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We've summarized some of the main points below, but check out the full interview for the full context.
What's the Biggest Evolution in the WoW Community?
World of Warcraft and the community have grown up with the internet and the way that discussions have evolved and has shaped how Blizzard speaks to the community.
The importance and rise of influencers is something that Blizzard has to think about and take into account how it effects the way the community thinks about the game.
At BlizzCons, Ion speaks to a ton of people to get feedback on the game and prior to 2016-2017 (or so), you get incredibly diverse answers that reflect their personal experience.
More recently it's been someone loving the game for the most part, but listing off a couple of issues and within a couple of points, Ion would know exactly which video they've watched and who made that video and the next three things that they're going to say.
It doesn't make feedback less valid but it's much less organic and homogeneous.
An example of this is the Mythic+ changes in the War Within. The discourse around Mythic+ beforehand was at the high end, everyone was very anti-affix and that became the broad community view, even by people who weren't pushing high keys at all. They had to realize that these groups of players were almost playing different games. That talking point has now vanished almost completely because it was being driven by the very legitimate and real complaints of a vocal minority in the playerbase who are writing the guides, streaming and making videos.
Is World of Warcraft Coming to Console?
No plans to bring World of Warcraft to console. There's no reason for Blizzard to hide bring WoW to console, as they would just say it.
The focus remains on the PC based experience and all of the class changes are about reducing complexity, as WoW is a very complex game.
There's members of the community who celebrate that complexity, but there's a difference between having depth and complexity.
The goal is easy to learn, impossible to master and Ion believes that the skill ceiling is going to remain "incredibly incredibly high".
You're going to see the people who have been pro level PvPs, people running MDI, people topping leaderboards in Mythic+, people pushing the RWF, the same people are going to be the ones on top in this world and there will be countless challenges to tackle as they approach perfection. We've been talking about this for a year now, philosophically, this is us stepping back and taking stock at the state of the game and what's required to play it well, what's required to even play it at a baseline level for the community at endgame, what is a normal or heroic raiding guild expecting you to know or to have installed, what is a Mythic+ pug expecting of you -- and making sure those expectations are reasonable.
The last pruning 8-10 years ago focused on button count and they mostly pruned utility abilities. The feedback they got was it really harmed spec identity and sometimes actually lowering the skill ceiling.
What they didn't do back then was simplifying the core combat rotation that all players need to do.
They asked, how many abilities are redundant that are usually macro'ed together and there's no deep gameplay to them. Maybe you build a Weakaura to remind you to use it every 15-20 seconds? Is that really adding interesting depth or is it just adding complexity?
