Game Designer Chris Kaleiki, who focused on class design and PVP, has left the company, saying that he has been unhappy with the state of the game for a while. Part of his PVP accomplishments (or ones he had a hand in) according to his goodbye video posted on Youtube (linked below), are that he developed the PVP talent system, Warmode, and worked in WOTLK to make all specs “viable in PVP”.
He says big things that made him leave are the story and the shift away from the guild and social focuses of Classic, and that he thinks that there is currently too much focus on character “progression systems” rather than engagement and social aspects of the game itself.
A lot of you will remember his now infamous “PVP scaling magic” MS Paint Tweet, featuring pictures of stickmen, and such quotes as:
“The anxiety over the PVP scaling system is unfounded”
“The tech will make PVP better for years to come”
“This player has better gear, so I lost. That seems fair.”
“Just gear your character as if there was no PVP scaling at all.”
For shadowlands, Chris worked on the Spriest redesign, monk legendaries, and said that he also worked on the “Warmode” PVP content.
Links:
Chris’s goodbye vlog from where the quotes were pulled:
The Tweet:
https://twitter.com/ckaleiki/status/1041878657701052416
Wowhead article if you want to keep reading:
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The shift from WoW being less social started once BC came out. Flying mounts, less emphasis on BGs and more on arenas, cross-realm BGs/arenas, and less player interactions. WOTLK brought in the dungeon finder which started the “rush-rush-rush” dungeon trend and more cross-realm stuff… Cataclysm the Raid Finder. Flash forward to today and you have the group finder to pug M+, heroic raids, etc. Somebody can basically play solo and still win at the game.
So I don’t know why these people keep saying WoW is less social when they were directly involved in the process of making it less social? The game used to be marketed towards the hardcore raiding crowd only, but now its trying to appease everyone.
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As you said, he’s also the guy who’s behind spriest’s awesome rework. I wish him the best.
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I don’t think that’s fair. The ‘less-social’ direction the game moved probably came from the decisions of people much higher up than him. And from the looks of it, he had very little involvement, if any at all, in those non-social systems that have been created over the years.
The guy had his hits and misses, but it seems like his work has overall been a net plus for the game.
I wish him the best as well.
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Wow has always been a game where solo players could do their own thing, but now less than ever. So many people have had bad experiences with guilds they were forced to join in order to access content that you can’t make them do that anymore.
If you didn’t belong to the right clique in the right kind of guild you didn’t matter to other players or to devs. If you remember an amazing community were everyone worked together and got what they needed, that sounds like you and your friends controlled the guild you belonged to and helped each other rather than those who weren’t best buddies of yours.
It’s time for devs to stop trying to force social engineering experiments on the playerbase and accept the players they have.
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It doesn’t get much higher up within wows team.
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Social game won’t work anymore with rampant boosting. People just use guilds for loot then hop to a higher tier one, and the amount of low tier guilds drops everyday due to how cheap/easy boosting is.
Pretty much, gate keeping content behind organized guilds doesn’t work. It never worked back in the day, and it doesn’t work now. The only reason people put up with it is because we had no options.
Getting into a good guild isn’t about being social, it’s about having connections and using people to get ahead.
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Looks like another wow dev headed over to Dreamhaven 
u can bet that they are brainstorming some stuff over there as we speak
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It’s got to be terrifying changing jobs in this climate and I wish him all the best.
I was dismayed by his microsoft paint explanation for PvP scaling, especially in light of the PvP gems thing. But I do agree with him about the damage that focusing on character progression has brought.
Just saw there is already a thread on this in the Arena forums with some good replies in it if yall wanna check it out:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/were-going-to-miss-him/725181/1
Regardless if that’s true or not, it doesn’t look like he had much involvement in the non-social systems, like i said. Seems like he was mainly focued on PvP and maybe some class balancing/designing. No indication he worked on group finder, lfd, lfr, cross-realm, shards, phases, etc.
