Community Council Interview Summary – Tier Acquisition, Soloing BFA Raids, BLP in Mythic+

The topic of this interview was Small Group, Solo or Open World Content.

Highlights

Here’s a very brief highlight of the interview, please listen to the interview for the full context:

• No plans to have smaller bundles for Tender, they were an experiment.
• They’re looking at additional ways to provide players to earn tender in game.
• Arfus was too low a drop chance and going forward they want to make limited time events have more accessible cool rewards.
• Organizational requirements are considered when thinking about rewards. This is why Delves are capped at Heroic raid loot in War Within.
• BFA raids that are unsoloable due to mechanics will likely be looked at before Dragonflight is done.
• No plans for Mythic+ Bad Luck protection.
• Warbound loot is tradeable until equipped and will drop at much higher item levels.

Interview Summary

Do you have any thoughts about the Trading Post feeling increasingly expensive when combined with the ability to pre-purchase upcoming sets?

• The overall cost of things isn’t increasing over time, but the amount of things in the catalogue is increasing but that’s because they’re adding back catalogue items.
• They’re looking at providing additional ways to provide players to earn additional tender in game.
• The Trading Post isn’t something they’re looking to use as a major vector for monetization.
• There will continue to be occasional bundles (e.g. expansion pre-order) that contain Tender.
• There were some smaller bundles for Tender. Those were an experiment and there are no plans in the short term to do those.
• Their plan is to rotate every item back in some form.

There are many different types of events from short-term to long-term events, to events that are quick vs. take a longer time. How do you choose what to do next?

• There are some groups that they like to focus on, especially when it comes to outdoor content.
• They also need to consider the progression scheme for that expansion.
• They also try to make sure that the content isn’t targeting the same group of people over and over and over again.
• When it comes to outdoor content, silent majority is thrown around for a reason. They may be frustrated or bored not be engaged and they don’t hear that directly.
• It’s a possibility to allow players to do something to make the rare or content harder, similar to Headless Horseman.

Will players be able to make their own Dragonriding races?

• They’re talked about how they want to evolve Dragonriding in the future and that’s one of the things that they’ve been talking about. There’s some technical limitations, but it’s on the list of things to do.

Any plans to help newer players catch up on Lore, especially with some important events or books?

• It’s definitely a weakness for sure. They’re talked recently about how they can intergrate in-game mechanicsms for getting people caught up.
• They don’t know that gameplay lore is the best way to do that in particular.
• In game journals, cinematics, things that don’t require you to go to YouTube are things that they’re talking about and wanting to move towards.

With the holiday refreshes, new rewards dropped from the bosses. For future years, will those still drop and will there be any Bad Luck Protection?

• They always looking for what the right solution is for bringing a thing back and it not feeling like it’s wasting a players time.
• They think they missed the mark on the drop rate of Arfus this year and think it was a little too low.
• Some of teh things that they want to do for the future: With the 19th anniversary, the Ilidari Doomhawk was on the vendor rather than the boss which makes it feel more accessible over time while still maintaining some feeling of hitting the jackpot.
• In the future, they’re leaning more in the direction of making things more accessible for players. No plans in the near future of doing anything in the direction of Heartbreaker (Big Love Rocket).
• They’re heading more in the direction of we’ll give you cool things this year, and then next year you’ll get even more cool things.
• There are some things that they’re hesitant to change like with the Heartbreaker, just due to the intrinsic value that players hold over it.

How do you plan on balancing the difficulty and accessibility of the content with the reward structure?

• They bear in mind organization requirements when thinking about rewards.
• A Mythic raid boss will drop better loot and other source. Mythic+ will get it from your vault.
• Delves in The War Within have a cap of Heroic raid level items because it’s soloable content. They don’t know they can tune it in a fun way or even if they can, it wouldn’t compare to the organizational requirement of larger group content.
• If they offer the exact same rewards without needing to group up with other people, schedule a time, make friends, then people will take the path of least resistance which are harmful to the social aspects of the game.
• They do want to make every path rewarding on its own.
• Tier acquisition is still in an awkward place. e.g. Having to run multiple difficulties because item level doesn’t matter there. Tier acquisition from raid bosses is vestigial, when the only way to get tier was raid.
• There may be something more elegant to work towards in The War Within. They’re still working out details, but it’s likely to see changes to how tier is obtained going forward.

Any plans for class/race holidays?

• There’s been a great amount of engagement from the player holidays.
• There’s some existing holidays that need a refresh (e.g. Midsummer) but they would love to do new holidays.
• Micro-Holidays were the start of updating holidays many years ago.

Is there an update to Archeology in The War Within?

• The triangulation minigame from Archeology is not likely to return.
• The idea of archeology is something they want to work towards.
• Azerothian Archives will be something like that in 10.2.5.

Will the progress on achievements be combined across all characters?

• That is the goal. You may need to log in on each character to have your personal progress. Where possible they want to make this retroactive.

How will Dragonflight’s public events (Superbloom, Researcher’s) be handled in next expansion at lower player counts?

• That is something they’re talking about.
• Longer term, they’d like to have the green eye that allows you to quickly jump into a group to do the event. For launch they’d prefer to avoid doing that because shard hopping with a brand new zone is takes you out of the world a little.
• Maybe some of those events could be really awesome for leveling.

What are the plans for Professions going forward?

• Overall they’re very happy with professions.
• Small Tweaks are being looked at such as Work Orders more reliably available.
• Expect the same level of depth and value to crafting in The War Within.

Most public events, you just need to tag the final boss. Any plans to address this?

• It’s something they think about, but don’t want to try to working on solving it at the expense of natural player behavior.
• Most players don’t AFK the event and just tag the final boss.
• On the flip side, certain players rush there late because they see the event is up and it would suck to get nothing because your contribution is too low.

Plans to allow players to solo BFA raids?

• They plan on doing a pass on mechanics for BFA raids before Dragonflight is done.
• There’s likely some misunderstanding on how the buff works. It’s not 2 expansions later they add a damage buff, that was used to compensate for stat squishes. Each expansion, players get around 5x strong, so 2 expansions later you’re 25x stronger by default. This makes it doable but not trivial. 3 expansions later, now you’re 125x as strong and it’s more likely trivial. When stat squishes happened, this natural gear scaling didn’t occur, so they had to fix it with a buff.

There are stories of people farming a dungeon 30 to 50+ times for a desired item due to bad luck. What is the average acceptable time to farm and item and any plans to have a targeted farming option to account for bad luck?

• There is no plans for dungeons. It’s random. Odds are 7-8% chance to get a particular item from your particular loot pool. With thousands of people, there will be extreme outliers on either side of the spectrum.
• The more things become deterministic, the more everything becomes you’re buying it off the vendor or you can circle the date on the calendar on when you’re going to get the item. There’s still something to the excitement of getting the drop you want.
• They try to be mindful about how these items are balanced against each other. If there’s a trinket that is just 25% better than anything else, that’s a problem with trinket tuning. If bad luck is you are only a little behind until you can get your best item, that’s self correcting.
• A part of dungeon loot is that bit of randomness, the dungeon loot pools aren’t too large.

What’s the Difference Between Warbound and Account-Bound?

• Warbound is tradeable until equipped.
• Warbound will drop at much higher item levels – if you’re running high keys right now, you can just get 460 piece that you can just hand to an alt.
• It should never feel required to have multiple alts to hand gear off to your main.

Any plans on allowing ensemble transmog bundles to be sold individually?

• As things rotate back into the Trading Post, they will take a look at some of the ensembles that may work better individually.
• They wanted to start them as ensembles as if they sold them individually, it’s really easy to miss pieces.