Tides of Vengeance Developer Q&A - Ion Hazzikostas

Feedbot · Dec 15, 2018

Developer Q&A - Ion Hazzikostas
Ion Hazzikostas will be answering your Tides of Vengeance questions today.

Communication

Patch notes were thorough, but not complete.
Profession requirements on crafted gear wasn't an intended change in the form it took.
Patch 8.0 crafted gear didn't have the profession requirement like previous expansions, this was fixed as being a bug without the entire team being involved. This was fixed as soon as the team realized what happened.
Going forward, in Season 2 crafted gear will have the profession requirement.
Some changes would clutter the notes, like belt clipping or typos.
Some changes were missed, such as Stealth detection on Underrot mobs. This change was made a while back, and the team forgot by the time the notes were being created.
Going forward, the team will try to ensure the notes are more complete.
One of the challenges for the WoW team has been evolving their processes as the team size grew. It used to be 5-6 people working on a certain feature, so everyone was aware of what was going on. This is no longer the case, as more people that are spread out are involved with the game.
The team wants to provide more reasoning in hotfix or patch notes when changes are made. They have been trying to do that for class changes, but will do it for more things in the future.

Cross-Faction Communication

There was a change that broke an addon that allowed players to talk cross-faction for RP reasons.
Cross-Faction communication has the potential for toxicity, but it's very different when there is consent. If you are friends with someone or in a community, you can talk to them.
The team didn't mean to break the addon, but can't restore the functionality.
The team is looking at adding the Elixir of Tongues, allowing you to understand the opposite faction for an amount of time.
This Elixir should go out in a hotfix this weekend or early next week.

Deleting Mythic+ Keys

This was a quick change that wasn't fully thought out on the team's part. It was hotfixed in at the start of the season.
Deleting keystones caused some bugs and led to emerging social issues, where players would cherry pick what seemed like the easier dungeons.
Since Burning Crusade, the team has tried to point players at different dungeons. Remember the Mechanar problem? It wasn't the most fun, but it was the best place to go and farm badges.
Some Affixes will make some dungeons easier than others, but the goal is for most dungeons to be similarly difficult.