Tom Chilton Interview: Patch 5.2 and beyond

Version française de l'interview | English version of the interview

Patch 5.2: The Thunder King

There are a lot of raids available on the Raid Finder. Will patch 5.2 allow players to subscribe to several raids simultaneously ?

That’s something that our tech can allow. It makes sense when the different instances are not gated behind other instances, for example that wouldn’t be super really cool at first with 5.2 as the different wings open up, but that’s something we’ve been enabling over time and it’s probably something we will allow with the raids. But we’d like to be cautious about how we expand that.


Last year, Ghostcrawler said that Spirits of Harmony could become Bind on Account. Any chance that this happens in patch 5.2 ?

It's not gonna happen in patch 5.2 as it’s a little bit too late before it is deployed, but it’s something that we will continue to talk about going forward.


How much time will it need approximately to totally unblock the Isle of Thunder on a realm ?

It will depend on the realm, but we’re guessing that it will be somewhere in the month neighbourhood; in some cases, 6 weeks. It’s a little bit hard to predict what the scale is going to be.


World Bosses were reintroduced in Mists of Pandaria. Patch 5.2 will add two more. What makes them different and even better than the Sha of Anger or Galleon ?

We had the chance to refine some of the fight mechanics a little bit more.

In the case of Galleon, because he was placed in the Valley of Four Winds that is very central in the game, we had performance problems for players in the zone. You can argue that placing the two new world bosses in a central zone is going to be better because you will not end up being regularly swarmed by players killing everything on their way to the bosses.

However, the new bosses are located in a very interesting new place in the sense that since it’s hard to get to the Island of Thunder (you can’t flight there), players will not be able to just fly over them and wait for them to spawn.



You've been working on MMORPGs for a long time. What are the main differences between the time you were on Ultima Online and now, with World of Warcraft's patch 5.2 ?

The differences are enormous. Certainly the genre has evolved a lot. It’s come a long way in terms of how you get into the game and find other people and play alongside them, and the types, the variety and the depth of the content. When I look back to Ultima Online, the content that we had there was really rudimentary compared to the things that we do now. The evolution of the genre as a whole has been dramatic.

There are things that we used to do that you can’t really do as well anymore or at least are a lot more difficult to do. There was ways Ultima Online was the wild west of MMOs, with all the kind of PvP stuff: you could kill somebody and take all their stuff. There were some huge emotional ups and downs, which is cool and totally works for some people. But there was an overhaul refine even from the time we were when World of Warcraft first launched.


Patch 5.2 has been digged into by a lot of websites, either by writing dedicated articles on the PTR or via datamining. Is it still possible to reserve real surprises to players nowadays ?

We used to try to hide things many years ago. We had the philosophy when World of Warcraft first came out that it was really cool for players to discover stuff they had no idea existed. That sort of broke down over time as you had websites that did the datamining to the point that we realized it was not going to be a battle that we could win. In theory, there aren’t a lot of ways for us to do that except in very limited cases. You can take in example the heroic bonus boss of patch 5.2 and how players didn’t really know anything about it.

We can do it on very limited bases like that, but it’s not something we can realistically do across the game. Part of that is because the testing process that involves players on the public test realms is actually very important. Players really help us refine what we’re doing and catch a lot of design problems or class problems. If we just surprise everybody with it, there would be a lot of stuff that would not come out as well. We saw this when we did Blackwing Lair back in 2005. We really had that idea back then that we wanted for the next raid to be a big surprise in terms of what the fights were and how they worked. We didn’t test them on the public test realms and we ended up with a lot of really really nasty bugs. That sort of tells us how important it is to involve players in our testing.


Scenarios are usually played very quickly, sometimes without having the time to read what NPCs say. Solo scenarios of patch 5.2 will allow players to take their time, read everything that happens and learn more about the lore of World of Warcraft. Do you plan to make scenarios of patchs 5.0 and 5.1 playable as solo player one day ?

We don’t currently have that plan, although it is something we can talk about. It’s not something that we really seriously discussed in the past. There would have some values to players, although I’m not sure how many players would really actively do that. There is not so much in the existing scenarios that it is really hard to catch at all if you want to as it is. We still expect to do solo scenarios in the future whenever it makes sense. They are a better way for us to do the events that we want to do without the complexity of phasing. We will also obviously do multiplayer scenarios in the future.


A lot of players criticized Blizzard because of the lack of content of Cataclysm, or what they felt like a lack of content. With Mists of Pandaria, players have a LOT of things to do and the developers really have a good rhythm on new content: a new release every 2 to 3 months on average. There are even some players complaining that patch 5.2 arrives too soon. Do you think you have the right rhythm with Mists of Pandaria ?

Yes, I do. I think it’s a much better problem to have content that’s too fast than content that’s too slow, because it’s not like the old content really goes away, or at least not with any kind of meaningful speed. If you’re not done with your 5.0 raid when 5.2 comes out then you certainly will be able to keep doing that and finish it in whatever timeframe that you want. I remember back in the early days of WoW, when guilds were much slower to progress in raids, we released Ahn’Qiraj and Naxxramas when the vast majorirty of the raiding population was still doing Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. We didn’t really have a complaint about that. People were more thinking “Cool! There’s still a lot of stuff out there to do!”


I remember that for Naxxramas, a lot of people didn’t have the chance to go there (hopefully they were able back on Cataclysm). Do you take that in consideration and you’re trying not to push updates a little bit too quickly ?

For the most part of the current content, people can do it. In the case of Naxxramas, it’s more that the new Naxxramas eliminated the need of doing the old one, which opened a lot of new people to do the new version which was very similar to the old, but not identical. But there are still players today that go back into Ahn’Qiraj and Black Temple. We have seen players do this kind of stuff for a long time, granted it’s not like going in Molten Core with a 40 level 60 players raid. But maybe that’s something we will be able to support at some time in the future.



What’s the thing you like the best in patch 5.2 ?

I’ve been asked this question before but it’s really difficult to answer. What I like the most about patch 5.2 is the overall package. It feels like a ton of content and we will upscale the player base in general. As a player, I know I’m going to be doing the Isle of Thunder, quest content, the raids, the Treasure Room, all this kind of things.

The most exciting single thing to me might be the Treasure Room because it’s not something that we did before, it’s a single player scenario kind of concept and it’s a very novel thing for World of Warcraft. I’m very excited about that even though obviously the raiders will find the raids to be the most interesting thing and people that prefer questing will likely find the island itself more interesting.


When you invite a traveller on your two seats mount, they get dismounted when you charge a new zone. Did you have the chance to fix that for patch 5.2 ?

That may have been fixed in patch 5.2, but I have to check. However, we were aware of it and we have been actively working to fix that.


Incoming patches

We have heard about patches 5.3 and 5.4 for Mists of Pandaria. How many patches do you plan for the expansion and do you already know what they will consist of ?

We have a general idea on what we’re going to have in these patches. We certainly plan to do a 5.3 and 5.4, and then a patch 5.5 is a possibility although you might view that patch as an introductory event to an next expansion. But it depends on the timing because it may end up having its own meaningful amount of content. But that’s a little too far away to know for sure how it’s going to shake out. We do know that 5.3 is going to be a patch that contains fresh and interesting content and will keep people going to the next raid tier that’ll be going to be in patch 5.4.


When do you plan to release the new character models? They have been in discussion for a long time but still not released. Any plans for that ?

This is something we are actively working on and at some point we will reveal them and give players a glimpse of it.


Do you plan to give rewards to players that have been on World of Warcraft for a very long time, for example for 6 to 7 years, such as mounts or pets or other things?

Generally speaking, the way we like to reward players is by having them play the game. We had the anniversary title event where you could get an achievement and an item by logging in during that anniversary period, and I expect we’ll continue to do that. Next year will be our 10 years anniversary so we’ll want to do something cool for that too. Otherwise, we already have a lot of content that award players with mounts and/or pets.




Instead of having players logging in during a specific time window, you could count the number of months they have been playing and reward them based on that.

I do think we can do a better job of recognizing accomplishments that players have made in those times when the content was relevant, such as playing through the content of Burning Crusade when it was considered as the current expansion, same for Wrath of the Lich King and vanilla. I hope this is something we will be able to do as time goes on, typically recognizing that players have been able to accomplish that stuff. I do not think that this is reflected in the number of years a player has been playing.


Will it be possible to buy the T14 set with Valor Points ?

The tier gear is still going to drop off the bosses in the raids themselves. Valor Points are going to be used for a variety of other items that are not gear set pieces. The difference between now and before is that now you can use the Raid Finder to do the older raids and there will be a lot of players doing those. So if there is something you need in the 5.0 tier raids, players will be able to queue in the Raid Finder and get those items.


Will it be possible to access all of the Golden Lotus quests in the future without having to go through the current reputation raising process ?

Through an extent we’re going to have that in 5.2 with reputation you can earn from dungeons. Golden Lotus is an example: you can earn Golden Lotus reputation by running your first dungeon or scenario a day [“for which we will let you choose which reputation you want to earn from”, ed.]. This will take longer than doing the actual quests, but it certainly is a possibility if you keep doing it up to exalted.


The Guild Finder tool has always stayed very basic. Do you expect to enhance it ?

It is something we’d like to improve, although that would probably happen somewhere later down the line. We don’t have immediate plans to make changes to it.