Tyler Colp (PCGamer): I saw that you guys mentioned like the dungeon finder will not be in, in Wrath of the Lich King Classic. I’m kind of curious if there are any other kind of features that have been left out for sort of similar reasons from what you’ve seen with the success of Classic.
Birmingham: Sure. One of the ones that is also similarly contentious… I know we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people who are both really excited that we’re not putting the dungeon finder in; and to be clear, that’s the automatic dungeon finder; and also people who are disappointed because they were looking forward to it.
We are planning to make improvements to the group finding tool, but we don’t want those improvements to mean that you will automatically be put into a group of people without talking to them; and we don’t want it to teleport you automatically to the dungeon or allow you to play with people from other realms.
So we do want to improve that way of like listing yourself for an interested activity, finding people and talking to them, and make that available. But the other feature to answer your question that we aren’t including, that also came in like the last patch of the original Wrath of the Lich King is the automatic integration of the quest system with the map where it would tell you where the quest objectives were directly on the map; and we’re not going to put that in because it was out in the very last patch of Wrath of the Lich King, and it changes the way you play the game; and we know some players don’t want that put right in their face. They want to be able to experience the game where they’re reading the quest text, exploring the world, trying to discover where those things are, sending them to and have that kind of immersive experience of living throughout the world and exploring that through the quest text.
While we know that there are add-ons — and we’re not doing anything to prevent these — if you want to install an add-on that does this, that’s fine. That’s okay. We want you to be able to do that, but we want players who want to be able to play without that experience, who want to experience Lich King the way they did the first time when they leveled up without that, to have that opportunity without it being pushed into their face, by the default UI experience.
Zierhut: Yeah, I want to emphasize, we don’t make these kinds of changes lightly. They come from really core values to what Classic is about. We think Classic is about being social and making friends and meeting new people so that in order to make that happen, you have to run into those people on multiple occasions, you have to have a chance to play with them; and then, play with them a second time and say: “Oh yeah, I remember that guy. He was cool last time. Maybe we should be sharing my friends list. Maybe I should put them on the list of people that I try to make Dungeon groups with all the time.” After you’ve had a successful adventure run.
So we want to emphasize social and we also want to emphasize that the world and the immersion in the world; and it’s really important when you’re reading that quest texts that you’re thinking about the world and the NPCs and the motivations, what’s going on and in all locations. Whereas if you have the tool that’s showing you all on the map, go to this. You start to ignore the quest text or the NPC and go just to the location the UI is telling you to go, instead of thinking about that immersion in the world; and so, because those two values are so important to us, we want to make these changes to emphasize these values.
Birmingham: Now that you brought that up on those together like that. If there’s even a social aspect to the–
Zierhut: You are asking for help, I can’t figure it out.
Birmingham: People tend to go straight to just look it up on the website and okay. You can look it up on the website, but oftentimes I find that I actually I chat the zone or ask my guildmates first; and then if they don’t know where I have to go, then I start — well, maybe I’ll look it up on the website or think a little harder about it and then look it up.
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Eric Law (Gamerant): I actually want to go back to sort of where you guys had brushed on the question before last, with the idea that what classic really is, it’s an old school MMO in a modern MMO setting; and so I think I want to pick your guys’ brain a little bit more about what it’s like designing an MMO that is rehashing this content in this old school sort of mode when modern MMOs are all about convenience, quality of life, making things easy and quick like the dungeon finder, for example. Can you shed a little bit more of insight on how you decide what parts you want to modernize? Like adding the achievements and stuff like that; and what parts you want to keep old school?
Zierhut: I think one thing I spent a lot of time in the last five or six years, looking at social in MMOs. It’s applicable for the last project I worked on and very applicable to Classic. We didn’t have people thinking about how social systems should work back when we originally did Wrath of the Lich King.
So it’s a new lens to look at things like what promotes social, what damages social, and paying close attention to that. There’s a lot of good writing out there on how do people form friendships, the process of forming friendships, which requires you to have social proximity. But you see the same people over and over again, you have to have similarities to other people, so you decide whether you should be friends, like we’re working on the same quest together.
So we’re trying to think about, as we design for Wrath of the Lich King, how we can promote social, how we can create those situations. People can find similarity, engage in acts of reciprocity, the things that lead them to friendship and avoid damaging social proximity, which I think that’s the thing that we weren’t careful about. We worked on Wrath of the Lich King the first time because we put in features that sounded great, but made players experience less social proximity; and so we want to put in features or make changes that strengthen it instead of weaken it.
Birmingham: Also as we’ve done in Classic and Burning Crusade, we’ve had this opportunity to kind of go back and re-examine them just broadly and see like what kinds of things as we’re playing through there are we experiencing with this second approach of we’ve played now through all of these expansions, we’ve gotten into mainline, where we are in our modern World of Warcraft, we are playing things like Shadowlands, and then looking back at Classic and people have been asking us for this. It did it differently. Some of us are also like, enjoy that experience and recognize that it’s different; and so first identifying what those differences are — which was something we did of course, to be able to do the release, but then playing with them again and living with them and saying like, okay, this thing is really cool. This I actually really liked. This is creating this experience that I can’t have anymore. How do we preserve that? What do we do to keep that alive and other things that we look at and say, oh, this is actually cool on paper. Well, we brought it back and maybe it isn’t actually what we want to do going forward.
Like arena teams is a good example of that. We were really excited about it. We put extra work in to make sure that we could deliver those at Burning Crusade, even though they had been completely removed from the game engine; and so we had to like rebuild them almost from scratch in order to get them out and we’re really excited that we were able to have that experience, experienced them again and say: “Oh wow! they actually really do not really belong.” They actually make the experience, not as socially sticky. People are already trying to form new teams and trying to like get off of the team and they have a roster that’s too big. Even with the kind of late in Burning Crusade changes to arena. They caused more problems than they solved.
And so we felt like that was something that everybody was very vocal about that they wanted us to remove, and we looked at it and we said, we agree. It actually does not make a lot of sense.
Zierhut: There are other cases where a hindsight is kind of helping us deal with things that we didn’t realize were going be a problem that became problems during Wrath of the Lich King. Wintergrasp is a great example of this. It drove a great exited so to speak or influx people, changing servers and changing factions because they wanted to make sure their faction won Wintergrasp. Because they needed to go to the Vault of Archavon because it had extra loot that contributed to progression. It dropped PvP items and helped you with your PvP progression.
Like people really wanted to win Wintergrasp to go to the Vault of Archavon. So we’re thinking about ways to make it not so important. Like maybe there’s a way to go into the Archavon dungeon without winning Wintergrasp. Right? If your side loses, maybe there’s some other way you can still get in there with a little bit of extra work.
So we’re trying to find solutions to those sorts of problems that are related to social, but just related to: “You know, that was a great idea,” but in retrospect, it did the opposite of what we wanted. Wintergrasp is supposed to be the king of all outdoor world PvP events ever; and what it actually ended up doing was killing world PvP as people server-transferred to win Wintergrasp.