Tom "Kalgan" Chilton Speaks on PvP, MLG and Game Balance Zen

My first impression of Tom "Kalgan" Chilton was that he was a mixture of Yoda, Tyler Durden and Cain from Kung Fu. He's not the sort of guy to be in your face all the time, preferring to float around through the crowd as though he's just another face. If you aren't in the know, you don't know who he is. Yet for those who are in the know, he's the unmistakable game design legend, one of the power players behind much of WoW's success. As one out of six original game designers for World of Warcraft and is Blizzard's long-standing "PvP guru." While this label has certainly evolved as the game has evolved he still has a significant amount of input for PvP balance and changes that are made to that aspect of the game.

Kalgan was nice enough to agree to an interview with me at MLG Anaheim in Soulja Boy's bus. (Well technically, it was the Gunners' bus but it's where Soulja Boy was randomly playing Gears of War.) Unfortunately, I was unable to arrange an interview with them both at the same time for juxtapositional hilarity, but I'll take what I can get.

What's your official job title at Blizzard?
I am the Game Director. Which basically means I'm responsible for the overall game experience. I oversee all of the design, art, and programming teams to ensure that all players find the game fun, no matter what aspect of the game they happen to play.

Would you still consider yourself the "PvP guru" of World of Warcraft?
More or less. I still have a ton of input, more so than most people involved with the process. I'm one of the people who watchdogs it. I work with the class teams and everyone on the class teams to analyze balance issues, how things go from battlegrounds to arena at every level.

How do you solve balance issues?
It really depends on what the problem is. There's a difference between looking at arenas and battlegrounds and raid DPS. We have to make the game fun for everyone and to ensure this we use a mix of scientific approaches as well as more nuanced data based on personal experiences. Raid balance tends to be more scientific due to WWS stats and such allowing us to get concrete data on everything, but PvP is a mix at looking at arena ladders across the board, our own personal experiences in PvP as well as other tools to see where things need to change.

How much of the player base actually PvPs? Can you give me a general neighborhood figure?
I'd say anywhere from 20% - 25% of players actually PvP in arena specifically and anywhere form 40%-50% of players participate in battlegrounds.

How many of them get to 2k rating?
A little less than 1% of those.

So what's the average arena rating of players?
The majority of players who PvP are sub-1500 rated. I'd say they average in the low 1400s or so.

The game is vastly different at various ratings and such. What are some issues you consider?
Well, again, we have to keep the game fun for everyone. Take Retribution Paladins for example. You don't see many of them in many top comps or in a tournament setting like this, but to someone in a battleground who looks at the charts and sees a retribution paladin killing everything in it's path it seems really unfair. This may be true in lower rated arena as well, we have to take that into consideration.

How does internal testing results differ from PTR testing and what you see on Live?
Testing things in person is a good reality check, but not a good way to balance things in the long run. We do a bit of internal testing, it takes a much bigger sample than what we have in office at any given time to get an accurate view of the whole picture.

How much influence does player input have?
It has quite a bit. We watch the forums, we watch in game chatter, that's how we get the complaints. From there, we figure out if it's backed up by statistics that we have. We need personal firsthand experience to know when we're way off though because there are things that are unforeseen.

Like death knights in season 5.
Yes, death knights are an example of something that was unforeseen. It's a little complicated because there are a lot of things where we ask ourselves if something is actually imbalanced or is it something that the players hasn't adjusted to yet. It takes time to figure that out.

Do you find that there are some cases where high level players think about game balance from an elitist point of view?
There are definitely some cases where that's true. Balance opinions are not based on their own high skilled play. The game has to be balanced, but also has to be fun for everyone.

What’s your favorite max level character?
[Laughs] I don’t really have a favorite. I have multiple max level characters. It's important to have multiple perspectives of the game.

What are your impressions of MLG?
MLG is cool. The tournaments are always good to see from a developer standpoint. This weekend we’ve seen a lot of different comps and a lot of matches go 3-2, which is good. Most teams are also sticking with their main comps. To me, it’s an indicator of how you're good rather than counter comping. We've seen more of it in the past and less of it now.

You’re not worried about Check6’s Beast Cleave as far as balance is concerned?
It’s something for us to keep an eye on. After we saw them dominate we made some changes based on data based on ladders and made sure it would not go too far. As we’re watching this tournament, we’ll take all of the variables involved to determine if any changes need to be made.

Well I think that’s a good point to wrap up our interview, Tom.
Thanks for having me! [he takes a moment to laugh] The PR department will probably yell at me for saying something I shouldn't have.