Venturebeat Interview with Ion Hazzikostas on WoW's Future

[kranur]

blah blah blah .. we fucked up again .. blah blah .. now we'll actually do better .. blah blah blah ...
here, take this store mount and this crap new rng system that we may fix after 1 year or more

Heard this before, how about you actually do something?

[Muxtar]

Well, seeing the course they are taking, I guess it is a safe bet to assume this game will be dead by 2025.

[crusadernero]

what do you mean 'getting' it's bottomed out, from a high end raiding PoV it's almost dead and needs a life support intervention asap, never in the history of this game outside of maybe naxx 40 has the raiding population been so low, you can literally get into a top 2k raiding guild by just killing 70% of the mythic bosses of the current tier nearly 5 months AFTER it released, that is 'groundbreaking' in that it has never happened before, raiding was meant to the last great bastion the game had when all around was crumbling to shit, now it's been reduced to the crippled mess it is all because blizz didn't listen back in wrath/cata about rampant power growth through racials and doubled down on race/class identity being integral to how you play a certain spec in the game, the snowball was allowed to run rampant and now it's about to land at the bottom of the mountain it has been rolling down the past 12 years.

as far as removing factions and combining players, that will never happen due to corporate reasons, as soon as you admit publicly that you don't have enough players to maintain your game world anymore investors pull out and it's a self fulfilling prophecy at that point, that's why they went so far out of their way to invent the new tech to have servers 'grouped' together under the pretence of making sure players could play together with friends no matter what realm they were on etc.

Yes, it is in a crippled mess. The easy fix for Blizzard while scoring some PR points and spin it like a good thing, is to remove faction barrier. "Finally you can play with your horde friends!" and "the faction war has finally come to an end!" or "For centuries the factions have been divided, now they come together as one to fight!" and so on.

I take it as a sign of a declining playerbase doing it, but Blizzard will for sure spin it as a cool feature coming to the game.

[paragraphgorilla]

Ion is such a sleazy snake holy shit

[Jshadowhunter]

they didnt change damsel because it was damsel, they changed it because it was being used to talk about a man.

Yeah... because making fun of a guy who is a reference to Don Quixote since he has delusions of grandeur, and seeing a man with a slender, almost feminine body (which is a standard for blood elves in-game), calling him a damsel, is BAD for some reason now.
Bloody context matters!

[Alkizon]

Diversity makes a better game. They don't want WoW to be for a niche audience.

Yeah I remember disastrous consequences it had for your design.

It's like: prepare for trouble and make it double... and therefore, let's further divide everything and everyone not in accordance with design/world rules, add mutually exclusive innovations that will plunge system into even greater chaos. Make everyone happy you can't, but respect obvious design rules you should.

...and I'm not talking here about "cynical" meaning of "diversity" word at all (IYKWIM)

[Ihavewaffles]

There is absolutely nobody on any forum crying for more diversity or more justice in the game. Why is he using those buzzwords? Who is he talking to? And then he goes on about needing to listen to the community?

This is spot on, useless company...

[uncl55]

Cross-faction raiding is nice, but how about Cross-faction Mythic+ ?

[Ihavewaffles]

No cross faction shit! Bad enough they ruined servers, communities guilds, now they'll ruin factions as well...it all started in MoP where they allowed u to gank your own faction...

In Warcraft 3 pvp in ur team you had a "team player" who only joined to send his peons n grunts to destroy your town hall just to grief, even though he lost as well.
THESE are the kinds of narcissistic people you cater to with cross faction, someone who only care about themselves, not the team..
As for those "i want to play with my friends" then fucking change faction, it's not hard, don't destroy factions cuz ur cheap selfish person..

[Awelon]

#Diversity makes a better game. They don't want WoW to be for a niche audience.#

As far as I see it, those who are crying for muh diversityh, are the niche audience. Yet since they're unemployed humans, who have nothing else to do than shout and write tweets, they are the loudest.

[bbr]

He's so young,..
I'm curious how much stuff WoW is going to take from fortnite in the next year or two.

[Lolites]

As someone who has played every expansion, it's clear that the game is worse and worse as time goes on, and it no longer deserves neither it's expansion nor it's monthly price. It's time to let it die.

i am always amused by this attitude "something is not worth the price so it have to be cheaper"
like do you come to shop with furniture and tell them "this couch is not worth 100dollars you HAVE TO sell it to me for 50!" too?
its not worth its price TO YOU so you dont have to pay it, as long as there are people who consider its price to be worth paying it absolutely doesnt have to be cheaper...

[Trumpcat]

I don't care about their internal dramas. Content when?

[twothe]

"Diversity makes a better game. They don't want WoW to be for a niche audience."

90% of the player-base ain't a "niche audience." But have fun sending WoW down the drain by actually making it a game for a niche audience.

[Soon-TM]

Awwww, Ion and his corporate, PR canned non-answers, full of evasives and non-committal BS. Oh, and he learns from feedback, did you SEE it? So cute.

[Mitak]

"There has been a lot of work towards allowing more open communication and feedback within the team about things going into the game."

Except when those open views and feedback dont 100% align with the new "diversity" path we are on.- Ion probably.

[Sprengdpanda]

At this point, your characters are heroes and there is no way that they can go back to being anonymous adventurers, but the team also wants to go back to simple core fantasy and not so much more escalating cosmic adventures.

YES, this is exactly what the game needs.

[hulkgor]

M+ - is only viable content for now. But casual players have to buy boosts for $$$

What?

"have to"?

Why?

[hecpercu]

Oh, I think he means this. It's a corporate and studio culture that listens but doesn't necessarily value feedback. There's a lot of "We know better" instilled as part of integrating into how the game is built. That's hard to change. Whether he, as leadership, can pull it off post-lawsuit is something we'll either see or not.

If change is to happen it will happen because the company is going through another trauma with the lawsuit. Change often does happen after an incident that rises to the level of trauma for the entire company. What that change will be remains to be seen.

FWIW: I read the entire interview on VentureBeat and it's somewhat more reflective than past interviews. Hazzikostas also sounds tired (if you can extract that from written text). I rather imagine that the last few months have been a wrench for everyone on the WoW teams and that Hazzikostas has been busy dealing with that. That also is very much in his area of responsibility as game director.

My heart wants to belive that so much, but as much is my brain frustrated with the company.
I whiteknighted this company for 15yrs....,now i just cant.
time will tell

[Postmasters]

No cross faction shit! Bad enough they ruined servers, communities guilds, now they'll ruin factions as well...it all started in MoP where they allowed u to gank your own faction...

In Warcraft 3 pvp in ur team you had a "team player" who only joined to send his peons n grunts to destroy your town hall just to grief, even though he lost as well.
THESE are the kinds of narcissistic people you cater to with cross faction, someone who only care about themselves, not the team..
As for those "i want to play with my friends" then fucking change faction, it's not hard, don't destroy factions cuz ur cheap selfish person..

Your fighting the last war. The dead faction and servers exist to milk more cash shop bucks. The community that is worth a damn has already walled itself off. No one gives a damn about faction and war mode exists so raids can farm the farcical against all odds weekly and to level faster.