Gamescom '10 w/Tom Chilton

[Winterherz]

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Beta Process
Things are still very much in flux in the beta. Chilton feels the expansion needs a few more months of iteration before it's ready.
The classes are still in the very early stages of fine tuning.


Tol Barad
Currently designed for 50 players on each side, but could be expanded to 100 each side based on beta testing
The gameplay is a bit different than Wintergrasp. Defenders will defend everything, attackers will try to capture and/or destroy everything (Wintergrasp gives defenders the ability to destroy towers to reduce attacker time remaining).
Is physically smaller than Wintergrasp, because Blizzard felt it was too easy to fall into a situation where you stayed in the same location fighting, due to how long it took to get to each point of interest.


Guild System
Philosophy for the new guild system is to recognize accomplishments guilds are making.
Rewards are not necessarily designed to give characters more power, this is so players not in a guild don't feel behind players who are in character power.


Item Inflation
The game is by nature inflationary.
The rewards from quests and dungeons in Cataclysm are intended by nature to encourage doing the new content.
The model probably won't change in the future, so replacing your tier 10 armor and items while leveling up is intended.


Expansion & Patch Cycles
Was the patch cycle a mistake? Did it take too long to get Cataclysm out? Chilton doesn't feel so. Cataclysm is a very expansive release, and it's been 5 years now so they felt it was a good time to go back and revamp the original experience.
This isn't something they'll do every expansion moving forward. This should hopefully narrow the time between the final content patch and the next expansion.
They don't want to go back to classic WoW patch cycles where patches arrived more frequently, because it means they can't provide content for every playstyle in a patch.


Phasing
Still refinements they can make for it. Both from a technology standpoint and player experience standpoint.
Learning lessons from using it in Cataclysm on how to use it in the future.
If you expose a player to phasing, it's important for them to notice it happens.
Learning a lot of things with how to best use it.


RealID
In the near future you'll be able to disable the ability to appear on the "Friends of Friend" list of your RealID friends. As an example, Chilton said if he were RealID friends with the interviewer, the interviewer could enable an option to not appear on Chilton's list of friends.[/FONT]

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