Social Features
Matt: So when we looked at Battle for Azeroth, and we really found an opportunity with social features. Our goals were really pretty simple I think. We really like the social structures that you guys have. We love guilds. We hope you guys love guilds, too.
But we found that we could make it easier to communicate, make it easier to make connections, and keep connections in the game. So your social structures that you might have right now — let’s say that you have a guild. You have a raid group that may meet Wednesday nights. Maybe you do PvP during the week. You also on the weekends, you do Premade Raid Finder for your raid, raid battlegrounds, and your mythic keystone dungeons.
If all of these social structures take place in a guild, you are probably doing okay. Otherwise, you are probably looking at other apps, or other ways to manage those connections, and keep in contact. Specifically if you are doing a lot of premade group finder, you might find it really frustrating to every single group you join having to find the next app you need to download, figure out what server you want to connect to just to talk to people in that group.
So the first thing we are going to do is: we are going to integrate Battle Chat voice into World of Warcraft. So this is the same voice that Overwatch uses. So it is the same quality and should be the same easy-to-use. It also is integrated into our game. So rather than having to look at another app to figure out who is talking, and correlate that name to the character names in the game, you will just be able to see a little pop up with their name, and a little speaker icon.
So if you are in a premade group, you will get a little pop up that says: “Hey, would you like to join the voice chat?” You say yes, and you are in.
For the other social structures that we have, we thought that guild was cool, but we wanted you (a little bit more) to support those features. So we are introducing WoW communities. So these are character specific groups.
They are cross-server, so you can keep in touch with your friends that are on different servers than you; and you can be in multiple communities at the same time (in addition to your guild).
So the features that we have for communities: you get roster members, you get the people that are in the community.
You have very simple role management. So you will be able to have like a founder, an officer, and members of your guild so you can manage who has control. This is all integrated into quick join. So when you see a community member join in to a game, you can hop into their queue, and join in without losing any time.
These will also be integrated with voice. So you can be able to talk to a community just by clicking a button. We are also introducing auto-maintain calendar invites. So right now you make a calendar invite, and you might have to manually keep track of who is in it.
With this, if your community is managing the calendar invite, once you make it — like let’s say the Wednesday night raid — once you make that calendar invite, anyone who joined your community automatically gets that invite. Anybody who leaves your community automatically is removed.
And we are also putting text chat history into the game. So let’s say that you are playing. You have to go for an hour, and then you come back an hour later. You will be able to see all of the history of every community that you were listening to, or that you were talking to in chat, and be able to catch up on the conversation right away.
So you are probably thinking: “Those sounds great. I wish I had those in the guild.” So all the new things for guilds will actually be in Battle for Azeroth, too. So voice integration, Auto-maintained Calendar Invites, and Text Chat History will be part of your guild. So yeah… it’s cool.
[applause]
So this is a sneak peek at what the UI could look like. This is a mock up that we are working on. So you can see at the top — this is a redo of your guild panel — you can see the chat that’s going on inside. When you actually see the chat, you can also pipe the chat back into your normal chat-frame. So /g will still be there, and you can take your communities, and make it /1 and /2.
You also see the Rated BGs Team, and a Friday Raid Group as communities that you have.
And that last box which is a little bit different is actually Blizzard Battle.net Groups. So a couple weeks ago, Battle.net Groups went live. So you can make friends with all of your Battle Tag buddies. So now you are going to be able to see those in the WOW client, as well.
All right. That is all we have today. Thank you, guys so much. We are really, really excited to get this expansion in your hands. I know you guys want to play too. So tomorrow here we have a Q&A at 4:00pm. You can submit all of your questions at the Darkmoon Fair. Also, there is an Art panel tomorrow at 12:45pm on the legendary stage. You should go check that out too. Thank you guys. Thank you so much. Have a great BlizzCon.
Commentator: Thank you for attending the World of Warcraft Gameplay and Systems Deep Dive panel. Up next, the Heroes of the Storm: What’s Next panel.
| BlizzCon 2017 World of Warcraft Gameplay and Systems panel transcript | |||
| 1. Island Expeditions | 2. Faction Champions | 3. Heart of Azeroth | 4. Warfronts |
| 5. Social Features | |||
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