but I don't know why what else is there to say just fix it come on let's go you may want half if you're doing hammer transmog and half being something else should be able to shield the sword on prop heli but there's no in terms of the technical implementation we don't have a clear path to get from where we are now to a situation that's the best of both worlds but it's not something we are saying definitively no on just sure not right now okay well that pretty much wraps up all the time that we have here today thanks again so much for coming on here anytime sticking through the camera issues and so on yes I appreciate this sorry about the technical difficulties yeah that's a 100% my fault we will have that fixed for the next time we do one of these which by the way we did get I was able to confirm we've got another one in the works for looking for early January we're gonna actually have some people on here to talk about some story and lore focus stuff so but until next time yeah merry winter veil and Winter Veil I will see how politically correct ball in 2019 see it so Ian can you just come on all craft like that be good dude like if you want to come on all craft or if another dev wants to come on and that'd be great it'd be something you know why you come on for like an hour and a half or so and we'll take some questions from chat and you know I'll do like some straw polls and see what people want to have the answers to because obviously somebody needs to know what the [ __ ] going on right you get these quiet you give these answers like Josh was never gonna challenge any of the answers I mean come on man you know an all crappy pretty awesome yeah I don't know why he doesn't do it like I'm waiting man I'm [ __ ] waiting would you guys think of the QA like what would you guys think about it I want to go ahead and do a few talk a little bit about that before I get into anything else okay I'm gonna go kill these dick suckers for a second okay trash I think it could have been a lot better I'll say that for sure could have been a whole lot better could have been a lot lot better

Channel: Assertonsin [Asmongold Stream Reactions]

Views: 243,728

Keywords: asmongold, BFA, WoW, world of warcraft, battle for azeroth, ion hazzikostas, asmongold reacts, reaction, asmongold watches, asmongold highlights, best of asmongold, twitch chat, questions and answers

Id: 5fYaHZjJ154

Length: 111min 52sec (6712 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2018