《魔兽世界》Friends Per Second播客暴雪访谈谈抗性装备与经济

The Friends Per Second podcast had an interview with Blizzard to discuss Addons, the Economy, Resistance Gear, and more!

During episode 106 of the Friends Per Second Podcast, the hosts interviewed Clay Stone, Associate Production Director.

We've summarized some of the key points from the interview.

Horizontal Progression

They're going to expand the world horizontally.

Professions are a big one, and there's a lot more they plan to do.

Legacy System can have additional rewards or perks for players for achieving certain things in the game.

For gearing and power progression, the goal is to limit the amount of power progression as they release each new raid tier.

There will be a little vertical power progression between raid tiers, but they're going to keep it as small as possible.

Gear should have a longer shelf life.

Dungeon Experience

From a philosophical standpoint, they don't believe that the optimal way to play WoW, from the original designers, was for players to sit in dungeons spamming them over and over again.

One of the core pillars is that "it's about the journey".

They want players to have social interactions.

They love dungeons; they're adding 9 dungeons at launch, and they're adding new dungeons across the entire leveling journey.

They went too high on the experience awarded from quests and a little too low on the experience awarded from mobs.

If you really want to spam dungeons, they could still be a way to do it, but they're really encouraging folks to go out in the world.

Addons

They don't want addons or mods that effectively play the game for you, ones where you don't need to engage with the game in a meaningful way.

That's antithetical to the experience and why they're building this in the first place.

For WoW: Forever, the encounters are far less complex than Retail.

For dungeons, they only have two mechanics and are very straightforward. That's authentic to Classic, but players don't need that level of support from an addon to navigate those encounters.

WoW: Classic has a quality that preparation almost matters as much as execution.

Skyborne

They have learned a lot about how to develop "new" art that fits into the space.

The community discussion led them to add SD versions of the Skyborne and take another look at the Druid forms.

That discussion will continue, particularly on stuff like Skyborne gear models.

Oceanic Realms

For launch, Oceanic will have dedicated data centers to keep the ping rate low.

Should they choose to party with the NA realms, it'll work like Retail, where the party leader will determine which server you connect to until you disband.

Even without an Oceanic megaserver, with their new pro-social server social structure, the idea is that it could almost feel like an Oceanic megaserver.

This tech helps you have a small realm feel.

Seasons

They've talked about how PvP will work, and it's like it has Seasons.

Beyond that, though, there are no other plans for seasons.

Economy

They have learned a lot about it through watching their recent releases.

Players have learned how to run the economy in recent releases.

From Season of Discovery, they learned how they could activate manager the economy in really powerful ways.

They can tweak certain spawn rates or put items on a vendor.

For example, Black Lotus is on the vendor, and it should never sell for more than that.

They have specific ways to make gold more plentiful at end game through regular gameplay activities. The goal is for players to have close to enough gold to participate in the activities.

The goal is not to reduce all of the grind, but a lot of the pain points.

They have taken a very strong stance on RMT.

Clay hesitates to use the word "Weekly", but clarifies that they want some form of reward for players participating in systems or things that are already in the game that they were hopefully already doing anyways, and then rewarding them with Gold.

The Cadence is still a little up in the air, but the intent is to reward players at endgame for continuing to participate in the game that then allows them to participate more.

Alchemy

They are talking about the possibility of reworking Alchemy to be less critical in the raiding phase of the game.

Resistance Gear

It is unlikely that players will need to craft resistance gear at the start.

It's something they could revisit as they go forward.

Controller Support

The response to gamepad has been incredible.