World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Interviews
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Q: What would you say have been the biggest failings of the WoW since launch and how have regular patches and expansions such as The Burning Crusade helped you address them?
A: I guess the only one that comes to mind - and I think my boss would be okay with me saying this because he redesigned it - would be the Honours system. Even though the design was pretty solid, it didn't actually fit into our philosophy of casual gameplay or being able to play only an X amount of hours a week. If you wanted to be at the top, you had to play a lot - and there was no getting around that. So, we changed the Honours system to two different systems so we still have the skill-based element with the Arena system and we have the Honours system 2.0 which allows you to play an hour a week and you can slowly move towards your goals. Actually, the Arena system allows that too but it benefits high-levels of skill more. I would say that's one of the few systems that we really had to redesign and everything else has been about slight tweaks.
And the interview at ComputerAndVideoGames.com chats with the very same people:
Q: Towards the end of last year there was talk from Blizzard about releasing a WoW expansion every year. Is that still the plan?
A: Absolutely. This one took us a bit longer because we had to stabilise a lot of things. World of Warcraft is a massive game. The infrastructure and operation behind World of Warcraft is enormous, so it took us time to get back into the groove and release the first expansion.
But we think we definitely put ourselves in the situation where we're going to put a goal to ourselves to release an expansion every year.
If you asked me to commit to you that the next expansion will come next January, I probably won't do it.
