In 2015 Ion went from Encounter Designer (pve) to assistant game director and the year later Legion came out and he became the game Director.
Legions direction lead the way to World of Warcraft current incarnation which i would be bold enough to claim that everything outside of Dungeon and Raid encounters are considered inferior to previous expansions or just simply disliked.
Although Legion was a success in some places and i’m a huge believer they improved the dungeon, raid and “story driven” game develop of the game. It did hugely diminish the entirety of player vs player and various other parts of the game due to gear design, gear acquisition, gated content and the biggest issue, Class Design. Now Battle for Azeroth became a shell of what Legion was, and where Legion failed it continued to fail and where Legion succeeded it went on to diminish.
Now it just seems very ironic that Blizzard would gain new Direction under a new Director, which is often the cause when any business gains a new leader… However as stated the game direction changing after a new director is put into place cannot be considered a coincidence and to my eyes it does seem that World of Warcraft downfall is entirely on the shoulders of Ion Hazzikostas.
Maybe i’m just seeking somebody to blame that the game i love is but a shell of what it once was, Maybe the entirety of the Development team have final input in the specific aspect they develop and it was a perfect “S**t storm” of Ideas that culminated in Battle for Azeroth creation that they did not predict would cause such damage. But i feel it should be reflected that the game direction has lead them into a position where no game developers want to be, a make or break position in their next expansion and that blame lies entirely on the leader of that direction.
Maybe Ion has took everything on board and is leading the team in a new direction in Shadow Lands. But I would say if Ion doesn’t, and Shadow Lands continues to fail where Battle for Azeroth failed, then i believe World of Warcraft will not survive 3 more years without a leadership change.
It’s sadly impossible to tell from the outside who is responsible to which degree. I would love to listen in on some of Blizzard’s internal game design meetings to see how they manage to drop the ball so consistently.
Took me a long time to forgive him for trying to remove flying.
Realistically I doubt it was solely down to him but he decided to announce it not via any official Blizzard channel but to do an interview which most of us only caught thanks to 3rd party sites like WoWhead.
I was one of the masses who unsubbed and told them exactly why I was leaving.
Shadowlands is the first BlizzCon where I have felt I’m in the demographic of players that have been listened to finally. We’ve had limited information but what I’ve heard, I like (mostly). I’m disappointed how stubborn they are being about not giving us tier back.
scapegoats and blame culture…ugh…
is he responsible for modern gaming, or are you?
blame culture is the reason nobody takes risks anymore and risks are what make exciting innovation…that’s what made WoW great in the first place…
Legion had the most content outside of Raids and Mythicdungeons ever.
Ion tried to remove Flying, that alone makes him a Hero in my book. Unfortunately, like Obama with Public Health Care, he succumbed to the pressure and ruddered back.
Mr. Hozzikostas is a yes-man with enough ideas about the game the higher ups deemed it worthy to set him up as game director.
But yes-man is the gist of the paragraph. He doesn’t seem (ofc I can’t see what’s in the background) to fight the higher ups for what the subscribers want, but tries to implement the higher ups’ ideas of how to prolong subs through tedious activities.
I sincerely hope he hasn’t lost track of what makes a good entertainment while doing all this yes-manning.
Mr.Hozzikostas, if you ever read this and that it turns out I judged you wrong, and you truly fight like a lion for players’ wishes but you just get outmuscled by the execs I apologize sincerely.
If any other major corporation in the world would lose profits the board would blame and replace the leadership. However we haven’t seen any of that with WoW, and I have no idea why. It’s clear that the game is failing now most likely more than ever, and few can see a future where the game can reach the peak subscription numbers it had at 11 million players during WotLK.
But replacing the leadership in this case will not work, as it’s Activision which is in charge. To truly ”restore” the game Activision needs to be out of the picture, and that will most likely never happen.
I also think it’s apart of Blizzard’s (or even Activision’s) philosophy that when a game is not profitable anymore they cease development of that game, and put the manpower on a more profitable project or game. Just what has most likely happened with WoW’s team moving on to Overwatch, and Heroes of the Storm’s to other games.
Wow began to fail when the talent system was changed, that is literally the only relevant change in regards to wow failing historically and in recent years, artifact power is a damning system for the game.
the only thing i can think of other than these is the speed of flying, it should have been 100% and maybe 150%, not up to 310%, with a dismount if any CC is applied to you during it and a paracute packed just in case for all flying mounts.
Yes obviously because as everyone knows Lon does everything at Blizzard, it’s amazing he finds the time to clean the toilets. He faces the same problem Todd Howard or Randy Pitchford faces every day, a bandwagon of angry Internet experts who amusingly don’t have the first clue what the hell they are talking about and somehow think they have the right to utterly destroy people’s careers because they are upset over a video game.
One thing is for sure, he has been a bad game director for Alliance. Hopefully he fixes his ideas or Blizz finds someone else for that position.
If he had learnt from his past mistakes it is better for an experienced director to stay yea but still I can’t be too optimistic about him upon seeing the decisions he has been making for our faction.
Yes, but this is the problem. Players often want completely different things (except for pvp vendors of course). Think about flying or the steps you have to take to be able to fly in new expansions - probably about half are on one side and half on the other so, whichever they go with, half the players will say they never listen and the other half are happy so don’t bother to say anything.
Ion is not a good representative for WoW. He provides answers with a lot of lawyer talk and poor levels of relatability. Which breeds distrust after his answers being pretty much one-sided and the rest of community being shafted. But I don’t think he is the main villain.
The main culprid I say is the CEO who is partnered with Chinese investors (which is when Blizzard merged with Activision same year Cata was out).
Didn’t help when they raised the prices last year, shafted 800 Blizzard workers off the window and having spyware in Blizzard apps.
Transparency, good will and community involvement is very important for a game to last.
I think a lot of people are misinterpreting for I think Ion is an evil overlord trying to destroy the game and/or is the sole reason for everything which is not the case.
I am simply stating that has a Leader, they have the final say of implementation ideas. The Board or senior management will simply meet with Ion to discuss the impact of his teams implementation on the games subscription development.
Looking at World of Warcraft and that it’s now less than 25% of it’s subscription base from it’s peak it’s clearly heading in the wrong direction. Now although Subscription has decreased they’ve offset some of the financial loss through the Online Shop Purchase.
Now All i’m saying is that his Direction has resulted in the current game which is decreasing faster than ever before, and it isn’t the fact players don’t like this type of game as they repeatedly return when new content is released only to leave of dissatisfaction. If it was simply people didn’t like the type of game Warcraft is now, it wouldn’t have a Huge influx at certain points.
His teams answers to him, He has a the final say given his position, and although he may be Armstrong into creating gated content and shop based content to increase subscription duration and income. He won’t be armstronged by activision to destroy class / gearing infra-structure which is the main reason most people are unhappy.
So yes if the game continues to fail it’ll be him that answers the call of the higher ups, and him that will be removed, Not the guys at the bottom.
Okay, that is true. I’m aware that reconsiling conflicting wishes is difficult and someone is by default getting hurt in the process.
However, who asked for a removal of PvP vendors and associated gearing path?
Or, pruning which is just a front name for homogenization?
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a decent game to play, if I wouldn’t be of this opinion I’d be out of here already, but some decision making by the management has been quite frankly, questionable.
Looking in from the outside, we really don’t know who is really responsible for what, so I’m very loath to lay every bad decision at Ion’s door. We can blame the senior team collectively, but in a dev environment, when you’re choosing between concepts on paper that are months away from being viewable, and a pack of alpha nerds (Chris Metzen’s term) all squabbling over what will be coolest, control is an illusion.
The problem first appeared in the wake of the scrapping of Titan, with what appears to have been a bad direction, before Ion took over. In one of his interviews, Ion said that the roots of what I would call the destuction of classes, the approach of a neutered class with a different topping each expansion, go back even further, to Wrath, when they decided to remove talent trees, but do it in two steps over two expansions.
In fact, many would say that the rot first set in during Wrath, with the changing of the guard at the start of Titan.
Incidentally, I don’t believe that for a minute. It might be true of the forum barflies (though I’m not even sure of that) but the forums are not anywhere near representative of ordinary players. I am absolutely confident that if all players were polled, we’d see at least 75% solidly in favour of flying from the start.
