What has Ion done well as Game Director?

[styil]

Ion Hazzikostas is now in his 4th year as Game Director of WoW. In an attempt to keep things positive, what would you say have been the things that he has done well in his tenure thus far?

I think that he has been able to articulate the concerns of the raiding community well. He seems to at least understand the issues that exist in the raiding scene. I have confidence that he will continue to do so in the future.

[Utrrabbit]

The issue is not that Ion is a bad game director. Because he is not one. He is great. The issue is not blizzard devs. It is the fact that their hands are tired behind activision.

However what i think he has done well would be him backing classic wow.

[Justpassing]

I don't think you care.

[americandavey]

The issue is not that Ion is a bad game director. Because he is not one. He is great. The issue is not blizzard devs. It is the fact that their hands are tired behind activision.

welcome to every day life. Where employees have to answer to their boss and do what they want for their business.

[Sliske]

When did he start? WoD or Legion? WoD had the model revamps which were mostly good, it had somewhat decent class development, it had great environments, the story which led into Legion was pretty good and the Garrisons, while a failure ultimately, where an impressive feat in their own right and play pretty good as a casual player. As a raider, 20 man mythic was a great idea. No more 10 man vs 25 man bullshit. One difficulty and everyone is on the same page.

In Legion, well, Legion was mostly great. D3 Legendaries were trash early on, but artifacts, mythic+, order halls, class fantasy were all hugely well received. Raids were pretty good, story was excellent, best we've had so far. Mage tower, absolutely fantastic content. I enjoyed the pet battle dungeons and the new pvp system. Suramar, best zone ever made by a lot of peoples standards. Removal of stand of the ancients.

BFA - mostly a failure, however they did land somewhat on their feet. They tried to go cold turkey off artifacts, legendaries and the crucible and really that was probably Ion's worst decision. They've spent all of BFA trying to rebuild the feeling Legion had, however we're still not out of the woods - the classes are still being held together by bandaids like essences, azerite and so on. Dungeons and Raids, once again pretty good.

The revamp to deepwind gorge was great and the pet battle dungeons were great too. Enviroments once again fantastic, questing great, etc. Return of AV and IoC and even Ashran and Wintergrasp, now in a decent place.

Overall the games main problem has been class design. People do not play a game if the medium by which they experience the content is trash. No one cares how many works of art you have, if i have to look at them through the bottom of a glass bottle. No one cares how great of a chef you are, if i have to eat it with toothpaste in my mouth. Classes were changed for the worse in WoD 6.0, and 7.0 and 8.0 has been attempts to bandaid fix them. Both attempts have worked, but its come at a hefty price - grinding. You must grind out essences, or artifact power, or legendaries, just to have a fun to play class.

In 9.0, Shadowlands, Ion's #1 priority should be making classes fun BASELINE. Remove all legendaries, trinket effects, tier set bonuses, artifacts, essences, azerite traits and make classes fun THAT WAY. THEN add on stuff.

Overall Ion, i give you a 7/10. Closer to a 6 than an 8. You really do suck at alts, but your team that makes quests, environments and story has been great. You need to focus more on moment to moment gameplay. More class fantasy too. Move away from raid themes and bring back class themes. No one cares about warfront armor because no one wants to look like a human in plate, other than a human warrior. Why do you think everyone runs around in T6 or its remake, or sets from Legion in general? People love to look like their class.

[probert]

production values remain high. good art, sound, music design.

raid encounters continue to be well tuned, with multiple layers of difficulty each tier. I dislike multiple tiers / difficulties of raiding but that's the design direction of Blizzard (everyone should see all the content; eternal treadmill of increasing difficulty) and within that context its worked relatively well. I'm less concerned with edge case scenarios of peak mythic difficulty, normal / heroic is decent.

i'm sympathetic to Ion as he inherited 10+ years of code and systems, been asked to tune them on the fly for a gradually decreasing player base and budget while extracting maximum profit.

i no longer play retail, but came back to play some of legion and the first few patches of BFA and my issues with the game aren't around execution. the design choices themselves are more of a concern, its just not the type of game i want to play.

[MyndZero]

Nothing, IMO. He became game director as Legion was basically finished up and all the patched etc would've been planned out mostly ahead of time as well. I think BFA was his first real "project" as game director and it's evident how much that failed and so far Shadowlands doesn't look too good either - from my perspective it may not have titanforging or the other terrible systems of BFA but my overall view of Shadowlands so far seems dull and boring, rather stale.

Hopefully alpha/beta changes my mind on it but it really seems to be lacking compared to Legion and even BFA.

[Voidwielder]

welcome to every day life. Where employees have to answer to their boss and do what they want for their business.

That is not always the norm. There are companies in which the middle-manager who has the rights to be creative - what Ion essentially is, a link between CEO/CFO/COOs and the grunts - has a lot of room for manoeuvre to execute as he sees fit.

Game development is inherently a bit more creative, fluid and open to deviations than, say, a company which makes butter knives. If it's approached like the latter, it can be very detrimental.

t. 14 years of experience in being the middle guy between CEO/CFO and the grunts

[Nadiru]

Ion correctly identified that WoW's classes were becoming too unwieldy, and opted to make a clean break among all classes with Legion. Since then he's tried to square the circle on class complexity with expansion-unique progression suites, which has led us to some ugly backlash among players. To his credit, Ion seems to be toning down rent-a-power stuff in Shadowlands (nothing we've seen with covenant powers or soulbinds are even remotely as invasive as Legiondaries, Artifacts, or Azerite Armor) while tuning up baseline class utility and complexity (the Unpruning.) All in all, I'm mildly optimistic about the game systems of Shadowlands.

[Tradu]

The issue is not that Ion is a bad game director. Because he is not one. He is great. The issue is not blizzard devs. It is the fact that their hands are tired behind activision.

However what i think he has done well would be him backing classic wow.

Blaming Activision in 2k20, really? Blizzard can make shit decisions all on their own.

OT: M+ is good, and they've added a bunch of promising systems outside of that as well, just botched execution and then deleted the systems instead of iterating on them.

[Ardenaso]

Not giving the Alliance High Elves. I think that's one

[CrawlFromThePit]

Ion Hazzikostas is now in his 4th year as Game Director of WoW. In an attempt to keep things positive, what would you say have been the things that he has done well in his tenure thus far?

I think that he has been able to articulate the concerns of the raiding community well. He seems to at least understand the issues that exist in the raiding scene. I have confidence that he will continue to do so in the future.

Not trying to be a jerk but this thread is worse than useless, it's misleading in many ways because the MMO-C community is not educated enough to understand what Ion does, and the few who have the knowledge to share will not be listened to or trusted by the close minded clowns rampant on this forum who will only believe their own ignorance instead of learning.

That goes both way, for those who say things like "good art, good music" when he in fact has almost nothing to do with this other than saying "that's cool" to the audio director. Obviously this applies to the blind haters who think Ion is single handedly responsible for every little issue in the game.

We can list what we think is good in the game in general since he's game director, but not enough people know enough about what he does to really talk about this.

[Ghostile]

Not trying to be a jerk but this thread is worse than useless, it's misleading in many ways because the MMO-C community is not educated enough to understand what Ion does, and the few who have the knowledge to share will not be listened to or trusted by the close minded clowns rampant on this forum who will only believe their own ignorance instead of learning.

That goes both way, for those who say things like "good art, good music" when he in fact has almost nothing to do with this other than saying "that's cool" to the audio director. Obviously this applies to the blind haters who think Ion is single handedly responsible for every little issue in the game.

We can list what we think is good in the game in general since he's game director, but not enough people know enough about what he does to really talk about this.

What? Are you saying Ion isn't literally sitting on a golden throne as an instrument of activisions will and whipping the slaves to make wow just like he wants?

[Lazuli]

He's pretty good at lawyering during Q/A

Is this a serious thread? Blizz hasn't made a single good change to the game since it became a poster boy for EA's 'surprise mechanics' and D3 personified.

[Laqweeta]

How can you people be this fucking blind?

Dude is trash, he needs to go. https://twitter.com/IonHazzikostasQ?...Ctwgr%5Eauthor

https://twitter.com/IonHazzikostasQ/...86427578753024
https://twitter.com/IonHazzikostasQ/...13293094293507
https://twitter.com/IonHazzikostasQ/...28909567520769

Please get him the fuck outta' here.

[Ishayu]

He's phenomenally good at keeping a consistent production schedule.

[ONCHEhap]

He's a pretty great game director,honestly.
The issue is that the devs don't really take decisions,the executives and the board do,devs just have to obey orders and try their best to make something good out of the instructions given by money hungry boomers who barely even know what a video game is

[phattsao]

He's been a great "Yes Man" for corporate. Puts a positive spin on all of the terrible decisions they force on the game. He'll go far in the professional world.

[ano2024]

The issue is not that Ion is a bad game director. Because he is not one. He is great. The issue is not blizzard devs. It is the fact that their hands are tired behind activision.

However what i think he has done well would be him backing classic wow.

That's such a retarded and brainwashed point of view. I see you have been drinking you daily dose of Blizzard's cool-aid, good job!

[Lucifer Morningstar]

Nice try Ion. We're not falling for this. Fix the game pls ty.