Hearthstone play and developer Q&A

Over the weekend, as I mentioned in WRUP, I was in Paris. What I didn't mention was that I was there for the EU Fansite Community Summit at Blizzard Europe in Versailles. Blizzard's EU team were fantastically generous and wonderful hosts, and it was an excellent weekend altogether. The biggest highlight for me, and almost certainly for everyone else there, was that we got to play Hearthstone!

We had about enough time for three full games, in a relaxed setting, but also with the Blizzard EU Community Team floating around to help us out and give us tips and input on how best to play. It was a fantastic surprise. Even more amazing to a Blizzard geek like me was that, shortly after finishing our game time, we got to sit down for a Q&A about Hearthstone with none other than the lead developers Ben Brode and Eric Dodds. So, what came out of that?

Hearthstone Gameplay

How was Hearthstone? First and foremost, what we got to play was an alpha, which only developers and internal staff had previously accessed. It has not changed a great deal in overall appearance since PAX, but many key gameplay changes have been incorporated. Unfortunately, due to Blizzard policy, we were unable to take pictures or video of the play session or anything else that took place.

Overall, the game felt solid. As we'll get to, they're really pretty happy with balance right now, but some abilities definitely still feel too strong, for example there was one mage-specific card that did six damage in return for five mana, now, without having seen the game yourselves, it's hard to understand exactly, but that is a heavy damage ability. Of course, it's worth remembering that we were only playing with what the devs called the "basic card set", so, none of the cards we could have earned or bought.

Other than that, the UI felt good, fast, stable. Turn systems vary across CCGs, but Hearthstone's, to me at least, seemed a little counter-intuitive. It's worth noting that, although the tutorial is complete, we didn't play through it, as the community team wanted us to have the maximum amount of time in the full game. That would likely have helped with the slightly confusing feel of the game, and the turn system. There were also some abilities and tooltips that didn't quite tie up, but none of these minor criticisms caused huge problems with what was, overall, an entertaining and well-put-together play experience.

We didn't, unfortunately, get to test anything but the main gameplay -- the deck builder, the sandbox-like Forge area, and the crafting were all out of bounds. But we were able to have various questions answered by the development team. Developer Q&A

I was lucky to have a huge number of my questions answered, and as we didn't know about the interview in advance, had to rely on my note-taking skill to get their answers down. Therefore, the below is not presented as, and should not be read as, verbatim quotations.

Earning Cards
I was very curious about the methods the devs had planned for earning cards, how exactly it would work within the game, and whether it was really a case of pay-to-win. This is often an issue with free-to-play games, but the devs assured us that that wasn't the case with Hearthstone. They gave the example of the internal testers -- basically everyone who works at Blizzard -- and said that of those who had reached Master, the highest rank, 40% had not purchased any cards.

I went on to ask how exactly cards were earned, and the devs weren't ready to comment on that just yet, only willing to mention that there were various methods, but that in general, cards were earned through normal gameplay. The cards earned through normal play could also be of any quality, not just basic cards, so Legendary and Gold quality cards could all be earned through basic gameplay.

Every player will start off with a free set of 30 cards, all basic, but strong cards. These will continue to be relevant throughout the game, and they are seeing these cards in regular use even at the highest levels of the game. Earning cards is done through the early matches against AIs, and cards earned at this stage will be specific to your hero class. The cards which are purchased in packs, or earned in packs, will have the potential to be completely random, and may not necessarily be compatible with your hero. The devs estimated that around 50% of cards were specific to one hero class.

Unlocking Heroes
On the topic of heroes, the nine original WoW classes will be available when the game is launched. There are no plans as of yet to introduce the DK or the Monk, but the devs also aren't ruling it out. Heroes are not all open to every player at the very start of the game, rather they are unlocked through gameplay. All players start with the Mage, and the devs told us that pretty much every game played in the initial stages would unlock a further hero until all nine were unlocked. Building Decks
They were also keen to point out, mentioning it several times, that the quality of cards was not indicative of their overall strength. They added that quality was mostly a mark of complexity, rather than of power. There was no limit on the number of a certain quality of cards that a player could have in their deck, only limits on duplication. So, any one card can only appear twice in your deck, and any Legendary card can only appear once. Again, the decks are comprised of thirty cards, and can be created and saved hero by hero in the deck builder.

Crafting Cards
One major element of Hearthstone is the card crafting. The devs clarified that this system was essentially the thing that made them choose a collecting game over a trading game, as it meant that any player could access any card. I pressed them for more details on just how exactly the crafting system worked.

They were happy to explain that players went into the collection manager, found unwanted or excess cards, and disenchanted them into Arcane Dust. Higher qualities of card would give more dust, lower qualities would give less. Once a player had enough dust to create a card, they could simply do so -- there was no discovery, learning, rating, or other requirement to access recipes for cards. The only hurdle is earning enough dust to create a card.

Ben and Eric were keen to point out the advantage of this system over a Trading system: this means that any player can access any card on Blizzard's terms, rather than having to bow to another player's demands to get hold of the rarest or "best" cards. This also means that even the most basic cards maintain a value, as they can all be disenchanted into Arcane Dust and re-purposed into better cards. What's more, the crafting system allows instant gratification, whereas a trading system requires that players seek out the card they are after.

Content
We talked a lot about the content of Hearthstone. One thing I was particularly interested to hear about was whether the devs had any plans for PvE content, such as campaigns in which a player can take on AIs of increased difficulty to provide an alternate route for character advancement. Ben and Eric clarified that, while there are early missions that fall into that category, there will not be a campaign in the game from the outset.

The devs are instead focused on the PvP aspect of the game, which is, for now at least, purely 1v1 duels. You are able to duel friends, setting up specific matches, and the developers are also excited about Hearthstone's potential as an e-sport, after interest in shoutcasted matches has been high.
There's also the Forge mode of play, where players are randomly assigned a deck to play with against another player in the same position. This has great potential for evenly matched games regardless of cards. With any PvP content, there are two key concerns: balance, and matchmaking. Ben and Eric said that, at this stage, they were relatively happy with the balance of the game as it stood. They mentioned recent changes to the Rogue Blade Flurry's interaction with weapons, and the Warlock's Life Tap hero ability, as well as work on how to balance one player having to go first. All of these things have been recently worked on, and they are happy with where it stands for now.

Matchmaking will be done via an MMR system, very similar to the WoW arena system, where players will have a rating and will be matched against players with a similar rating. Success or failure against higher or lower rated players will adjust this rating, and as Ben noted, it should always feel like you are good at the game, even if you're not! Decks are not taken into consideration with this rating. High rating will award achievements, the rewards for this are not yet ready to be announced, but will be something more exciting than just points.

Other
There were a couple of other tidbits from the interview that didn't really fall into any particular category. Every card has its own flavor text and voice element, they were very keen to point that out, but there is no faction-specific segregation in the game. There was no specific plan to integrate Hearthstone into WoW, other than the potential mount link.

It will be region-locked, for now, so that US players can only face US players, EU against EU and so on. They are looking into ways to allow cross-region play, as it is regularly asked for. They may consider battle.net integration for friends lists and the like.

And lastly, Ben and Eric confirmed that, if interest remained high, they would look into getting Hearthstone onto Android! Tags: ben-brode, breaking, eric-dodds, featured, hearthstone, hearthstone-developer-interview, hearthstone-developers, hearthstone-gameplay

Filed under: Hearthstone Insider

View the original article here

Hearthstone play and developer Q&A

Over the weekend, as I mentioned in WRUP, I was in Paris. What I didn't mention was that I was there for the EU Fansite Community Summit at Blizzard Europe in Versailles. Blizzard's EU team were fantastically generous and wonderful hosts, and it was an excellent weekend altogether. The biggest highlight for me, and almost certainly for everyone else there, was that we got to play Hearthstone!

We had about enough time for three full games, in a relaxed setting, but also with the Blizzard EU Community Team floating around to help us out and give us tips and input on how best to play. It was a fantastic surprise. Even more amazing to a Blizzard geek like me was that, shortly after finishing our game time, we got to sit down for a Q&A about Hearthstone with none other than the lead developers Ben Brode and Eric Dodds. So, what came out of that?

Hearthstone Gameplay

How was Hearthstone? First and foremost, what we got to play was an alpha, which only developers and internal staff had previously accessed. It has not changed a great deal in overall appearance since PAX, but many key gameplay changes have been incorporated. Unfortunately, due to Blizzard policy, we were unable to take pictures or video of the play session or anything else that took place.

Overall, the game felt solid. As we'll get to, they're really pretty happy with balance right now, but some abilities definitely still feel too strong, for example there was one mage-specific card that did six damage in return for five mana, now, without having seen the game yourselves, it's hard to understand exactly, but that is a heavy damage ability. Of course, it's worth remembering that we were only playing with what the devs called the "basic card set", so, none of the cards we could have earned or bought.

Other than that, the UI felt good, fast, stable. Turn systems vary across CCGs, but Hearthstone's, to me at least, seemed a little counter-intuitive. It's worth noting that, although the tutorial is complete, we didn't play through it, as the community team wanted us to have the maximum amount of time in the full game. That would likely have helped with the slightly confusing feel of the game, and the turn system. There were also some abilities and tooltips that didn't quite tie up, but none of these minor criticisms caused huge problems with what was, overall, an entertaining and well-put-together play experience.

We didn't, unfortunately, get to test anything but the main gameplay -- the deck builder, the sandbox-like Forge area, and the crafting were all out of bounds. But we were able to have various questions answered by the development team. Developer Q&A

I was lucky to have a huge number of my questions answered, and as we didn't know about the interview in advance, had to rely on my note-taking skill to get their answers down. Therefore, the below is not presented as, and should not be read as, verbatim quotations.

Earning Cards
I was very curious about the methods the devs had planned for earning cards, how exactly it would work within the game, and whether it was really a case of pay-to-win. This is often an issue with free-to-play games, but the devs assured us that that wasn't the case with Hearthstone. They gave the example of the internal testers -- basically everyone who works at Blizzard -- and said that of those who had reached Master, the highest rank, 40% had not purchased any cards.

I went on to ask how exactly cards were earned, and the devs weren't ready to comment on that just yet, only willing to mention that there were various methods, but that in general, cards were earned through normal gameplay. The cards earned through normal play could also be of any quality, not just basic cards, so Legendary and Gold quality cards could all be earned through basic gameplay.

Every player will start off with a free set of 30 cards, all basic, but strong cards. These will continue to be relevant throughout the game, and they are seeing these cards in regular use even at the highest levels of the game. Earning cards is done through the early matches against AIs, and cards earned at this stage will be specific to your hero class. The cards which are purchased in packs, or earned in packs, will have the potential to be completely random, and may not necessarily be compatible with your hero. The devs estimated that around 50% of cards were specific to one hero class.

Unlocking Heroes
On the topic of heroes, the nine original WoW classes will be available when the game is launched. There are no plans as of yet to introduce the DK or the Monk, but the devs also aren't ruling it out. Heroes are not all open to every player at the very start of the game, rather they are unlocked through gameplay. All players start with the Mage, and the devs told us that pretty much every game played in the initial stages would unlock a further hero until all nine were unlocked. Building Decks
They were also keen to point out, mentioning it several times, that the quality of cards was not indicative of their overall strength. They added that quality was mostly a mark of complexity, rather than of power. There was no limit on the number of a certain quality of cards that a player could have in their deck, only limits on duplication. So, any one card can only appear twice in your deck, and any Legendary card can only appear once. Again, the decks are comprised of thirty cards, and can be created and saved hero by hero in the deck builder.

Crafting Cards
One major element of Hearthstone is the card crafting. The devs clarified that this system was essentially the thing that made them choose a collecting game over a trading game, as it meant that any player could access any card. I pressed them for more details on just how exactly the crafting system worked.

They were happy to explain that players went into the collection manager, found unwanted or excess cards, and disenchanted them into Arcane Dust. Higher qualities of card would give more dust, lower qualities would give less. Once a player had enough dust to create a card, they could simply do so -- there was no discovery, learning, rating, or other requirement to access recipes for cards. The only hurdle is earning enough dust to create a card.

Ben and Eric were keen to point out the advantage of this system over a Trading system: this means that any player can access any card on Blizzard's terms, rather than having to bow to another player's demands to get hold of the rarest or "best" cards. This also means that even the most basic cards maintain a value, as they can all be disenchanted into Arcane Dust and re-purposed into better cards. What's more, the crafting system allows instant gratification, whereas a trading system requires that players seek out the card they are after.

Content
We talked a lot about the content of Hearthstone. One thing I was particularly interested to hear about was whether the devs had any plans for PvE content, such as campaigns in which a player can take on AIs of increased difficulty to provide an alternate route for character advancement. Ben and Eric clarified that, while there are early missions that fall into that category, there will not be a campaign in the game from the outset.

The devs are instead focused on the PvP aspect of the game, which is, for now at least, purely 1v1 duels. You are able to duel friends, setting up specific matches, and the developers are also excited about Hearthstone's potential as an e-sport, after interest in shoutcasted matches has been high.
There's also the Forge mode of play, where players are randomly assigned a deck to play with against another player in the same position. This has great potential for evenly matched games regardless of cards. With any PvP content, there are two key concerns: balance, and matchmaking. Ben and Eric said that, at this stage, they were relatively happy with the balance of the game as it stood. They mentioned recent changes to the Rogue Blade Flurry's interaction with weapons, and the Warlock's Life Tap hero ability, as well as work on how to balance one player having to go first. All of these things have been recently worked on, and they are happy with where it stands for now.

Matchmaking will be done via an MMR system, very similar to the WoW arena system, where players will have a rating and will be matched against players with a similar rating. Success or failure against higher or lower rated players will adjust this rating, and as Ben noted, it should always feel like you are good at the game, even if you're not! Decks are not taken into consideration with this rating. High rating will award achievements, the rewards for this are not yet ready to be announced, but will be something more exciting than just points.

Other
There were a couple of other tidbits from the interview that didn't really fall into any particular category. Every card has its own flavor text and voice element, they were very keen to point that out, but there is no faction-specific segregation in the game. There was no specific plan to integrate Hearthstone into WoW, other than the potential mount link.

It will be region-locked, for now, so that US players can only face US players, EU against EU and so on. They are looking into ways to allow cross-region play, as it is regularly asked for. They may consider battle.net integration for friends lists and the like.

And lastly, Ben and Eric confirmed that, if interest remained high, they would look into getting Hearthstone onto Android! Tags: ben-brode, breaking, eric-dodds, featured, hearthstone, hearthstone-developer-interview, hearthstone-developers, hearthstone-gameplay

Filed under: Hearthstone Insider

View the original article here

CoverItLive Developer Q&A: Thursday, April 25

Topic: Mists of Pandaria Gameplay and Design, Patch 5.2 and Beyond

Time: 5:30 p.m. PDT 
Duration: Approx. 45 minutes

Panelists: Dave Kosak, Ion Hazzikostas, Brian Holinka, Cory Stockton, Greg Street
Moderators: Bashiok, Crithto, Daxxarri, Rygarius, Zarhym

Good people of Azeroth, lend me your eyes!

We’ll be hosting a live World of Warcraft developer Q&A open to the community on Thursday, April 25 beginning at 5:30 p.m. PDT. Designers Dave Kosak, Ion Hazzikostas, Brian Holinka, Cory Stockton, and Greg Street will be available to field your questions about Mists of Pandaria gameplay and design, patch 5.2, and beyond. This will be a moderated chat, and community managers Bashiok, Crithto, Daxxarri, Rygarius, and I will be there to filter your submissions for the developers.

We receive thousands of questions each time we host these events, so please be patient with us and bear in mind that we won’t get to every question. You can help by keeping your inquiries concise and focused on one topic per entry. Submissions that are well over 200 characters, or contain multiple questions on an array of topics, are much less likely to receive responses. We want to cover as much ground as possible and appreciate your assistance in helping us to achieve that.

To participate, all you have to do is log in to the CoverItLive client embedded below once the Q&A is live. You can create a CoverItLive account, use your Facebook or Twitter credentials, or simply sign in as a guest. If you’re on the go while the event’s underway, be sure to check out the free CoverItLive mobile apps available on the Android Market and iTunes Store.

We look forward to chatting with you on Thursday!

About the Panelists

Dave Kosak
Lead Quest Designer

As Blizzard Entertainment's lead quest designer for World of Warcraft®, Dave Kosak oversees the development of all quest content for the game and its expansions, as well as contributing to the overall fiction of the game world. In addition to managing the team that creates the quest flow for all of the Warcraft universe's zones, Dave plays a pivotal role in defining the relationship between gameplay and storytelling.

Prior to joining Blizzard Entertainment, Kosak was a co-founder and original creative director of GameSpy, where he wrote under the pen-name 'Fargo.' He is a passionate reader, loves indie games, and can play nearly four entire chords on a guitar.

Dave Kosak
Lead Quest Designer

As Blizzard Entertainment's lead quest designer for World of Warcraft®, Dave Kosak oversees the development of all quest content for the game and its expansions, as well as contributing to the overall fiction of the game world. In addition to managing the team that creates the quest flow for all of the Warcraft universe's zones, Dave plays a pivotal role in defining the relationship between gameplay and storytelling.

Prior to joining Blizzard Entertainment, Kosak was a co-founder and original creative director of GameSpy, where he wrote under the pen-name 'Fargo.' He is a passionate reader, loves indie games, and can play nearly four entire chords on a guitar.

Ion Hazzikostas
Lead Encounter Designer

As lead encounter designer on the World of Warcraft® team, Ion Hazzikostas's primary responsibility is overseeing the creation of the game's dungeon and raid content. Hazzikostas joined Blizzard Entertainment in the summer of 2008 as a game designer, and his responsibilities have included raid boss design and implementation, class design and balancing, and maintaining the World of Warcraft achievement system. Prior to arriving at Blizzard, he worked as an attorney at a law firm in Washington, DC.

In his spare time, Hazzikostas enjoys exploring Southern California in search of craft beer. Having grown up in New York City, he is a lifelong Yankees fan.

Brian Holinka
Senior PvP Game Designer

As a senior game designer on Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft® team, Brian Holinka focuses exclusively on continuing to make the World of Warcraft PvP experience enjoyable for all of its players. Holinka works with the systems and content teams to create a balanced competitive environment with exciting rewards and diverse content.

Prior to joining Blizzard Entertainment in 2012, Holinka worked on the multiplayer components of Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, Homefront, and Frontlines: Fuel of War. Holinka got his start in the game industry moonlighting on the "Desert Combat" mod for Battlefield 1942 while serving as a Captain in the United States Air Force.

Cory Stockton
Lead Content Designer

As Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.'s lead content designer for World of Warcraft®, Cory Stockton is responsible for overseeing the design and implementation of all exterior zones, dungeons, Battlegrounds, Arenas, and cities. He is also involved with many other aspects of the game, such as dungeon scripting and the Pet Battles System.

Stockton started at Blizzard Entertainment in June 2005 as lead dungeon designer before transitioning to his current role. Prior to his arrival, he was a lead designer on the Ratchet & Clank series and also contributed extensively to the Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver series.

In his spare time, Stockton plays games extensively, and enjoys collecting classic consoles and games. He holds an associate's degree in computer animation from the Art Institute of Phoenix.

Greg Street
Lead Systems Designer

As the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft®, Greg Street is one of the two lead designers on the team that reports to the Game Director. He leads a team that is in charge of World of Warcraft class, item and tradeskill design. He and his team also design the user interface for the game and handle all of the various combat calculations and number tuning.

Contrary to popular belief, it is not Greg's #1 priority to make players (read: Paladins) unhappy. In fact, if given the opportunity, he’d love to meet with each and every one of you individually over a good gin—note: he doesn’t drink with the underaged.

View the original article here

Developer Appreciation Week is back!

Yes, once again this year Scary is running his Developer Appreciation Week – a week of blogging in support and praise of the people who make our games happen.

Previous years have been fantastic, and I’m sure we’ll see some great posts this year. So this is just a call to bloggers – remember Developer Appreciation Week and write a post if you can!

Personally, this year I’m particularly appreciative of non-MMO developers (or at least, not-yet-MMO-Developers) Mojang, who make Minecraft. I bought the game for 15 Euros, and so far I’ve played it longer than most MMOs. Their commitment to openness, their very cool attitude to mods and licensing, their massive development rate, and everything else make them the developer of the year for me.

Tagged as: developer appreciation week

If you enjoyed this article, check out our other posts from these categories: General MMO Interest

View the original article here

Developer Watercooler: Encounter Tuning by Watcher

In this blog, I’d like to shed some light on an aspect of our design that may unfortunately seem inscrutable or even arbitrary: how and when we make adjustments to our raid encounters once they’re on the live servers. The only changes we jump on immediately to fix are clearly irritating bugs that never benefit the player in any way (e.g., issues that can cause players to fail to receive loot from a boss, glitches that can cause an encounter to evade or reset prematurely, etc.). Thanks to our internal QA team and the feedback from players on our test realms, those are relatively few in number.

Other than these clear-cut cases, virtually every change has some negative cost to it, such that the benefits must clearly be evident in order to justify making them. If we fix a bug that allows for an unintended strategy on a fight, then the following week there will be raid groups that previously had a working strategy on an encounter and will now have to re-learn it. If we reduce the difficulty of an encounter, there will always be groups who were very close to a kill on the “pre-nerf” version whose victory feels cheapened as a result. And so forth.

Given this background, let’s look at some of the adjustments we’ve made (or not made, in some cases) to the 5.0 raid zones over the course of the past months, broken down into a few general categories.

Our players are ingenious and adept at coming up with clever solutions to the challenges posed by our raid encounters. While we have learned from past experience to an extent (Rule #14 of encounter design: If it’s possible to kite adds instead of killing them, someone will kite them instead of killing them), we are still unable to always anticipate the lengths to which our players will go to overcome a difficult encounter. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and often one of the hallmarks of a great encounter is that it is open to multiple approaches, depending on the strengths and weaknesses of an individual raid group. I can think of three distinct approaches that we saw to handle the Molten Elementals summoned by Heroic Ragnaros, for example, and I’m sure there are more out there.

For example, a common tactic on the Heroic mode of Amber-Shaper Un’sok in the Heart of Fear is to have a dedicated transformed player who maintains a Destabilize stack on Un’sok throughout the entire second phase of the fight, when he is otherwise nearly invulnerable and the raid’s attention is focused on the Amber Monstrosity. This is only possible due to a bug. Un’sok was intended to be immune to Amber Strike during phase 2 of the fight, and he was in fact immune to it during that phase for much of the beta testing of the boss. However, fixing a separate bug late in development (ensuring that Amber Strike could always interrupt the otherwise-uninterruptible Monstrosity) caused Amber Strike to also bypass Un’sok’s shield in phase 2. Oops.

This would have been a simple bug to fix, but we chose to not do so. This was a clever tactic, and while it made phase 3 of the encounter relatively simple, it did so at the expense of adding length, challenge, and complexity to the first two phases of the fight. Kudos to the players who first came up with it.

As a general matter, unintended tactics are only a problem when they either trivialize an encounter, or when they simultaneously are the “right” (i.e., easier) way to do the fight and make it less fun in the process.

Gara’jal the Spiritbinder
On the first night of Heroic progression through Mogu’shan Vaults, Heroic Gara’jal proved to be an incredibly tough test for the damage-dealing capability of the best raid guilds in the world. A number of groups were a few percent shy of a kill, but it appeared quite possible that it would simply require another week worth of gear upgrades to get there. We would have been fine with that, but then one raid group noticed that one of the trolls before Gara’jal cast a massive haste buff on itself that was Spellstealable. The raid kept a couple of those enemies crowd controlled throughout the encounter, periodically breaking them out to let them cast their buffs for the mages to Spellsteal. This gave them the extra bit of damage that they needed, and Gara’jal fell.

Other guilds got wind of this tactic, and were attempting to utilize it as well. We definitely didn’t want the fight to require the awkward use of Spellsteal and bringing other mobs into the encounter, mandating the use of multiple mages in order to meet the DPS check for initial kills. But we also didn’t want an unfair playing field in the Heroic progression race, with one guild able to continue progressing in the instance while others were stuck behind a slightly-out-of-reach DPS check and unable to take advantage of the trick that had been used to secure the first kill. As such, we made a hotfix that prevented that buff from being Spellstolen, but also reduced Gara’jal’s health by 5% to offset for the extra damage that the mages with the buff would have done.

Exploits vs. “Creative Use of Game Mechanics” – A Brief Aside

I’d like to take a moment to note that what this guild did was not an “exploit” in the sense of being cheating, bad, wrong, or against the rules of the game. Players used Spellsteal to steal a beneficial effect from a mob, which is what the spell is supposed to do, and the beneficial effect increased the power of the mage, which is what it was supposed to do. This was the essence of “creative use of game mechanics.” (Note that this is not to say that it isn’t possible to violate the Code of Conduct by using Spellsteal in general – if you find a spell that you can steal that causes you to damage nearby allies, and you take it back to town to grief newbies, that’s a little different. . . .)

By contrast, a different group found a bug with Gara’jal where he could be dragged on top of the gate to his room such that players standing outside the gate could damage him without being susceptible to his attacks, and used this “unintended tactic” to defeat him. We fixed that bug, but also removed the loot and achievements earned from the players involved, and issued account suspensions. In general, it is never permissible to cause parts of a boss encounter to evade in order to gain an advantage, or to use line of sight or collision to get a boss stuck where you can attack it but its abilities no longer function.

Will of the Emperor
One more example, also from Heroic progression—most of the “unintended tactics” tend to be discovered and applied by cutting-edge progression guilds, since they’re the first ones to see the encounters, and are often undergeared and struggling to find every possible advantage, which usually means thinking outside the box. On Heroic Will of the Emperor, the Emperor’s Rage constructs that spawn present a real challenge. Their health is significantly increased, but each one of them also produces a deadly Titan Spark upon being destroyed, which explodes on contact to deal massive damage. The amount of damage and attention required to keep up with both the Rages and the Sparks they produce is one of the core demands the Heroic mode makes upon a raid group. It was so demanding, in fact, that most of the early groups that reached this encounter were unable to handle the overall DPS requirement.

Looking for solutions to this problem, clever players noticed that the mage spell Ring of Frost froze enemies for 10 seconds, had a 30-second cooldown, and had no target cap. Cue three mages cycling Rings of Frost to keep every Rage frozen for the entire fight. They spawn in waves of four in 25-player mode, resulting in anywhere from 52 to 64 Rages frozen in one giant clump by the end of the fight, causing client and server performance issues in the process. On the upside (for the designers observing these attempts), when this mage rotation faltered, the resulting wipes were fairly comical, bearing more than a little resemblance to an endless stream of passengers emerging from a clown car.

This was an example of a tactic that made the fight both significantly easier and significantly less fun. With so many enemies entirely neutralized by a small portion of the raid, the gameplay for many of the remaining players was reduced to standing in the middle of the room nuking the boss(es) for ten minutes and hoping the mages didn’t screw up. Not ideal. We wanted to fix it. However, the issue here wasn’t specific to the Will encounter. We had always fully intended for all forms of crowd control to work on Rages, so changing that was not an option.

The problem was Ring of Frost – being able to incapacitate an unlimited number of targets with a single spellcast caused problems. This ended up being a case where the negative cost of hotfixing the issue outweighed the upside of improving the encounter. When hotfixing spells, we do not have the ability to update the tooltips and other data that resides on each individual client. Thus, if we had added a target cap to the spell via hotfix, a mage who attempted to use it on a large pull in a dungeon, or a large group of players in a battleground, would have thought the spell was broken when it suddenly didn’t work on many of the targets. Quite simply, confusing hundreds of thousands of players in all sorts of contexts, in order to fix a problem in a situation affecting a few hundred players, was not an acceptable trade-off. As such, we changed Ring of Frost (capping it at 10 targets) in patch 5.1, allowing for ample notice through patch notes and PTR cycles, as well as a properly updated in-game tooltip. By the time this change went live, access to superior gear from Heart of Fear and Terrace of Endless Spring allowed players to much more readily handle killing the Rages as we originally intended.

Other adjustments occur simply because a boss is proving to be more difficult than we’d intended, creating a roadblock. Note that we will essentially never make pure numerical (health/damage) adjustments to a raid encounter that make it more challenging once it’s gone live. If we goof on the tuning in the players’ favor, then so be it.

On average, the self-selected pool of guilds that go through the effort of copying characters to our test servers are far more skilled and organized than the typical Normal-mode raider (and the pick-up groups that form tend to be below the target skill threshold), so there is a bit of estimation that goes into tuning Normal mode encounters. Because a disproportionately difficult Normal mode encounter presents a brick wall that entirely blocks progress, we will act to reduce the difficulty of such encounters, often shortly after they first become accessible, to avoid giving players a frustrating experience. For example, when Heart of Fear was released, we observed that even some guilds that had fully cleared Heroic Mogu’shan Vaults were struggling to meet the berserk timer on Normal Garalon; we made several adjustments to the fight to bring its difficulty in line with the rest of the instance on that first day. By the time that most others saw the encounter, it was where we wanted it to be difficulty-wise.

Over the long-run course of a raid tier, we pay close attention to the community’s overall rate of progression. We don’t have target completion numbers for each tier or for a given number of bosses; we are far more concerned with the rate of change. Progression is fun. Running into a challenge can also be quite a bit of fun. Running into a challenge that seems insurmountable is not. So when we notice that the rate at which groups are progressing is beginning to stall, we tend to take action. In Dragon Soul (and in Icecrown Citadel before that), we used a zonewide aura to reduce the difficulty of encounters over time. Some community members’ “hand on the dial” jokes notwithstanding, those processes were not automated, and reflected an assessment of the latest progression numbers from the live servers. We have the framework for such a system in place for the current raid tier, but we have not yet felt that its activation was necessary.

Our goal is not to make sure that the group that currently has defeated 4 of 6 Mogu’Shan Vaults bosses finishes Sha of Fear before our next patch; we do want to ensure, however, that they feel reasonably able to continue progressing at the rate they have been, with the assistance of gear upgrades gained along the way. As such, we recently reduced the difficulty of a few elements of the Normal difficulty Elegon encounter in a hotfix. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Elegon was “too hard” in some absolute sense – his difficulty presented a welcome challenge to the first wave of raiders who tackled the encounter this past fall. But the folks who defeated Elegon back then have moved on to Heart of Fear, Terrace, and/or Heroic raids in the meantime. A nerf to Elegon doesn’t affect them one way or another, but allows for raid groups still making those attempts to continue making progress today.

And then there’s LFR. Ultimately, LFR raids are designed to be completed by groups of players that qualify to queue for them. This does not mean that it should be impossible to fail, but unlike our Normal and Heroic raids, which are designed as progressions of increasing difficulty, LFR is designed to have a flat level of difficulty within each wing. Whereas a raiding guild will routinely give up and return another night or another week when they run into a challenge they can’t quite overcome, an LFR group that runs into a difficulty spike continues to grind away as new people cycle in to replace those who depart. Most players who ran LFR last fall will recall the ubiquitous partially-complete instances with a dense carpet of skeletons to greet arriving players—not a particularly fun experience. As such, we act quickly to adjust the difficulty of encounters in LFR when needed.

Ultimately, there is no hard-and-fast rule or formula that we follow to determine how and whether to make adjustments to encounters once they are in players’ hands, but hopefully this blog has provided some insight into the sorts of factors we consider, and our thought process with regard to a handful of specific changes during this last tier.

Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas is Lead Encounter Designer, and really wishes you would stop making him ban you.

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