I just saw this crop up on the official forums:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...02781337&sid=1

I will be very interested to see what sort of questions they are addressing, and where they will keep mum. I'd love to know the series of discussions that led up to the tailoring nerf/un-nerf/buff everything fiasco. Also, whether the raid game that went live in January was how they originally envisioned, or whether they knew all along a patch 2.1 of epic proportions would be required due to schedule constraints.

What other burning questions does the EJ community have for everyone's favorite designers?

I'd like to know why my elixirs stack to 20 and potions don't. Little changes that apply to a variety of items but aren't distributed evenly annoy me. But, on a more serious note, I'm curious to know what motivated them to upgrade the current epic items. I was quite surprised at the changes, they're pretty significant. I assume their reasoning falls in line with expected raid progression and is related to the Alchemy changes, but a definitive answer would be nice.

Should be an interesting discussion overall.

I'm actually interested if Elitist Jerks has an IRC channel (hopefully on gamesurge?). And if not, perhaps we should make one?

Can somebody please ask him this

"How is it possible that the game has to be changed so much with the upcoming patch , to simply be made 'fun' and rewarding to players with regards to raiding, consumables, itemisation, trash, risk vs reward ? After 2 years of learning since vanilla wow's release, how could the development team make so many glaring oversights/mistakes to let the situation in TBC get so bad?"

Oh I have a bunch of stuff i'd love to ask them about 'equally interesting' mobs and what their goals are for the Paladin class (among other things).

I don't get the point of this question. You have this one chance to actually talk to people who can make a change. I mean chit-chat is fun and all, but I'd expect we all want the answers that affect our playtime - rather than a grilling of why it happened.

The most important question right now is probably:
What are you going to do about Superior Mana Pots (et al.)?

A few others might be...
What is your tuned casual and hardcore guild timeline?
And perhaps: Where do you see WoW raiding in 9 months?

I'm curious why they appear to wax and wane regarding the opinions of the playerbase. Someone touched on the tailoring nerfs as indicative of this: How is it that some problems can persist in the game for so long and be well documented and thoroughly discussed by players, but relativley minor changes to itemization can become a hot button issue virtually overnight, leading to rapid response? It seems as though their priorities may be placed in the wrong areas (or am I reading too much into this?).

This is one of the things that I really missed from Asheron's Call 1. Having semi-regular IRC devchats seemed to greatly facilitate feedback from players on changes and the state of the game.

I'd really like to ask why the only epic offhand swords available are Blacksmithing or Gladiator.

Overall question:
I am wondering if, with these current item changes on the PTR, they have expanded their ilevel inflation allowance for difficulty settings and if they plan on continuing this method in future expansions. That is to say, in order to allow items to have the proper increases, they have to exponentially increase the ilevel gap each difficulty bracket to continue to allow 'real' upgrades to exist.

As for a greedy/personal question:
Would it be possible to have the Vindication talent (15% from target str/agility, Bosses are Immune) be changed to something that would incline a raiding guild to use a retribution paladin. Also, along the same lines, with the new stacking Vengeance it would seem that the door has been opened to allowing it to effect the *group* (not the paladin himself) via the stacks. Say 1% to group damage per stack of vengeance on the paladin. This would also provide another benefit of a paladin meleeing non-stop on the target and, when combined with the new improved sanctity aura, give a substantial damage boost to the surrounding group members.

Notice also that the Chat day correponds close to a maintenance day, which could be a good indication the patch is out next week? What better way to drum up general interest and excitement in the game again than having big interviews from these developers spilling some new exciting gossip - splashed over gaming websites the day before the monster 'fun' patch comes out.

I disagree, id much rather have an answer to that question than something like 'Why do elixirs stack to 20 when potions don't?" or "What are you going to do about Superior Mana Pots?". Sure, both would be very interesting to get answered - but some peoplle are more interested in the mentality behind the game designers, not asking little questions about trivial stuff. (Superior mana pots and their current over-excessive requirements+usage comes under the designer mentality for what makes raiding 'fun' too, so its a similar themed question)

The developers are making a game I plan to play for years - their mentality on how to create it and design it as 'fun' is very important to me and whether Id like to keep playing in future.

I registered #elitistjerks on Gamesurge. It's not widely used however.

Q1. Do you plan to ever make more craftable items available that are as desirable as the Tailoring Sets or the Blacksmithing Weapons? Do you regard those items as mistakes/aberrations? For example, would you consider making a plan for a leatherworking set similar to Ebon Netherscale, but with the stats like those on Windstrike Gloves?

Q2. Are you happy with the state of Enhancement Shaman for raiding post WF-change? In your view, what is the function of an Enhancement Shaman in a 25-man raid? If it's exclusively or largely DPS, why is a comparatively large portion of our item budget spent on stats (int/mp5) that have only very marginal DPS utility? If we're there for buffs, why don't our buffs scale with gear a la Shadow Priests? If you intend us to spend a significant portion of our time healing, why don't we have some more talents/mechanics (a la Nurturing Instincts or Improved Leader of the Pack) that make it easier for us to fulfill that role?

Q3. Are you OK with some specs not being pvp-viable? Is there any plan to improve these specs (non-Holy Paladin, Enhancement Shaman, Prot Warrior, etc) in this regard? If not, would you consider lowering respec costs so that players who choose this playstyle in PvE have more of a chance to participate fully in PvP as well?

One can only wonder how many Shamans whining there will be, concidering Kalgan is there. :P

If the last Dev IRC I attended over a year ago is any indication, none of these issues you guys are proposing will be addressed.

The questions are grossly staged, as is to be expected, and they will avoid all hot topics currently going around the community. They will only answer questions that add more "flower" to WoW, and which can be answered in a short sentence or 2.

They will then conclude the chat after about 15 minutes and nothing that really matters will have been covered.

Not to be the rainmaker here; I really do hope they do better. But my last experience was something I don't wish to repeat, and I don't suspect they will change it.

Having witnessed several of these through three years of FFXI, I really hope this one doesn't end up the same way.

To clarify, you get a bunch of casuals asking idiotic questions such as "are you going to make leveling easier?", "can i change the colour of my Tauren's hair?", "why is Princess Theradras so hard?" ad nauseam and miss out on some truly insightful information, knowledge and reasoning from the only people capable of answering the questions we all want answered.

Hopefully the people in charge of selecting the questions and putting them forward are capable of preventing something with so much potential being ruined.

They probably aren't going to be too interested in questions related to a specific class skill/talent/issue. They're probably going to spend a lot of time dealing with the casual issues, possibly talking about future issues, etc.

For my part, here are a few of the questions I'd ask:

* What sort of "average weekly time investment" do you design the end-game around? How do you determine how much time should be spent on gear acquisition, consumable farming, assisting guildmates, etc.? On thate note, how "organized" do you intend for the average raiding guild to be?

* How do you feel about class specialization? As talent trees expand, classes are generally encouraged to specialize; the result tends to be that classes that don't heavily specialize end up being significantly marginalized, to the point where players can't effectively tank/heal/DPS unless completely specced for it. Will future expansions continue this trend or somehow attempt to defuse it?

* The game is getting longer for new players; for a newcomer to become engaged in the same game as experienced players (i.e. level 70 content), they need to spend nearly twice the time to level to that point, relative to pre-expansion WoW. Is this consequence of adding content considered good or bad?

* How do you feel about the prospect of equipment or talent specs that are heavily specialized to either PvE or PvP? Is it expected that those with substantial time investment in one should be rather weak in the other, and vice versa? What sort of edge should a player get who significantly focuses on one over the other?

What's with the agility on all the newest warrior DPS plate, considering that T4 and T5 started with agility and both had it converted to crit later?

Also, how does the dev team view the impact of heal supressing abilities like mortal strike and wound poison in the arenas?

I would be curious to hear about what they feel are their biggest design and development mistakes, and their biggest design and development successes (since 2.0). The answer would give a lot of insight into where the game is heading, but I don't think it's a question that they would take.

I agree that previous WoW dev chats have been near-worthless. They took creampuff questions, and it lasted less than half an hour. I really hope they take it seriously this time. The inclusion of Tigole gives me reason to be positive. When he makes appearances on these forums, he's quite to-the-point and leaves the bullshit canned PR responses for the WoW.com boards. Given that (as I understand it) endgame content is his primary focus, I'm sure the raid game will come up to some extent.

Also, I hope it goes without saying, but they can't answer questions that haven't been submitted. If you want there to be at least some chance they "answer the tough questions", log onto Stratics and submit 'em!

I would be interested to know their reasons for making certain things in the game extremely tedious, and whether they feel those reasons are still valid today. Examples of things that seem needlessly tedious include paladin blessings that last only 5 minutes, the priest's Inner Fire having 20 charges, and various classes having to purchase reagents to cast spells.

I would have included buffs that cost a large amount of mana in the list as well, except that in PvP they are balanced against the cost of dispel abilities. If the game were PvE only, 30 minute duration buffs should not cost mana.

I would ask:

a) A lot of people talk about balance in the game. What does it mean to them?

b) Have they seen anything in other games which made them think 'I wish I had thought of that'?