He’s been in a dev role at blizzard for around 10 years. Did you think he instantly went from lawyer to lead dev?
I don’t know much about his background, to be honest. What i do know is people keep repeating his lawyer credentials, so i was interested how a guy in legal practice end up in a field that’s completely 180 from what he did.
I’d be focused on trying to improve the leveling process. There should be multiple difficulty settings, the lore should make sense, the quests should be updated to modern quality and it should all (optionally) scale to max level.
There’s a reason we get a free level boost with each expansion. It’s because the game’s lore and leveling are a mess.
Not sure, but at this point his lawyer credentials don’t matter, they just bring it up to try to discredit. He’s been on the dev team for a long time.
I see. Thanks for the information.
Lot’s of us might agree/disagree whether is he doing a good job or don’t, but on a common ground, i foster a mutual respect to every professional tradesmen.
I might not personally like ‘your’ work, but i respect that you have put your best effort on it. Unless you manage to prove otherwise, then shame is on you.
why are you in my house. go back to work
Different strokes for different folks. Evidently not many people shared your tastes because the spec was played by even fewer people than now, and that’s saying a lot.
And “feeling like a melee spec” is one of the biggest issues.
It’s toolkit was a mess. While the identity is fragmented right now you can tell they have at least put thought into what abilities went into the base toolkit. Legion Survival was just a bunch of random abilities using old names lumped together with no real plan or grand design beyond “omg, melee Hunter!”. The complexity of the spec came less from any interaction between the abilities (which was minimal) and more from the sheer number of them + certain mandatory talent options and it could better be described as “unintuitive” and “exclusive”. Somehow, despite having such a wide toolkit, it mostly failed at having anything truly unique. It was a disaster of a spec that was the result of the general shortsightedness and carelessness that led them to make a melee-only Hunter in the first place and predictably was rock bottom for representation for the entire expansion. As much as I dislike Mikepreachwow in general for being a bandwagoning tryhard who is flat-out wrong about several major issues with the game, I did personally like his summary of the spec in Legion which was, and I quote, “a hodgepodge of dog&$^#”.
Current Survival has issues. Some of them carried over from Legion (e.g. excessively depending on BM’s identity to carry a melee Hunter, near total lack of interaction between abilities in the baseline, being melee in general) but it is almost objectively an improvement. It has actual flow now and is more accessible (as much as some people cringe at that word it is actually an important thing for class design) and approachable. They’ve cut the nonsense (e.g. having the iconic Serpent Sting back instead of the cheap Rend rip-off that was Lacerate, and Explosive Trap in general) and provided good talent options. It also has a real niche as a melee with a lot of ranged utility. I STILL think it’s a load of rubbish for a bunch of reasons that almost all originate from being melee, but it is in a far, far better position than Legion Survival. And before you seize on that to try to argue that melee Hunters are actually fine and Legion was just a “good idea with poor execution”, do know that a major part of its improvement is from either a) things independent of being melee, like rotational flow, or b) actively being less melee focused (i.e. all the ranged functionality it has now).
And the best part of everything I just said is that it’s all totally independent of my own personal experience, despite how all the Survival fanatics on the forums like to pretend apparently none of it counts when I say it (even though most of it is from *their own feedback on the two iterations). If you think that’s not true, do you care to demonstrate to me how Legion SV did have baseline interaction between its abilities that indicated a real, concrete plan and direction for the spec, or how both Legion SV and BFA SV don’t excessively depend on BM’s identity, or how the spec wasn’t found to be “unintuitive” by a number of people including those who mained it according to their own feedback at the time, or how BFA SV doesn’t have more players, or anything else that can’t actually be dismissed at all by my not having played it on live servers (because apparently testing them on beta servers doesn’t count either now)?
Hopefully with the totality of the failure of Legion SV laid out before you it’s understandable how I found it just a little ridiculous that someone in this thread actually thought that it was the designers of BFA SV who didn’t know what they were doing and the designers of Legion SV were the good ones. The latter group largely winged it while ignoring feedback and taking no time to actually form a long-term plan and delivered a broken mess of a spec that nearly no one played. The BFA designers managed to at least improve the standing of melee Hunters after that trainwreck and bring it back from the brink (although it’s still just borrowing time). Again, it’s a common opinion of people that play Survival.
Why the mage tower flails are still broken a year on. It looks like your holding a rotten banana when you use it.
What I would say to Ion’s face if given the opportunity could not be printed on this board without getting me banned from the forums.
It would be a VERY long conversation about the Alliance and the situation it is in (dying) and how we got here, how to fix it and where the faction should go from here. Followed by trying to understand Blizzards obstinance about things.
Also why they have stopped looking at other MMO’s for inspiration and help.
the dog shiet story.
If he had unlimited power and resources with no restrictions, what would his dream game be? And what direction would he take WoW? What did he think of the game before, and what was his role and vision? How did he end up doing this after being an attorney? lol. Other games not related to Blizzard… But I don’t know, conversations tend to go all over the place sometimes, as you discuss various topics. Probably end up talking about music.
I would ask him about how he got to where he is now, how he deals with criticism, etc etc.
He’s just a person guys.
I would ask him when he retire
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I’d probably ask for a tour of blizzard headquarters to be honest.
I would have a lot to say. I’d have to ask if he at least giggled a little bit at the Ono Fuzzikoalas parody thread I made all those years ago. Or if that sinking feeling my rng is actually cursed is because, well, he didn’t giggle, he just fiddled with some dials and I’m never going to see the voidtalon portal. Never ever.
Then I’d let him know that despite my abysmal luck in happening across any rare spawns or getting anything on my long list of wished-for .0000001% drops, Azeroth’s been my favorite place to spend time. Not just that one planet, of course, but the whole kit and caboodle.
And then…I would launch into the most beguiling, impassioned, hopefully quite convincing argument for player housing that any developer has ever heard. It would end with Ion tilting his head a bit and saying “I’d never thought of it like that before, but it’s all there. We have the art resources already lying around in npc homes and it would perk up the monetization of the game to add a few estates and deco items to the shop. Most players would find home/farm/wildlife sanctuary creating highly enjoyable and no one who didn’t want to participate would need to fuss with it. The lifespan of the game would increase greatly. So many positives would come from this single facet finally being added. Let’s do this! You said you’ll be a creative consultant for…free?!”
Well, affordable sums of gold, Ion, a girl needs all these pets and mounts, y’see. ![:woman_farmer:t4:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/woman_farmer/4.png?v=6" ":woman_farmer:t4:")
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Getting back up and finding someone else to talk to.
He’s got nothing to really say.
He just wants to keep his job.
Move on from Ion.
Please.
I’d probably ask him what exactly his vision for the game is, and keep trying until I got a satisfactory answer from him (as opposed to a canned soundbite). In return, I would attempt to explain why I am so dissatisfied with the game, currently.
In the end, nothing would change, but I would (hopefully) walk away with a better understanding of the person with the most theoretical control over where the game will go from here.
Oh, and I’d have this large bell I’d ring:
Shame!
Shame!
Shame!
Ion definitely grew up in King’s Landing.