World of Warcraft director Ion Hazzikostas talks the game’s future

World of Warcraft is in the middle of extraordinary times. The MMO will be turning 17 years old this month, and while Blizzard prepares for the launch of a new patch, it is also looking within to fix its own culture under the backdrop of a state investigation into sexual harassments issues.To get more news about buy wow gold safe, you can visit lootwowgold official website.

Last week, I had a chance to talk with World of Warcraft director Ion Hazzikostas. I asked him about what’s happening inside Blizzard and the World of Warcraft team since the investigation became public. We also talked about the changes that World of Warcraft is seeing in the upcoming 9.1.5 patch and beyond.GamesBeat: The World of Warcraft team has been changing or removing some of the game’s emotes and art. What’s the thought process behind those changes?

Ion Hazzikostas: As we said in, I think, a brief blog, a forum post, this has been a process that has been ongoing as a result of an internal period of self-reflection over the last few months. These are changes that are coming from the team as a whole. In the discussions we began internally in the aftermath of the lawsuit and everything surrounding that, on many levels, trying to understand how we as the current leadership of the team could do better — better for our team, better for our community. One thing that came up is that there are pieces of our game that, over the course of 17-plus years now, that were not necessarily the products of a diverse or inclusive range of voices, that did not necessarily reflect the perspective of the current team and of many of our players. There are things that people on our team were not proud to have in our game. These are many things that people, over the years, have pointed out in the community, but we didn’t necessarily listen in the way we should have at the time.

What we did was we just set up a process internally for folks across the team, as well as sourcing some feedback from the community as a whole, to flag pieces of the game for review, whether it’s old quests or specific lines. As a random example, there were a number of jokes and references made a dozen years ago about how feminine male blood elves were, mistaking male blood elves for women, just poking fun at that in a not necessarily good-spirited way. That doesn’t sit right in 2021. That’s the sort of thing that was reviewed by a broad group that reflects the diversity of our team today. We made decisions on whether to leave some things standing, because they’re borderline, but we’re not looking to reinvent everything, turn over every single stone and rewrite 17 years of WoW. It might be a little bit juvenile. It might be off-color. But this isn’t something that is really making our game feel less welcoming for people, which is what we’re aiming to change. Those things we left. Others were removed, others were rewritten or changed accordingly.

Because of the nature of the feedback loop in the community and the way we publish new builds during the public test realm cycle and fan sites data mining them, every one of these changes ends up getting a huge spotlight shone on it alongside class balance changes or new systems we’re adding. This is a massive patch, but this is not something that took the entire team offline. In the grand scheme of things these are small changes. Many of them would probably go unnoticed if not for that spotlight being shone on them. But they’re things that were important to the team, and we’ve heard from many in our community that they’re important to them. This isn’t necessarily something that we expect to do in every patch going forward, to have a bunch of changes along these lines in it, but we want to be more sensitive to how the content we make is received by our team, and by the global player base that calls Azeroth, World of Warcraft home.

Hazzikostas: Mixed, right? Some of it is confusion. Changes started to be seen before we explained why we were doing what we were doing. There’s a range of folks. You have folks who see this as political or unwelcome. “Just focus on making a fun game. I don’t care about this stuff.” On the other end there are those who have expressed concern that we’re almost doing this as a smokescreen. Rather than actually tackling the hard issues, we’re just changing some words in a game. This isn’t an “or.” It’s an “and.” We understand that we’re not fixing systemic injustice by changing an emote in World of Warcraft. But why not do that while we’re also working on larger cultural unity and diversity and safety issues and more? As we’re improving our processes for evaluating managers, for sharing feedback with the team; as we’re improving our recruiting and hiring to build a more diverse team, let’s also turn that same eye on our game. That’s one thing that may be more visible in the short term. But in the long term we understand that what we’re going to be judged for as a team, as a company, and as a game is far beyond that. That work is still underway.