Ion Hazzikostas wrecked world of warcraft

[Talrath]

Vanilla leveling was always a bit tedious just like any expansion, the class quests were sometimes enjoyable. Also the reason why people go with the classic hype is that it's plain nostalgic, stepping into a game genre where you dont know squat as a 12 year old. Now however, we know how these things work and there are no more mysterys anymore regarding the ingame lore. We have seen them all. My advice is that if you want that feeling again, you need to play a different mmorpg. There is guild wars 2, FF14.

I do have to agree that professions are useless now except for cooking and alchemy.

[TragedyAnn]

Alright, I think the guy actually has a decent point about crafting, present day crafting sucks, and I haven't felt like I got anything good out of crafting for years...

But I laugh at the idea that he considers present day leveling a chore, and acts like it was a magical experience everyone enjoyed during vanilla. Just as many people complained about leveling being a chore back in the day as do now. And it was WAY MORE of a chore in Vanilla than it is now, that's for DAMN sure. (60 levels of slow content vs. 10 levels of fast content, I mean duh)

"The game starts at level 60!" they used to say...

Quests now are also far more fun, diverse & story driven, wheras classic quests were more mundane and repetative. Endless complaints about killing 40 bears to loot 10 bear hearts plagued us back then... (because apparently 30 bears didn't have hearts)

And we didn't get 2 months of demon invasions or magic Alterac Valley to power level all our alts in a week back then either. :P Most people had 1 alt that they gave up on and got bored with around level 30-40. :P

Classic was successful because people who didn't live through it thought it was some magical experience they'd never seen before. People who actually lived through it were prone to call it just as much a chore back then as you're calling BFA now. Now its waning as people are seeing through the rose colored glasses. I won't deny there's still a community who enjoys and prefers it, but there were also droves of people who tried it with enthusiasm only to quickly abandon it when they learned how much quality-of-life it lacked over the live game.

BUT my goal here wasn't to bash classic... merely to poke holes in the laughable idea that leveling is a chore NOW but WASN'T in vanilla. That's ridiculous. Leveling in Vanilla was downright painful at times.

[Hyrja]

No, Activison did.

[Shakana]

This has been discussed a good amount of times.

Ion imo isn't the best neither the worst. I think overall he should be paying more attention to details, such as the oopsie he did with socket systems on benthic gear.

[Belloc]

Sorry OP, but you're full of shit.

I stopped playing in MoP and came back during BfA. Back in MoP and previous expansions, I was a hardcore end-game raider. Nowadays, though, I don't have the time for competitive gaming. Even so, I noticed that there's faaaaar more to do in WoW now than there was back in MoP or any time before.

Yes, they are putting a lot of work into the competitive endgame, this is true... but they're also putting a lot of work in the more casual aspects.

Tl;dr: Maybe you're just tired of WoW after all this time, because the game has more to do for everyone than ever before.

[Steelangel]

Thank you for starting this informative thread that no one has started before ever.

[Augusta138]

He did this all on his own.
Nobody but him is accountable.

Because he made the game all by his own.

People are really delusional in thinking 1 person alone "wrecked" anything.
People clearly have no clue a business is run or how decisions are made.

Btw; this is thread 1000 in the last month or so about 1 person apparently "wrecking" a game.

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No, Activison did.

Also a load of bull....
But sure keep on thinking that

[Trend]

He is the game director, and in charge for where WoW heads nowadays. He also was a vital part of the development team before. Nowadays he is responsible for to what the game evolves. And what i described in my first post is the current state.

And in the current state, the existing world does not matter. He had time enough to change that. Instead, he added timers to everything, forgot about the old world even more and made challenges and competitions in instanced content the core gameplay. It is his fault, and he should allow someone else who knows how to design the world in world of warcraft to do the job properly.

WoD was totally raid or die and Ion had nothing to do with that. Thus, your whole premise is stupid.

The irony here is that you have no credentials to know anything beyond what your personal preference is. WoW got more popular during a time in which your nebulous open world bullshit decreased and raiding and other endgame became more central.

[Martymark]

He ruined the gameplay, but we can thank Golden and a few others for ruining the story.

But really, all the original creators retired (game started being worked on 16-17 years ago), so whatcha gonna do?

[Kralljin]

Also a load of bull....
But sure keep on thinking that

Well, the corporate structure of a public traded company is not necessarily helpful in improving the quality of a game

[froschhure]

Remember Cataclysm, where all of Azeroth was redesinged... and nobody cared...

Redesign? REDESIGN??? They basically wrecked everything they could find. Cata, design vice was the worst that happened to OLDWORLD WOW. AT VERY LEAST CLASS DESIGN FROM WOTLK CARRIED OVER AND GOT SOME NICE TALENT TREE MIX.

[bloodykiller86]

For me it is clear that the current development team destroyed world of warcraft over the years.

Instead of focusing on the world, they moved all their effort to (competetive) endgame. They forgot about the world they created in classic, and left it unchanged for a very long time until cataclysm, where they renewed it in a way people did not like much as well.

Nowadays, if a new expac releases, all the focus is on new raids, mythic dungeons and rated pvp. Questing content is more a chore than a main feature, while it should be the core gameplay. It should be about the world mainly, and about dungeons and raids only if there is any time left to create them.

I believe the classic reboot was successfull at start, because all of the world mattered again. In nowadays World of Warcraft, the world does not matter at all, and the fun gameplay happens in instanced content only. Leveling is a chore, without any kind of challenge. Crafting in old content does not matter. Crafting at end level feels like a raiding extension, as you need mats from raids to get raid level gear. Beside that, crafting is just another chore, as like are world quests.

Endgame feels like a massive collection of time gates, where you cannot decide yourself what you want to play. Patch 8.3 shows that really well, where you have to do both assaults and world quests, which lack of fun gameplay or any kind of engagement. While the Nyalotha raid received all developer attention.

For me it is clear that Ion Hazzikostas, as game director, is directly responsible for how the game evolved. I think he should be replaced by someone who actually knows how to design a MMORPG with a living and breathing world, which does not want to be a dungeon crawler.

sounds like you dont really play end game lol also i have enjoyed new quest style that really started in cata. i hated Classic's quest style. it was so fucking boring and monotonous. and i hate how people say classes feel the same...bs lol no way in hell a fury warrior feels the same as a mage or a healer etc etc

[Kyphael]

He does make good WoW art and music though.

Except he doesn't, the art and music teams do. He's probably too busy number crunching walls of text no one will read explaining how the crotch plate on my paladin can either drive him crazy with its numbers or boost my DPS by 23.37566% if RNG permits.

[Sentynel]

They forgot about the world they created in classic

Good news though, that classic is here for you to enjoy

[froschhure]

tbh After all of my "I HATE ION HAZZIKOSTAS" Threads i came to realize that he is not the problem. He is just the face that we use to get our anger against. Simliar to tank. A goblin Tank in fact. Prob. the next logical target is activision. Because it is not only World of Warcraft that is suffering. In general all of blizzard games are. Overwatch 2 f.e. is just another money grab.
Heroes of the Storm, i am ashamed what they did to all their characters. Hearthstone was actually fine the first year. But then it turned out to be the most cancerous moneygrab ever created. The more i think about this, the more it seems to me, that those developer actually develop good games, that then get wrecked by capitalismmachineries.

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modern wow has 4 different versions of one raid. it is truly disgusting.
and most of people never get to see mythic raids, because of this prefilter

in times where HC was hardest, many more people saw real end game content, even if they did not manage to kill the last boss.
But yeeha times change

[therealbowser]

Pretty much.

I'm not an Ion fan at all (in fact, I disagree with at least 95% of what he says regarding WoW), and I'm aware that he does have a lot of say in what goes on as game director, but he's not the only authority on everything. It's not like like there are 30 people from WoW's team sitting around a table, and 29 of them want some change to happen, but Ion is sitting at the head of the table saying "Nope, not gonna do it" and that's end of discussion.

The same thing happened when Ghostcrawler was still around, and he wasn't even game director. He just happened to post on the Blizzard forums a lot, and people thought that meant he was Supreme Dictator of WoW. I've even seen people blame those forum community managers (who, aside from having direct access to ask the devs questions and such, have little to no say in what goes on with the game itself) for things they didn't like about WoW, just because those community managers can post in blue text.

Ironically, a big reason why people blamed Ghostcrawler for everything was in a large part because he was so communicative with the playerbase. They got mad because he "wasn't listening" when he didn't do everything everyone asked -- which is impossible in most cases, because different people want different things.

[Justpassing]

With his time machine? Yikes.

[lockybalboa]

You Ion haters need to get a grip and lay off him. Ion is the lead in charge of the two best expansions WoD and BfA. He is a pure genius and we should be thankful we have someone like him in charge. And he should be absolved of blame from anything bad because he is merely a game director who gets his big fat paycheck doing nothing at all. We should push the blame to all of his subordinates instead. Ion should be knighted for great services rendered to gaming. ALL HAIL ION ALL HAIL MOO CHAMP

[Rhidana]

Can't we rather bash Steve Danuser? He is the Lead Narrative Designer. Under him the Story of WoW is worse than it ever was.

[MoanaLisa]

Watcher's influence on the game has been to largely bring a technocratic-engineering point of view to its internals. That doesn't leave a lot of room for creative or out-of-left-field ideas.

OP's post largely seems to blame Watcher for stuff that was done under Chilton's watch though so is wrong there. In fact, the current game is more the creation and extension of Chilton's time as team leader as anything. There's been no great divergence in how the game is designed since Wrath; just more and less successful attempts to recreate that success.

The larger point is that the game director position is largely about managing teams and achieving consensus among them. That position has the inherent ability in it to influence how some things are done but ultimately expansions are a team/committee thing. Some people believe that having large committees designing creative arts projects is a problem and I would agree with them. But software is as much about engineering management as creativity so consensus decisions, ultimately lower-risk, are going to happen. Add to that they are making decisions today about the game you will see in a couple of years (expansion after Shadowlands) and it's relatively easy to get it wrong. Blizzard's famous slowness to finish anything is really their big problem.

Yelling about whoever the face of the game is is a time-honored tradition even though most know it's dumb and beside the point. You don't need to read far in this or any thread like this about Watcher or Ghostcrawler (back in the day) to see truly dumb stuff being said.

It's just as well they ignore this stuff. It's not usable feedback. It's just vitriolic hateful garbage. But it makes for threads with lots of posts. So, well done.

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Can't we rather bash Steve Danuser? He is the Lead Narrative Designer. Under him the Story of WoW is worse than it ever was.

That would make more sense although people know the name Christie Golden a little better so she gets all the blame. As far as I can tell from what she and others have said, her main contribution to BfA was writing dialogue for the cinematics. Those have been great so I suppose she must be doing OK.