>... >IGN UK: Why did you decide to go down the route of lowering raid counts, designing more content around solo players and so on? > >Jon LeCraft: Well, we've always made sure that we've had solo content - we think it's very important for the gameplay that you should be able to play the game by yourself in case your friends aren't online, or if you haven't met anyone online yet or whatever. That's a core aspect. As for why we're doing it, it's a lot more manageable with these smaller groups and, ultimately, we can make better encounters for these smaller groups. We don't have to worry so much about things like 'Oh, well, if eighteen mages come along, they'll just Polymorph everything in this room'. Whereas, with 25 people, some percentage of that will be healers, some percentage will be something else, so really it just gives us much more flexibility with design. > >IGN UK: How much influence does your fairly vocal user base have on content updates or expansions and how much opportunity is there to experiment with new ideas and do something you want to do as a team? > >Jon LeCraft: Well, we take that feedback but we don't necessarily take it literally. We take it and we try to glean what people are asking for but just because they ask for something very specific doesn't mean that's actually what they want. You know, we try to see what's lacking there and then we mould our design in that direction. Ultimately, we're making the game for the players and it's great to be able to get feedback like that. Obviously now, we have test servers with thousands and thousands of players and it's the best focus group you can have - they give us feedback directly, not through the forums as ideas, but directly from the game saying 'Hey, we like that, we don't like that'. It's not necessarily the vocal groups then, it's everyone on the test servers so we get really good feedback. In fact, since we launched the servers, we've been able to launch better, more polished patches to players. > >IGN UK: Do you feel constrained by the framework you've now established for the game or do you think there's still a lot of room for experimentation? > >Jon LeCraft: I think we do still have some freedom for flexibility - I mean we don't want to radically change the game because it works and it's where we want it to be. We want to keep adding to it with content that works with the existing system and we do want to add some new systems, as long as they're well integrated and don't really fight against the game. So yeah, to some degree we are a little bit constrained, but it's okay, as we can still create massive amounts of cool content and sub-systems. >... Read the full article here!