Blizzard wants to cut out World of Warcraft overwork on their workers

[Yunru]

Source:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...with-no-crunch

Recently, the controversy over working conditions in game development has moved from the punishing workload involved in shipping big releases like Red Dead Redemption 2 to the stresses of keeping popular online games constantly updated, thanks to a Polygon report on the relentless crunch at Fortnite developer Epic.

While it may not move at the pace of the latest battle royale games, Blizzard's evergeen online RPG World of Warcraft, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year, still has an ambitious update schedule. The WOW team ships a major paid expansion, equivalent to a new game release, every two years, and substantial content updates every two to three months. So when I had the chance to interview John Hight, the executive producer and vice president for World of Warcraft at Blizzard, over video link last week, it was the first topic I raised.

"Generally our policy on the team itself is we want to be a no-crunch team," Hight told me. "We're not there 100% yet, but we're really dramatically better than we were even five years ago, certainly 10 years ago. I think that very few parts of the team end up having to work any degree of overtime."

Hight admitted that running a mature game such as WOW has its advantages: after 15 years of constant development, he said, "we've got a pretty good sense of what we need from a staffing standpoint". But still, cultural change can be slow. "There's still a few pockets... Largely this is people that are self-motivated, they want to put in just that extra little effort and they have a hard time letting go. As we're finishing up a major patch or an expansion, I'm literally wandering the halls and saying, 'Go home! It'll still be there tomorrow.'

"There's enough studies that have shown that people are just not that effective once they've crossed eight, 10 hours of work. At that point it's diminishing returns, so we don't really want to adhere to that. I think we're pretty successful, but we can always get better. I'd love it if we could have perfect work-life balance. That's a goal."

Hight is a veteran producer who assumed leadership of World of Warcraft when his predecessor J Allen Brack replaced Mike Morhaime as the studio's president last year. At Blizzard, he has shepherded Diablo 3's console version and Reaper of Souls expansion to release as well as the last two WOW expansion packs; prior to that, he had a long stint as an executive producer at Sony Computer Entertainment America. He's seen first-hand how the industry's working habits were formed, and knows the imperative for changing them. "I've been in the industry 31 years, and man, I can tell you I missed out on a lot of important life events because I was working crazy hours, especially early in my career. And you know, we loved the work. We were building a new entertainment form, so it's very enthralling and engaging, and it's easy to get pulled into that. But by the same token, games are going to last for many, many years, and we want the people that are developing games to last as long!"

Asked if he felt pressure from the likes of Fortnite to match their aggressive update schedules, Hight said that external pressures didn't bother him, but as a WOW player - he raids two nights a week and has played the game continually since the original beta, earning his 10th anniversary statue - he knew improvements needed to be made when he joined the team at the end of development of the fifth expansion, Warlords of Draenor. Lengthy gaps between the last update for one expansion and the release of the next were particularly annoying to players. The team set a soft goal to update the game roughly every 11 weeks, and were pleased when they were able to stick to that schedule regularly enough that players started to predict accurately when the next update would arrive.

More controversially among players, under Hight World of Warcraft has started to pace out content updates, unlocking their features over time, a process he calls "right-sizing". He's adamant that this is a "healthier" way to enjoy the game, even if it runs counter to player expectations. Thanks to datamining, he said, "people know [the content] is out there and they expect to have access to it right away, and they're disappointed otherwise. But I think it's actually a little bit healthier for us if we can pace some of that out - I mean healthier for us as players. Rather than getting this firehose of content, I'd like for us to withhold a bit more and unlock at appropriate times. Ideally, it's unlocked when you're ready to play it, you're not waiting for a long period and you don't feel rushed, either."

Hight gives the impression of being, for want of a better expression, a production nerd: in our conversation, nothing got him so animated as the prospect of running WOW as a smooth, well-oiled machine and giving his development staff what they need to do their work as frictionlessly as possible. For example, when I asked what aspects of this 15-year-old game he would rebuild from the ground up if he could, he didn't talk about the design, the graphics engine or the user interface - he talked about dev tools. "The tools for WOW were built 15 to 20 years ago... while we have modified them over time, I think that we have a ways to go to really optimise them and make it fun to create content for the game. My ideal would be that an artist or designer would have an idea in the morning, sit down at their desk, start to work on it and see it in the game instantaneously. Right now, there's a delay. If we can close that gap, the more iteration you can do, and the faster the transference from ideas to reality, the richer and deeper the experience can be. Maybe it doesn't sound very sexy, but just making our toolchain a little better, a little faster will yield really excellent results."


Makes you wonder to think why the recent wow expansions were bad. A overwork and burnout.
However i do see this blizzard response as coporate propaganda and i hope their workers get more normal working hours in future. As it stands right now, every large video game creator is overworking everyone to their bone.
Not to mention this:
https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/16/18...ive-pay-unions
Constant threat of losing a job.

However timed content is (aka gated), nothing else than a strategy to make you sub longer. It doesnt exist there to give workers more time to do something.

[Powerogue]

I really don't think most expansions come down to over/underwork so much as good/bad ideas at the core of them.

There was clearly a ton of development put into BFA. Levels of detail certainly comparable to Legion, even surpassing it in some regards (more music comes to mind, with them having more raid and night music this time around). But core ideas in the center that didn't jive with the playerbase like azerite armor, warfronts, and island expeditions meant players just weren't having as much fun. Especially since they made the conscious choice to prune many of the things players did like in Legion.

Cataclysm has gotten a lot of flak over the years as well, but there again you can see tons of dev work went into it. They revamped ALL OF 1-60 for crying out loud, PLUS an expansion of endgame content. They were stretched thin, and compromises certainly must've been made.

[Yunru]

I really don't think most expansions come down to over/underwork so much as good/bad ideas at the core of them.

There was clearly a ton of development put into BFA. Levels of detail certainly comparable to Legion, even surpassing it in some regards (more music comes to mind, with them having more raid and night music this time around). But core ideas in the center that didn't jive with the playerbase like azerite armor, warfronts, and island expeditions meant players just weren't having as much fun. Especially since they made the conscious choice to prune many of the things players did like in Legion.

Cataclysm has gotten a lot of flak over the years as well, but there again you can see tons of dev work went into it. They revamped ALL OF 1-60 for crying out loud, PLUS an expansion of endgame content. They were stretched thin, and compromises certainly must've been made.

Well a lot of games like this lean back on history. So a person who is tired all the time will do a bad job. You can see norse mythology, pyramids, cthulu and so on.
If one cog in machine breaks, the later production wont be able to revese a bad changes.

[bloomy]

i mean obviously, fun class design is harder to make and harder to keep up, snapshotting dots makes balance harder and adds more work, 10 man mythic raiding would add more tuning work... all of these things are good for the game and a lot of fun. but a long time ago they made a decision that our fun wasn't worth their effort.

that leads us to BfA, so it worked out great for them... lol

[ls-]

Why ?? No crunch or OT is a good thing to strive for.

[Sethus]

When a business is extremely greedy, poorly organized and led it doesn't matter if workers are forced to put in extra labor hours. These multi billion dollar corporations set tight deadlines and budgets all for the sake of profitability and product hype, but in the end customers get sub par products and workers get burnt out.

[styil]

Blizzard workers need to work smarter, not harder.

[Kumorii]

Makes you wonder to think why the recent wow expansions were bad. A overwork and burnout.

Can't really find anything that shows being overworked or having a burnout is a new thing. The way gaming industry or entertainment in general is that there is plenty of overtime, both forced and by workers own volition. I'm pretty sure they worked overtime back in vanilla and also during classic development now.

[americandavey]

I am going to say it now, Ion is going to get "some" slack now that a new name has been put out there that brought in "gated content"

Blood is in the water now.

Edit" I will say this, its not the lack of work harder or faster. Its the lack of effort and lack of creativity that is hurting WoW. If a team can not create 8.1 from Launch day to 8.1 release which was 4 months with most of it gated. 8.2 from 8.1 being 6 months or so. None of that is demanding, that is just unorganized

[Eleccybubb]

When a business is extremely greedy, poorly organized and led it doesn't matter if workers are forced to put in extra labor hours. These multi billion dollar corporations set tight deadlines and budgets all for the sake of profitability and product hype, but in the end customers get sub par products and workers get burnt out.

Exactly.

To be honest I genuinely feel for the workers at Blizzard who joined that company to make amazing products or because they wanted to be a part of the Blizzard family

Because nowadays that isn't the case. The Blizzard "family" is nonexistant and I can't imagine any dev there is excited to be working on Blizzard products these days especially with a good chunk of their talent being forced onto mobile garbage.

[Donald Hellscream]

Being european I am obviously biased since we do get way more time off then the people across the pond do but I definitely think they should.

[cparle87]

Exactly.

To be honest I genuinely feel for the workers at Blizzard who joined that company to make amazing products or because they wanted to be a part of the Blizzard family

Because nowadays that isn't the case. The Blizzard "family" is nonexistant and I can't imagine any dev there is excited to be working on Blizzard products these days especially with a good chunk of their talent being forced onto mobile garbage.

Your bias is showing again. Might want to work on that. Is it painful, lurking around on forums all day just to insult a company that you feel has personally betrayed you for not being exactly what you want it to be?

[Kaver]

I love WoW and I want the game to be great, but no one should work under bad conditions.

[Nathasil]

If what he says is true, that most overwork is done self-motivated, i consider this the optimal state of things in a creative industry. People who love the project they are working on and dream about ways to improve it SHOULD want to overwork from time to time. If you are working on a creative project you LOVE...would you punch in your card on the minute each evening? I sure as hell would not.

What i absolutely DO believe is that this kind of behaviour happened a lot more at Blizzard 10+ years ago, when - and that is just how i feel about it! - Blizzard loved its own games a lot more.

[MoanaLisa]

I am going to say it now, Ion is going to get "some" slack now that a new name has been put out there that brought in "gated content"

Blood is in the water now.

They design by consensus which brings its own set of problems (a horse designed by a committee is a camel). If corporate behavior is anything like what I've seen over the years things are mutually agreed to well in advance and some sort of consensus is achieved before the top person even needs to make a call. It's how teams work. Design sometimes is better when there's a single driving vision behind what the end result should look like (Metzen in many cases) but if they have that now it's not obvious. The game is designed by a sizable group of people and feels like it; a bunch of disparate parts that together don't add up to as much as they should.

Forums love to have a target and it's always the person who's out front talking to people. It's the only explanation for the hysterical overreaction to Street and Hazzikostas while all the years that Chilton was game director very little of it was directed at him.

They're doing the right thing by their employees by attempting to eliminate crunch time and sending people home when the day is done. Shit happens though and never more often than in software development.

[wushootaki]

They might have a real good idea of what they need to make the game...

Now if only that had a real good idea of what makes the game good...


Warfronts - Failure
Island Expeditions - Failure
Azerite Armor - Failure

3 of the biggest BFA features tanked

[Veggie50]

Your bias is showing again. Might want to work on that. Is it painful, lurking around on forums all day just to insult a company that you feel has personally betrayed you for not being exactly what you want it to be?

Wait... what are we discussing here except our personal opinion (= bias)?

[Kokolums]

They might have a real good idea of what they need to make the game...

Now if only that had a real good idea of what makes the game good...


Warfronts - Failure
Island Expeditions - Failure
Azerite Armor - Failure

3 of the biggest BFA features tanked

The current WoW design goal is:
1. Tons of super easy mindless content for over 90% of the playerbase.
2. A small trickle of very hard content for a small percentage of the playerbase and for people to watch the pros play on stream.
3. Gate stuff to prevent people from having nothing to do like in WoD.

Warfronts and IEs would be considered GOOD content by this team because its mindless and easy for the casuals. Azerite Armor would be considered GOOD content by this team because it is the gate mechanic.

[Eleccybubb]

The current WoW design goal is:
1. Tons of super easy mindless content for over 90% of the playerbase.
2. A small trickle of very hard content for a small percentage of the playerbase and for people to watch the pros play on stream.
3. Gate stuff to prevent people from having nothing to do like in WoD.

Warfronts and IEs would be considered GOOD content by this team because its mindless and easy for the casuals. Azerite Armor would be considered GOOD content by this team because it is the gate mechanic.

And all those mechanics that revolve around timegating or RNG are not working right now.

[Kokolums]

And all those mechanics that revolve around timegating or RNG are not working right now.

I think they'd argue it IS working, because without those things you get mass exodus like in WoD.