It's hard to believe that almost two years has passed since the release of the World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade expansion in January 2007. But in just about a month, Blizzard will release the game's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. At this year's BlizzCon in Anaheim, California, we sat down with WoW Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan to get the inside opinion on what's gone smoothest -- and not-so-smooth -- as the game has progressed through a lengthy beta period.



GameSpy: The Lich King beta has obviously been going for a while now. What's the general feedback been like? What's left on the team's plate to complete?
Jeff Kaplan, Lead Designer: We're very deep in the beta. It's been going on for a long time. Previous to that we were actually in alpha for a long time, too, so it's been almost a year that the game's been in some sort of playable state and being tested.

Where we're at right now is we're working on the patch that comes out in a couple of weeks as well as a follow-up patch that's going to come out before Wrath of the Lich King and then there will be another "OK, we're live, what tweaks do we have to make?" or "do we have any emergency situations that need to be taken care of?" patch.

So we're kind of over the hump of adding large new features at this point. We're more in the phase of heavily focusing on class balance. That's probably the number-one thing that we're looking at. It's really hard to settle down the class balance while new content is being added.

So while new raids and dungeons are being added, new class abilities -- you know, someone has a cool idea like "hey, Death Knight should do a death grip!" -- the minute you throw that in, all the classes are out of balance. We're at the point where we said OK, we're not adding anything new at this point, we're just going to balance things and then we'll start talking about our next patch.

GameSpy: Of all the new features, which have given you the most trouble? Which new features are keeping you up at night?
Jeff Kaplan: That's probably Wintergrasp, the outdoor PvP [zone]. It has all the [movable] vehicles, it has all the destructible buildings, it's absolutely awesome. It has a lot of moving parts, and anytime you have open PvP, where you have no control over who decides to show up and engage in that activity, the balance is out of your hands at that point.

For better or for worse, the beauty of an instanced battleground is we can guarantee you a fair fight... or a fair fight within reason, I should say. But once it comes to Wintergrasp, you're kind of left to... I don't want to say your own devices, but you don't have the same rigid control that you would.

We have some balancing factors in there that will handle population imbalances. It's very common for servers to lean one way or the other. Contrary to popular belief, a lot of people think there's an Alliance imbalance on all the servers, that everyone's playing Alliance, which isn't actually the case; on some servers we actually have a Horde imbalance. So we've tried to put mechanisms in there to favor the underdog after a while to make sure that it's not always held by the same side all the time.

But also, just trying to get it to run smoothly... there might be 10 people there one day at midnight or four in the morning or whatever, and then the weekend rolls around and we might get 400 people there. Having 400 people do anything in an online game is very tricky, let alone having vehicles, destructible buildings, all sorts of zone auras going on that are balancing.
GameSpy: What kind of stress testing have you done for Wintergrasp so far? What's the most people you've packed into the zone?
Jeff Kaplan: We have good news on that front. We do stress tests every couple of weeks in the beta; we publicize "hey, we're going to be doing it at this time, we need as many people to get there as possible." Last Monday, I think we had 350 people in the zone with zero lag on the server side. That's not to say that some people on lower-end home machines aren't going to have video lag [trying to render that], but the server had zero issues going on with 350 people in the zone.

Which is actually somewhat beyond our expectations... we don't think realistically you're going to have that many people in the zone at any one time. That's kind of a worst-case scenario, like someone rallying the troops, "hey, everyone on the server, let's get to this area right now."