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r/heroesofthestorm Blizzcon Interview

Announcement

Hey everyone! While we were at Blizzcon this last weekend, /u/ScarletBliss and I had an opportunity to interview some members of the Heroes of the Storm Development Team! I've transcribed that interview below, and under each question and answer is a TL;DR, because man, this thing is a wall of text. Also, as you may know, I can't spell, so please forgive any spelling or grammar errors.

Our interview was with

Interview

Q1) Hermes - I think to start, we asked the community for questions, and one of the highest upvoted ones that wasn’t already answered pertained to the engine. So we all know that the game engine started from StarCraft 2 and has been heavily altered to fit Heroes of the Storm. Is having to deal with that legacy system blocking you from implementing any features you would like to introduce? Obviously players like to talk about a shiny new engine, and if you could make that happen, is there anything that you would be able to implement that you can’t currently?

A1) Claudio - Sure, so at this point we’ve diverged completely from StarCraft. So our development team based in Heroes is completely separate from StarCraft. We have an amazing slew of engineers that do work on our game and we’ve added tons of new features to it. We currently have no intentions of implementing a brand new engine for the game. It preforms well, and we’re introducing performance improvements all the time, like trying to reduce reconnect times and everything we can do. We have systems around that in the future that we can do to support things further, but rebuilding the engine is not really on the books. I think that Blizzard as a conglomerate would rather us just build a new engine for a brand new game rather than an existing game that’s already doing pretty well.

TL;DR - No, we're not making a new engine for the game. We are always improving the one we have though. Better reconnect coming soonTM. Oh, also Blizzard is working on a new game ;)

Q2) Hermes - Awesome, so another thing that Reddit is a really big fan of and we’ve seen before is the Brightwing model rework. They were wondering if that’s a possibility ever?

A2) Claudio - Sure, it’s on the table. It’s something we have to be really careful with tough, because for as vocal as people can be about wanting the new thing, there’s a lot of people that really like the current thing, and those people don’t show up and say “I like the current thing”, it’s usually just the people that want change that are the outspoken ones. And so we do have to be careful, we have some tech coming in next year that may allow the best of both worlds in that situation. It’s not really something I can go into at the moment, but hopefully we can satisfy both groups with it.

Q2.5) Scarlet - So hopefully we can switch between both models?

A2.5) Che'von - We don’t information about that yet. But once we have announcements we’ll make sure to talk about it.

TL;DR - We're hopefully going to have a system that let's everyone be happy with both models sometime next year. Maybe by switching between models on a per user basis?

Q3) Hermes - You mentioned you have that vocal minority, and then obviously there’s a lot of people who like what they have and don’t ever talk about it. How do you find a balance there?

A3) John - That ones just tricky. (the room laughs) In general, we always try to make sure we find ways, different avenues to talk to the community. One of them that’s a good example is Reddit, another one is our forums. Another one is by playing the game actively with our community, we get to see what people like to do, and how people like to play our game. Another great experience is BlizzCon, because a lot of times, I’ll hear things for the first time. “Oh! That’s a really cool thought”, I’ve never really thought about it from at least that angle, right? Because they’re approaching it from just a pure player standpoint, and unfortunately I have the bias of being a designer on all the projects and I always kind of angle it from “Oh, that would be really cool to produce this product or make this new battleground", because that’s what I focus on, and so it’s basically just making sure we always listen to every different facet of community interaction, and make sure that we don’t just only use the subreddit, or only use our forums, or only use BlizzCon. We use everything, and we try to collect as much data as possible from every different facet. We have a great community team, Che'von does a great job, and so everyone gives us information from different areas.

We have to make sure we think globally because the French community, the German community, the Italian community, every, sorry, there’s too many countries to list. Because I’m also going to miss one and then I’ll be in trouble. (the room laughs) Every single community has a different approach to that, especially if you look at from an esports perspective. The EU teams are kicking ass right now. They just took down the first game vs MVP Black, we’re sitting here on our phones and we’re like “Yeaaaah!”. So it’s interesting to see how different metas form and all of that impacts the way we develop the game, and so we try to make sure we are always listening in every different aspect as possible. That’s actually one of the tricky parts of being a designer, is that our community is who we’re developing the game for, and so we need to make sure that we’re always listening in every way we can and even if you’re quiet, you’re still important to us and that you know that, that’s really our target.

Q3.5) Hermes - I think of all the Blizzard games, you guys are the most “We’ll tweak it, see how it works, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll change it back or tweak it again.”

A3.5) Claudio - Yeah, and we love to iterate. That’s our goal.

A3.5 2) John - I’ve been on a couple different development teams and this is one of the unique teams where they also like to iterate with the community, which is very different to me. A lot of times you iterate internally and you work internally, and then “Okay, this is the perfect thing, ship it”, and then “They’re just wrong, they don’t know yet”, right. That’s not the way we think, we go “Okay, they’re very vocal, okay, maybe we missed that, and we need to respond, or we need to listen, or we need to, you know, pay attention and reevaluate our decisions”, and I love the fact that we’re healthy enough in that. Because I think that’s the healthiest way to approach game design, and I love being part of this team because of that.

TL;DR - We're taking in as much information as we can from all the sources we can. We look at every way the game is played, and all the markets that it's played in. We like to iterate with the community, rather than tell them that they're wrong. We love to iterate on things until we feel they're in the best place.

Q4) Scarlet - One of the often request features from the users is more stats shown in game. For example, how many coins I turned in on Blackhearts Bay, or how long I CC'd people during this game. What are your plans for implementing that in game. Are there any challenges?

A4) Claudio - There’s definitely challenges. We do have access to a lot of that data, and we store it. It’s visualizing it for the player in an intelligent way in the UI and making it flow good. I don’t know if you guys saw the panel yesterday, the Stage of the Nexus panel. Travis talked about personalized stats, so we’re going to start there and going to give you those little nuggets of like “You’re like top 1% or top 20% of players in your bracket for damage dealt this game”. So we’ll start on that, and as with everything, we’re going to iterate on it and we’re going to build further and further along that systems, and hopefully we can get down to the granular level that you’re asking for.

TL;DR - UI is hard to get right, and we want it to be right.

Q5) Hermes - Something they discussed at the Hero Deep Dive when they were discussing Ragnaros is that you guys went through a lot of iterations on him. At one point you were playing as Majordomo and you’d summon Rag, and there was a very late minute change where that wasn’t exactly the feeling you wanted for that character. So you rigged up Ragnaros to be the character that you play as, and so that’s obviously a very late minute change you guys made, and I was wondering, have you ever gotten a hero almost done or even fully completed and then decided that they didn’t have the feel or ascetic or meet the lore and decided not to release them?

A5.1) Claudio - Totally.

A5.2) John - I guess I’m going to deviate the question just a little bit, because I’m mainly focused on battlegrounds, and I have to say I’ve done that on battleground. The first Diablo map to release was not supposed to be Battlefield of Eternity. It was supposed to be a completely different battleground, but we ended up, we went through about 6 weeks of development, had it fully implemented, we hadn’t started the art yet, but through design it kind of got to this point where, you know what, this isn’t Diablo enough. You know, and we just scrapped it. We shelved the whole battleground. We actually still like the idea and mechanics behind it, but we were really chasing the Blizzard franchise of Diablo for that battleground, and it was just like “Ahhh, we missed it”. And so we started all over again. That’s what Infernal Shrines became, because that was my new focus. I started working on Infernal Shrines, and at that point we go, “Okay, well we’re not going to make the time requirement for Infernal Shrines because we’re starting all over again, and the other battleground developer at the time, Meng Song was really ahead of schedule on Battlefield of Eternity, and so we’re like “Alright Meng, get in there! Get in there!” And so a lot of the time we will make those adjustments because we know what’s best, well, we don’t know, but we think we know what’s best for the game.

We try to make the decisions to hopefully make proper mechanics for the game, and also really kind of highlight the worlds of Blizzard that we want to do and add to Heroes of the Storm, as best as we can. When a Hero doesn’t really feel right, I’m just assuming they think kinda along the same lines I do of “Oh, we really love this mechanic, but we really need to hit it. And it needs to be out of the park, and Ragnaros, it’s not a character you can kinda miss on, right? That character needs to just be a home run, right? And so, they did a great job on his character. I love Ragnaros, he’s so fun to play, all the different Ults, taking over a fort, and being this giant monster feels so enjoyable and feels like a raid boss. I actually was constantly pitching about “So you guys aren’t going to make Rag right, so I can use him as a battleground?” And they’re just going like “No, not yet, we’re figuring that out.” .. “But I want to use him.” .. “No, we’re going to see if he’s a good hero first.” .. “But, but, he’s a raid boss, I should have him”. And so there’s a lot of conversation about that too.

A5.3) Claudio - He was probably one of the heroes that stretched the time limit the most. We usually allot ourselves maybe 2 months to really really get solid on the kit for a hero. I think Rag was probably double that. And we knew he was a BlizzCon hero. We have some ways in production where we can move some things around. We work on multiple heroes at a time, and sometimes if one hero’s trending behind another, we have the ability to switch their release dates, which might buy us another week or two. But when you have a hero like Ragnaros for BlizzCon, you don’t get to switch your release dates, and so you’re really locked in. We just bled over, and the team, we worked the team into the ground for Ragnaros across the board and they obviously did a great job. As soon as the community and everyone can play him, I think they’ll see that.

Q5 3) Hermes - Well he feels great. You guys did a great job.

Q5 4) Scarlet - I love the flame wave that just travels across the map!

TL;DR - The first Diablo map wasn't going to be Battlefield of Eternity. We scrapped our first go because it didn't meet the Diablo flavor. We think Ragnaros really hits the flavor, and took FOREVER to get right. But we got it right. He's a ton of fun to play. Also, maybe Rag will be in a battleground one day?

Q6) Scarlet - On that note, I have another question. Because for example, for characters like Ragnaros, they have a very strong lore fantasy attached to them. Are there any characters which you feel it’s very difficult to implement their lore correctly into the game, and so they haven’t been implemented?

A6) Claudio - So, we tend to select heroes that have a very strong history at Blizzard. Out list of characters is gigantic, right? We can pick anything all the way down to a dryad. That’s an interesting case where we have some history with it, but there’s a lot of room to play. Ragnaros has a very strong fantasy, because people harken back to that Vanilla Wow day of trading Molten Core and playing agains him, and so he has flames, fire and Sulfuras, and you can kind of play around with those things and so we just kind of decide what we want in the game, do we want to create another summon and so maybe we'll nix the idea of like a Son of Flame but we'll use a ton of Sulfuras in his kit or something.

So it can be a challenge to decide what part of the lore it's going to hit but for the most part, if we're going to make a Sonya right, like we have a very strong place to start, but characters from Diablo 3, in particular like Li-Ming, they have a lot of build paths that you can take them and so it's mostly up to the designer who's in charge of that hero. They're really going to focus on that style that they played the Wizard in Diablo 3, for example, so Ragnaros, no ones played has him before, but I think that as long as you have fire, and meteors and Sulfuras, you're in a pretty good starting spot.

A6.1) John - And really it started to feel Ragnaros to me when they added that amazing VO. "DIE INCECT!" .. "Yes! That's Ragnaros.

A6.2) Claudio - Yeah, VO really helps a lot.

TL;DR - We have a huge list of characters to add to the game, so finding heroes with strong lore isn't hard to do. Ragnaros has a lot of history, so getting there were a lot of different ways to take him. Even with something like Diablo characters who might not be 'named' characters, they have a strong aesthetic. The designer developing the hero will likely develop their kit based on how they played that class in Diablo

Q7) Hermes - Going back to battleground for a second, Haunted Mines was taken out of rotation almost a year ago with the introduction of Cho'Gall, and it's coming back, and so I was wondering if you could speak to the iteration you had on the map, and how you decided to move forward with the map.

A7) John - That was a tricky one, because we knew we wanted to do a pass, and we had actually done a couple of passes on it, you know, the public has seen them all, but all the different layout changes and we realized we're still not hitting what we want mechanically for this battleground. So the best way to adjust this is just to take it offline, and do kind of a reboot on this battleground. We knew there was a couple fantasy hits that the community loved, that as developers we loved, and one of the core goals of Blizzard games is to develop games that we like to play, right? The fantasy of going into that dungeon and chasing after skeletons and having that big brawl down there is really fun, so I knew I couldn't kill that, right? I knew that, alright, I still have to have the two levels, and there's definitely some technical limitations to that. I loved having that hole that let you peek down, and so alright, I have to have to put that back in there, but there's a lot of technical limitations around that specifically. They cannot be visually on the same screen, even from the game engine eye, not just from the player eye, otherwise the game just doesn't work. It's not good, right? And I wanted to change the layout to bring the edges closer together, meaning I wanted to bring the holes closer together, but I couldn't do that.

So I ended up having to take a lot of looks at what I wanted to do, and really it started out with a lot of conversations, of "Okay, what is wrong with Haunted Mines, and what, even if it's not inherently wrong on it's own, a compilation of the mechanics that didn't synergies well together?" One of the ones we identified was having a lane that doesn't feel like a lane that matters to you was really negative. You always kind of have that one player that gets stuck down there and "Alright, you're the guy that defends vs 4 people, have fun." And then, if you're losing, and you have no ability to get in there and get skulls, you're just kind of like "Well this is kind of going to be, at least it's a quick beating, but there's not much I can do." Well we wanted to have more opportunity for the losing team to get in there and kind of get scrappy and get a couple skulls, maybe even get a pick and actually turn the fight around. We actually ended up opening up 4 entrances to the mines, and not just two. We've also taken the two entrances from the far away points and put them closer together, and also made the map truly symmetrical, as before it was kind of symmetrical. It was a marvel that we tried that because it's really tricky to get a good state of balance when a map isn't truly symmetrical. Though the data showed that it was actually relatively event for both sides, so Meng did a great job on that first implementation pass.

Then we also, we kept on trying different things in the mines. "Well, let's put the boss on the right side and most of the skulls on the left side, alright let's do that, let's have this really long one. If you guys remember the very first Haunted Mines, that mine down there was long. It was like an adventure to get the skulls. And that boss was really far away, and so this time around, I wanted to take a, at least try and idea of putting the boss in the dead middle, and making all the fight around him. It kind of worked out, because originally we thought players would be able to control the mines so heavily because the boss was, you know, a focal point. Then they could just kind of poke and "Hey no no, you don't get those skulls." But if we separate it, and add good vision blockers, it was really kind of easy to sneak around and grab skulls, because there's 4 entrances, I can't really lock you out. I can, you know, if you're on boss, there's a hole that tells me "Hey, they're on boss", so if I look down the hole, the hole's right over the boss, so I'm like "Hey, they're doing boss, quick, get all the edge skeletons, get some skulls". That telegraphs it better than before, what happened, because while we had a hole so hopefully you don't get ambushed down there, players learned that edge. They would wait just outside of vision, and you'd come in and you'd get ganked anyway, so it didn't really work. So we wanted to give you a piece of information that was valuable, and that even though you've played 30 games, was still valuable, which is "Hey, they're on boss", or "Hey, they're not on boss". And so that's why we changed the hole to that.

We also made it so that the golems themselves rotate lanes, making both lanes valuable. We also kinda wanted to get rid of the, "Alright, you do this, then you do this, then you do this" type of gameplay, which is "alright, I always go in here and get these two camps, then I go to this camp, and then there's pretty much a premium path to get skulls. I basically made the distribution of skulls much more even though out the whole Mines, so really grabbing any skull camp is valuable. There isn't one that is like "Oh, this is the best one", and the best ones were close together, so this is where you have to start. I wanted to get rid of that. We got rid of the bruiser camp in the middle, because we knew there was this "Okay, I'm winning, take the bruiser camp." Now it's two sapper camps, they're separated from each other, they're both very meaningful. If you remember sappers from Towers of Doom, they do a lot of damage. Well now if you get some sappers going into the Core at the end, that's going to be pretty meaningful, that's going to break that shield down. I really like mercenary camps that have player interaction, that you're not as much fire and forget, like some of the merc camps are now a days. Knights are one of those camps that we see more often than not grabbed and then never supported. Sappers are one of the camps on Towers of Doom that we see get the most support, people escort them the most. "I want them to explode!" And they're a moment, "Boom!" and then they're done. Right? And you want that explosion, that's really gratifying, and then on the opposite side, it's really gratifying to stop them, right? So it's a really rewarding experience for both sides, and so we wanted to bring them into a regular map and we thought, this would be a really great test, experiment. I think it's going to work out. Those were our goals.

TL;DR - Haunted Mines wasn't what we wanted it to be. We took it out of rotation and redid the whole thing. We have 4 enterances to the mines, the boss is in the middle, and the skeletons are spread evenly around the outside. The golems now spawn in alternating lanes so that you don't get such snowbally games. There's a hole right in the middle so you can see if people are on boss. We removed the Knights camp and replaced it with two Sapper camps.

Q8) Hermes - One last question about battlegrounds, they mentioned during one of the panels that they're going to look at cutting down on the map pool, and rotating that throughout seasons. When you do that, are you going to look at maps that we already have and see if any of them need more tweaking at all, or more iteration?

A8) John - Absolutely. I think we want to always look at maps and their iterations. I don't think the map pool alone is going to make us do that. I've actually been wanting to have an excuse, and so this is kind of probably giving it to me. I also want to look at, this also gives us a better idea to step back, we're at 12 when we turn Haunted Mines back on. That's a lot of battlegrounds for players to use, and so I get to go through now and go "What's the best groupings, what are the cool ways [to group them]."

I need to speak with Travis more about his map rotation systems that he's been developing. I kind of gave him some pitches in the long run, but I'm not exactly sure where he's landed. There's going to be fun ideas there where "Oh, do we actually want to put a group of the same like battlegrounds in for a rotation so that players will modify their meta?" Because battlegrounds have always been designed that way, where they're going to hopefully challenge the way players pick their heroes, and challenge the way they look at the game. I know the balance guys are going to love me for this, but maybe certain heroes are going to fall out of love for a little bit, just because there's a lot of this type of battleground in the rotation, and I'll be like "Guys, don't tweak him yet, it's probably because of the map rotation. Wait until the next rotation hits."

A8.1) Claudio - Yeah we're going to have to be cognizant of that.

A8.2) John - As we get a larger hero pool, which we're getting at, it'll actually be healthy for the game, because then we'll see a nice ebb and flow of heroes being popular and not popular. Just like battlegrounds, having a fun ebb and flow of their rotation. I think that will just kind of create an ecosystem that's constantly moving, constantly varied, and you know, exciting to participate in.

TL;DR - We're absolutely going to look at maps that aren't in rotation. The rotation will hopefully develop a new meta, and hero design is going to have to consider the map rotation when balancing.

Q9) Scarlet - This is probably one of the more circle-jerky questions, but it was really highly upvoted (the room laughs). One of the most anticipated heroes for Heroes of the Storm is Kel'thuzad. What are your plans regarding him?

A9) Claudio - We can't talk about any new heroes we're working on. We definitely hear the community on that. He's on our list of 250, and he's definitely higher on that list. Obviously he's a super big A-lister, but we don't have any details to say. But we know the community really wants it.

Hermes - We knew you wouldn't be able to say anything haha.

Claudio - He's coming tomorrow!

John - It's always worth that shot! That's not truth! He's not coming tomorrow, don't quote him on that!

TL;DR - Kel'thuzad is at the top of the list, but we can't talk about it. Also, he's not coming out tomorrow.

Q10) Hermes - You guys have now implemented two heroes from Overwatch. Both of them fit the Overwatch aesthetic very well, specifically with Tracer, I think you guys nailed her. It feels the same when you're playing her between systems. Can you talk about some of those challenges, what that's like to have something, like you had said with Ragnaros, no one has ever played as Ragnaros, so you can kind of build his kit, but with Tracer, there are people who have put hundreds of hours into Tracer, so what are some of the challenges in developing that?

A10) Claudio - So on the hero design side, we will typically, for really well established heroes like Overwatch Heroes, we will pick a very passionate designer to work on those heroes. Nathan LaMusga who's one of our hero designers plays a crap to of Overwatch, plays a lot of Tracer.

A10.1) John - And actually, a quick anecdote, he's actually one of our top 10 Overwatch players, before we ever released Overwatch, in internal testing, and was an exclusive Tracer player at the time. He played A TON of Tracer.

A10.2) Claudio - It's a natural fit to pull someone like that in. We're not just going to give it to, you know, someone who is very unfamiliar with Overwatch, because they're not going to hit the notes that we hit for her. We're typically pretty smart about which Overwatch heroes we're bringing in. We can see their kit translation to our game, and see that they're in a very unique place, so we're going to be smart about which ones we choose. We'll develop the tech we need to make those things happen. We didn't have the auto fire while moving, that was new tech we had to develop, but we get to leverage it now for which ever Overwatch heroes we need to in the future, or other non Overwatch heroes if we wanted to do something. They've been a pretty fluid transfer for all the ones we've worked on, honestly. Like all the Team 4 guys have given us a lot of inspiration and a very easy path to pull them in.

TL;DR - We pick heroes that have kits that translate really well. We might have to develop tech to bring them in, but once it's in, we can reuse it. We give the hero design to developers that really love those heroes and play them a lot.

Q11) Scarlet - Another question regarding Overwatch. We often see a bit of an overlap with certain kits in Heroes and Overwatch. For example, Nova and Widowmaker. So Widowmaker was instead implements as a skin. What are some of the biggest challenges in porting Overwatch heroes into Heroes of the Storm?

A11) Claudio - We had Nova in our game for a very long time, even while Overwatch was being developed internally. I couldn't confirm this, but my guess would be that they took some inspiration from what we had done with Nova, and just other snipers in other games in general. Our Hero pool is pretty sizable at this point, I wouldn't say that we only have room for one sniper, but wether it's Widowmaker or Ana or some other type of sniper character, we're very conscious of stepping on future hero production. Widowmaker is just not a hero that we're interested in bringing into the Nexus at this point, so we decided we can honor her though a skin, so it was a very conscious decision to do that. That doesn't mean that she couldn't show up in the future, and maybe we would have to modify her [Nova's] skin slightly to make that transition of bringing her in more separated from the skin that we had already done. But with a list of 200-300 heroes, we have a lot to pull from before we get there.

TL;DR - Maybe Widowmaker will be a hero one day, but not anytime soon. We have a list of over 200 characters we want to add to the game, and Widowmaker is low on that list. We try to make sure we're not duplicating heroes with similar kits.

Q12) Hermes - Another question that the community was really interested in pertained to the Treasure Goblin mount that was part of the Diablo event from a long time ago. They were wondering if that was ever coming back, or if you guys had any interest in those more gold sinky mounts. Also how do you decided, when developing a mount, wether it's going to be a gold mount or a real money mount?

A12) Claudio - I can't speak to wether we're going to bring the Treasure Goblin back. We typically like to make new things, that doesn't mean we wont bring old things back. We have a great marketing team, and a team that helps us get a feel from the community, a really good Community Team. We listen to a lot of community feedback on that stuff, we do like the gold sink mounts, the money pigs and those sorts of things, so we'll continue to create those. They're a nice flavor add that we can get to the community, and as people stock gold and you get stuff from Brawls and you're getting more gold, it just gives you a nice way to show off and do stuff. And Travis has talked about progression and stuff, I could totally see us like, "Hit hero level 700 and you get this crazy mount here." We love that kind of stuff, right? So yeah, you're going to see a lot of that.

TL;DR - No comment on when / if the Treasure Goblin is coming back. We do like having gold sink mounts, and there are likely more coming. We're also considering adding them as account level rewards. Maybe.

Q13) Scarlet - Part of the Reddit user base was asking for a Clan or Guild feature for Heroes of the Storm. Are there any plans or challenges when implementing such a system?

A13) Claudio - We do have plans for Clans. If you saw Travis talk about stuff yesterday, it is on our list. It is a massive feature, it takes a ton of work to develop something like that. It's on the list, but we can't really talk about it moving forward but it is something we're very interested in supporting for the community, especially with such a team based game.

TL;DR - Clans is a huge undertaking, and we're working on it. No ETA.

Q14) Hermes - So you guys are obviously in the subreddit all the time, you guys are very active. I was wondering if there was anything that has made it into the game that specifically came about because of Reddit.

A14) John - Well, Azmodunk. (Room laughs)

A14.1) Claudio - Yeah, absolutely! Bam! Haha there are so many things.

A14.2) John - I can also tell you right now, there are a lot of great brawl pitches. I haven't picked any specifically that are like "Okay, yeah we're going." But I'm just going into Reddit everyday going "That's a great pitch, that's a great pitch". I have this master document of brawl ideas, and as I get more and more time to develop future brawls, I'm going to be pulling from that list, so you're going to see a Reddit brawl eventually.

A14.3) Claudio - There's a lot of, there's a million. I can't even tell you all the small things. I read Reddit in between meetings because I'm just looking for "Hey, there's a bad bug with this, or a Rexxar player is upset about this new thing that happened, or whatever." Reddit is really good at surfacing those things. Our forums are good at it too, but Reddit, I don't know what it is about it. It's super hardcore audience, and they're very involved. There are countless things that we've discovered and that have been surfaced there that we have been able to fix form PTR's and other things before they actually make it live that have saved us.

Because we have an awesome QA team, we play test a shit ton of stuff internally, but we cannot find everything that millions of players find, and so to get those surfaced to us quickly is super important. And it lets us turn around fixes before they even make it to live and start ruining the game. I don't know if you remember the Tassadar shielding an Azmodan minion from his heroic. The shield never expired, an so it would reduce the damage to only 1 damage per attack. So it would take 300 attacks to kill one minion. So you would just shield three minions and you would win the game, because you couldn't attack them enough to kill them. This was like really early on in development, but I remember seeing that like "Whelp, it looks like we're going to be patching tomorrow!" So Reddit's great for that stuff.

TL;DR - Azmodunk is straight from the subreddit. Also, there's going to be a brawl based on a Reddit thread eventually! So keep the brawl idea threads coming! Reddit also brings bugs to light frequently, and they use that information all the time to make sure game breaking bugs don't make it to Live.

Takeaway

Wow, that was a wall. But there's some really good information there. Reddit has a real impact on the game, and it's cool to know that the developers are really reading what you guys have to say. I want to thank Claudio and John again. They were great and it was a pleasure to get to sit with them and talk about the game. Also a huge thank you to everyone that submitted questions for us to ask!

  • Neyman
    Posted 7 years, 10 months ago (Source)

    Great interview, thanks for doing it!

    Also, is their PR guy really called Slaughter?

    Che'von's the best! She makes our job easy.

  • BlizzClaudio
    Posted 7 years, 10 months ago (Source)

    Thanks for the interview, guys! I had a blast and look forward to doing it again in the future. Hope you enjoyed the rest of your BlizzCon. :)

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