1 panel - „World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor - What's Next”:
In Addition to some of the specific raid content that we are releasing we are taking a moment to reflect upon our philosophy and how we are approaching our design in the raid. We are super happy to see how it works out so farer and how it has been embraced. I think It's really offering a solution to a lot of the social problems that often are one of the signs of group ratings. Anytime there is a mismatch between the number of people who want to raid. Eight people looking to do a ten player raid you have eight unhappy people. If you have 12 people you have to deal with who sits on the bench. One of the good things about the flexible structure is the ability to come and go. And it is really opening an experience that we think of as a core part of the multi player role playing experience to more people and that is fantastic. Now, for several years now for a couple of expansions we supported a structure. We are really having efforts to make them equal in terms of difficulty and award. There have been tensions that we have experienced. Trying to reward them equally while trying to recognize the logistical difficulties with the roster together and there has been the struggle with back and forth between the ten to 25. One of the things we see, one of the potentials of flexible raidings is everyone can win. We see it as the way forward in that regard. We are looking to see how we can expand flexible mode. How can we expand the scaling that we have to suit other types of raid structures? One of the first things we realized when testing flexible mode feature is that really the biggest difference between that and normal mode rating was the tuning. People who tested the first flexible test monkeys you remember scaling and the tuning was too high it actually helped lie a normal mode raid except you had 21 or 19 people. That wasn't our tuning target for flexible mode. It was a great proof of concept for where to go i nthe future. We see no reason why it can't just work flexbly. You can do it with ten, 45, 14 or 19. However many people you have on hand. So that leads us to continue to think. What about raid finder? Raid finder makes sense to match mate. I'm sure most of us have had the experience where you are about to and something drops and you are standing around waiting for it. Wouldn't it be nice if the boss could scale down so you could fold instead of waiting? With Flexible scaling we can make that happen. Is there anything flex can't do? Yes. One area we don't think it is suited is the most cutting edge content because it is a challenge for us to begin with to tune it correctly for two difficulties currently. This is the audience that will try to min/max every possible event. The last thing is to try to do with 17 people and so forth. No one wants that. We are not going to do that. Don't worry. What that means is that really cutting edge content is best suited to a single raid size. Since we have been getting rid of the parallel structure in our normal mode and thinking what we can do about that for our current mode. We are looking to consolidate to a single raid size going forward. We are trying to pick a point that would be the compromise between the two existing raid sizes and allow for us to do things like assume you have at least one of every class present. If you miss – we can do that. I don't know that we do exactly that but we can do that. It will have a much more level playing field and a better experience all around going forward. So to sum up this the picture of raiding. We are stream lining. We are competing down to four. We will have raid finder with the benefit of being able to scale to accommodate various group size. You will have a normal mode that scales. And a heroic mode. And for those seeking the ultimate raiding challenge we have a mythic difficutly for 20 people.
2 panel - „World of Warcraft Raids, Gameplay, Questing, and More”:
I would like to revisit this slide from yesterday's panel. I heard a lot of interesting discussion coming out of this. We will talk about how it will work overall in warlords. We will have three different difficulty tiers for organized rate content and raid finder will be the one you know today with the addition of other features. On other than that, we see the normal mode in warlords being equal to what flexible mode is today, in difficulty and in our overall philosophy for it. It does not make sense to full a difficulty flexible, buns flexibility is the normal. If you are a normal mode guild today, you will find heroic content suitable for you in warlords. That will scale from 10 to 25 and if you are a heroic player, the mythic content is for you. One of the things about this, and one of the things that makes flexible rating as a style, it allows you to raid with firends that cannot miss all of the raid and may log on late, they can hop in. And you can participate without necessarily feeling a sense of obligation where you are letting people down and something comes up and you cannot make it. All of our raiding except for mythic, will be cross realms and enabled from day one. I think cross server mythic would be a bit messy with things like realm first and for the most mythic guild or rather to a single server, so we are keeping it that way. Each difficulty has a separate lockout. So you do not have to worry about, oh, i did my heroic with my guild on wednesday and I cannot join my friend's raid on that weekend. And the way the lockouts work, thay are similar to the current lockouts. That is to say, you can be in the raid, with the boss alive that you have looted that week, wiht however, you cannot loot it again. If you want to help out a friend, if someone asks you to join them later on, you cannot loot the same boss again, but you are free to raid and join groups as you see fit. Currently, the way flexible raids work, you go through the interfaces and cue up to it and you are put in the zone. That is a concession ultimately we made to get the raid finder – to get flexible raid finder functionality, but in the long run, this is normal raiding going forward, it's not special mode, it's just how raiding works. You walk in the front door, you form a group and zone in and you are raiding flexibly. The only raid activity that will work through cueing through the UI and teleporting is going through the raid finder. How does loot work? Does it mean personal loot is now the norm for heroic raiding? No. Personal loot as it stands is well suited to groups of strangers and raid finder or pick up groups where it allows you to deal with do you trust someone to be the master looter. Do you trust that guy is not going to ninja loot and run off with things. When you are playing with your friends you want the ability to trade things, and if someone comes back after a while, and you want to train them, and pass them loot to get them geared up quickly. Those are things that need to be possible and that is how loot will work in normal and heroic mode. So that raises the question of course, well, how is the drop going to work If I have 13 people do I get 2.6 loot? What is 0.6 of a loot? The answer is actually, 0.6 of a loot is 60% chance to get a third loot. The thought is it will scale smoothly with ratio of loot drops per eligible player is constant throughout. We want to avoid and work on avoiding any perception of break point or magic numbers when it comings to the flexible group. This is something we learned from the community, we never want you to feel like had when your friend asks to join, you say, no, that will us over a threshold, and you do not want to have to go get a warm body to put you over a threshold. And loot, we've benn streamlining how the targeting and logic works to avoid break points. In things today, you have a 15th player cut off, and three people get targeted by a boss's ability instead of two. With most abilities we can probably randomize in a way that avoid the existence of break points. So, for example, Sun Tenderheart, casts Shadow Word: Bane, it hits two people in 10m and three in 25m. Today the second you go from 14 to 15, it starts hitting a third person, that makes many people feel that we should avoid having 15. 14 is a magic number. If instead, it hit when you had 14 and had an 80% chance of hitting three, and 20% chance of hitting two. Over the course of the fight as a whole, you will still see the same number, but you will not feel you are hurting yourself. There's mechanics that it will not work for. Prisons, where you – it's important to know exactly how many will go out. You do not want to be caught by surprise, or have the random every time. For the most part, we can do everything that we can do to avoid the existence of break points and make it feel like, you have 17 people on, go raid with 17. You have 12, go raid with 12. Just play with your friends, have fun, enjoy the content.
