Straight from Warbucket:
The German gaming site Krawall.de has once again had the chance to sit down with Blizzard's Bill Roper and ask a number of questions concerning World Of WarCraft.
They were able to get quite a lot of new information out of him which I have summarized below (since the original interview is in German naturally):
For the whole interview (in German), go here.
[li]Server architecture: One World Server plus several Monster and Character Servers.
[li]Bill Roper mentioned several possible methods to combat spawn camping:
1) Monsters dont respawn in the same place.
2) Blizzard identifies the most popular monsters and places several of them in different locations.
[li]About 3000-500 players per server.
[li]The server setup is very scalable (i.e. new servers and such are easily added if existing ones should be overcrowded).
[li]Blizzard is trying to enable players to move from one server to another. Bill Roper stressed the fact that they really want this feature in.
[li]There aren't going to be any PvP servers.
[li]PvP is purely optional in nature. There are going to be designated areas for Player vs Player interaction but outside of these areas, no PKing is going to occur.
[li]Some was said about instancing:
- The idea is to make the player feel more 'important/unique'.
- Example: Only the boss mob room of a given dungeon might be instanced.
[li]All races have 'capitals' similar to Stormwind. Those also act as start locations for newly created characters.
[li]There are going to be many different forms of transport - some player owned and some hired. However, an area will have to be explored by the player before speed travel to that area is going to be made available.
[li]The only way to level is killing monsters.
[li]The day/night cycle will probably not be real time.
[li]There isn't going to be any support for voice communication software.
[li]Different methods of payment (of the monthly fee) for different countries (ie not credit card only).
[li]The European server might not be ready on release.
BabelFish translation can be found here.
