Where is Ion ?

[Kralljin]

Patch 8.2.5 led into Shadowlands. 8.3 however was unrelated.

You have a point on Legion, but on BfA i said it already: 8.2.5. came out before Blizzcon and as you said, 8.3 had nothing to do with Shadowlands.

Soon you will find what he is truly capable of when he is no longer bound to Bobby.

I find statement like these so fucking hilarious when you also have ex devs that literally say that they haven't felt the influence of Activision once.
While you can argue that Ion might have protected the devs from this, then i have to ask how managed to keep this knowledge from the devs, but still had them implement these systems to push engagement.

Disregarding that there is still a ton of other dumb shit that has been implemented under his watch that makes your head scratch.

Who told him that Corruption was a good idea?
Who went onto multiple interviews to fight for covenant restrictions? Conduit energy?
PvP Scaling? Remember that one?
Who has players jumping through hoops for flying since WoD?
I don't think Bobby told to not implement flying into Draenor, then rework the continent to make it compatible with flying.

It also goes against what we've been hearing about how Blizzard has had a Firewall to protect their devs from the business side in order to keep their identity.

I am not going to paint a picture of the devs being responsible for virtually everything wrong with WoW and Blizzard, but that doesn't mean they can somehow hand off every bad decision of the last ~6 years towards management, some of these fuckups are so damn specific in their implementation that no Execs who has no clue of game design would ever come up with.

He told my friend that he would fire Danuser on the spot if possible and get Metzen back (i can say this here as a random post on mmo-c will obviously not be believed or get traction).

Considering they even released a Sylvanas plush right when SoD cinematic came out, i'm not going to buy that Danuser (who by looks, really pushes for Sylvanas) faces any serious opposition within the team.
Completely disregarding that the Sylvanas fight in itself is a subtle Sylvanas wankfest - as strictly speaking, the player doesn't defeat Sylvanas, it just ends at 50% (or 45%).

[Miffinat0r]

And therein lies the problem. He's completely uninterested in anything that does not pertain to raiding, and it trickles down to all aspects of the game. I wish they had someone else who could take his position so he can move back to what he actually likes to do.

While I've made this argument before, I've become more nuanced with it. I don't believe Ion is malicious with his development at all. But I do believe Ion has next to no connection of the playerbase who is not in the high-end of M+ or Mythic Raiding.

[MoanaLisa]

I dont like people blaming one person for all the problems either but he is the game director. Its kinda his responsibility.

That doesn't explain why Ghostcrawler took all the crap when he was the communication person for WoW when Tom Chilton was game director. Who the community turns on is pretty much purely a function of savaging the person that talks to us. I can remember when people would go on and on and on about Bashiok and Zarhym and they weren't developers at all, just community managers.

The fact is that the community loudly demands communication and then promptly shits on whoever it is that does that. No one gave two fucks about who Lore was once he got a job at Blizzard and what he did until he started reading questions out to Ion at Q&A sessions.

There are certainly issues with Ion who several years ago said the quiet part out loud that the only important things in the game were raiding and PVP. That was before Warlords which, I'm pretty sure, changed a lot of minds about what's important; the primary one being that non-raiders shouldn't run out of things to do. I'm not a fan of how they've gone about solving that problem but it's pretty clear that they want to provide a game in which there's always something you can do (whether you like it or not).

[Hotmail]

Preparing a cameo for the next Ace Attorney game

[klaps_05]

After the recent confirmation that it was Afrasiabi's personal agenda to destroy the lore before leaivng, this explains a bit more Ion and his goals with the game currently.

[darklogrus]

He will show up with 9.2 pat himself on the back, proclaim himself smarter then everyone else and then disappear again just as the 9.2 train derails..

[GreenJesus]

Pretty hard to get any word done when your team is probably constantly changing right now.

Ion right now: "Hey Middle-Manager... when is that system going to be done?"
Manager: "uh.. Joe-Bob (the guy that worked on it for 6 months) left like 2 months ago and no one can find the file he was working on. I'm having 5 guys redirected from what they were doing to try to rebuild it from scratch."
Ion: "RIP Raid Tear"

[Wowplayer2021]

So some history on when the next expansion was announced compared to when the current one "ended" as far as the final raid release is concerned.

Burning Crusade was announced (10/28/2005) well before Naxx40 released on (06/20/2006).
Wrath was announced (08/03/2007) well before Sunwell released (03/02/2008)
Cata was announced (08/21/2009) well before ICC was released (12/08/2009)
Mists was announced (10/21/2011) slightly before Dragon Soul was released (11/29/2011)
WOD was announced (11/08/2013) slightly after SoO released (09/10/2013)
Legion was announced (08/06/2015) slightly after Hellfire Citadel released (06/23/2015)
BFA was announced (11/03/2017) slightly before Antorus released (11/28/2017)
Shadowlands was announced (11/01/2019) slightly before Nyalotha released (01/21/2020)

Basically from this we can see that out of the 8 expansions to compare, only two had their final raid release before the next expansion announcement with one of them (WOD) basically being a dropped expansion and Mists famous for a relatively fast patch release schedule with an overly long final patch.

BFA announcement made no mention of Sargeras sticking a huge sword into the planet so I doubt that "Villain attacks planet" is enough to stop them from announcing an expansion. Cata's announcement trailer even mentions how the war against the Lich King continues. Finally Ion himself joked during the Shadowlands announcement that even though 8.3 hadn't released yet, thanks to datamining everyone already knew it was going to turn out fine anyways so they had no problem looking forward.

[cantrip]

Ion: "RIP Raid Tear"

Yep, and "Raid Tears" is all Hazzikostas cares for nowadays.

[Swnem]

Hiding, as usual.

After all his disastrous interviews, i imagine they don't let him out of the cave anymore.

[Tiev]

At home with his spread sheets trying to find the coefficient for fun.

LOL, I snorted.

[Th3Scourge]

At home with his spread sheets trying to find the coefficient for fun.

Lol, probably more accurately the coefficient for engagement