World of Warcraft is apparently better when the developers listen to the players. A realization that seems to have taken quite a long time.
The last few years have been hard to bear even for the most loyal fans of World of Warcraft. After the already largely disappointing “Battle for Azeroth”, “Shadowlands” was another step in the wrong direction.
Feedback from players was heard far too late. Major features like Azerite armor or Torghast were implemented as the developers thought was right – and the community had already said during beta: That’s not it.
But since the end of Shadowlands, things seem to be improving, and even the Game Director of WoW notes: If you listen to the players, WoW can be good again.
In an interview with Dot Esports, the Game Director of World of Warcraft, Ion Hazzikostas, spoke about a change in game development – specifically regarding WoW.
What triggered it, quite frankly, was that our old approach no longer worked. We failed to connect with the player base, and people were unhappy with game elements that we viewed simply as a continuation of 20 years of tradition.
This at least explains why some features were held onto in the past. Especially “Borrowed Power” and an “endless grind” were always a problem. Even in Legion with the artifact weapon, the same dungeons were farmed endlessly to gather artifact power as quickly as possible. With the Heart of Azeroth, it was the same later on.
We definitely had some wake-up calls along the way, and we realized that none of that matters if we don’t build a connection to our player base, meet them where they are, and create a world that brings them joy and inspires them to spend time in it and return.
This must especially be remembered when it comes to Torghast. An otherwise cool idea of a “Rogue-Like” in World of Warcraft that quickly fell out of favor because of the weekly “compulsion” for this content. Numerous systems and features were mixed together, resulting in a whole list of tasks that had to be tackled each week.
For many, WoW felt like a “second job” – the fun was left behind. No wonder the community quickly renamed the tower “Torghast” to “Choregast”.
WoW developers want a presumption of trust – and also give one to the community
The answer is simply a conversation – to understand the things we did and that did not resonate as we hoped, working out possible changes, discussing those changes with the community, and continuing the conversations so that hopefully we arrive at a place where [the conversations] have become the norm and people can rely on them. There may still be a little room for both sides to grant each other a little presumption of trust.
But even if Hazzikostas appears optimistic and the current numbers in World of Warcraft support him and the team’s course (after all, WoW has more subscribers than previous expansions) – he warns at the same time. The WoW development team will never be perfect, and mistakes will continue to happen.
We will do things wrong. We are not perfect, and we will make mistakes. When we do, our hope is that through conversations we can understand faster what we did wrong and at the same time have the trust [of the players] that it won’t stay that way forever; that when we do something wrong, it’s because we make mistakes just like everyone else, and that our greatest hope is to understand how we can fix it.
These words have often been dismissed as “hollow phrases” that have been heard too often – but with Dragonflight, Blizzard seems to be proving that they can still bring WoW back on a reasonable course. One can only hope that it is not too late after the Shadowlands debacle.
