"Lead Rewards Designer Russ Petersen announced on Twitter he’s leaving Blizzard after working at the company for nearly 10 years.
Russ designed the Great Vault in Shadowlands and was behind various Battle for Azeroth systems including the Heart of Azeroth system and Azerite Armor."
Is this good news for this game? What do you think?
I mean, unless he was just surrounded by yes men or just ignored all of the team’s feedback (as well as players)… it’s hard to say whether or not anything will change.
So somebody who designed systems that players railed against as being anti-player is leaving Blizzard? Good Riddance. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
I am hoping this is one of the many reforms for the improvement of the game. I really hope Ion has to leave once the merger goes through with Microsoft.
I didn’t like any of those. I would have liked the game a lot better without them.
Now it’s hard to tell if the finial in game version of these were the way he wanted them to be. Maybe someone above him directed certain changes or they ran out of time to make finial changes. We’ll only know if someone tells us. But only time will tell us if this is good news.
I do know that the senseless gear time gating coming for rewards in 9.2 is a horrible idea!
after around 10 years, its just news. neither good or bad. the natural flow of things.
the example systems are not bad systems in of them selves, its just the implementation of them that had friction.
and part of that could have been from trying to solve the wrong problem.
like, assuming they (bliz) saw that players would HAVE to swap out their abilities every boss pull because they could, made them think that more permanent fixations would prevent that sort of degenerate game play. instead, it became a horder’s house of 5x of ever exact item so the min maxing could be done any way. soul binds kind of do the same thing as far as systems go, but without the energy cost, its a better system.
players can min max to a degree. the travel to the fixed point to apply different options is enough deterrence. minor changes like paths or different binds can be done where ever and that is good enough for minor tweaks.
Let me do literally an entire raid, multiple M+ and then choose from an array of all likely terrible pieces of loot, or a currency capped at 3 per week that I can use to buy other currency that might get something useful eventually. The only worse reward system in the game is the Cache of Sanctum Treasures.