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Heroes of the Storm: Update on Artifacts and Talent Unlocks

An update welcome by many on the artifact and talent unlock system was just announced for the Heroes of the Storm alpha.

Quote from: Blizzard

As we’ve mentioned previously, the Heroes of the Storm Technical Alpha is the earliest in a development cycle that we’ve ever invited the community to test one of our games. It’s an opportunity for us to try new ideas in their infancy, and work with all of you to help us make a better game. We’re fortunate to have so many passionate people taking part in testing, and we’d like to take a moment to address your feedback on the artifact and per-hero talent unlocking systems.


Artifacts

Artifacts were designed to provide you with a meaningful way to spend gold, while also providing additional options to customize your heroes. We wanted to test artifacts in the Alpha to find out if the system fulfilled those goals. As testing began, many of you voiced concerns around fairness issues, “correct build” issues, balance, new player tension, and other issues that made it clear that artifacts weren’t working as intended. We agree—those issues started to outweigh the benefits of the system.

As a result, we have decided to remove the artifact system from Heroes of the Storm with a patch scheduled for later today. We will explore different ways to give you fun and compelling options for spending gold, while avoiding the problems that the initial artifact system created. We don’t have any updates on what our future systems may be, but we’ll be sure to keep you informed and look forward to getting your feedback on alternate systems.

Per-Hero Talent Unlocks

We’ve also seen a lot of feedback about changes we made to the talent unlocking system with our most recent patch. Our intention was to gradually expose new players to heroes and their talents, with meaningful progression that could be obtained relatively quickly on a per-hero basis.  Since making this change, many of you have shared your frustration with the time it takes to unlock a hero’s talents.

Beginning with today’s scheduled patch, reaching hero level 4 will be more than three times faster than the original implementation. Unlocking all talents on a hero can be done in as few as three games with friends in versus mode. We hope this will achieve our goals for maintaining gradual talent exposure while lowering the barrier to entry substantially enough to be acceptable to the average player.

Additional feedback revealed that initial talents did not feel as powerful or optimal as later choices. We want all of a hero’s starting talent choices to be useful and viable. We’ll continue striving to meet this goal throughout the alpha, beta, and beyond, and we’d love to hear from you if you’ve got specific feedback on a hero’s starting talents.

Thanks to your feedback and testing efforts, we’ve arrived at changes that will make Heroes of the Storm a better game. We hope you’ll continue to share your feedback with us throughout this phase of testing, and beyond.

GL HF, and we’ll see you in the Nexus!

The Alliance Chopper Is Riding into Azeroth!

The alliance chopper will be implemented ingame, however it will cost you gold to get it! How much is currently unknown.

Quote from: Blizzard

Due to popular demand (and a few shady back-alley deals in Stormwind’s Old Town), the Alliance bike built for Azeroth Choppers will be rumbling its way to a vendor in Azeroth sometime after the launch of Warlords of Draenor. This mount will cost a pretty hefty sum of gold, however, so you might want to start saving up now if you want to ride around in style on this masterful machine. As a reminder, once the winning Horde Chopper is added to the game, it will be available for free to players who log in between now and September 30, 2014.

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Remember, only characters of the associated faction will be able to ride each bike, so buyer beware!

EU Beta Character Copies, Blood Elf Models Not At Launch WoD, Trolls Will Be

It looks like character copies are on the horizon for EU players in the WoD beta!

Quote from: Blizzard
EU character copies are coming. We’re hoping to have them functional in the next major build.To give a little insight: the beta realms are located in one of our North American datacenters. European characters are, obviously, located in European datacenters. For a number of obscure technical reasons, getting those datacenters to securely communicate with each other to transfer character data has been a much larger challenge than we expected.We think we’ve got it solved, though, so (fingers crossed) you should be able to copy your characters soon!

Chris Robinson, Senior Art Director at Blizzard, has gone to twitter to explain that sadly the blood elf model update will not make it at the WoD launch. However the Trolls will still make it for launch! The artcraft should come next week or the week after.

Artcraft—Updated Facial Customization

Quote from: Blizzard
Artcraft—Updated Facial Customization

Hello, and welcome to Artcraft! I’m your host Chris Robinson, art director of World of Warcraft, and today we’re going to tackle something I know a lot of you have been looking forward to: facial customization options.

 

When we began working on the updated character models, we knew it would be a huge project, and we weren’t sure we could do it all at once. The idea originally was that a few races would be available at launch, and all the others would be patched in throughout the course of the expansion. While it wouldn’t have been ideal to see a mix of lower-quality and higher-quality models running around side by side, it did seem like the most realistically achievable solution at that time. Since then, though, we’ve committed ourselves to getting all of the original character models in by launch. It’s been a monumental challenge for us, but we think the effort is worth it, and the finish line is nearly in sight.

 

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Our next big focus is doing justice to the facial options. With the original models and their simplistic geometry and low-resolution textures, a lot of facial expressions were simply painted on. Now that we’ve moved to higher-polygon models with lips, teeth, and fully articulated faces—not to mention higher-resolution textures—recreating those same facial options isn’t as simple as painting them onto a flat surface. Previously, to get a sneer out of a model, you’d just paint a sneer on its face, and that was that. To do it correctly now—and make it look great—we have to fully pose a sneer, create a custom texture, and mesh that base pose with all of the existing emotes and animations.

 

These more detailed face customization options were also originally part of our earlier “update-as-we-patch” rollout plan. Our initial idea was to release the new models with their base face, and then add additional options in updates over the course of the expansion. Again, that plan was based on the sheer amount of work involved in creating what are effectively all-new races (art-wise) on top of all of the art a big expansion like this one generally requires. But stepping back, we came to the conclusion that it just wasn’t going to be a good experience to have everyone playing with the same face geometry and a slight texture change, not knowing what their character would really look like until some later patch. In the end, we decided it would be best to tackle all of a race’s facial options at once. Up to this point, you’ve seen one facial geometry set, but very soon you’ll start seeing more finished products for each option in upcoming beta builds.

DM_Face_Posing_large.jpg
The original Dwarf model (left) has his teeth painted directly on his upper lip to give him a snarl. With the new models, which have fully modeled and textured teeth, a simple paint job just isn’t an option—it would look terrible. In the middle, you can see what that same sneer looks like right now in the beta test; on the right is what you’ll see in an upcoming beta build.

 

 

FacialPosing_OrcM.jpg
On the left, we have a pair of original Orc faces. The second column represents what you’re seeing right now in the beta build, showing texture variation but the same facial geometry. The third column shows a posing rig to demonstrate how we’re customizing each of the face appearances further. On the far right, you can see the final product.

 

We’re working hard to ensure all of the updated character models have the high level of quality you expect from us, and that we expect from ourselves. This revamp is a truly enormous project that we care deeply about, and we know you feel the same. We’re looking forward to seeing all of these new, high-quality, awesome-looking models running around Azeroth, and we hope you enjoy seeing the characters you know and love in a whole new light.

 

Thanks for reading, and see you next time!

WoD Beta: Raid Testing Schedule – July 31

Quote from: Blizzard
On Thursday, July 31, we will continue Warlords raid testing. As this is early in the overall beta raid testing cycle, it is quite possible that there will be technical or gameplay issues that disrupt the testing. Thank you in advance for your patience and understanding.Remember that Heroic difficulty scales for any group size between 10 and 30 players, so feel free to assemble and bring a group of any size within that range. Our general plan is to test every encounter on Heroic difficulty first, and then test sections of the raid on Normal and Raid Finder, alongside targeted Mythic tests.Beastlord Darmac

Each encounter should be available at approximately the listed times below on all Beta servers.

Thursday, July 31

Flamebender Ka’graz – Heroic Blackrock Foundry
13:30 PDT (16:30 EDT, 22:30 CEST)

Beastlord Darmac – Heroic Blackrock Foundry
16:00 PDT (19:00 EDT, 01:00 CEST)

As always, this testing schedule is very fluid and subject to the realities of a beta environment. We might have to change the time of a testing session, change the boss being tested, or cancel a test entirely, due to bugs, server hardware issues, etc. Keep an eye on this forum for the latest information, and thank you in advance for testing and providing feedback.

Important Testing Notes

Q: How do I get into the raid zone?

A: In Stormwind, Orgrimmar, Dalaran, Shattrath, the two Vale Shrines, and your garrison, you may speak to Nexus-Lord Donjon Rade in order to teleport into the raid zone while it is open for testing. (The option to teleport into a zone will not be available when the zone is not open for testing.) Note that new teleport NPC locations have been added to other expansions’ capital cities, as well as near the zone portals in Stormwind and Orgrimmar.

Q: What character should I use to test the raid?

A: Whichever you prefer. We will be scaling players’ effective level to 100 for raid testing, and their item level to an appropriate threshold for the encounter(s) being tested.

Q: How long does testing last?

A: The primary purpose of testing is to give us the information we need to balance the encounters, evaluate how mechanics are playing out in practice, and identify bugs. Once we’re satisfied that we’ve received that information for a given boss, we’ll be shutting down testing. Usually this takes anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours, but there are no guarantees.