We Asked Blizz About The 12.0.5 Disaster... Interview with Paul Kubit (Associate Game Director)

[00:00] Your efforts to help us in these dark days brought you to my attention. A massive void energy has appeared at the gates of silver. Right, I've had enough of this. I've got to get some answers.

[00:28] Hello internet, my name is Taliesin. And I'm Evitell. And we are here with Paul Cubitt. Hello, everybody. Nice to chat with you. First of all, do you mind us asking about the rollout of the latest patch, 12.0.5?

[00:42] For sure. Yeah, yeah. So we put out a, well, at the time that we're recording this, we put out a little message last night just talking about how there were more bugs than we thought was acceptable in this patch.

[00:54] And so we heard loud and clear from players. We agree. I know I chatted with you guys a bit about this as well. I come from a background in QA, and so I don't like seeing bugs, and we've been taking it really seriously.

[01:07] The team has been focused on making sure that we address issues as quickly as possible. In fact, most of the large issues that the community has pointed out have been dealt with. And so, again, we take this really seriously, and when these issues come up,

[01:24] the best thing we can do is we'll fix them quick and then identify the potholes that we fell into and pave them over so that we don't fall into them again. And that's sort of what the team is focused on now is identifying where some of these issues came up

[01:36] and then not letting them happen again. I love the eight-week patch cadence that we've kind of settled into in WoW. It's always because it's something to look forward to. Do you think there's an element of the very fast release of content

[01:50] and always having new content to come out that kind of affects the QA of that a bit? I mean, right now what we're doing is we're doing a lot of data gathering. So a lot of these bugs, we sort of identified where they came from pretty quickly, and others were sort of doing the deep dive to figure out where they come from.

[02:04] And that comes into the conversation. We're looking into everything to see how can we make a less, have fewer bugs escape. You know, we gave some examples. This might be getting a little bit into like the nitty-gritty of some of these bugs,

[02:16] but I think a good example sort of shares like how we ended up with one of these particular bugs, and that's looking with the VoidForge. There was a case where the void forward was giving duplicate items. You were supposed to not be able to give the same items.

[02:28] And this was a bug, which the way that we have our testing and PTR set up right now is actually sort of like unfindable in QA and unfindable in PTR. Because the way it works is there was just a bug in code.

[02:40] It happens sometimes. Humans write code. They create bugs sometimes. There's a bug where the punch card, which saves what you have gotten from a particular boss, is being saved to a realm as opposed to the entire realm list, the entire region.

[02:52] And so in test, in our PTR realms, our PTR is just one realm on one realm list. In our QA setup, our QA is one realm on one realm list. On live, it's many realms on a realm list. And so this is sort of where that bug came from.

[03:05] We identified it pretty quickly and put a stop to it. But in the future, what we need to make sure is like, well, it's not okay that that bug can't be found before we get to a live environment, right? And this is the first case where we have had a bug in that sort of class of bugs.

[03:19] So this is the type of thing that we're looking at in a lot of these cases is making sure that, okay, that was an escape. It's unfortunate. Make it right with the players and then move on to get to a place where it won't happen again. Yeah. I wonder if there's something to do with the, because I know a lot of people who view the PTR as just kind of, or beta as like early access as opposed to reporting bugs.

[03:41] Right. Yes. Right. So I wonder if that requires maybe a bit of also a perception shift in the community being like, oh, actually, we do need to keep our eyes peeled for those as well. Yeah, for a lot of folks, it's okay to use PTR as early access a little bit too,

[03:56] if you want to be able to test stuff out. And I'll also point out, we have a lot of really good testers among our community of players who do report a lot of stuff on PTR. So we do see a lot of results. That's why we continue to keep running PTRs is because we see a lot of good results.

[04:09] But something like this just would never have happened on PTR because of the architecture of how it's built. And that's what we need to be able to address. And just for the record, I would accept multiple puzzle boxes if that had to happen.

[04:21] You know, like, I'd take it. Okay, noted. How do you view the 0.5 patch in terms of a season? Because I kind of see it as the halfway point, I guess. It's sort of. It's like the one-third halfway point for sure.

[04:33] Yeah, it's our first check-in after the big story drops, right? And that's not even necessarily the case for Midnight because we've had stuff sort of rolling out every week almost up until 1205. We've had a couple different raids.

[04:46] We've had a story that sort of continued, and then that final raid ended with a little bit of an epilogue as well. So we're trying to make sure that there's always been this feel like, next week on World of Warcraft, you have something to look forward to. But 1205 is where you get that next big beat happening.

[05:00] And so this is sort of the void escalation, dealing with more, you know, the void assaults and also opportunities to just like take something a little bit more off the beaten path with things like decor duels and stuff like that. So, yeah, .5s, .7s are always sort of fun opportunities to just sort of continue to push with the raids and dungeons and delves that you've been playing with and play with some fun new toys as well.

[05:23] And looking back on Season 1 so far, how is the general feeling in the team about, you know, the three raids structure of it and the way that released? How did that go down? Any lessons there?

[05:36] Really excited about the three raids. I think that we saw when this was sort of pitched internally within the team, from the encounter team, they said, we want to make three raids. At first, we told them they were crazy, but then thought about it. I was like, no, that's actually really cool.

[05:49] There is a couple of different ways that these raids are split as well There the Void Spire versus Chimeras which is one thing just having two different places to go But then there also that extra raid which comes a couple weeks later a week or two weeks later, depending on which difficulty you're talking about,

[06:02] with the March on Koldanas. And those were both experiments in and of themselves. We're trying to see how players would feel playing both of them. And I think they both went pretty well. Like early designs for the March on Koldanas actually had it coming a week later.

[06:15] We had some more story that we wanted to cram in in between the two. But then as we shared our ideas loosely with community, and said, here's what we're doing, we heard a lot of feedback that like, I hope they're not that far apart, because this will harm the pacing of my own raids progression

[06:30] or race to world first, which a lot of people care about as well. And that ended up adjusting the tuning of that. So lots of positive feedback. Lots of things that we're looking at is like,

[06:42] how can we do even better if we decide to do split raids in the future as well? Is it on the cards to do it again in the future? I don't see why not. I mean, nothing specific to announce at this point. We're still only in 12.05. But I don't think it was.

[06:54] I think players intended to like it. So yeah, if the story makes sense and the setting makes sense, why not? On a purely personal level, I think you made the absolute right decision by having the March of Color of Ass come out when it did. I think from our raids' point of view,

[07:07] there was a real sense of momentum and kind of urgency with it all, which is fantastic. There was also something really magical about seeing the world change after completing the raids and seeing the environment change and the music change and everything.

[07:19] Do you have kind of more plans on seeing that in the future in the game? Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, this was all sort of, I mentioned it earlier, but that next week on World of Warcraft feeling is something that I think means a lot in a live game,

[07:32] where you have a lot of people interacting in a social space, interacting in a shared space, and seeing the world change together as you all progress through content together, or just time passes together. And I know that's also a touchy subject, because a lot of players can be really sensitive to what feels

[07:45] Like, well, I know that raid is in the patch, so why can't I play it now, right? It feels a little bit arbitrary. But if it's part of the story, and if it's tied in some of the spectacle like you're talking about with the skybox changing and the beam of war between the Sunwell and the Voidstorm going off in between,

[07:59] that it sort of rationalizes the decision to say, like, no, actually, like, the whole serial rollout of this content actually, like, is paying off and doesn't feel arbitrary, at least not for most players.

[08:11] Not for the raid, for sure, yeah. Yeah. What about gear? Yeah, generally the gear progression in this season has been the fastest, the most efficient, you could say, of any season I can remember ever.

[08:25] And with so much potential for gear coming from Mythic Plus and the way that affects what you get from Raid and how relevant that would be. Are there any thoughts you can share on how that's gone? Yeah, it's gone a little faster than we expected.

[08:40] Not a whole lot faster than we expected. And actually, if you break it down, you can see that players who are at the highest end aren't really gearing much faster than they have in the past. But players sort of in the middle of the bell curve in terms of average item level are going a little bit faster.

[08:55] And what that means is people are getting to their item level goals a little bit quicker. And so as we roll into things like 1205, we have things like the Void Forge come out. This is where we want to make sure that, well, if you're motivated by I want to get stronger gear, I want to make my numbers go up,

[09:09] than having opportunities like the Void Forge to make your gear stronger feels more valuable. And also, we have a new feature called housing, which is also like adds another sort of horizontal progression for players.

[09:22] As you get to that point where if you aren't someone who is as motivated by gear or is as equally motivated by gear as, say, like your collections or decoration or whatnot, that point later on in the season where you do sort of reach your item level goals

[09:35] is a really great opportunity to say like, actually, you know what, I got some other stuff I can work on now. And I know a lot of people, myself included, feel like, well, I got to get my gear to the point first before I can play with those toys. And so having the opportunity to gear a little bit faster may open up some more

[09:50] windows to play the game a little bit differently. Sounds interesting, that player housing after checking out. How do you feel about that, Evie? Because for me, the gear progression and the speed of it has been one of those things where on paper, I don't like it. In practice, I've kind of really

[10:03] liked it as a player who typically doesn't run keys as like an open world enjoyer as like a delve enjoyer it's been really exciting to get to a point where i feel like i can actually jump in

[10:16] and start doing higher level level keys not necessarily being carried by my my pocket healer so that kind of like gear progression has been really i found it really empowering and i think a lot of people who might dabble in more like casual content i feel like that's kind of opened

[10:30] open the doors for them maybe is like a stepping stone into something a little bit more challenging or difficult. Yeah. Thinking about housing, which is a great feature, you should check it out. I will, yeah. Yeah, we were excited to see Decor Duels coming.

[10:45] And that just feels like a feature that was maybe born out of like, hey, we have housing and we have PVP. How do we bring these two very disparate communities together?

[10:59] Can you talk a little bit about Decor Duels? And then also, are there any ways, maybe unexpected ways, that player housing has kind of affected systems or development in WoW? For sure. So yeah, Decor Duels is absolutely

[11:13] the marriage of two very different characters, right? It's housing and PVP. But it's not the first time we've done that. We married Transmog and PVP first, right, with Travel Style. Yes, which remains my favorite form of PVP in the game to the day.

[11:26] Ruthless. But Decor Duels gives it a run for its money as well. Yeah, I mean, this is just another thing that sort of was born out of the team. Folks were looking at what cool things we can add in some of these patches which aren't

[11:39] necessarily tied with our Battle vs Zalatath or any of the stuff that going on with Silver Moon and whatnot And something which looks like a prop hunt makes a lot of sense particularly in a world where we just added a whole bunch of props in the form of decor

[11:54] So, yeah, we've seen a lot of people having a lot of fun with it. I know I played a bunch throughout this week. I'm just doing a lot. I'm not very good at it. Don't play Hunter. It's much easier than I hear. Well, it was for a while, sure.

[12:06] Yes, but maybe not as much anymore. But yeah, so yeah, this is sort of a passion project coming from the team. As far as housing, I mean, housing has inspired a whole bunch of gameplay. I mean, one of the things that I was most happy with was a particular quest, which came up, I think, two weeks ago now,

[12:25] which is just your housing weekly, which shows up in the main cities, which a couple of times has been like, hey, go deliver the mail. It's been go pick up some pets. This one was like, go host or have a party at someone else's house. and we saw so many awesome player stories

[12:39] come out of this particular one where, speaking frankly, I hadn't spent a whole lot of time in other people's houses and I was like, well, let's just hop into LFG, look for a group. And I found a great group of people who were like, the guy had an awesome house.

[12:51] Everybody was like, I love what you did with your dining room. There was one guy who got himself stuck in this fellow's bookcase and I used my priest life grip to pull him right out. I was very lucky I was there.

[13:04] Nice to use your life grip. every night and yeah that's me done for the month yeah yeah so uh those types of experiences um sort of like are really happy to see those and looking for more opportunities to maybe uh engineer more

[13:16] reasons for people to want to maybe hang out with each other in houses and whatnot in the future likewise i have a very fun story about that quest but i'm not going to share it because it is nightmare fuel um but i also will not hear slander about the postal quest though they're brilliant there is uh a lot of excitement at the moment about um the i'm going to call it the mythic flex one boss raid

[13:33] coming in 12.07. And what kind of doors that could open in the future. Is this like a test bed for that, really? Or is there an idea that that could kind of evolve into something else? It feels like a test bed, doesn't it?

[13:45] Yeah, yeah. I mean, we for sure have heard all sorts of feedback. I mean, this is coming from inside the house. So many people working at Blizzard even say, like, my raid is exactly the right raid for something like this Fungarian One Boss Mythic Flex raid where we complete AOTC

[14:00] and then we would go farther, but we just don't quite have the flexibility to either get the extra people or to bench a couple people or we can't reliably seat 20 for what is normally required for Mythic. But that difficulty feels right for us.

[14:12] And so, yeah, this is an opportunity to say, like, well, what would that feel like in a place which is like in a little bit of an off-the-beaten path in that it's like pretty late on in the season where this boss will come in. We'll be able to see how we can build that and how players feel with it.

[14:27] Does it feel right? Does it feel too easy? Feel too hard? field and then assuming players like it then then who knows where we go from there that's really good to hear my raid group is that raid group right so it's like you know we can't it's the

[14:39] thing of we can't cut down our team it's like cutting one of the beetles you couldn't do it right so it's like that for us we're all really excited about players have gotten better and better at knocking down heroic raids and so it just and yeah after the game is out it's the player's game

[14:51] they're telling us we want need something a little bit harder than that uh just without that pesky 20 player restriction so that's what we're looking at resolve um a little more question You were talking about the story earlier. And there's been a little bit of concern in the kind of corners of the internet that I hang out in about the, I don't want to call it the reunification of the elves, but the kind of the teaming together of the elves in the season one story.

[15:18] and the idea that any kind of like lingering resentments or kind of problems that they might still have will be kind of put to one side as we move on to other parts of the expansion.

[15:31] Can you speak to that at all? Yeah, well, first I have a feeling maybe we hang around in similar corners of the internet because I've seen some of that feedback as well. And for sure, I think it's well-founded. So the story that's told in campaign,

[15:44] the campaign of what at least is pretty, linear is not the right word, but like serial, you know, a number of things happening in a particular order. And it's meant to show a lot of the big moves and shakes that happen in the world of Azeroth.

[15:58] And some pretty big moves and shakes happen at the end of this chapter of Midnight, where not only do we deal with the threat of the Voidstorm and the threat of the Darkwell, but also the elves overcome some of their long-held rules.

[16:12] is particularly in Silver Moon about some pretty hard-held beliefs about how close we will allow Void Elves to get to the Sunwell itself, and also some ancient sort of, not ancient, but old and, again,

[16:27] hard-held difficulty between Silver Covenant and between the Sun Ravers. And so if you play through sort of the epilogue quests, you will see for sure that not all of that tension has been diffused.

[16:40] there's still some very much insinuations of like, okay, we'll light this torch together. We will work together. But if you step over the line, then all bets are off. But what the campaign is meant to show is that

[16:52] we've sort of crossed the threshold. I'm like, okay, we're going to try to work together. But campaign can't get into all the nuance of all that stuff. And so I would continue to, if we're looking for nuance in terms of how elves will continue to interact with one another,

[17:05] either on positive or negative terms in the future. And this could also be extrapolated. not to elves, but to any sort of groups in the world or any of these types of stories. Look to local stories. Look to zone stories. Look to those little interactions that you see in town where someone interacts with you

[17:18] in an interesting way. That's where you'll maybe see some of that nuance come out. Yeah. Did you hear that, guys? Please play your side quests. Exactly. Yeah. If you are not Sojourners, pause this video, get to work, and come back when you're done. Team Sojourner.

[17:31] Although I have to say that I don't think I was alone. Maybe you noticed this in our corners of the internet as well The crushing disappointment I felt when the promised Armani customizations turned out just to be hair colors and skin colors

[17:45] I get it. But I think a lot of us really had our eye on some of those cool kind of like orky rigs. Is that pie in the sky? Is that never going to happen? Or could it maybe happen?

[17:57] We'll keep listening to feedback. I wouldn't hold your breath for anytime super soon. But yeah, this was sort of an opportunity for us to play with a customization that we don't really do in quest rewards or in achievement rewards.

[18:09] We haven't done a lot of this. I mean, you can point to some of the things with the Minari skin for the Draenei, but that was also its own specific quest line, which was focused on this. This was more on like, well, what's a cool thing we can do for completing the Zulamon?

[18:21] And we haven't really said, like, well, customizations for a particular character, a race in the game is something that could be unlocked. And so looking for player feedback on it. It sounds like for you, at least, it was you were hoping for a little bit more.

[18:33] I don't think I'm alone. No, yeah, for sure. But I just love those chunky boys. They're so great. I mean, Tally's got his mind on character customizations, and I think that's fair. But I really, really am excited about the new Keystone

[18:48] achievements. Can I bring up the Keystone myth thing? Because I, yes, was absolutely very excited, and still am, about Keystone myth. I think it's a fantastic idea. we were all looking for a higher tier of kind of reward in Mythic Plus, I think.

[19:00] A little bit of a tepid reaction to the mount reward since they've been announced. I know you're introducing a mount reward for the title as well, the 1% title. But I think there's maybe a little bit of disappointment with the Keystone Myth rewards.

[19:13] Yeah. So, I mean, we continue to listen to feedback on rewards for things like this. And when it comes to mounts in particular, we're always pretty cautious about making sure that we understand the double-edged sword that is giving out unique mounts for very difficult achievements.

[19:26] because there are also mount collectors out there that will look at that and say like, oh, that's actually a huge disappointment for me because I know I'm just not going to or capable of reaching 3,400 or whatever the high level achievement is.

[19:39] And so putting something that's super unique in that, it is a double-edged sword. There's pros and cons to putting something unique versus something which is more of, in this case, there are opportunities for players to earn maybe things which felt like they were some legacy mounts

[19:51] that were no longer accessible that now you can get into with those saddles and whatnot. So we're going to continue listening to feedback. This is the first time that we've done Keystone Myth. And so we don't necessarily have to have a locked in approach for seasons moving forward.

[20:04] It got me to jump back into Mythic Plus again straight away. As soon as I heard about it, I was sort of like pretty much done. Just doing my vault every week. And then, yeah, instantly I had that motivation to try and climb again. Yeah. And this is also in response to players hitting their goals.

[20:18] Again, we said players hit their itemization goals a little faster than we expected. Same is true for Mythic Plus goals as well. We saw either people hitting Keystone Legend or on trajectory to hit Keystone Legend, maybe a little bit sooner. And so I would call this out as sort of a success of the team looking at this and saying like, oh, we can do a little bit better.

[20:37] We can actually get this in. And if you've been following PTR, it came in pretty close to the end of PTR. If it even made it onto PTR at all, this Keystone Myth achievement to be able to give you that motivation and a bunch of other players' motivation to say like, I love playing Mythic+.

[20:50] I just sort of hit my goals already. to add another goal if you are incentivized or if you want to keep playing. This will give you that carrot to keep playing before you eventually retire to your house and start decorating that. How do you feel about tuning this season?

[21:03] Certainly with tanks, it does seem a bit more skewed than usual maybe or is that just me vibing it wrong? Is it kind of actually normal? Because there's usually a tank that's way out ahead but Brewmaster seems like way out ahead this season. Yeah, Brewmaster's a little bit ahead right now.

[21:15] I mean, that one, I think we're still working on tuning. Typically what you see in a season is at the beginning of the season, you have actually like a pretty broad distribution of different healers and different tanks that people are playing. And then as you get later on, then

[21:29] metas inevitably form. And that's, you know, inevitable and also arguably healthy for a social game for people to agree like this is the way that we've agreed to play together and whatnot. But a meta for tanks in particular came out a little earlier this season. And

[21:42] so the solution, like the pure absent existing players playing in the game right now solution would be to bring Brewmaster down, but that obviously wouldn't be the right decision. I was scared to bring it up

[21:54] because I'm so glad to see Brewmaster have its moment in the sun, like finally, and be the absolute boss that it should be. So yeah, please don't do that. Yeah, yeah. What likely ends up happening is we make light touches to Brewmaster.

[22:07] We also make light touches to the other tanks to bring them closer to within band one another and aim to do this in a way which introduces as little disruption as possible. But yeah, ultimately we measure success

[22:19] on tuning based on are folks capable of hitting sort of the places that we've set as our major goals for the game? Am I able to complete Myth 10s? Am I able to get this, sorry, plus 10s?

[22:31] Am I able to get the Keystone Legend, Keystone Myth? And as long as we're able to do that with all the tank specs, with all the healer specs, then that's one of many metrics we use to do this, but we're going to keep tuning in a way that is as non-disruptive

[22:45] as possible. And one last quick question, because we're here in your house, so welcome. lots of speculation about 12.1 obviously you know you can't give anything away

[22:57] about that but I've got a feeling I've just got this feeling it might be a good idea to set our hearthstones in Zulaman for that one is that advice you'd recommend

[23:09] or is it because you just enjoy the view off the coast or like what is the view off the coast is really good really intriguing yeah and yeah kind of that Yeah, I would say if you enjoy the view off the coast,

[23:22] then setting your Hearthstone for Zulomon is a really good place to set it. That's good enough for me. Awesome. Thank you so much for having us. Yeah, great seeing you as always. Cheers. Thanks, everyone.