How long do you think Ion will be around for?

[Sluvs]

I hope he does not leave for the foreseeable future.

He may have fucked up in BfA, but he is also one of the few WoW developers that faces criticisms and try to respond to it. Even if he is not equipped for the job (which I think he is), his attitude of trying to fix the games mistakes and listen to popular demand will turn the game around eventually IMO.

[Huzzaa]

Idk, what the half-life of an Ion?

The nucleos of Iono Hazzikostiluky decay rate is 500 000 years.

[Dystemper]

We are now well into the Ion cycle of WoW, however if previous cycles are anything to go by (Vanilla-Wrath, Cata-WoD, Legion-present), the WoW lead doesn't stay on for very long and moves on to other things after a couple of expansions.

Do you think that Ion will be another one of those guys who shakes things up for a bit then moves on, or do you see Ion sticking around long term?

I think he leaves for other opportunities right after Blizzcon . And by that I mean he is fired

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I hope he does not leave for the foreseeable future.

He may have fucked up in BfA, but he is also one of the few WoW developers that faces criticisms and try to respond to it. Even if he is not equipped for the job (which I think he is), his attitude of trying to fix the games mistakes and listen to popular demand will turn the game around eventually IMO.

HE fucked up BFA, LEgion and most of WOD. Any other company he would have been fired after WOD

[Sluvs]

I think he leaves for other opportunities right after Blizzcon . And by that I mean he is fired

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HE fucked up BFA, LEgion and most of WOD. Any other company he would have been fired after WOD

Legion is the top of expansion for many people. You may not like it, but to say he fucked it up is your view on it, not an objective thing like WoD(Which I'm not even sure he worked that much on it) or BfA. So I would only count BfA and Legion, and he is trying hard to turn the ship around with 8.2. Not to mention we don't have data of WoW Success in this recent era, this means that we are inevitably analizing an incomplete picture.

And even if you dismiss all of that, you cannot know for sure that the expansion's failures are his fault, he leads a big team and he still has to answer to someone above him. So claiming that he was the cause for their failures might not be correct.

And even after all that, if he is delivering results to the board, he is technically doing his job. So the board would have no reason to fire him.

There is a lot of nuance in this topic. I'm not saying that he is blameless or anything like that, but I'm saying that it's not as simple as: Ion Hazzikostas is a bad game director!

[Dystemper]

Legion is the top of expansion for many people. You may not like it, but to say he fucked it up is your view on it, not an objective thing like WoD(Which I'm not even sure he worked that much on it) or BfA. So I would only count BfA and Legion, and he is trying hard to turn the ship around with 8.2. Not to mention we don't have data of WoW Success in this recent era, this means that we are inevitably analizing an incomplete picture.

And even if you dismiss all of that, you cannot know for sure that the expansion's failures are his fault, he leads a big team and he still has to answer to someone above him. So claiming that he was the cause for their failures might not be correct.

And even after all that, if he is delivering results to the board, he is technically doing his job. So the board would have no reason to fire him.

There is a lot of nuance in this topic. I'm not saying that he is blameless or anything like that, but I'm saying that it's not as simple as: Ion Hazzikostas is a bad game director!

He is the game director. Its literally his job description that as far as wow goes, the buck stops with him. The game sucks, its on him. No one else because he signs off on everything . As far as Legion? Legion had massive issues , especially when it first launched. Things didnt get better for it until almost the end when you could target the Legendaries you wanted and there was a massive catch up mechanic for AP. Legion seemed better then it was because of coming off from WOD. BUt Ion sucks as a Game director he was fine as lead raid designer. Under him the game has lost more players then any time in its history and the game has seen the worst PR under him. Constant mistakes and blunders . He needs to be fired and anew Dev team put in place. But seeing as Blizzard will most likely end WOW with 9.0 I guess its a moot point

[MoanaLisa]

HE fucked up BFA, LEgion and most of WOD. Any other company he would have been fired after WOD

He wasn't game director for Warlords. Chilton was. Warlords was released in 2014. Chilton was Game Director for Wow until October of 2016. Probably the best thing about Warlords was the raids. Those were Ion's.

Who would you replace him with? Who at Blizzard is doing such a good job that you would be happy to see them take Ion's place as game director?

[Fred Skinner]

I do not think it is right to attack Mr. Hazzikostas personally. I am all for critizizing the devs design decisions, but personal attacks should be a no go.

[Vynestra]

If "one person is responsible for the game" thing is really a thing (which it isn't). I'd say Ion gets props and major credit for legion being such a giant success.

You could also say it was the executive producer at the time, J Allen Brack who engineered it. But once again, it's nonsense, there is no one single person who is responsible for wow.

Still, props to the dev team for engineering legion, probably the most successful expansion to date.

[Zandalariprelate]

We will see next Blizzcon. If they repeat 2018 PR disaster, Blizzard will need some scapegoat for every game(except HotS, of course) and they will replace them with new, more expensive people.

You think Golden and Danuser could be replaced as well? Honestly blizzard needs to hire someone that keeps at bay the writers to not go full retard, the invasion of Brenadden and the interview about that is a good example

[Weeps]

Clearly he is currently working on the next expansion. They are pretty much at the halfway point, I'm guessing.

So... after that expansion development ends, I hope he gets the boot.

He brought a lot of good things to the table but god damn does he irritate me badly

[iamthedevil]

He'll be around until he is no longer working for Blizzard.

[Kithelle]

The quicker the get rid of him the better...

[Walross]

Topics like this make Tseric's words echo in my mind.

It depends on whether or not he keeps up a social media presence. This community has a habit of driving out WoW devs and team leads. If he can stop worrying about the community, he'll probably be around for a while. Otherwise, he'll be gone in a year or two and everyone will have to find someone else to bitch at for all their pet issues.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Activision-Blizzard share holders "asked him to step down" any time now. Of course, maybe Activsion-Blizzard isn't sharing the sub count anymore out of sheer modesty and the game is actually doing better than it ever has before

Here we can see who pays their own bills and who doesn't.

[MoanaLisa]

You think Golden and Danuser could be replaced as well? Honestly blizzard needs to hire someone that keeps at bay the writers to not go full retard, the invasion of Brenadden and the interview about that is a good example

Start with Afrasiabi who designed the story. Danuser I don't know much about but Golden seems to be mostly writing dialogue. Afrasiabi is creative director after all so perhaps his belligerent unsubtle story-telling would be a better place to start. People are making noise about Christie Golden like she wrote the expansion. There's zero evidence that she did and piles of evidence that she's just filling in empty spaces in the larger story.

Like all things Blizzard though, it's fair to say that it's story by committee and that's more than half the problem.

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I wouldn't be surprised if the Activision-Blizzard share holders "asked him to step down" any time now.

Who exactly would these be?

Institutional investors that own 88% of ATVI stock? Are we really saying those pension and mutual funds are paying close attention to the Game Director of a single game within a portfolio of dozens which doesn't generate the most revenue for the stock by a long, long way?

I'm sure those top six institutions are keeping a close eye on MMO-C's forums to inform their collective decision making.

More seriously, ATVI is much bigger than this. And mutual fund managers don't intervene with the HR departments of the stocks they own to badger specific low-level managers (to them) about the work they do.

[matrix123mko]

You think Golden and Danuser could be replaced as well? Honestly blizzard needs to hire someone that keeps at bay the writers to not go full retard, the invasion of Brenadden and the interview about that is a good example

I think that Blizzard needs to hire more "lorekeepers" who would prevent them from making contradictions.

[InTheEnd]

I'm surprised there aren't some people chiming in with "fire Ghostcrawler!" slogans.

[Marrilaife]

Tbh doesn't matter who designs wow, current trend in triple a game design corps is basically less content, more meaningless grind, more recycling, more rushed buggy premature releases, less investment and quality, more cash shop. Ion will quit maybe if the situation comes to the point even more crew is fired and even more financial cuts are forced down upon by the CFOs and other bean counters, but that's nowhere close to good news for the playerbase.

Don't worry though, he'll probably just move to the ever expanding mobile games department before wow team is cut to a skeleton crew.

If you think Blizzard is a long standing company enough to not be threatened by these trends, just check what happened with Bioware. Complete downhill ride, mostly thanks to stupid management / decision making from the higher ups. And it was a company that gave us great games 10-15 years ago.

[Skildar]

I can't really understand why you'd want to fire Hazzikostas... first of all, you don't know half of what he brings to the table as a game director. And when you don't know what a guy does for his work, you're just not in a capacity to say if he deserves to get fired.

There might be a guy somewhere who could steer this game into a better direction, maybe, but the direction we're going in is a good one. They've made a lot of mistakes on this game but most of them are due to bold moves which always brought good things as well. I've rarely felt like they saw a good situation and thought: "might as well not touch it too much as it worked once". As they've explained numerous times, when they implement features they then check for the new expansion what worked and what didn't and try to adapt it and perfect it.
I see a lot of people complaining about azerite gear, but damn that is a good feature that solves a lot of problem! But too many idiots riled up players against every little things azerite is doing wrong compared to legion weapons... Well you don't remember everything legion weapons were doing wrong then...
1/ it was based on weapon slot, which was a slot that was already meaningful
2/ it was offering a lot of traits to unlock slowly (good) but when catching up to others or with an alt, you would unlock 50 traits in one AP token. felt weird and unsatisfying.
3/ to keep us entertained with the weapon they added new traits, the tree got really big, so more strong passives abilities. Everything was additive!
4/ on yop of that we had legendaries that were an RNG mess, and they tie into the problem as their effects were absolutely not on par with each other in terms of power. And it was embarrassing to ask for five parts of your set just because you had to juggle between legendaries depending on fights and some legendary took the slot of your torso or whatever.

how can anyone not see what and why they got rid of legion systems to do azerite gears??! The result could have been better but before shitting on it, try and see what good things it brought! Now please stop those thread cause it makes the whole mmo-c community look like a group of 12 yo trying to grow a third chromosome 21

[Eosia]

As I said, in my comment (the part you didn't quote), Ion doesn't strike me as a business guy. And John Hight took over as Executive Producer and Vice President of World of Warcraft after J Allen Brack moved upwards.

You said there wasn't much above him except for "maybe" an executive producer. I turned your "maybe" into a "definitely".

It's weird that when Ghostcrawler was the Lead Systems Designer, everyone blamed him for everything and no one really cared much about Tom Chilton who was the Game Director at the time.

That's because GC was "the face" everyone say. It got so bad Blizzard offered to provide security to his house after death threats. Chilton only came out for BlizzCon usually and I do not remember him saying much usually. The same thing happened with Ion when GC left for Riot. He was still just a Lead under Chilton but he soon became the target of the same garbage.

Yep.
Chilton didn't put himself out that as much as Ion does - sitting in front of the Twitch firing squad on an almost monthly basis. Ghostcrawler and Holinka got similar treatment because they were more engaged with the audience.

If Jeremy Feasel or Matt Goss were the ones constantly fielding the more controversial questions, they'd be vilified instead. It wouldn't be overnight, but it'd happen.

You're right. Every time a major departure happens, the so-called "fans" will cheer because the one person making X horrible is gone and how now it will get better. Heard it after Kaplan left, heard it after GHostcrawler left.

[Kyphael]

Obviously until they feel he is doing well at his job or until he wants to. Since we have no access to finances or subscription numbers, they feel he is performing his duties adequately. He seems to enjoy his job so it'll probably be the former unless he starts hating it before he starts under-performing.