To everyone’s joy, the official WoW: Forever Podcast is continuing to put out episodes! This week brings episode 6 which is all about tech, and creator Shobek guested. You can watch the entire episode right now, and we’ve also put together some of the highlights from the episode below.
Raid Groups Larger Than 40 Players
There are many players that have put together massive PvP battles out in the world, and there has been wishes for raid groups that allow more than 40 players to be in the same group. In this episode, there was some dancing around the subject, but phrases like “we’ve been talking about larger raid sizes” and “never say never” were used. There might also be a whiteboard somewhere at Blizzard HQ that says “Mega Raid?” according to Principal Software Engineer Frank Williams.
Improvements to Layering
The Beta had a lot of layering issues, with layering sometimes happening when players who were on the same layer grouped up, and then were separated when they disbanded the group. Lead Software Engineer Ana Resendez reiterated that this technology is in constant state of improvement, and how much they have been able to improve it over the course of the Beta. They even mentioned that the last 24 hours of the Beta gave them a ton of information to work with, in between players killing world bosses and farming for their Tier 1 set.
They even shared this graph of how much they improved layering (or as labeled here, World Refreshes):
Rulesets Almost Could Do Instances Together
The developers told us that there were a lot of conversations about how much Rulesets should (or should not) be separated. For a while they considered letting players on PvP and Normal rulesets group up together for instanced content, but as they went down that path they realized it would have to come with a lot of restrictions. It’s easier to farm on Normal servers, so economies has to be separate, which means trade would have to be restricted in cross-ruleset groups, which makes loot in dungeons tricky. So they decided to fully separate them.
They did say that since this is a technical possibility, there is a “break glass in case of emergency” to implement some cross-over between rulesets. One example they gave was if a ruleset had a complete player base implosion, but this truly is a worst-case scenario.
Day-Night Cycles for NA & OCE Regions
Timezones are hard, you know? With players in North America and the Oceanic region playing on the same servers, players in Australia have voiced their frustration with the day-night cycle not matching their time of day. Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield said that it is technically possible to separate the day-night cycles with layering, but that the downside would be if an Australian player joins a group in a NA timezone, then it could rapidly change from nighttime to daytime in a matter of seconds.
Because this is a possibility, they want player feedback on this. Is this something you want? Take to the comments on the YouTube video, or start a Reddit thread and let them know!
Proximity Chat Is a Consideration
There has been a lot of community events using proximity chat, and the developers are aware of this and would love to bring it to the game. Nothing to announce right now, but “never say never”.
No Current Changes to Holiday Events
Although there are some hopes to bring updates to in-game holiday events like Hallow’s End or Winter Veil, there will be no major updates for launch. The team is hoping to implement more updates to these events in the future.
Next Episode: Lore!
The next episode of the WoW: Forever Podcast will be published in two weeks (no episode on launch week), and it will be all about Lore! So look forward to that hitting on November 12th.
