In a very indepth interview, PsybearTV talked with Game Director Ion Hazzikostas for almost an hour. We've summarized some of the key points from the interview below, and there are some very interesting topics regarding the Mythic Raid Lockout and Blizzard looking at possibly changing it, the Patch 12.0.5 launch and much much more. I'd recommend listening to the full interview as it's a great listen, but if you want our summary, read below.
Make sure to check out the Interviewer, PsybearTV on his socials.
X (Twitter)
YouTube
Twitch
Reception to Midnight
Overall with regards to the season, feedback has been great. There's been lots of excitement and participation.
Mythic+ has been a night-and-day improvement over War Within Season 1. War Within Season 1 was tuned to be really challenging and with Midnight the goal was to be more approachable and has landed pretty well.
They had to pivot and provide rewards at the high end for players who blew through the lower end, but they're excited about the new top 1% mount and title.
For raids, they experimented with split raids and the flexibility that has been given to both pugs and guilds has been great.
Delves continue to "rock on" and it's been a great PvP Season.
Delves
There's now a dedicated team to the Delves experience.
They want to do more with solo outdoor players. They were excited to add Prey for those people as well.
Housing
They view the system today as a foundation for which to continue to build.
They've heard feedback from many players that its "never forcing me to do it and I have so many other things that I want to do", but Ion says "that's okay". It's there for when people want to move onto it.
They want to keep layering on depth to the system but avoid the heavy handed systems like player power to force players to interact with the system.
Things Feeling Formulaic
While Midnight has been great, one of the things that the team is reflecting on is some of the feedback that things are feeling formulaic.
It's very easy to pivot away from things that all players are mad about, but when they are getting good feedback such as with the gearing system, they carry forward what is working, but then they get some of that feedback.
One area that they're focusing time on is the raid ecosystem, and it hasn't been touched since when 10-30 flex / 20 person Mythic came out. Mythic+ and Delves have cut into some of the core motivations of raiding, and in Season 2 raids give you better rewards in the Great Vault so that they can hold their own against Mythic+ and Delves.
Prioritization of the Team
It's a lot of plate spinning and having to give attention to the one that looks the wobbliest.
Ion can't think about any other game out there that has the diversity of playstyles and motivations that WoW has.
They look at the data on what players are doing and spending their time, and consulting feedback from the playerbase.
Solo players, or players who had a few friends would level up and hit end game, and then realize they ran out of things to do without joining a guild or having more people. That's what the existence of things like Delves and Prey are for.
There are millions of players who play the game solo, or with a small group, despite there being not too many content creators for it. They have a wealth of data to draw from and do the best they can.
They know that for portions of the community, it can feel frustrating if feedback is being given and they do something else instead, but it's likely they're just listening to a different portion of the community at that specific point in time.
Addons
Ion Hazzikostas is happy with how the disarming of addons has gone, but it's not perfect and there's still work to do.
There is a very ingenious community that will find loopholes and workarounds, so they're refactoring how buffs/debuffs are shown in 12.1 to make it easier for addon developments to write code for those things, but it should close a lot of loopholes.
Regarding Mythic L'ura, it was part of the natural arms race between players and developers. Players are going to look for every possible advantage to help simplify mechanics, but Blizzard needs to be mindful about what the player experience will be and whether it will feel required in order to download and set up a bunch of addons in order to be on a level playing field with everyone else, or if enough tools are given out of the box.
Early on L'ura, they hotfixed loopholes on L'ura for Interrupt Tracking, etc, but they pivoted away from that because it was very disruptive to the majority of players.
If none of the workarounds for Mythic L'ura existed, Ion can confidently say that aspects of the fight would have been nerfed much more. They want to provide an appropriate challenge for the guilds with the tools that they're using. Of course the top guilds are capable of coordinating the mechanics without addons, but of course they're going to use addons to help. When everyone starts to use those tools as well, they need to make sure the mechanic still remains challenging. In a world where these tools didn't exist, they'd give you a few more seconds to deal with it, or remove one of the things you need to interrupt.
The hope is they see less of these types of addon workarounds going forwards, and give players an experience that works out of the box giving you the information that you need to succeed, without it needing to be fundamentally redesigned.
The Top 3-5 guilds in the world are playing at a different level and Ion confirms that they do in fact design the last couple bosses early on for them as no one else is going to be seeing those bosses early on. If they made a boss for Hall of Fame guilds from the start, the Top guilds would steamroll it and there would be no competition. The approach they take and will continue taking, is to tune them at superhuman levels early on and then progressing them down to mortal levels as the season continues
The encounter team is continuing to evolve and learn how to build encounters and mechanics in this world. What's easy? What's hard? They have been accustomed to a world where they previously understood how players would deal with a mechanic and thus determine how much time to give them, but things have changed.
As an example, Echo had a wipe in the Secret Phase due to the Starsplinter mechanic, and previously that mechanic would have been solved trivially by addons with each person being assigned a specific spot. It's not an impossible mechanic but it became harder and could wipe a top guild. That should be part of learning an encounter rather than seeing it, and th en having your addon author write something for it.
They don't want to dismiss the bumps and frustrations along the way, but Ion says the worst is behind us.
Fast and Buggy Content
If something feels rushed or half baked, it's not something they want to take lightly.
There's a lot of different perspectives and desires in WoW and they're trying to serve a very diverse audience.
They committed to a faster patch cadence and Ion is proud of the team's effort to meet that cadence.
Moving faster doesn't mean that they are sacrificing quality. Ion says "We are never going to put something in a Patch if its not ready."
If something isn't ready now, they know that there's another patch in 8 weeks and they can move it to then.
An 8 week patch is an aspiration, it's not set in stone. If they're getting lots of bug reports from QA or PTR players are unhappy with a big feature of the Patch, they're not going to push it out just because it's the 8th week.
Ion does acknowledge 12.0.5 and how players felt it was really buggy. He does not think that 12.0.5 was a function of them moving too quickly but there were some systemic and process issues that they have improved on and resolved from that patch. They had the patch mostly ready to go, and put in some last minute bug fixes for minor things that ended up breaking more major things elsewhere.
One of the major issues was they had to disable housing for 12.0.5. During their internal checks on the day of the deploy, people who zoned into their houses would have all decor that was off the ground, snap to the ground permanently. The cause was a last minute bug with the Siege of Orgrimmar elevator where players would fall through the elevator. Because of the complex nature of 20-25 years of code, aspects of how a player attaches to an elevator also touches on how objects can be stacked or touches each other in housing. They verified that the elevator worked, but they never went back and checked housing. In hindsight, they should have not fixed that in the tiny window they have before release of the patch.
Sporefall and the Mythic Lockout
Results of Sporefall have been great but it's somewhere between a one-off and the future of all raiding.
They've heard a lot of the feedback about old school Mythic lockouts
More people are looking to pug Mythic than previous and there are AOTC guilds looking to progress past Heroic but don't see a clear path to doing so.
There is a lot of value in a fixed raid size for the higher end encounters where they need to tune to a CE level, and players would absolutely manipulate raid size to find the optimal raid size which would be a bad social experience.
Full flexible is not the future of Mythic, but it's not impossible that we see some flexible Mythic size raid bosses make their way into raid tiers.
Ion brings up the potential of the rigid Mythic raid lockouts being reevaluated later in the tier, maybe after the Hall of Fame is full.
Dreamrift bypassed all Mythic lockout issues, and was an easier Mythic boss, but was a good player experience
They would need to think about a lot of the effects of a loot structure change as it would change the boosting structure, and Mythic splits. They want to do the thing that is best for the most players but also need to consider that competitive players will take advantage of every loophole provided.
They are clearly looking towards and likely to move in the direction of increased flexibility in lockouts and structure. But they're going to take incremental steps.
Item Level and Gatekeeping
Back in the day, if someone had Sunwell gear, you know they did all the content before that and cleared the Sunwell raid. Now we have parallel dungeon and raid gearing which complicates things.
But the community is well aware of this and knows to look for more than item level. For dungeons, you look at Mythic+ rating and key history. For a pug for a raid, you're looking at achievements and not looking at just the item level, but their experience.
Some can say that's toxic, Ion doesn't call it that toxic and thinks it's reasonable. If you're a jerk about it, that is toxic. But it's reasonable for players to seek out those who have a similar level of experience. If someone has learned a boss over 2 months through countless failed groups, at this point it's reasonable to want to seek out others who have similar levels of experience who are going to be on the same page.
It's important to align expectations which is why the dropdown was added was LFG.
High Item Level and Myth tier gear is more accessible that before, but they are pulling back slightly on it in Season 2, but what they've heard from the high end community is that gear is a means to an end; end being competition and success. For others, the content is the means to the ends of the gear and it's not the worst thing that lower skilled players are getting gear closer to the high end. The high end has been telling Blizzard pretty clearly, they just want to get their gearing with early on so they can chase their skill based goals.
