What is the difference between wow and wow cataclysm

You have the hardcore raiders, the heroic players, the re-rollers who keep re-starting, but never get past They have eight characters and they are all between 30 and We want to get that player to We want to get them to experience the content, and I think that's why, with every expansion, we go back and make the leveling curve a little bit easier.

Like the mount changes we just did, making it easier to obtain mounts. Stockton: Yeah, I know! That was one of my changes. I'm so excited about that. We want to get you past those humps. Those humps shouldn't be there. The game should be fun to play, should get you all the way through no matter what level you are. It should always be fun; there should always be another carrot that you want to get.

I don't want you to feel that between 40 and 50 that it's "grindy" or it's "slow" and "there's no dungeon for me. I think we feel like we have to do things a little differently, but that's where you see something like "hard" modes and "normal" modes come in to play.

It's our stab at trying to do that. You want to make the normal mode accessible to absolutely everyone, then we want to have hard modes for our top percent players who can have something that's really hard but has really great rewards.

They get better loot, they get achievements. I think you also see a little bit of a difference between and man raids , also. It's easier to get 10 people together and to do that content, but in some cases, the man hard modes are harder then the man because losing one person in 10 is a lot worse than 1 in It's something that we constantly struggle with, but the biggest key thing that we always come back to is we want as many people as possible to experience the content.

I think that's the key factor. And whatever changes we make to hard modes and normal modes in the future to try and get that right, I think you'll still see changes there in between now and Cataclysm. We didn't even know how it's going to play out for Icecrown zone yet because we are watching Trials of the Crusade in patch 3.

I think it is a little bit of a moving target, but we definitely want to have as many people as possible be able to see Arthas, for example. Was there a different team that worked on changing the game or did that affect your development team? That's definitely our team. But the changes have been really small. There have been things like changing icons, like the fact that we are not allowed to show bones for instance.

Nothing that has had an effect overall yet or anything that's really serious. Not too much of an impact. I'm just glad it's back online. That's the best thing. I don't live in China. I don't know what the standards are. Like what is acceptable for, say, a nine-year-old girl in China? I don't think I can really say what that is. Obviously, there is the Chinese government so that's where we stand on it. I would rather them have the content that we have since it's rated. We say what age the person should be to play the content.

We definitely know that three or four months after a patch comes out players feel like they've seen it all and they're ready for something new. We just haven't had time to crank that stuff out yet. Some people are skeptical about this explanation. While there has been a traditional drop in player numbers following each WoW expansion, the period of decline has lasted longer and been larger following Cataclysm. The problem is the lack of strong appeal for anyone in particular. The gear doesn't carry enough psychological weight for the hardcore players, and the raids are too difficult for more casual players, especially relative to the rewards they provide.

The last raiding tier was significantly nerfed in 4. For years, the strongest tie to WoW was a social one. For high-level players it became a kind of IM with avatars, a place where the relationships built over months and years of planning, learning, and achieving together could be give some ambient comfort. If WoW 's mechanics are at a saturation point where adding variety doesn't add new complexity, and its charms as a social network are waning in comparison to other platforms, is this the beginning of the end?

Is this something we're going to want to support far off into the future? As long as players keep playing it, having fun, and coming up with new ideas I don't think that there has to be an endpoint. All MMOs have faced periods of dwindling decline, but there are many examples of games that have remained vibrant and rewarding from generation to generation. Part of why Chess and Go endure even today is that they let players take part in both the creation of problems and determining their solutions.

With its MMO, Blizzard has been in the business of designing vast amounts of problems, in the form of new quest lines, dungeons, boss encounters, and raids, for players to help one another solve. But the tactics necessary to beat a dungeon or a particular quest are relatively fixed and, at the higher levels, exclude huge chunks of the player base from participating because of inadequate gear and attributes.

What if players were allowed to participate in creating their own dungeons, quests, or boss encounters? Or going further, what if the crafting and jobs systems were expanded to allow players a possibility to role-play in ways other than combat? What if FarmVille players could just as easily contribute to a WoW community, managing, harvesting, and trading crops, requesting new seeds from other areas, requiring some neighborly warriors to go out on an adventure?

I don't know how long it would take us to develop something like that. I think it would be really popular if that was something we were able to pull off. Minecraft is a great example because a lot of those players are showing off it's actually a creative medium and they're impressing each other with the tricks they've been able to figure out. The idea of increased player control may be incompatible with certain basic expectations of the combat system, where the tolerance for randomization and unpredictability is low.

I can't even tell you about the amount of bitching and whining from some pretty high-level guilds when confronted with a configuration that was unsolvable. That can be a roll of the dice. Or there can be one of five configurations and you don't know which one you're going to get. That's just five more problems you have to solve and you don't know which one you're going to get.

But the idea that there could be some sort of random element -- like life makes things unsolvable or unwinnable -- that is just patently unfair. Could this aversion to the unpredictable and potentially unsolvable -- like the ever-present possibility of a draw in Chess -- be lessened if the game became less about upgrading abilities, gear, and combat and instead focused more about social role-play?

Could WoW live forever if it evolved into not a social game, but a comprehensive world where social ties were the backdrop against which all types of gameplay -- combat, farm sim or hidden object storytelling -- could be experienced? No, probably not. There's probably less to be gained from fretting about how to make WoW immortal than thinking about how to keep it rewarding for a little while longer. In 10 or 20 years? That's really weird to think about. In the meantime, there will be new bosses, new raids, new dungeons, more quests, new loot, adjustments to what isn't working quite so while, and some new changes that will rankle people whole liked it the way before.

Legion also had a rocky start, if less so, but Blizzard was able to course-correct the biggest problems and turn it into a thoroughly enjoyable expansion. It seems like a good time to put all this negativity aside and focus on the things that have made WoW special. This is all, of course, just my opinion, man. Stepping into Azeroth for the first time was a magical, almost religious experience for so many players. Finally we had an MMO that put aside so much of the tedium of the genre and focused on fun first.

Most of all, have fun! We leveled, slowly, but smelling the Mageroyals along the way. We wanted to wring every last drop of adventure out of this game. We got frustrated trying to figure out the clues to complete quests.

Sometimes we asked chat for a hint. Sometimes we cheated and went to Thottbot to look it up. Along the way, we made friends and we made enemies. We formed guilds and grudges. We saved gold for mounts and riding skills. We fought to the death in Hillsbrad.

We begged for UBRS runs. We were paranoid about Deep Breath. We raided faction cities over and over, even on PVE realms. WoW memes were everywhere. We were willing to put up with just about anything as long as we could hang out in Azeroth. For many of us, our lives would never be the same.

Traveling through the Dark Portal for the first time is one of my all-time favorite WoW moments. The sky above and the ground below felt utterly alien. Some of this content was accessible to average players.

Some was reserved only for the most hardcore guilds, especially before the many attunement requirements were lifted. Looking back, between Heroic dungeons that really felt Heroic, questing and daily questing in genuinely dangerous areas, few catch-up mechanisms, and single-difficulty raids, TBC was an unforgiving expansion. TBC also gave us the innovations of quest hubs, badges, daily quests, and flying mounts. All in all, Blizzard succeeded at giving us a new place to explore that was completely different from Azeroth but still felt like it occupied the same WoW universe.

The stories of Classic and The Burning Crusade were a bit disjointed and hard to find.