Who's in charge of wow developments (who can we ''blame'')

[Mallarry-silvermoon]

You sure ? i like the guy,but hes not doing well atm

[Udig-silvermoon]

Everything in this game needs to get Ion’s approval before going live

[Thalerin-argent-dawn (Thalerin)]

Just blame the coperate people.
WoW does not need to be perfectly streamlined and ballanced, it needs to be fun first.
Hopefully change is coming now

[Mallarry-silvermoon]

I just want to love this game (still do) as i used to,ion can stay if you ask me,just listen to our feedback.Why is it so hard…i dont get it.

[Symy-draenor]

Alot of people. Ion gets the blame because he’s the lead dev. I like Shadowlands though and thisnk they’re doing good job except for the long patch cycle.

[Thalerin-argent-dawn (Thalerin)]

me too bro, me too.
But hey, lets give creds where creds are due, the art team is knocking it out of the park like always

[Mallarry-silvermoon]

Yes,but i really hate this negativity going on with blizzard and world of warcraft,art team cant carry other teams anymore we need something fresh.

[Shumensko-azjolnerub (Shumensko)]

This is WoW forums, so you can blame everyone. Aliens, old gods, the Jailor, Sylvanas - take your pick.

[Thalerin-argent-dawn (Thalerin)]

Can I blame you.?

[Shumensko-azjolnerub (Shumensko)]

Of course you can. Blaming other forum posters is rather common.
[edit] Here’s a pretty good recent example:

High End Mythic raiders are responsible for almost everything wrong with Shadowlands

Now, before you take your pitchforks out, read everything and think carefully. I’m not defending Blizzard for the record content drought. I am however, exclusively blaming High End Mythic raiders or “the 0.1%” for the state of the game at the moment and how we got here. Shadowlands has been riddled with restrictions in one form or another since before it’s inception. Here are 6 examples how high end raiders/keystone players ruined the game for everybody: AoE cap was introduced to some classe…

[Thalerin-argent-dawn (Thalerin)]

I am not one to blame others.
so the only logical thing to do is to blame my self.
damn you Thalerin for ruining wow.

[Bigkeg-twisting-nether (Bigkeg)]

Ion makes the game but his superiors decide on funding and set targets the game has to reach. Like “player retention” = game must have timegating. Some blame on bad/boring systems is Ion team part but some is upper management metrics requirements.

[Tahen-pozzo-delleternità]

@Bigkeg-twisting-nether

Ion makes the game but his superiors decide on funding and set targets the game has to reach. Like “player retention” = game must have timegating. Some blame on bad/boring systems is Ion team part but some is upper management metrics requirements.

The blame is 100% on Ion. And he should go at this point.
There are million ways to hit metrics and marketing target, and he’s using all the wrong ones.

[Jìmusa-draenor]

ion should go back to what he was good at, encounter design.

[Ccr-draenor]

@Tahen-pozzo-delleternità

The blame is 100% on Ion. And he should go at this point.
There are million ways to hit metrics and marketing target, and he’s using all the wrong ones.

I mostly agree. The higher-ups may demand higher player retention, but it is up to the WoW dev team to come up with solutions and implement these. The time-gating is an easy and lazy way out. But that is probably due to the amount of development time they instead put into the needlessly contrived systems they put in place (which take an entire expansion to somewhat fix) and those one-off campaign/covenant storyline quests (which are not re-playable).

Instead of making an all-round good game, with a lot of natural replay value, they seem to put a lot of resources into a very limited scope and the rest of it suffers because of that. So now that the story is ridiculously bad and the systems in Shadowlands are unfun, the game just hasn’t got much going for it.

[Jito-turalyon (Jito)]

@Mallarry-silvermoon

in terms of systems

Morgan Day is the current Lead Systems Designer.

[Nagrash-draenor (Nagrash)]

I thought everyone was just blaming Bobby now?

Don’t tell me I have to learn yet another name

[Shumensko-azjolnerub (Shumensko)]

@Nagrash-draenor

Don’t tell me I have to learn yet another name

There’s no need. You know the drill - it’s puny’s fault.

[Barry-the-shatar]

@Mallarry-silvermoon

Im just wondering who’s in charge of how the next expansion is going to look like,in terms of systems and so on.

everyone will be willing to just throw ion under the bus here, but the buck always stops with the higher ups, and yes ion is the lead game dev for wow, but he still has bosses and a list of jobs that need to be done in a specific way, so its mostly down to the activision heads and the higher ups at blizz that have certain quotas to fill. given the fact that ion is himself a player of the game and knows how bad some things can be to play, he would most likely want to make changes to make the game play better but cant because there are other people making choices.