Alex "Furor" Afrasiabi Never Left

[thesmall001]

I've seen this posted a few times recently so I just wanted to poll the public: Why do some people seem to think he left and came back recently for Warlords?

I know some people on these forums believe WoW is designed by 4-5 or even 1 Elite Puppetmaster (whether it's Ghostcrawler, Bashiok, Bobby Kotick or anything else really stupid) but in reality it's a highly horizontal design structure with multiple departments that interact and cross-over with multiple Lead Designers, Directors and Producers as well as Department and Team Leads. As far as I'm aware, Furor continued to be involved with WoWs Development on a day-to-day basis after he "moved to Titan" (which, at this point, we're fairly sure is code for "party in the blizzard hot tub") and so he can't be "the one to blame" for Warlords.

It confuses me that people seem to believe that one person can drastically shift the direction of an entire expansion as if nobody ever has a contrasting opinion in Blizzard, like they're this perfect hive mind of terrible ideas when there's something you don't like. It's not how game design works, it's not how business works and it's not how people work.

So that's my rant attached to a genuine question, because as far as I'm aware Furor has been Quest/World Designer in some capacity or another without stopping since Vanilla. It was Jeff 'Tigole' Kaplan who left for Titan. I don't believe he's returned though. I could be wrong if somebody has a source on his absence for any expansion, I'm looking for credit leaflets right now.

[Orange Joe]

I've seen this posted a few times recently so I just wanted to poll the public: Why do some people seem to think he left and came back recently for Warlords?

I know some embarassingly misguided people on these forums believe WoW is designed by 4-5 or even 1 Elte Puppetmaster (whether it's Ghostcrawler, Bashiok, Bobby Kotick or anything else really stupid and ignorant and misinformed) but in reality it's a highly horizontal design structure with multiple departments that interact and cross-over with multiple Lead Designers, Directors and Producers as well as Department and Team Leads.

It confuses me that people seem to believe that one person can drastically shift the direction of an entire expansion as if nobody ever has a contrasting opinion in Blizzard, like they're this perfect hive mind of terrible ideas when there's something you don't like. It's not how game design works, it's not how business works.

So that's my rant attached to a genuine question, because as far as I'm aware Furor has been Quest/World Designer in some capacity or another without stopping since Vanilla. It was Jeff 'Tigole' Kaplan who left for Titan. I don't believe he's returned though. I could be wrong if somebody has a source on his absence for any expansion, I'm looking for credit leaflets right now.

If I remember right he never left blizzard, but did leave wow development for Titan. He just came back to wow development when they downsized titans development.

[Zstr]

he was moved to Titan project, however as they are all in same company, and they mentioned it a lot, that developers are cooperate between each others no matter of what SC or Diablo Warcraft project they working on.

[Thimagryn]

He's still at Blizzard. Most devs get shifted around on projects at some point or another. It keeps em creatively stimulated working on something new instead of stuck on the same project. People from other teams bring new ideas to the table, and it keeps things fresh.

It sure helped D3 at any rate.