World of Warcraft Interview

The latest Blizzard Insider newsletter contains an interview with World of Warcraft producer Tom Chilton about the team’s future plans for the game’s PvP content.

Q: When the PvP system was first released, it became one of the two pillars of the main end-game content for World of Warcraft: one being the PvP content, the other one being the raid game. At the time the PvP content was introduced, the only raid content was Onyxia and Molten Core. That content has progressed a lot since then. How do you see the raid content of World of Warcraft influencing the PvP content?

A: Well, they’re very much intertwined. Any time you can get loot from a raid that will affect your chances to be successful in PvP, they’re inevitably going to be mixed in with each other, and for the most part I think that’s a good thing. We know that there are a lot of players out there that want to PvP and don’t necessarily want to raid, and we try to support them as much as possible through the PvP item rewards.

Something we’ve also done in patch 1.11 is increase the quality of those rewards that you get, trying to keep up with the inflation from the raid zones. That’s one example where they are directly interrelated. If we’d had the PvP rewards at the balance that they are today, back when we first launched the Honor System, they would have been viewed as incredibly overpowered at the time and the perception would have been that you had to PvP in order to be successful and that raiding wasn’t viable. It’s one of those things where we’re always trying to keep the balance going back and forth. And I think that both as a player and a developer, the game is more enjoyable when you mix up your activities. I find that I very much enjoy both going on raids and PvPing, and I really would like to do things to encourage more players to do both.

I don’t think players will be able to expect to gear up only by doing PvP. They might be able to gear up a lot of the way by doing PvP, but they’ll be slightly better off if they also do a little bit of raiding or do end-game instances.