WoW Interview on Gamergod

Grimwell from Gamergod did an interview with Shawn Carnes, a game developer at Blizzard, about World of Warcraft.

The big news in there, at least for me, was naming a possible date for the first WoW expansion set. As I feared, the projected date is "late 2006", which will horribly disappoint some people who had dreamed of getting it *this* christmas, instead of next. Well, Blizzard was never famous for speed, but for quality. Everquest 2 will release the first expansion this year, and I'm pretty certain that by the time the first WoW expansion will be out, EQ2 will have 2 or 3. EQ1 clocked up 9 expansions in 6 years, and compared to that one expansion in two years seems rather slow. On the other side WoW has more free content added to the game with patches, while other games mostly use patches to, well, patch things.

On Real Money Trade (RMT), Shawn just said that Blizzard is against it. Apparently they are primarily relying on players ratting on others to detect virtual goods traders, as well as some monitoring of in-game activity. Hey Shawn, have a look at the IGE website if you want evidence of major WoW RMT activities. But Blizzard seems determined to ban the little guys, and ignoring the big guys. That's like going after the kid who grows a canabis plant on his balcony with the drug squad, and ignoring the big Canabis Superstore on the other side of the street.

The final interesting bit to me is that Blizzard seems to be well aware that there are less Horde players than Alliance, and equally aware that this is causing problems with the battlegrounds. They are "looking into solutions", but frankly I don't see how they are going to do it. Ask 10 people about why there are more Alliance players than Horde and you get 10 different answers. My personal theory is that this is out of a preference to play the "good guys", but that is just a guess.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:45 AM Permanent Link