World of Warcraft Designer Q&A

Blizzard’s official World of Warcraft community website has been updated with a new designer Q&A detailing the creation process behind Tirisfal Glades’ Scarlet Monastery. Check it out:

Q: When you first started playtesting Scarlet Monastery were there any surprising strategies from the players? Cheese loopholes you had to close?

A: Yeah, players exploited the hell out of it! During Beta, this was the highest level dungeon in the game, so it was essentially the end-game content – which it was never designed to be. We learned a lot from the process though, lessons that carried over into the final game to help polish it. We saw game mechanics getting bent. For example, aggroing monsters and then using geography to kill them – standing in places where the player couldn’t be reached but the player could get at the monster. We fixed that by not allowing players to hit mobs that couldn’t strike back. Also, we saw players running SM again and again and acquiring too much loot, so we added in the binding system to keep the number of powerful items in the world lower than it was. Another example is that spawn timing was too long, lower level players were beating the dungeon through sheer tenacity just by coming back again and again until they managed to get through it. This was allowing players of lower level than should be able to make it through succeeding and getting the loot it generated. There are a lot of other things we learned from watching players tackle the Beta (too many to list them all here) – resourceful players always find the path of least resistance and are often surprising with their inventive solutions.