How to make a Cataclysm

Our design for Lich King was to give players a lot more flexibility, both in terms of the classes that they brought and whether they preferred to do 10 versus 25.

The problem was the way we set up the rules, we were actually encouraging people to run both 10 and 25 every week, which just got to be a little draining. It's fun to raid once a week, it gets a little old if you feel like you need to raid four, five, six nights a week in order to do a 10 and a 25 of some of these longer dungeons.

So our new model is: you pick which you like the best and you just stick with that.

Well, they're gamers, so they're trying to game the system. They're kind of trained to do that. So it's up to us to put in a system that rewards the kind of behaviour that we want players to do and that a lot of players would prefer to do. So for example, we're putting caps on the amount of the highest-level PVP and PVE currency that you can earn in a week.

I don't think there's anything wrong with min-maxing. I don't think anyone will make that argument. Min-maxing's part of this genre, part of gaming actually, it doesn't have anything to do with MMOs. I play Mafia Wars or anything on my iPhone and I have this natural tendency as I evolve in the game to try to maximise my playtime and style.

Where it does become a problem is where what we call 'degenerate gameplay' evolves. Where something like a Coliseum situation comes out, where we provide a lot of options for the player, and in order for the player to maximise, they have to ride all those options... It actually does wear and tear them down, and eventually they start to feel badly about what they're doing. And we don't want that.

Oh, I think that's totally right. I think it will get the players out of Arenas who don't enjoy Arenas, who are only doing it for the gear, and give them another alternate way to acquire that gear. So I think in that sense it will be healthy for the game, because we won't be forcing people to do something they're not really having fun doing.

That's a good question, I mean, WOW was never designed from the ground up to be a PVP game in the same way that, say, StarCraft II is designed to be a PVP game. I think if we had done that, I wasn't even here, but the designers would have made some very different choices in terms of how they set it up and structured it.

It's just a lot of fun, I think, and it'll be even more fun when rated Battlegrounds are in, but... We're not really trying to push every player into PVP. We're kind of OK with PVE being more popular and PVP having a smaller audience, as long as there are players that are enjoying it and feeling like they're getting their money's worth out of it.

Eh, you know. We'll take them as they come. It's certainly... they're always different in some form or another. We'll see. I feel great about this expansion and I have no doubt that the next expansion, whatever that might be, is going to be just as awesome if not more awesome.