It gives us a lot to think about, for sure. There's some design philosophy lessons learned in terms of the importance of player agency, what types of progression do and don't feel good, permanent versus temporary power. In some ways, we designed the Azerite armor system to respond to what we saw as a failing in Legion Artifacts in a lot of ways. Legion Artifacts had fantastic choice and customization but it was very frontloaded.
It was one of those areas that players didn't complain about, but we saw a lot and perceived as designers. For the first two months you were making tons of choices as you were speccing out your Ashbringer or your Doomhammer or whatever else, but then for the rest of the expansion, once you unlocked those gold border traits, you were just putting Artifact Power into a linear progression that was giving you small incremental upgrades for the next year and a half. You weren't making any big choices and you were like every other [Retribution] paladin because you all had the same fully unlocked Ashbringer. That felt like a missed opportunity for us.
We wanted to find a way to have that alternate advancement at max level, where you'd be presented with a stream of continual, interesting choices for new pieces of armor that you would get would offer opportunities and possibilities and things to unlock and goals to work towards.
That all sounded great on paper, obviously, and we've seen a lot of the negative feedback of the execution of that idea.
Procedurally, there are definitely some things for us to learn.
A big failing of the way we approached designing Battle for Azeroth and testing it was we waited too long in the process to get the Azerite armor and the Azerite traits fully stood up in the beta. We were playtesting them internally and making sure they felt good to have, but we didn't leave ourselves enough time in beta to get a good feel for how we or players are going to play through the game organically at max level. Hitting 120, doing dungeons over the course of weeks, upgrading your gear, getting your artifact power up.
We missed some important data there that would have been essential to catch this earlier that might've led to us making improvements before the system was live.