Ion doesn't deserve the hate

Can we just make it clear that Ion is just doing what the investors tell him to do? Like he’s just the middle man that needs to create stuff for us based upon what the investors tell Ion, and it needs to get greenlit by the higher ups at Blizzard.

Do you really think Ion adds all this time-gated, cosmetic bullcrap to the game when the man just raidlogs and does a mythic+ dungeon or two on his character?
Do you think he adds all this stuff because he enjoys it, or do you think he’s told by the investors to create a system to draw in players for $$$.

He’s just doing his job. I feel bad for him.
You should focus your anger more at people like Bobby Kotick and the investors at Blizzard. They’re the ones ultimately calling the shots.

20 Likes

True , pretty sure wow would be x100 better without Kotick’s greedy grasp

4 Likes

the investors havn’t a clue about game development and no idea at all about the gaming industry, their just capitol investors.

Ion is the one who listens to his developers, HE is the one who then has to sell the idea’s to the higher ups, he’s the one who gives and accepts dev timelines, he is a major part of the dev chain of command.

That’s why he is head developer, that’s why he’s paid the big bucks, for WoW development he is the top of that chain, so yes he is responsible for problems…thats his job

41 Likes

More like the investors give him an idea and he’s the one that has to work around said idea

People just want an easy target for their forum whining and hate, and they figured the director would be the best target for it, even for stuff which he would have literally no impact on.

Ion is just the communities current Blizz punching bag, there’s always been one, used to be Ghostcrawler, for example. And it’s still Jeff for Overwatch…

2 Likes

Ion is has been.
He doesn’t understand what WoW players want today.

And if he doesn’t agree with the investors, he does have to do like Ghostcrawler, get out

The fact that he is always there makes him love what he does, and we can only see that he is out of the game.

Blessed be the day he is gone

18 Likes

He isn’t just a drone, you know. Guy’s supposed to be creative if not know how to manage creative people.

4 Likes

On Ion’s side they have had some good idea’s in concept over the years BUT their final development and implementation as been absolutely abysmal and then months further down the line when they finally get them going in the right direction…they just scrap them…with no reason.

Thats not how businesses work.

9 Likes

It’s quite simplistic and foolish to say that he has no power and it’s just a puppet to mean and bad investors. I don’t understand how Blizzard and the WoW team is organized but he certainly has power on the decision making of what goes and what doesn’t go into the game.

Also, the man is way to evasive on addressing the issues the game have, not just expansion problems, but issues that keep infecting this game for quite some time like boosting, botting, faction imbalance, PvP issues, etc.

13 Likes

Just look at the number of changes he’s forced to make in Shadowlands so much the mismatch between his ideas and his community is worse than the Deathwing Crater.

His game no longer has any logic.
One time PvP is bad for stuff, and the next day it becomes the strongest way.
One day the M + is strong, tomorrow it’s bad.

The balancing of the classes, you are going to take 10% today and 5% next week. But meta is still the same even with change.

The “new” spells they put back in overalls that nobody uses … lol
So happy to use my frostball on fire mage 10/10 Ion

Is he playing his game at least? Because I don’t even understand that he’s happy to give us this out.

I will be director of WoW today, I will be ashamed of myself

3 Likes

Nope , you’ve no idea, Investor’s are just money lenders, they make a contract to invest “x” amount of capitol over “y” months and they are then to receive “z” return (profit) that’s all investors are, they are basically gamblers on a higher level. they dont care how they make a profit and have no say in how its done, just as long as they get that profit they will keep investing

11 Likes

Every single expansion, systems are released in a terrible state, get fixed over the patches and turn to be good by the end of the expansion, new expansion gets released, old systems scrapped, new systems are dysfunctional again, cycle repeats.

2 Likes

Exactly and that’s just bad development, in fact its not development at all, its going backwards…and whos head of development…oh right that’s ION

4 Likes

Old devs saying that Activision and investors hold too much power on them to the point they left because they weren’t allowed to be creative or innovative in their works so

Well, if as a game dev he doesn’t push back against the investors and actually lobby for a better game… He does deserve the hate. Yes, he does seem to want all that and his ‘team’ seems to think so as well. Don’t forget, he’s responsible for the team that’s hired on and who is working on what as well. Which, the biggest failure for about 6+ years has been class design and balance.

5 Likes

That’s nothing to to with the games development directly, thats more about investors wanting strict timelines for their returns, that’s all about revenue schedules and profit goals, actual Game development falls on Ion, and in Shadowlands case the development side made too many changes and made them way too overcomplicated they openly admitted they "ran out of time" and who’s faults that… the head developers

1 Like

Well a lot of good ideas seem good on paper and are a mess in practice. But still, the game isn’t that bad, I mean at least that’s what I tell myself when I pay to play it.

Still would like to know the genius who decided holding back flying for long amounts of time was a great idea.

I feel bad for you for writing so dumb stuff, do you really believe investors are to blame for lack of loot, failure of maw, anima and whole timegating? If anything, Ion is probably happy about his position and does what most big companies do, take the safe route and timegating is just a solutions to keep the subs running and his job for as long as possible. The Shadowlands marketing was just another of his tricks to pleass higher ups

7 Likes

Thats very true with most things. and in Shadowlands Alpha the community made it well known certain things would not work and even explained why, they gave tons of feedback for bugs and many of the issues still ijn the game now, BUT blizz ignored most of it, as they usually do, they never like admit they are wrong.

1 Like