Can we send the writing team to college?

[Lannislight-tichondrius]

I would just prefer if the devs had a better idea for the story but didn’t themselves write it and let the writing team do their thing.

Like it seems like a lot of story decisions end up at the whims of a dev who decides “this will be cool lol” and it’s something like not cool and ruins the story, and the expansions are like barely strung together in connection but past that there doesn’t feel like a greater connection to the story like does SL feel like it’s been built up from MOP? Not really and why is that because they only plan one expansion ahead?

Why did the writing team who did a good job in Cata w Garrosh get him “wrong” on some “oh well he wasn’t supposed to be that way” way, their the writing team?

I watched a small thing from what ever the ffxiv like event is where they brought out the lead writer and like I think the person I was watching was saying like how they were emphasizing how good of a job they did to plan from like ARR all the way to what ever the current thing is. And I thought tbh does shadowlands feel like it was planned from that far back in regards to wow? And if not why? What’s the issue and why are devs who aren’t writers writing so much when it comes to wow

For what it’s worth I kinda asked this question in another thread a bit back and the answer was very good so I bookmarked it

@Baalsamael-turalyon

The CDev team is visibly under staffed and the Quest/Encounter Teams have a lot of leeway in what goes into the text.

There is ONE (1) Historian and he does not have a sub team that serves as Lore Editors for all quests

Now, according to Questifer in a tweet a few months back, every sub team has a WoW Writing and/or CDev person

But that doesn’t necessarily translate to Editorial Purview.

So unlike Every Other Major Game, where they have IN-HOUSE IRL HISTORY TEAMS and ACTUAL WRITERS having a chokehold on the world building

The Devs™, who are not Professional Writers nor Trained Historians Or Academics Otherwise, are allowed control over world building

Ergo why we get odd hyperspecific references (there’s a venthyr couple at the ember court to the side that have names but aren’t interactable that are references probably to a fairly popular Filipino soap opera that even Christie Golden is watching because other Blizzard people are watching it, or how the four mini bosses in front of Lady Darkvein in CN are four Romanian words that form a half sentence) or incredibly basic western hegemonic references (eg Muh Dracula’s Castle, Muh Angel Psychopomp, Muh Thanos Lucifer Sauron Zovaal)

Because it’s all to the whims of individual devs who do the material labor of building the game world and have been loaded with the creative labor of world building

I will not have faith in WoW’s writing team until:

• They admit the monster races based on POC are representation
• Say they are working on adding more phenotypic diversity to the races in general, eg curly hair for all
• Add an inhouse historian team, or at least 3 historians in CDev
• Add at least 5 subhistorians with editorial purview
• Take world building eg quest text out of Game Dev hands, or at least have mandatory editorial approval