Dissecting Interview With Ion

“It’s a heavy burden on the shoulders of our narrative team, of our encounter designers, to deliver something that’s been years and years and multiple expansions in the making,” World of Warcraft Game Director Ion Hazzikostas says. “Getting the chance to face off against a figure of her stature, people are going in expecting a lot.”

This is a false narrative that s been forced upon us. Those of us that wanted to fight Sylvanas already have. We invaded Undercity and killed her where she stood. We didn’t require a false narrative pushed down our throats in order to do this.

"I am looking forward to seeing the community discuss and dissect as they try to figure out what’s next for her. And what’s next for the Shadowlands as a whole.”

The fact that there IS something next for her is the problem. So many are tired of Sylvanas. A once beloved character has now become an icon of disgust, not due to anything her character has done in game, but simply because of her overuse. The fact that there is now a term, Sylvanas fatigue, underscores this.

“One of the great things about working on a live game like this and this iterative content cycle is that we can see what players are excited about, they’re confused about, want to learn more about, what preconceptions or ideas they have about the way things are going, and pivot to make sure that what we’re doing is going to hit the mark.”

If you actually had your thumb on the pulse of the community you would know what we are excited about and what we are bored with. But you’ve “pivoted” away from “hitting the mark” time and time again in regards to story telling and the use of systems. We are “confused” because YOU are confused. The question is why are you confused about what we want? You completely ignored the beta tester feedback on Torghast as a prime example, and you completely ignore the forums chatter. How can you expect to “hit that mark” when you refuse to acknowledge what that mark really is?

The problems with Torghast were not easily picked up in the beta because players on the beta were there to simply check out Torghast and didn’t have the specific goals in mind that come in a live environment.

There was literally tons of feedback from the PTR telling you Torghast was fun, and then you changed it practically last minute to the iteration that was released live, the one that everyone hates. Again, you missed the mark because you had no idea what the mark was because again you didn’t listen.

“We continue to expand the team and get as many resources as possible…"

But not in the area of in-house game testing obviously. Launching a release with major expansion features broken does not imply having “as many resources as possible” at your disposal.

“That closer look at the community in Classic and Burning Crusade informs some of our thinking about the modern game and how to recapture …as we think about the evolution of the social side of Shadowlands and beyond, is how we can reinforce and reintroduce the mechanisms that lead to the formation of new friendships…"

First of all bring back servers being servers. Remove LFG/LFR, cross server interaction. Meeting people in enclosed boundaries like real server communities fosters a community where people run in to each other again and again allowing for relationships, groups, and guilds to form. This doesn’t happen with LFG/LFR and cross-server interaction to any degree resembling how it worked in the early days before these systems were implemented.

“What that era and Classic and Burning Crusade lacked was interconnectivity and accessibility in a different sense…"

You just used your litigation attorney experience to double-talk your way out of understanding the real resolution. It’s that interconnectivity within the server that allowed for relationships to be built in game. Creating any larger interconnection through cross-server play waters down the pool, creating less chance of encountering that random player more than once that would potentially become a friend.

“We have pieces of it, things like our PVP ecosystem or Mythic Plus, a place where people add people to their friends list because they had a good experience running with them,” Ion says. “They do it again, do it repeatedly. And before you know it, this is a new friend."

That’s not how it works! And if you actually played WoW you would know this. People join LFG, they burn through the instance, and they leave. Rinse and repeat. Occasionally someone may make a lasting friendship through the current system but its the exception not the rule. You would know this if you played the game.

Remember at BlizzCons from years past Blizz employees would gush about their own characters, their own in game experiences, and what they as players would want to see in game? Think on that for a bit…

57 Likes

This isn’t a good idea. You have servers that are so buried in one faction like A52 and so popular that they had issues logging in for weeks at the start of the expansion, versus servers that just don’t have enough of a population to support group activities. Add in the faction imbalances all over the place and it would be a nightmare.

Where are all of the players who not on giant servers going to move to if their server doesn’t have the population they need to do group content?

26 Likes

Server consolidation and server redistribution are two ideas. Last I counted there were 73 servers labelled as Low Pop.

Why do we need 73 Low Pop servers?

6 Likes

Link to the interview?

3 Likes

It’s not a false narrative lmao. The lore, characters, and story is theirs. You may not like the direction the story is going but you don’t have to play if you don’t want too. I think it’s awesome that we finally get to kill Sylvanas this way.

7 Likes

You do not understand the term false narrative.

False narrative in this context means Ion is under the assumption that the player base as a whole wanted and needed a reason to have Sylvanas as a raid boss.

False narrative does not mean in this context that the story is false.

6 Likes

Doesn’t consolidating them oppose your whole idea of making servers into servers again and bringing back community?

When they do it (because it does happen occasionally) it hasn’t seemed to alleviate giant servers vs empty servers. It’s a band aid, and closing off servers is going to cause this issue: do I stay on my lower pop server (doesnt even have to be truly low pop mind you) and struggle, or do I move where it will be easy, but I will have to wait an hour or more to even log on?

2 Likes

Consolidating 73 low pop servers with less than 3k players in to 10 medium pop servers does not go against anything I and others propose when asking for servers to become servers again.

www ausgamers com/features/read/3635679

1 Like

Kinda does though. It’s the same as what we have now, but just limited for the sake of making more headaches honestly.

1 Like

So much rage about a character in a mmo lol. I hope the fight is fun and cool.

3 Likes

Nah dude, it’s actually you who doesn’t understand the term.

Well this really shows that they are just going to keep recycling her in some way. Fatigue isn’t the problem so much as it becoming obvious to us they have no original ideas.

I think they would have to reduce the number of servers though. I think the sharding does 2 things: It allows Blizz to pretend they need servers because of population and it also allows people to keep their IGN’s. I remember players hating the server they were moved to when theirs was shut down. Many games have one server and it’s fine.

But then this leads to less interconnectivity and accessibility for some.

Honestly? All this man does in his interviews is essentially the same as most politicians - talks a lot, but says nothing of substance.

It is from AusGamers. They may not be able to post a link, but if you really want it then you just highlight one of the quotes, right-click, and then choose to google search the text.

false

sylvanas was frogs all along

1 Like

It is in no way like it is now and I do not understand your analogy.

Silver Hand has a pop of less than 2k players on it. So players there that aren’t already in a large guild have to resort to cross server to meet other players. The cross server system does not guarantee they will ever meet the same player again, to the contrary the numbers prove they likely won’t.

Consolidating low pop servers in to real server status means Silver Hand gets a population closer to 20k players that bump in to each other the way players used to bump in to each other in the chat channel, at the AH, bank, instance entrance, etc… being confined to the server population pool as opposed to running in to random player every time a cross server system is used.

This is how guilds formed back then, from playing with the same people multiple times and deciding they were fun people to play with.

Because he is a litigation attorney not a Game Designer.

2 Likes

I do sympathize with developers because a lot of beta testers are there to get a leg up on mechanics and strategy not for bug reporting and feedback. (Thank you to those who do beta and give feedback ).

The rest… meh. I think he has some fair points while others are standard interview fluff.

1 Like

But it seems like they gave out a lot of beta keys to streamers and high end raiders. I can’t feel sorry for them under these circumstances.

6 Likes

Absolutely correct. And another reason why there needs to be paid, in-house testing. However, in the case of Torghast specifically there was tons of feedback that was ignored in lieu of changing it from how it was on PTR to what it was on release. And none of that feedback obviously held any weight because the change was contrary to the feedback,

I don’t think that’s actually a term, but yeah some people are sick of her.

Do keep in mind we’re in the Shadowlands though. If Sylvanas was to die in the Shadowlands she’d just reappear as a soul. So whether you like it or not, she’s going to have a future in this expansion since we are in the afterlife, the place you go after a raid team wipes 100 times and then kills you.

2 Likes

I’m as tired of Ion as I am with Sylvanas. So tired of the crap he spews from his lying mouth.

3 Likes

Yes it is an actual term used on several forum posts, player videos, streams, etc.

Another issue with beta testing, they are using PTR as a marketing tool more than a testing tool. Couple this with no real in-house game testing and you get what you get.

3 Likes