User Interface Questions

Question - Are there any plans to increase the number of quests you can keep in your quest log, or to add more information about quests or tools for guilds in the user interface?

Stockton - We’re not planning on upping the number of quests you can have. And that’s not from a technology standpoint; it’s just a pure design decision. If we give you too many slots, you start to forget about why you were on that quest or what you were doing in that quest - you lose a little bit of that connection to what’s going on. That’s the main reason we don’t have that larger.

As far as the UI itself, that’s something we’ve definitely been talking about, and we’re currently discussing ways that we can make that interface better. Things like making it take up more screen space, showing you more information about the quest that you’re on, giving you more info about your party-mates that are doing that same quest, how does that interface with the minimap. That’s actually something that we’re pretty deep in discussion on now, so I think it should be coming soon. I don’t have any timeline, but it’s definitely something that we’re working on.

Guild UI is right in the same boat. We know that the guild UI needs a fair bit of work to get it where we want it to be. We’ve done small improvements but we haven’t really done anything large overall. And that comes with a lot of other stuff; when we change the guild UI, we’d like to make guilds more exciting as a whole. So that’s a little bit of a bigger project, but both of those are on the board. But definitely quests would be in front of that.

Question - Has there been any more discussion of taking the more popular UI mods like ThreatMeter and Outfitter and integrating them into the UI for Wrath?

Stockton - I think we talked about both of those at BlizzCon, at least as far as the basis of those mods and getting something like that into WoW. Both of those are things that are currently being worked on. Whether they’re going to make Lich King, I’m not 100% sure on yet, it just depends on if they’re ready. But those are definitely two mods that are at the top of the list as far as priority goes, especially the threat meter, what the threat meter means to our endgame raiding and the dungeon gameplay in general. So I think all I can tell you is that they’re really high on the priority list and we’re going to try and get them in, but I can’t promise anything.



Classes & Crafting

Question - How will you work to combat exploits in classes like the Warlock?

Stockton - We haven’t finalized any of the spells for any of the classes yet. But as far as exploits - meaning could you teleport to an area that we don’t want you to get to, things like that - we have new tech that we’re using in Lich King that allows us to check collision a lot better than we were able to check collision in Burning Crusade, and that’s how the dynamic line of sight stuff that we’re using in the arenas works. And that would be used for spells like that - to make sure players can’t get to someplace that they’d be safe and wouldn’t be able to be attacked. Those kind of things are definitely taken into account when we think of the spell. Even though the spell might seem really cool, if it’s exploitable like that, no matter how cool it is we can’t get it into the game.

Question - What’s been the response to the Death Knight?

Stockton - Overwhelming. It’s definitely been the question that comes up the most: what’s going on with the Death Knight? Why did we choose the Death Knight? There’s a lot of reasons; we have a lot of options as far as the class we were going to choose for that and mainly, it came down to: what do we need in the game? Do we need another healer? Do we need more casters? And we really thought we could use another tank. It’s how we can get players into the dungeons easier. When you’re setting up a group, finding a tank is always a really difficult issue. But we didn’t want to make another warrior, or make another class that feels just like something we already have. And that’s why we came up with the rune system and the concept of runic power. And - tanking without a shield, we feel that that’s really different - it really sets it apart.

But also just the fact that it fits Northrend so well. Death Knights - they fit in with Arthas, with the Lich King, it all just merges together and it seemed like a really good fit.

Question - How do you go about creating and balancing a new class like the Death Knight?

Stockton - We can obviously look to the other classes and see about what’s the number of spells we should have for the Death Knight, but it’s more about being unique with the class. We wanted to give him a taunt, but we didn’t want it to feel anything like the taunt that a warrior has. It should feel like something completely different, and that’s really hard to do - taunt is a pretty standard thing.

But in general, even separate from the Death Knight, what we deal with in WoW is screen space - real estate to fit all the buttons that you need even with all the slots we give you. And at some point, the class becomes too complicated to play. Between the shaman with all his totems or the druid with different forms. We want to make sure the class is deep and interesting to play, but we don’t want to get it to the point where in order for me to roll this class, I have to go read about it to learn how to play it. At that point, even though it might be the coolest spell ever, it’s buried somewhere in a spell book and you might miss it or not even know about it. It’s just a level of keeping those things that we think are really class defining and trying to weed everything else out.

Question - What can you tell us about Inscription?

Stockton - Inscription’s doing really well. We have the first implementation of it in. Herbalism is the collecting profession that’s going to go with inscription. We’ve gotten pretty far in the actual in-game UI portion - it’s in and working and we know how it’s going to work. At this point, it’s basically tuning of what exactly you’re going to be able to do with it. We know how it’s going to fit into the game and how it’s going to be used; it’s just a matter of what are exactly the words of how it’s going to work, because it affects your spells. And those are still in flux for some of the classes, so it’s hard to finalize what that inscription on a spell is going to be.

We’re definitely aware of the issues with Burning Crusade jewelcrafting - you might have to go back to the old world and mine all the way from zero up. I mean, we all had to do that, so we didn’t like it any more than you guys did. We’re looking into ways to make sure that to have ways that you won’t necessarily have to go back to the old world and spend so much time there. We want you to still go to the old world and use those nodes and mine, but we don’t want it to be annoying or frustrating, because that’s never the goal.



PvP, Battlegrounds, and Arenas

Question - Currently for PvP players, level 70 arenas are the endgame. What are the plans to take it from 70 to 80? Will the arenas be focused on 70 until some critical mass of players hit 80?

Stockton - Arenas are going to continue to be the PvP endgame. We’ll still be giving out the top-end 5-piece sets and we’ll continue to do the battlegrounds giving you the filler, the other three piece sets that match up with that. The intention is still for the top-end game to be there, though. During the level-up phase, it’ll work similar to how it worked in Burning Crusade. We’re not really planning for there to be a huge influx of players that will be going directly into arenas right off the bat. We’re introducing the two new arenas - Dalaran and Orgrimmar - so those will be available to players. Typically, I mean, what we saw before was that players want to get to endgame and get geared up as well as they could before they’d get into the rankings - we found that a lot of players like to play less games than more, so I think we’ll end up seeing that same situation here.

Question - Is there anything to the rumors we’ve heard about a battleground based on Defense of the Ancients? [Defense of the Ancients, or DotA, is a custom scenario for Warcraft III wherein the goal is to destroy the opponents’ heavily guarded “Ancient” in each corner of the map]

Stockton - That’s a game map we’ve talked about doing for a long time. We don’t currently have any plans; we don’t have anything as far as a map that does that yet. But we talked about doing a map like that for Wrath specifically, but we opted for an attack / defend type where both sides have a chance to do the attack and the defend scenario. Mainly, that just fits the siege gameplay really well, because more players get a chance to get in the siege vehicles and break walls and destroy buildings. But doing a DotA-style gameplay map is definitely not out of the question. It just requires a little bit of design work on how exactly you would script that to happen.

Question - In the Northrend Battleground, the attacking team starts on boats attacking the shoreline. Are these boats’ cannons functional?

Stockton - No, the boats are just transports, they’re going to bring you in. The concept behind that was to create something just a little bit more dynamic at the start of a battleground rather than to start behind a gate or being stuck behind a bubble. We have to do that in certain areas, of course, but whenever there’s a chance to do something cooler, we want to try and get that done. Coming in on the boats is something we’re still trying to figure out just how we’re going to get that done, but it’s high on our list to make sure it happens for the battleground.

Question - How possible is it to see boats as siege weapons in the future?

Stockton - That’s definitely something that we’ve talked about, that we would love to do. I think the first step toward that would be getting boats to work in general - player controlled boats - and then, once we’re there, doing siege combat wouldn’t be difficult at all. But, currently, the game doesn’t lend itself to doing much with a boat. But that’s definitely something that, as far as transportation goes, if we ever were to have a world that would make really good use of that...right now, I don’t think you’d want to get in a boat and try to travel from Eastern Kingdoms to Kalimdor. I think most people would still take the fast travel. But it’s definitely not out of the question.

Question - With the addition of Wintergrasp and the Northrend Battleground, the PvP population is going to be spread out even more. Are there any plans to make the server battlegroups smaller?

Stockton - There are currently no plans to make the battlegroups smaller. How we’re aiming to deal with that is by tuning the queue system. The queue system actually has a ton of knobs that we can turn - how long players sit in the queue - and it also judges your armor. We actually look at your armor and matchmake you as close as we can. But the smaller that we make that space, the longer you sit in the queue. But there’s quite a bit of tuning we can do. If someone doesn’t accept the queue, it still saves that slot for them right now. So you could start a battleground and be short that one person. That’s a system we can modify a little bit, we can change that amount of time you can wait.

So I think there’s a lot of “knobs” there to deal with the fact that we’re adding one more battleground without making the queues being even longer.

Question - What kind of rewards can we expect for collecting spirit shards in Wintergrasp?

Stockton - We don’t have the rewards laid out yet, but we do know that we want rewards to be something that players would want to come back to. We really like the way that spirit shards worked out in Terrokar, but the thing is once players got the rewards they wanted, they never did it again. With Wintergrasp, we want to make the rewards more renewable, so maybe things like epic gems and enchantments that you could go back and get. So not only would you want to have those just for that first time, but you might want to go back and get something specific from there.



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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

About The Author

Jeff joined the Ten Ton Hammer team in 2004 covering EverQuest II, and he's had his hands on just about every PC online and multiplayer game he could since.

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