Why ion hazzikostas is the best Game Director

[Kithelle]

so because its social studies, he is not smart? lol... btw he still has his lawyer license active, and he had a history in it https://pview.findlaw.com/view/3726028_1

Harvard itself handpick people from all the globe, and only the top people in it, so if you think that a harvard graduate is not smart, well, i doubt anyone can convince you.

and whats with playing resto shaman? i mean him playing shaman doesn't increase his skills by 500% in mythic? he plays mythic actively, because there are people like you with all my respect wears a tinfoil hat and think that Ion is conspiring against other specs or against top raiders.

quit the hate, you will never have a game director like him.

Well he obviously can't fool people with his lies so he obviously isn't as smart as he thinks.

Resto, like I said is the only decent off Shaman spec in BfA...it's amazing how Resto is still in decent shape considering how shit Elemental and Enhancement are...it shows his priorities, A.K.A. himself...fuck the rest.

Even if he is the smartest person on the planet, we've had better directors than him...WoW keeps going farther and farther downhill with his lies, trolling, and he knows best smug attitude.

[Jotunhammer]

Question is, with all the legendary names vanishing from WoW production, whats left of the
true wow? I wonder that, if the direction of the company is not what the founders had in mind
and they leave because they feel it is not going the way they wanted.

what is going to happen to wow?

[bozoben]

It's 50/50, I don't think he should be Fired, But I do think someone else needs to take over and let him focus on separate rolls.

Legion was only Decent, and is no reason to place him on a pedestal and make him untouchable, but I'll reserve my final judgment for after raid release.

[Ashrynn]

My opinions of Ion changed with Legion. I still feel he is kind of an asshole, but at the same time he does admit mistakes which is something we've wanted the Dev team to do since WoD. I think the game was amazing in Legion even if I found it harder to raid(work schedule) and am happy to go into BfA.

EDIT: Harder to Mythic Raid*

[SirCowdog]

It's 50/50, I don't think he should be Fired, But I do think someone else needs to take over and let him focus on separate rolls.

Legion was only Decent, and is no reason to place him on a pedestal and make him untouchable, but I'll reserve my final judgment for after raid release.

If nothing else, Ion being in charge for so long would tend to cause stagnation in the overall design direction. He may not need to be replaced entirely, but expansions should maybe alternate leadership in order to keep things fresh.

The problem is that whatever we think of the game as players, it would seem that Ion's design for WoW is profitable from a business perspective. And sadly, in a corporation the size of Acti-Blizz, that's going to trump all other considerations.

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My opinions of Ion changed with Legion. I still feel he is kind of an asshole, but at the same time he does admit mistakes which is something we've wanted the Dev team to do since WoD. I think the game was amazing in Legion even if I found it harder to raid(work schedule) and am happy to go into BfA.

EDIT: Harder to Mythic Raid*

Admitting mistakes doesn't mean jack if you keep making mistakes.

[Demeia]

Counter point:

"Random distribution of legendary items isn't a problem. There is something cool about not having the ability to choose a specific legendary from a list. Each person may have a different legendary, but those should be good in some different situations"

IMO Worst lead dev ever... the above statement is all the proof I need.

I like Ion but there does seem to be a willingness to double down on bad policies on his watch whereas I got the feeling Greg Street's team might have just said, "We need to back down." I have relatively few scars from pre-Ion (25m to 10m change, admittedly, is a big scar--a lot of people recognized that would be a disaster but to be fair they fixed it), but during Ion's term I have the whole flight debacle, mobs scaling with gear (in any form to me this still rankles), and the above mentioned legos. How, how, HOW in the name of Azeroth did they not see almost from the start that the thing to do would be to either let you pick what you want or mammothly increase the drop rate? Why did their drop rate stay consistent for the whole expansion? Even now they don't seem to want to give legos that will be useless in about a month, the free lego they gave us seemed more to solve the problem of weekly chest rather than actually give us something we could play around with for a month.

[Soluna]

Let me tell you the tale of Yoshi-P

Yoshi P WAS a good director, FF XIV has now gotten really popular, and he and his team lack any sort of creative vision, and they cut more and more content, or thin it out like butter, in order to bring new content to the table, which either always flops, or it is just some repetitive thing in order to succeed (Look heaven o high, eureka being boring diadem 2, etc).

Dungeons lack any sort of flexibility, unlike WoW dungeons, raids have gone from amazing side stories to boring fanservice (Omega is a pure BS dragonball power level tournament compared to the likes of Alexander/Bahamut. The only things that still remain amazing are primal fights, amazing music, good story, beautiful artwork, and solid boss fights.

I mean, an okay package, but their quality is dropping by each patch, while they stuff the fuck out of the mog station with new cosmetics, and whenever the community asks for something, they either find a retarded way to accomplish it (examples include housing wards, inventory space, glamour management among many), or they just give you the middle finger in a kind way. Oh, not to mention the 'apology' we get every patch due to the newest 'Rabaun EX' solo duty fucking up the queues and halting progress. How do I know all that even though I despise the game in its current state? Well if I unsub for more than 40 days, the house I share with my gf will be toast, and we have far too many memories with it and friends since heavensward to let it go to waste. Therefore I always check in all the new content, only to be disappointed for the most part. Oh and dont even get me started on the customer service... they have even charged me by accident and I did not even get a refund, so yeah, Yoshi P was better in the past than the current Ion Hazzikostas, but not anymore, and in all honesty, everyone loved Ion in WoD.

[Axaion]

Fair enough... I can definitely be a smug SOB . I think people forget just how good some former leads actually were (especially GC, who has had a successful career in this industry with multiple games). Or at the very least, they designed a game that I enjoyed far more than I enjoy the kind of expansion legion was. The sad part is, with a few reasonable adjustments to some of the systems (quickly WF/TF max +10 ilevels, rolling cap that increased weekly for AP gains, anything besides what they chose to distribute Legiondaries to name a few) Legion could have been right up there with WOTLK. The actual content was very good... it was the BS grinding systems and RNG littered everywhere which stunk up the whole joint and made me unsub.

Legion was a failure at the systems level and Ion is the lead dev, that means he was ultimately responsible for decisions like randomly distributed legendaries, which I see as one of the worst decisions ever made design wise in the game. Having good systems in a game is very important, and Ion just doesn't think these things through. I also feel like he's incapable of looking back and admitting mistakes... at least publicly.

Maybe they just got better at putting it out there, but to be fair, when GC was lead, twitch and mmo-c and so on wasnt anywhere nearly as popular so that probably has something to do with it too

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That is just patently false, You clearly weren't around when GC was, He was constantly posting and was even a very early user of twitter when it came blizzard devs.

Ion is the downfall of WoW. He has slowed the game to a crawl, taken away features for no real reason other than slowdown, He uses his lawyer speak so well as to never truly answer a question that is hard. The fact that so many people like him is just astounding. He has done nothing for this game to make it good. He bows to the activision overlords and doesn't have a spine to push for more freedom of design, instead its time for SLOWDOWNS so we can sell them boosts! Truly a man of integrity. Bring back Kaplan.

eh, read my other reply

And i was around, from beta till late wotlk (perma ban lul, i would be less salty if they banned me for what i actually did tho.), then again wod-> now

[Falynn1]

I personally think Ion is great... he has done such a wonderful job with the game. He cares about it and loves it as much as we do.

[Melsiren]

I mean, anything is an improvement over the paint huffing fool Celestalon was.

[Exkrementor]

Ion is intelligent and knows what he is doing. He was a hardcore Raider and did a bunch of Guides back in the day. If people believe it or not: He understands mythic raiders and their concerns.
However nowadays it seems like the Dev Team is making really stupid decisions and he is the one that gets to communicate all that bullshit to us.
When you watch the last Q&A he said a few times that they have to change the game in a way that every dummy understands whats going on.

Levelsquish? Nah, Players would be confused.
Bonus EXP at the end of a Dungeon, that is stated in the fucking tooltip in your Quest tracker? Make it so the final Boss gives more exp so people are not confused.

Or the personal Loot change.
Everybody who likes the personal loot change has no idea what he is talking about and is not affected by it in any way or form because the content they do already has forced personal loot.
But there is such a majority of stupid people whining in the forums about stuff they dont understand that blizzard feels the need to give in.

Azerite Armor is not tradeble because blizzard doesnt want people to get kicked out of pugs because they didnt trade their item to someone else.
THIS HAS NEVER FUCKING HAPPENED ONCE TO ME IN 14 YEARS OF WOW.
Besides you can get kicked for failing or bad performance anyway and nobody can force you to trade something. Maybe the next step is to remove the kick option for the group leader.


tl:dr
Ion is good but the team has to give in to morons.

[Sesethi]

Holla at these biches Ion. These gurls are just cray cray and hella jella of ya, gurlfriend

[Eggroll]

I have just watched the Q&A and i must say, i am so happy that Ion Hazzikostas is the game director of my favorite game. Here is some reasons why:

He is passionate about the Warcraft universe.
- How do you know?

He plays the game so he knows our struggle if something is broken or unfair.
- How do you know?

He is not hiding behind pre-made words, he actualy says what he feels.
- He is an attorney and he talks like one all the time.

He is not afraid of talking about misstakes they,him, the team made/makes.
- No he doesn't. He only admits what he can't deny without making a complete idiot out
of himself and Blizzard

And last thing, his has a good sense of humor :-)
- Does he?

Do you guys agree with me? What else does do good? Does he piss you off?

No, I don't agree. He is arrogant, ignorant and patronizing and his behavior suggests a complete lack of empathy.

[Duckypoo]

However nowadays it seems like the Dev Team is making really stupid decisions

They've been doing that since the release of cata.

[Malikath]

I mean, anything is an improvement over the paint huffing fool Celestalon was.

class design still hasn't recovered from the touch-screen forum mod though.

[Beazy]

WoW has steadily gone down hill in quality since hes taken over. Ion brought time gates and 10 layers of RNG because he was too lazy to put in extra hours with the team to design actual content.

[Isilarya]

WoW has steadily gone down hill in quality since hes taken over. Ion brought time gates and 10 layers of RNG because he was too lazy to put in extra hours with the team to design actual content.

Or our worst fears are becoming manifest and Activision is starting to put their fingers in the cookie jar more than Blizz is letting on.

[Malikath]

WoW has steadily gone down hill in quality since hes taken over. Ion brought time gates and 10 layers of RNG because he was too lazy to put in extra hours with the team to design actual content.

*every piece of craft-able armor in the game*
"bind on crafting"
<random additional grind>
remember when we could get plans from raids we could craft and sell?
and they each had their market due to the stats they brought?

[Alkizon]

11. Some criticism to Ion's approach (&GC reference) +/+

There is even song for him:

You think I'm laughing at you? There even was a hint