World of Warcraft at Ten Ton Hammer

Can you tell us more about your plans for World of Warcraft in China?

So we actually have an office in China that is Blizzard China, strangely enough. And we’re interested in growing that office. We’re interested in engaging the Chinese community more. We have a new partner in China called NetEase, which we’re really excited about. So yea, we’re going to start to do a better job over there.

Right now our plan is to get Burning Crusade finished out in China and then move on to Wrath of the Lich King, so that’s what we’re focused on.

Right now, with regards to Battle.net, if you own WoW before you link it up with the other games, and you link it to Battle.net, it changes all the information on the game to match that to Battle.net. This makes it easier to purchase accounts in your own name. Is there anything you plan to do to prevent the purchase of level 80s from happening and making the game a little more safer?

That’s actually a tricky question. We talked about that a great deal; we talked about the rules for merging your WoW account to a Battle.net account. We boiled it down to two choices, we could go the soft way (which is the way we ended up going), or we could go the hard way, which basically meant that if you’re a player that is not currently playing on your account, you would not be able to merge your account without great pain. And our decision was to let players play. That’s a consequence of that. We think that the backup features set is strong enough that its going to discourage a lot of that type of thing that goes on right now. At the time it seemed like the right decision and today it still seems like the right decision. Because many of you (and I won’t take a poll) are probably playing on accounts that do not have your last name, right? Or you know people who are.

When will you guys update the WoW character models? Or is that not going to happen?

That’s actually something that we’ve talked about a lot recently. Particularly as we start on the next set of races. The blood elf, the draenei, the worgen, and the goblin look a lot better than the old human. So that’s something that may or may not happen in Cataclysm. One of our approaches to graphical changes is that we do small graphical changes because as soon as we do that, we’ll have a slew of comments about ‘these aren’t as good as the old ones’ and blah blah blah. So we had to take that into account as well. One thing we’ve talked about is having an option where you can decide if you want the new models or not.

Now that we have rated battlegrounds, which are more casual friendly, do you see arena PvP returning to how hardcore it was with Burning Crusade?

I actually think that Burning Crusade arenas were far more casual than Wrath of the Lich King. In the Burning Crusade arenas, people just ended up creating a team to get welfare epics; that was sort of the rise of welfare epics. I actually think that the Wrath of the Lich King arenas are far more hardcore. The number of people we have participating in arenas today is substantially less than we had in Burning Crusade, and that’s directly related to how our matchmaking is so much better, so you can’t create a team and immediately start face-rolling people.

Whenever you play, within a few games, you’ll be playing against teams that are as good or as competitive as you are. In my case, after I’ve lost a few games, then eventually I’m going to be playing against teams that are crappy enough that I can beat them half the time. That’s the philsophy for matchmaking, that you should win about half the time.

Now that Battle.net is going to allow players to charge for StarCraft 2 mods, why can’t we charge for WoW addons?

I’ll never say that we’re never going to do that. I think one of the ideas right now is that we have a way for mods to work, and changing that way is not simple. It’s not simple. And it has a certain obligation on our part that those mods are of a certain quality and are not doing bad things. That’s not something we’ve ever done before, so we may or may not do it, but right now it’s not something that we’re working on.

Are you happy with the difficulty of raid content in Wrath of the Lich King? Did you expect it to be cleared three days after launch?

People say C’thun’s too easy. I don’t think that that’s a new comment. I think we feel pretty good about how Naxxramas turned out. One thing that we learned from Naxxramas and that we implemented to some degree in Ulduar that we’ll be doing even more of is our Heroic stuff. We like the idea of having a more friendly mode called normal mode, and then having a soulcrushing heroic mode that players can go through and really feel like they’re awesome. Because they are awesome.

That’s sort of the direction that we’re going; it’s to stratify it a little more and have the 10-person normal, the 10-person heroic, the 25-person normal, and the 25-person heroic for every single boss. That’s the lesson of Ulduar, people really like the hard modes, they like having the choice of doing it both ways.