WoW Developer Reddit AMA Concluded

Update: 9/12/2012 1:45 p.m. PDT

The full AMA transcript is now available on the front page of our website, sorted according to each developer's responses.

--

Update: 9/11/2012 8:00 p.m. PDT

The AMA has concluded. Thank you to those of you who participated! We plan to post a transcript on our front page in the near future, but until then you can read the full AMA here: http://redd.it/zqm8d

--

It’s been two weeks since patch 5.0.4 was released and, with only two weeks to go until Mists of Pandaria takes the world by storm, we feel that this is the perfect time to give you access to the World of Warcraft development team. Tomorrow, Tuesday, September 11 beginning at 5:30 p.m. PDT, we’ll be conducting a live developer “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on /r/WoW. I’ll be on-hand to host the chat and will have Lead Systems Designer Greg Street, Lead Quest Designer Dave Kosak, Lead Encounter Designer Ion Hazzikostas, and Game Director Tom Chilton available to field your questions.

We’ll spend at least an hour working to answer everything possible. So if you have any questions about patch 5.0.4, Mists of Pandaria, and anything else pertaining to World of Warcraft’s story, content, and systems design, come prepared! We want to cover as many different topics as possible and hope to address a wide array of inquiries from participants. We'll be choosing questions based on the information we can reasonably provide, and what kinds of answers we feel will be the most compelling and informative for the entire audience. Be sure to up-vote the questions you’d like to see addressed the most!

If you haven’t done so already, head to reddit and create your account. It’s easy and completely free. Also, keep in mind that /r/WoW is not owned or operated by Blizzard Entertainment. The folks who maintain that subreddit are kind enough to host us, so please be respectful of the great resource they’ve set up for the community.

We hope to hear from you tomorrow!

Inc 5000 questions on CRZ

They won't be that specific.

Just slight variations on "Why did you kill the game?"

Yea, it's totally fine if we have some strong critics asking questions. I just really hope if the questions come from a place of unhappiness, it's clear to everyone reading that X design is the cause of said unhappiness. I'd like to believe that'd make the readers, posters, and us all happy. :)

Edit -- Happiness: making people happy since people.

09/10/2012 06:21 PMPosted by Hackur

We'll be choosing questions based on the information we can reasonably provide, and what kinds of answers we feel will be the most compelling and informative for the entire audience

in other words if any questions on the CRZ come up theyll most likely be brushed aside

Nope! That's the opposite of what an AMA is about. CRZ questions are expected. We see this as a great opportunity to clarify some things about the system. ;)

09/10/2012 08:11 PMPosted by Mirs

I understand they've made a lot of changes, but this game is 8 years old and they've been working on this stuff for at LEAST the better part of a year, most likely a lot longer than that. There are no answers they can give for a lot of this stuff other than "We're sorry, we screwed up" and that would make them look stupid, so they're going to avoid those questions, legitimate questions, out of pride.

If you think that's the best answer these guys can muster, even to the issues you listed in your post, you don't know them very well.

An AMA isn't about maintaining good appearances, as it seems you implied in your post. It's about having frank discussions with the community in a less formal setting -- a place that happens to have an excellent system of bringing the most popular questions to the top.

So come ask something. And if you don't want to, at least read along and up-vote the questions you'd like to see answered most. That's the important job of the audience.

We'll worry about the part where these four developers want to answer as many questions as possible, in the best and most informative way possible, within a relatively small time frame. It'll be fun. We hope those reading will find it insightful, and we expect to learn a lot from them as well. :)

To hell with reddit and twitter and facebook!... all the devs should do a strictly Q&A thread here on the wow forums like once a month.

Sometimes different formats work better for different types of content, or avenues for engaging one's audience. Reddit's system for displaying posts based on reader votes makes it ideal for trying to answer the "most important" questions. That is, it's very transparent to you and us what questions most of the readers want to see answered. We tend to get thousands of questions when we hold developer Q&As, so having a system filter those for us by popularity is useful.

We did one of these for Diablo III a couple of months ago and it went quite well. This is our first time hosting a World of Warcraft chat on reddit, so we're very anxious to get it going!

09/10/2012 08:43 PMPosted by Hippeaux

I’ll be on-hand to host the chat and will have Lead Systems Designer Greg Street, Lead Quest Designer Dave Kosak, Lead Encounter Designer Ion Hazzikostas, and Game Director Tom Chilton available to field your questions.

Is there a reason the art team never gets their own Q & As and never seems to be invited to the group Q & As?

Or am I just the only one who's dying to pick their brains the most?

Edit: bain, brain, whatever. : \

In a general Q&A like this, art questions tend to be few and buried. I agree one needs done though! I'll see if we can sketch up a Q&A specifically on art and get that team better exposed to the community. I think it'd be fascinating. No promises yet though. ;)

09/10/2012 08:51 PMPosted by Pins

Do you intend to open up the thread an hour early to let people get the questions in, and let the up/downvotes take effect before going through and answering them?

Hmm. We'll consider that. Anyone else have an opinion for or against this?

This is how I know I'm a cynic. If the topics are based on user votes, who is to say that the fanboys aren't going to flood votes into questions about things other than this awful patch? And if they choose to give some 'dance around' answer to the topics people want to see, how long before a follow up question could be voted up to actually call them out on it? This thing is lasting, what, an hour? That time will fly by, and honestly I doubt much depth will be shown.

You want to make the community of players feel like you care? Instead of a stunt like this, write a lengthy, articulated response to their forum posts on the forums. Not a Blizzard on Blizzard Q&A blog either, those things are awful. The hardest questions you ask each other sound like, "So, is it hard being so awesome?"

I don't particularly share your view and feel it's a little unfair -- to have it reduced to a "stunt" when its inception was in direct reaction to all of the feedback we've received on the forums about patch 5.0.4, is saddening.

But I do agree that we won't be able to cover everything with an amount of depth that will please everyone in the time allotted. The idea, though, is to tackle really targeted questions people have about 5.0.4 and Mists head on. It's a high-speed method of disseminating information with two-way communication (as opposed to the blogs and interviews you referenced). We can then compile all of that into a very visible transcript, at which time we hope to keep the dialog going on the forums, reddit, Twitter, etc.

09/10/2012 09:32 PMPosted by Schwarzkopf

Reddit's system for displaying posts based on reader votes makes it ideal for trying to answer the "most important" questions.

You were correct to put those two words in quotes, because the reddit system will prioritise the popular questions - not the most important, nor the most interesting.

Popularity gives us Big Brother or Dancing with the Stars.

I hope you don't get voted off the island :)

Well, no, I put it in quotes because what questions about this game are most important to a person is subjective. Your post is almost a direct reflection of that. The fact that you might disagree with a majority of readers about what is most important or most interesting is a startling indication of humans acting all human-like.

I'll concede one thing though. This AMA would be way better for you if you got to choose every question. If only a community worked that way, right? :p

It'll be on http://www.reddit.com/r/wow for a very, very long time.

Ah sweet :) I don't use reddit so I wouldn't know haha.

We'll try to make sure we get a transcript posted on our site afterward as well. :)

09/11/2012 12:49 AMPosted by Fibromyalgía

We'll try to make sure we get a transcript posted on our site afterward as well. :)

You're burning the midnight oil, eh? Get some sleep before the AMA! Your ghostly skull looks a bit tired.

Yea, I need it. I was about to play Diablo III, but I can't get work tasks off my mind!

Well, no, I put it in quotes because what questions about this game are most important to a person is subjective. Your post is almost a direct reflection of that. The fact that you might disagree with a majority of readers about what is most important or most interesting is a startling indication of humans acting all human-like.

I'll concede one thing though. This AMA would be way better for you if you got to choose every question. If only a community worked that way, right? :p

But did it have to be Reddit? Isn't there another site out there with a similar upvote system that managed to progress out of the Windows 3.1 root-branch display system for posts? Or one that's at least easy to read all of the relevant content for a question without needing to expand everything into infinity just to get the full context of what is said?

We like reddit. It's a popular platform. While our main focus is the front page of the WoW site and forums, at times we want to reach out to our community wherever they reside -- Facebook, Twitter, reddit, etc. We'll try to gather a transcript sometime after it's over for those who can't make it.

The AMA has concluded. Thank you to those of you who participated! We plan to post a transcript on our front page in the near future, but until then you can read the full AMA here: http://redd.it/zqm8d

The full AMA transcript is now available on the front page of our website, sorted according to each developer's responses.