Venturebeat Interview with Ion Hazzikostas on WoW's Future

[Super Kami Dende]

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

Would make sense if the game hadn't already shown years ago that it could hold a massive Audience.

[Selah]

It all sound good on paper, we'll see what actually happens. It will take Blizzard producing multiple good expansions back to back while demonstrating that they're listening to valid feedback and actually learning from their lessons before I will start to trust them again.

[Sorshen]

acknowledges that they should have reacted to player feedback earlier

Every 2 years, like clockwork. Nothing to see here folks.

Cross-faction raiding is a bit more on the radar now

No shit...

[Super Kami Dende]

Typically the more people playing your massive multiplayer game is good for the game

Yet they have only seemed to lose People with this philosophy. go figure.

[Argorwal]

My bet for next expansion, they will go back to simple core fantasy and not so much more escalating cosmic adventures for a expansion and players will loose their shit over it.

This is my guess as well.

A simple story expansion, no progression outside dungeons and raids so nobody feels “forced” to do anything else. No dailies or world content with anything useful other than a cosmetic

And the game is dead in a few months like TBC classic with only a handful of raidloggers playing and a massive amount of criticism for “listening to the wrong people”

[Kumorii]

seems to me its WAY more than 30%
but yeah, i was always sceptical about them risking another "wod cut"

Seems higher because it's usually the same posters doing the same routine in every thread tbh

[baseballfan]

Genders are sociological constructs so there exists as many as we decide as a society.

For the love of god at least try to know what you're talking about before crying about it

I'm sure you are great on Twitter and Reddit

[The Stormbringer]

So, the next expansion is indeed likely going to be back on Azeroth. I can get behind that.

That said, the idea that "no reboot is ever necessary" feels a bit out of touch for my liking. I honestly think the best thing to do would be to nuke it all and start over a hundred or thousand years in the future. Possibly coinciding with Warcraft 4 or a new Warcraft series entirely, to set things up the way Warcraft 3 set things up for WoW.

[Aerisot]

My bet for next expansion, they will go back to simple core fantasy and not so much more escalating cosmic adventures for a expansion and players will loose their shit over it.

Ion doesn't know how to do Core fantasy without borrowed power though, so by 10.2 or 10.3 we will have borrowed power again.

[The Stormbringer]

Sounds good. X-faction raiding, less bs story, more accessibility - I can take that.

I would prefer if it was more than just raiding... why not allow grouping in general, for questing, dungeons, etcetera? And, y'know, being able to communicate cross-faction, of course.

[Aerisot]

Also...

"The team wants to keep expanding on ways to better use what they have built over the years into the game, but it's not quite there yet."

Wth does this even mean??

[Pratt]

Strongly support the return of "simple core fantasy."

[Gadzooks]

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

Yet, you're the one that had rambled endlessly about "discussions" in the WoW team over changes, Ion. Now you need to "improve" that? I'm guessing this is as close to "the Team is run by a small handful of devs who stubbornly refuse to change course" that we'll get (and have suspected), but "There has been a lot of work" is a cop out, and to me says "Yeah, we won't get much done on that front, without firing some key devs who simply will not listen or budge. That's not happening, but hey, we tried."

Ion acknowledges that they should have reacted to player feedback earlier about conduit energy, and knows that they can do better about communicating not only that we are being heard, but why things are not necessarily implemented or changed right away.

Same old Ion, lol. He's been talking about getting better at communication for how long now? Note how he brings up conduit energy, like that change is the only one people wanted, and not that players want ALL of their ridiculous "systems" gone - which means they're planning on more moving forward. Oh, sure, they'll try to communicate about small moving parts of the machine, but the machine itself of multiple systems will still be there. Classic Ion, lol. "Hey, look, we changed a small part of our overall systems, what, that's not enough for you? Give us credit, man, that hurt to have to change. That took so much discussion and courage to change!"

9.1.5 reflects a shift toward more accessibility and letting go of old lessons instilled on the team from the past that don't necessarily reflect the way that the game is enjoyed today.

The only rational translation to this is that they had to drag lead devs kicking and screaming to the table to make small, QOL changes players had been pleading for. And they grudgingly made them.

Well, my "will I ever play WOW again" meter is pegged on "Not fucking likely", still. Sorry Ion, lol You haven't learned a damned thing. I don't think you and your team are capable of it.

Folks, you don't have an Ion problem, you have an Ion + Lead Dev problem. Good luck!

PS - I'd like to point out that Ion's first public comments after coming out of his office hole in months wasn't to the players directly, on their own forums or even their own website. You know, because god forbid Ion talk directly to the player scum.

[Redzonetode]

Meh, was foolishly hoping I'd read this interview and that my hope in WoW's future would be restored, but... this is just more of the same.

They mention using machine learning to help with toxicity in game chat, which just means more automation and not hiring actual people to help with problems and look at reports.

He pulls the same "we're listening for real, we're changing to be more player friendly" talking point as the past 3 expansions.

He's still not being direct with the playerbase, especially on answers like cross faction raiding. Take a page out of Yoshi P's book on communication, please.

As it stands, I have no hope for 9.2, let alone 10.0, being significantly different.

[The Stormbringer]

I think they realise the amount of money required to make a whole new WoW that actually surpasses current wow is just flat out higher than any money they'd make on it

Plus part of the appeal of wow is all the years of stuff people have and how relatively easy to run it is. Plus RTS as a genre is effectively dead for the mass market so I doubt we'd ever see a warcraft 4

I get that, but I feel like not doing it will inevitably lead WoW to a slow and painful death. The bloat is real, and the appeal for new players when there's seven, eight, NINE expansions is extremely limited. I know that the history and collections keep some people in, but that doesn't work on everyone. I walked away from the game, haven't even touched Shadowlands, and may not even come back, despite being a player since Vanilla.

[Ezyah]

PLEASE ION, no complex system or such. Just dont add extra layer like covenant that needs tuning, just focus on having good classes and specs. Less system = easier to tune and maybe room for a new class to generate hype

[MoanaLisa]

Im not buying this one Ion! It took me like 84 times of hearing that, but u wont get me another one.

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.

[dDic]

More pleasing everyone that will end up pleasing no one.

[Steelangel]

Genders are sociological constructs so there exists as many as we decide as a society.

The problem here is that there's not a particularly large "we" here when it comes to these particular cultural shifts. A small number of loud people on the internet and in niche sub disciplines of sociology and anthropology have been making these "decisions" and foisting them as if they were carved in stone tablets from a deity and brooking no actual argument or discussion.

And then these people are all like "shocked pikachu face" when large swathes of the culture start to ask questions or push back.

Leftist politics has two threads: one requires organizing and doing the work of convincing others of their rightness of the cause, the other is coming across like a knows-only-the-truth zealot and using threats to shut down one's opponents.

The latter thread burns out quickly, but leaves destruction in its wake---with the most damage done to the causes supported by the zealots.

[Myradin]

Also...

"The team wants to keep expanding on ways to better use what they have built over the years into the game, but it's not quite there yet."

Wth does this even mean??

Possibly like how FF14 does it. Large chunks of the world still feel relevant even an expansion or two later. They keep them part of the story and add new or 'what happened later' version of dungeons to them further on. The roulette system also keeps older content relevant with scaling used.

Its a rather big contrast to wow where old zones pretty much go in the 'nastalgia farm only' zone once the next expansion rolls around.