World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

CEO Bobby Kotick Outlines Progress and Commitments

Today, CEO Bobby Kotick shared the following email with our employees:

Everyone,

A few weeks ago, I reiterated our commitment to become the most welcoming, inclusive company in our industry. Today, I want to update you on some initial progress and important, additional steps we are taking to advance our commitment with greater impact, transparency, and urgency.

First, I want to offer my sincere gratitude for your continued focus and dedication to our players – and to each other. You’ve shown incredible resilience throughout the pandemic, exceptional care for colleagues and communities, and the relentless commitment to excellence, creative independence, and purpose that always sets our company – and our franchises – apart. During a tremendously challenging time for so many people, you’ve continued to bring joy and connection to our players and communities around the world.

My goal – and the goal of our Board, our entire senior corporate team, our business unit leaders, and their teams – is to make sure you have the resources, culture, and commitment from leadership you need to succeed in our collective aspiration to be the model workplace in our industry.

Over the last decade, as we’ve brought in new companies, grown our workforce, and expanded our business, we believed we had the systems, policies, and people in place to ensure that our company always lived up to its reputation as a great place to work. Clearly, in some vitally important aspects, we didn’t.

The guardrails weren’t in place everywhere to ensure that our values were being upheld. In some cases, people didn’t consistently feel comfortable reporting concerns, or their concerns weren’t always addressed promptly or properly. People were deeply let down and, for that, I am truly sorry.

Being welcoming and inclusive, in the context of our workplace, is crystal clear. We will still passionately debate ideas, employ healthy skepticism when appropriate, and demand excellence and rigor in all of our pursuits – but we will always treat each other with dignity and respect. And regardless of differences, voices will be heard, perspectives welcomed, and contributions valued.

We are a business fueled by passion and performance. These are cornerstones of our creative excellence but we must constantly recognize, embrace, and celebrate that the very best ideas, the most rigorous execution of those ideas, and ultimately our responsibility to our players and each other are best served by a culture that recognizes and respects that true excellence comes from diverse views, voices, and talents.

We’ve made progress over the last few years fostering that diversity and creating a better work environment – a commitment that has improved in scope and speed in recent months. We’ve tripled our investment in anti-harassment and anti-discrimination training; we’ve made meaningful organizational changes; and we’ve substantially increased resources for reporting and carefully investigating improper behavior.

The EEOC’s investigative process, public discussion on discrimination and harassment, and your reports and suggestions helped shine a light on practices we need to improve, policies that need to be strengthened, and resources we are now adding. The EEOC’s review was a catalyst to sharpen our focus on the ways we can become a company others emulate as a model for workplace excellence and one with an unwavering commitment to its values.

We have a lot more to do if we are to be the company that others emulate.

I want to share five new changes we are implementing, but recognize being a model for workplace excellence will be a dynamic process requiring additional changes and an unrelenting commitment to improvement.

1. We are launching a new zero-tolerance harassment policy company-wide – In the past, when we discovered and substantiated harassment, we terminated some employees and provided verbal or written warnings or different disciplinary actions to others. In retrospect, to achieve our goals for workplace excellence, this approach is no longer adequate. We need tougher rules and consistent monitoring across the entire company to make sure reports are being handled correctly and discipline is appropriate and swift.

As a result, we are implementing a zero-tolerance policy across Activision Blizzard that will be applied consistently. Our goal is to have the strictest harassment and non-retaliation policies of any employer, and we will continue to examine and tighten our standards to achieve this goal everywhere we do business.

Any Activision Blizzard employee found through our new investigative processes and resources to have retaliated against anyone for making a compliance complaint will be terminated immediately.

In many other instances of workplace misconduct, we will no longer rely on written warnings: termination will be the outcome, including in most cases of harassment based on any legally protected category.

Future employment contracts and equity awards will be clear: termination for these reasons will result in the immediate forfeiture of future compensation.

We also want to ensure that employees who file reports are encouraged, protected, and heard. For all reports of harassment and retaliation, we will investigate the allegation and whether the Activision Blizzard personnel who received the report of such behavior took the appropriate steps to protect the integrity of our compliance processes.

There may be some places around the world where local law may restrict some of these measures. In those cases, we will apply the highest permissible standards and the strongest possible discipline.

2. We will increase the percentage of women and non-binary people in our workforce by 50% and will invest $250 million to accelerate opportunities for diverse talent –Today, approximately 23% of our global employee population identifies as women or non-binary. Building on the success that King and other business units have achieved, we will seek to increase our percentage of women and non-binary professionals by approximately 50% – to more than one-third across the entire company – within the next five years and hopefully faster. Each franchise team, business unit, and functional area will be expected to have plans to help fulfill this ambition.

With respect to diversity, while we perform better than our peers with 30% of our U.S. workforce from diverse or under-represented communities, broadening this progress will continue to be a significant focus of mine as well as company, business unit, and franchise leadership.

To further this commitment, we’ll be investing an additional $250 million over the next 10 years in initiatives that foster expanded opportunities in gaming and technology for under-represented communities. This commitment includes inspiring diverse talent to pursue career opportunities in gaming through an ABK Academy that includes partnerships with colleges and technical schools serving under-represented communities, mentorships for participants, and a rotating apprenticeship program that leads to game development jobs, similar to the programs we began with the United Negro College Fund and Management Leadership for Tomorrow. We will also provide learning, development, and advanced degree opportunities for current employees to increase the number of women and those from under-represented communities in leadership positions across the company and in our industry.

In the coming months, Brian Bulatao, Julie Hodges, and I will share details about how we are operationalizing these goals and implementing and measuring this expanded investment.

3. Based on feedback from employees, we are waiving required arbitration of sexual harassment and discrimination claims – For any Activision Blizzard employee who chooses not to arbitrate an individual claim of sexual harassment, unlawful discrimination, or related retaliation arising in the future, the company will waive any obligation to do so.

4. We will continue to increase visibility on pay equity – As described in the recent note from our President, Daniel Alegre, and our Chief Administrative Officer, Brian Bulatao, the company continues to focus on pay equity for employees. In fact, our U.S. analysis showed that women at the company on average earned slightly more than men for comparable work in 2020. To ensure transparency on our continuing commitment to pay equity, we will report these results annually.

5. We will provide regular progress updates – We will be monitoring the progress of our business units, franchise teams, and functional leaders with respect to workplace initiatives and we will provide a status report quarterly. We also will be adding a dedicated focus on this vital work in our annual report to shareholders and in our annual ESG report with information on gender hiring, diversity hiring, and workplace progress.

Specifics on how these measures will be implemented and tracked will be forthcoming.

Lastly, I want to ensure that every available resource is being used in the service of becoming the industry leader in workplace excellence. Accordingly, I have asked our Board of Directors to reduce my total compensation until the Board has determined that we have achieved the transformational gender-related goals and other commitments described above. Specifically, I have asked the Board to reduce my pay to the lowest amount California law will allow for people earning a salary, which this year is $62,500. To be clear, this is a reduction in my overall compensation, not just my salary. I am asking not to receive any bonuses or be granted any equity during this time.

There’s a tendency when companies face challenging moments to lose sight of what makes them special, what makes them great. You are a truly special group of people who – through passion, conviction, drive, and determination – keep accomplishing extraordinary things. While the critical work ahead won’t be easy, I am confident our collective commitment to workplace excellence will be achieved.

I truly wish not a single employee had had an experience at work that resulted in hurt, humiliation, or worse – and to those who were affected, I sincerely apologize. You have my commitment that we will do everything possible to honor our values and create the workplace every member of this team deserves.

I am grateful for how much people care about this company, and I appreciate that many past and present employees have reached out with their thoughts, concerns, complaints, and suggestions. Your experiences, so courageously shared, serve as reason and reminder for why it is so important for us to do better. And we will.

With thanks and deepest gratitude,

Bobby

Name Reservation Details

WoW Classic Season of Mastery name reservations will open on November 11! Players with an active subscription or game time on their World of Warcraft account will be able to create one character per WoW account.



Season of Mastery Release Date

WoW Classic Season of Mastery releases worldwide on November 16 at 3:00 p.m. PST.


When you reserve a name, you’ll also choose the realm you will play that character on. There are a few additional things to keep in mind as you make your choice:

• After WoW Classic Season of Mastery is live, you’ll be able to create additional characters up to a maximum of 50 characters in each of our three games:
  
  • Up to 50 characters total in World of Warcraft Classic (includes Season of Mastery)
    
  • Up to 50 characters in Burning Crusade Classic
    
  • Up to 50 characters in World of Warcraft and World of Warcraft: Shadowlands
    
• Characters that were created for the WoW Classic Season of Mastery Open Beta will not be available to use in WoW Classic Season of Mastery.
  
• For the name reservation period only, we will have a limit on the number of characters that can be reserved on a realm. When the realms go live, the limit will be removed.

To create a character and play WoW Classic Season of Mastery, you will need to download and install the client first.

• Open the Battle.net desktop app and select World of Warcraft in the game selection menu.
  
• Select World of Warcraft Classic. If you have more than one World of Warcraft account, you’ll see a second dropdown for Account. In that column, select the active account you want to play on.
  
• Click the Install button. You’ll see an installation progress bar that will show you when the installation is available to play.
  
• Once the installation is complete, click the Play button.

You’ll need to select the Season of Mastery realm you want to play on which will be identified in the Realm list. Then select Create New Character. You’ll be able to choose your faction, class, and race, as well as fully customize your new character and name them. If you change your mind about a character and have already reserved one, you will need to delete the one you made. Please note, the name associated with the character you deleted will be immediately available again to be claimed.

Before you put your plans too firmly in place, we encourage you to gather your allies together to select your new home realm. If you’re looking to reconnect with your old friends and guildmates, be sure to check out our Classic Connections forum.

Once you’ve created your new character, all that will be left is to synchronize your chronometer with your friends and allies and prepare for your world (of Warcraft) domination! We’ll see you in Azeroth at 3:00 p.m. PST on November 16!

The Season of Mastery Beta is back online following maintenance and includes the following updates.

Week 4 of open Beta (October 27)

• Many groups of Guard NPCs that were removed from Alterac Valley in patch 1.11 have been restored for Season of Mastery.
• The denizens of Blackrock Depths have grown more leery of criminal activity and will now attempt to stash their most valuable items away if they suspect that a thief is in their midst.
• Many adjustments have been made to the raid encounters in Molten Core and Onyxia’s Lair.
• The PvP honor system has been adjusted to accelerate the rate at which players rank up.
  
  • Developers’ notes: Each week, the Honor system keeps track of players’ PvP participation, and at the end of the week, player-characters with at least 15 honorable kills are sorted by PvP participation. Once sorted, the system decides how many points to award that week, and the sorting is independent of the character’s current PvP rank. The system then awards a calculated number of expected points, and the calculation uses the character’s current PvP ranking points. This can be simplified to: (this_week’s_expected_points - current_ranking_points) * rate_factor. The result is then added to the character’s current_ranking_points, so each week, every player-character approaches their deserved rank. In Classic Era, the rate_factor (i.e. the percentage of the previous week’s expected points that will be awarded) is 20%. In Season of Mastery, we are increasing that rate to 40% to match the faster pace of content.

Please join us starting tomorrow at 2:00 p.m. PDT (5:00 p.m. EDT) for another round of raid testing. Molten Core and Onyxia’s Lair will be open for 24 hours.

Thank you!

The release of Shadowlands provided a new opportunity to streamline and redesign the character creation process. Go behind-the-scenes with Senior UI Designer Jeff Liu to learn more about the thought processes behind it.

Greetings, denizens of Azeroth! My name is Jeff Liu, and I’m a Senior UI Designer on the World of Warcraft User Interface Team. I’m here to share some insights into the Character Creation redesign that launched with Shadowlands. With all the great new customization options that have been introduced recently, we thought this was a great time to pull back the curtain and show off a bit more of the behind-the-scenes design choices we’ve made to the user interface (UI).

I previously worked on the Transmogrification System and Auction House redesigns. Revamping old UIs is by far my favorite type of project, so I was incredibly excited to redesign the Character Creation screen.

This was part of the New Player Experience initiative, which included Exile’s Reach, the new player starting zone. Character Creation is the first screen a new player interacts with, so we wanted to modernize it to make a good first impression. The character art team was also in the process of adding lots of new customization options for Shadowlands, so the timing for the UI update was perfect.

The New Layout
For reference, this is what the old Character Creation screen looked like:


One of the first things we tried was splitting up the class and race selection screens. You would choose your class on the first screen, and your race on the second:


In this example, if you want to play a Night Elf, you’d have to go back to the previous screen, pick a different class, and then keep going back-and-forth between screens to see all your options.

Yeah, it was pretty awkward.

This didn’t work out, so we nearly ended up keeping the old layout and simply updating the art. During a last-minute brainstorm, my fellow UI Designers, Crash Reed and Ray Ocampo pitched a concept where the races were split into opposite sides:


One highlight of this layout is how the face-off between the Horde and Alliance instantly communicates the faction war. We loved the simplicity and freshness of this design, so it was full steam ahead!

Go With Your Gut
With a new layout in our pocket, I reevaluated the amount of information presented to players on this screen. The old Character Creation screen featured a lot of information in the form of text descriptions:


The harm of presenting too much information (even if it’s useful) is that it can prevent someone from making an otherwise simple choice.

We designed the new Character Creation screen to help new players avoid what’s known as analysis paralysis. We cut down a lot of text and relied on visuals and sound to explain the races and classes. We’d rather show you a mage casting a fireball than describe it to you.

Most new players will already be familiar with these fantasy archetypes through pop culture. It’s commonly understood that a warrior wields a sword, wears relatively heavy armor, and fights in melee range.

We sorted the classes in an order that would help new players quickly identify a class they’d understand:


The first three are the strongest, most understood archetypes. The next three are slightly less strong. For example, someone who’s never played a video game might not know what a Priest does. After that are the hybrid classes, which are more complex.

It’s important to note that this design choice wasn’t about how hard each class is to play, but rather how easy it is to understand the concepts behind what the class is and what they do without the need for additional explanation.

Races are largely an aesthetic choice. We didn’t want new players to worry about racial abilities, so we hid them by default:


For us, it’s ok that a new player doesn’t create their “forever character” on the first go. They’ll learn much more about the races and classes by playing the game than we could ever explain on the Character Creation screen.

All we want new players to do is pick the coolest looking race, pick a favorite class archetype, and go!

Show, Don’t Tell
Now that we removed all that text, we set out to create new animations that could really sell the class fantasy.

We began by exploring how elaborate the animations should be. We were especially mindful about the duration, as we didn’t want it to drag on for too long.

Here were the first mockups created by Lead Animator Ian Lang:


Side note: the last clip shows an early concept we tried of a large, cloth background and your character standing on a pedestal. Here’s another mockup of that:


After we decided on a direction, the animation team created a sequence for each class, working with the FX team to select the right special effects to accompany the shown abilities. When that was completed, a sound designer hooked up sounds to all the animations.


I think you’ll agree that the animation, FX, and sound teams did an amazing job making these classes feel heroic. The animations turned out to be one of the biggest highlights of the new Character Creation screen.

Stay Focused
One of our major goals was to have your attention focused on the character model in the middle of the screen. We wanted it to feel like you were designing a superhero. This philosophy guided us on many of the decisions we made in designing this screen.

Instead of the traditional WoW UI art style, we went with a more minimalist aesthetic. We removed elaborate art pieces on the sides, like the old faction banners, as they were too visually distracting and took focus away from your character.


We placed a large shadow on the edge of the screen to give the character a spotlight effect, effectively creating a vignette.

We also positioned the UI elements to draw your eyes toward where we want you to look.


Finally, we blur the background when the camera zooms in during customization mode. This makes the character pop and helps you focus on your character’s features.


New Players
New players see a different version of Character Creation than veteran players do. I wanted to curate a simpler, cleaner experience for them.

For example, only the core races are shown, and their names are labeled under the portraits.


Then there are some subtler differences.

The first character you’ll see as a veteran player is an entirely random race/class combo. For new players, the first character they see will always be a Human or Orc Warrior (of a random gender). This goes back to the idea of easing new players into the game by showing them something more relatable.

Characters are also randomized a bit differently for new players. Since this might be their first introduction to the Warcraft universe, I felt it was crucial for each race to read well visually. For this reason, we disabled options that obscure the face – such as tattoos, war paint, and headdresses – when the character is randomly generated.



But don’t worry, once the player goes into customization mode, they’re free to choose those options.

Lastly, new players see a tip on the customization screen:


One takeaway we got from user testing was that some new players had anxiety around finalizing their character. It makes sense, right? If you assume this is your last chance to customize your character, you’re going to take your time to make sure it’s perfect. This tip lets them proceed with confidence and get into the game faster.

Character Customization
Speaking of Character Customization, let’s look at some of the early mockups for that screen. You can see how the design evolved from the old layout:


At one point, I experimented with a more free-form layout where the options weren’t contained inside a box:


We disliked how cluttered this looked but liked the openness of it, so I combined it with some of the earlier ideas where we grouped the options into categories:


Now we’re getting close to the final layout!

The Option Selector
You’ll notice that the options in the last mockup are controlled by sliders. This UI control went through many iterations during development.

The old layout featured large preview portraits on the right. If you look at these examples, it’s difficult to tell the difference between the different face options:


They’re also not very scalable and counter to our goal of focusing on your character in the middle.

So we set out to find a UI control that could replace the portraits.

I didn’t want to use a mix of different controls (like checkboxes, buttons, and color pickers), as I felt it would make the screen look cluttered and overwhelming. I wanted to use a single control that could work for all option types.

However, the most important goal was enabling you to jump between any two options quickly so that you could easily compare them.


The first few iterations didn’t satisfy that requirement, and it was a hassle to navigate between options that were far apart.

Sliders made it possible to jump around quickly, but not precisely. Sliders are also typically used to move between two extremes (like short and tall), which wasn’t the case for most of these options.

In the end, I came up with a multi-column dropdown that satisfied every goal we had:

• It lets you jump quickly between any two options.
  
• It lets you see all the options at the same time.
  
• It’s a single, versatile UI control that can be used for both names and colors. In some cases, we even mix the two types in the same dropdown.
  
• Your focus is kept on your character in the middle.
  
• And perhaps the coolest part: it lets you preview options in real-time just by mousing over them.

Side note: I’m a huge Overwatch fan. How many Overwatch references can you find in the option names?

The Category Icons
All of the customization options are contained in one of three categories. Here’s how the categories and their icons evolved:


I originally planned for five categories, but that changed after I tested it in-game.

I felt it was clunky for hair options to be in the second category, since changing your hairstyle is typically one of the first things you do. So I moved them into the first category with the face options.

Most races don’t have many body and tattoo options, so I combined those two categories as well. And that’s how we ended up with the final three.

Barbershop
You might remember that the barbershop used to have a completely different UI from the Character Creation screen. With the redesign, it made a lot of sense for us to use it in both places.

Some barbershops used to be inconveniently dark because the lighting was based on the environment around it. This also made the perception of colors inaccurate in some cases. A green might look yellow, for example.

The art team solved this problem by applying a completely neutral light around your character when you activate the barbershop chair. Now the lighting is both bright and color accurate.

A new feature of the barbershop is that you can change your character’s gender. Here’s a video of the very first gender swap, recorded by the engineer who implemented it.


Bugs
There were many visual bugs we had to iron out over the course of this project:


You can thank the QA team for saving you from this nightmare fuel!

Until Next Time
The Character Creation revamp was a huge collaborative effort involving character artists, animators, producers, test analysts, sound designers, user researchers, and engineers (read their previously published article here!). We hope to have built a flexible, modern UI that will facilitate the creation of millions of characters in the years to come.

I hope you enjoyed this inside look at how we redesigned the Character Creation screen. Thanks for reading!

Jeff Liu
Senior UI Designer, World of Warcraft