If i told you I would have to throw it all away and start over.
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While I do think there’s something to be said for work experience over technical training, WoW’s overarching story has been hit-or-miss at best for a very long time, so I wouldn’t really cite Afrasiabi’s position in CDev as being indicative of him being good at his job or qualified to do it.
Alex Afrasiabi being good at his job or qualified for the position are subjective stances. What OP is posing is that because Alex has never worked on anything save for World of Warcraft, he is completely bankrupt of any credentials to write for it, disregarding the fact that he has been the head of CDev for both hit AND miss in WoW’s tenure. He’s made it abundantly obvious that he’s not actually arguing from an objective criticism of how Alex GOT the job, but rather that he simply doesn’t like the current state of the story and would like to believe that Alex is here because of nepotism - even though it doesn’t really fit the bill at all.
There are many a fair criticism to be made about Alex Afrasiabi. But the argument the OP is posing is quite frankly very silly. Were it that he was posing it as his own personal dislike of Afrasiabi, then it’d be another story.
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Just say you want the writing team fired and replaced. Why go through all of this text?
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You don’t need to take a creative writing course to be a good writer. I’m pretty sure they weren’t teaching that when the likes of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other famous long dead authors were alive.
When I first started writing, I was bad. Like, really bad. Good story ideas, interesting dialogue, bad execution. Don’t even get me started on grammar. I was pretty damn poor back then so I didn’t have the spare money to take even a single college course.
So, what did I do? I kept writing and practicing, all the while I studied other authors. I learned pacing and other creative writing techniques on my own. Now, it took a long time, but I’ve gotten to the point where readers have told me I’m a talented writer. So, no, you don’t need a fancy education to be a good writer.
If WoW’s writing has taught me anything, it’s taught me what not to do when it comes to writing a cohesive story.
Agreed. I have a lot of criticisms to make of the BfA story, but going after someone’s lack of credentials is the wrong tactic. I would like to point out that JRR Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, not an author as other authors are actually talented amateurs and do not have any sort of formal training.
I would actually want someone who has been in-house for years than to bring someone in from the outside who doesn’t know the lore/story as well as the long standing writer/employee.
Skill at writing is a whole other issue. Attack the story, not the person. I may not like how Christie Golden writes, but I would never attack her personally. Then again, I am an author myself so I can see it from the other side.
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A much less pretentious version of what I was trying to say 
This is why I shouldn’t post past my bed time.
Even the most impressive list of credentials isn’t going to change the fact that story comes after gameplay everytime with Blizzard. This isn’t a WoW thing, just look at their other franchises. There’s pretty much no story in any of those games or it’s the most basic and recycled themes.
The creative team have their hands already tied behind their backs when having to craft a story to meet whatever the gameplay devs have in mind, then they probably have to present something that those devs want to program as well.
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Afrasabi has 30 years of experience working at Blizz (although I dislike a lot of his choices). The one that bugs me is Ion. He went from being a corporate lawyer to the face of WOW real fast.
Oh, ok random guy on the internet. You are clearly highly qualified to make this insulting thread.
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Isn’t there a rule against calling out specific people from Blizzard?
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He went from high level raider (if you recall him and his guildies ran a class theorycrafting forum and he also concluded that Cthun was mathematically impossible) to raid designer, which he did an excellent job at. MoP and WoD happened under his tenure as lead raid designer and both have raids that are among the best this game has ever had.
You can question his decisions as lead dev, that’s fine. But to say he has no credentials is about as wrong as saying Afrasiabi has none. They both contributed heavily to very successful content that the community loved.
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A quick check says he has been at Blizzard for at least 10 years. Not exactly “fast” by most measures.
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Ok, if Afrasabi is the GREATEST CREATIVE LEAD OF ALL TIME and Ion is the GREATEST GAME LEAD OF ALL TIME…
Who do you blame for BFA being the horrific dumpster fire on both the game and story fronts?
That’s a strawman. Nobody is saying that Ion and Alex are paragons of design. Just that they’re not entirely bankrupt of credentials, and have contributed to expansions that were good, if not great.
Don’t be dishonest now, it’s not cute.
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Goaty McScapeface, the Satanic mannequin I keep in my closet for all such situations where a corporate face obscures creative responsibility.
He’s a symbol for the commodification of storytelling and the way the profit motive prioritizes engagement and hype over satisfaction and integrity
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Ah, so Activision, and it’s master Tencent.
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Well BfA was made by pretty much the same team that made Legion, so it’s not a matter of who is to blame as outsiders looking in, as WoW is a game created by hundreds of people, all of whom contribute to the overall gameplay, narrative and aesthetic as well as marketing and none of us really have enough insight.
If there’s anything more outwardly visible to us, it’s what went wrong and how, although again, this is kind of hard with such little insider information regarding the actual process as it goes down in WoW.
Yeah, it can feel unsatisfying to look at the ugly result of a complicated processes and be unable to point a finger at any singular person that we could easily replace in order to transform a hot mess into something amazing.
But that’s life.
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The music and art teams are doing their job. Don’t lump them in with the terrible story and gameplay teams. 
Did you not just hear a single word Tamanii said?
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If anything I’d say the failures of BfA have more to do with the A team clearly being dedicated to the next expac. BfA is basically just running on the skeleton of Legion systems. I know some people will say they should have just abandoned BfA like they did WoD but I’m glad they didn’t, personally. Just cutting the story of WoD short so quickly gave us an ending that made no sense and also a long lull of 0 content between the first and last patch.
Though it did make Legion pretty meaty so idk.