Having left Blizzard this past July, citing personal reasons and burnout after four years on the World of Warcraft development team, Scarizard was one of the most well known designers, both for his work on the rewards team responsible for everything players obtain and use throughout the game, as well as his own outspoken nature.
Running well over two hours, the four-way discussion is quite exhaustive, but we've highlighted many of the more interesting anecdotes below. Please also note that Scarizard also has a tendency to be considerably more long-winded than most interviewees, which makes for much blockier quotes and bullet points, though his comments and philosophies are generally very insightful.
Burning Out Players and Developers
There is a price to pay for endless content. Blizzard has made great strides to reduce the downtime spent waiting for something to do in the next patch, but the speed at which content is being made and the direction in which the design is being pushed can leave developers overburdened and burned out.
The day to day of working on World of Warcraft was a dream, but the circumstances and timelines were wearing thin. Ultimately, Scarizard left not because of any one person or thing, but for his own mention health and to avoid spoiling the future joy of working on games.
People Don't Notice Good Game Design
Game design is a discipline which isn't often talked about when everything is done right. Like watching a good movie, players might recognize a good dungeon or boss, but don't often appreciate the amount of people or hours that go into making it.
On the other hand, everyone gets on your ass when something goes wrong, so it's easy for developers to feel browbeaten and unappreciated when most of the feedback they hear is negative. Combined with the fact that the games industry is also generally underpaid compared to other private software firms, its easy to lose people though negativity, so Scarizard is very passionate about hyping up his teammates when they make great things.
Keeping Up with Faster Content Cycles
From both a business and player perspective, the faster content cycle is inherently good, though it also creates a situation where it's harder to take risks or mitigate when the risks go poorly. When the pacing is too fast to course correct, and something does go wrong, its may be better just to keep moving on to the next thing than spend the time to fix it.
Many developers are players too, and like most, they often play less towards the end of the patch. There's a unique situation at Blizzard where they're already spending a lot of time working on the next thing during a release, and in the case of very time limited content like Dastardly Duos, it can result in the developer missing the event entirely!
There's a business incentive for World of Warcraft to keep churning out content, as well as for secondary businesses - when stuff is happening in WoW, content creators have something to talk about, which gives players something to watch. That's inherently good for all parties, and Blizzard wants players to have something to play, goals to chase, and a reason to log back in, but there is a point at which players check out. When your "wall of apathy" or "too much other stuff going on" gets too big, players tend not to log in again. To him, the previous Turbo Boost feels like something where people probably played hard for a week to make their characters real big, then stopped coming back.
It all means that Blizzard needs to try a lot of different things in a lot of different ways to keep players engaged, even if it's not always going to be a new dungeon or raid, but this speed is what makes individual designers take less risk and results in the content having a lower chance of being memorable. Overcharged Delves were probably someone's baby, but will they be remembered in three years with so many new things to follow?
Working with Rewards
Rewards design is particularly difficult, because so many aspects of future design might affect what you're doing now. Dinar are a good example, originally being on the raid renown track, but then designs for Turbo Boost came along which needed a strong reward.
The process of planning rewards several months ahead and then quickly changing course to support a design change from another team, is very iterative because the game's rewards exist in perpetuity and often overlap with one another - you're making a special cloak for 11.2 and then get asked to support another reward for Overcharged Delves, which now also exists alongside the ring some players are still using, which causes a pileup situation. Now you're talking about making a reward that's meant to be strong now, but also intended to be nerfed in a few months so that it doesn't overshadow the next thing already in production.
Scarizard (paraphrased)
It's the same as this belt. Why wouldn't you take away focus a little bit to just nerf the belt? You know, we had done it for the circlet. You know, we've done it for the annulet. We've done it over and over again, right? Which again, I don't think that stuff is good.
I hate the "here's a patch, and here's a thing, and then it's overpowered, and we tell you you don't need it, but you are still going to need it! I hate that shit, man... I think it sucks.
These issues extend beyond just rewards though. It also leads to more bugs and stability issues, which makes it hard to know if WoW or its players can really support this speed, but will people really be any happier if it goes slower? The genie might be out of the bottle on that one.
That cadence affects many things. Having already left Blizzard, it was mind-blowing to learn that a part of the Frost Death Knight Rider of the Apocalypse set bonus is not working correctly, because that is normally the kind of thing Scarizard would have immediately jumped on, but while he may know some of the people who responsible for fixing that bug, he doesn't know anything about their current workload. It's not an excuse, but with Midnight development in full swing, he has to imagine they are all in on class updates, which leaves little time for anything else.
Scarizard (paraphrased)
I'll put it this way. Apex talents probably were in a conversation before I left. I had never heard the words Apex talent. I didn't know they were going to do hero talents or anything like that. So, I have to imagine that those people are absolutely face grinding to get a lot of stuff for Midnight out.
Being removed from development side of things, the only thing Scarizard knows is that everyone is working really hard and really fast. Sometimes that's all it is, but he can also speculate that the fact Frost is doing well right now might have something to do with it. Something that came up all the time during his years working on League of Legends was a bug negatively affecting a hero with an already high win-rate. You can't just fix the bug without making them even stronger, while the "right" answer or fixing it and rebalancing everything rebalancing everything else may be more effort than it's really worth.
It's hard to say how an individual bug comes about or why it doesn't get fixed, but what we do know is that everything is moving very quickly. Everyone also knows that bugs sucks, though they are something that just happens, even if it it feels like they shouldn't.
An Argument for Speeding Up
It's always possible that these are just growing pains. The cadence doesn't necessarily have to slow down, maybe it needs to speed up, but in way that allows developers to find new ways of being creative within that scope.
When looking at things like phasediving and the cloak, it's hard to envision a world where we get a system as unique as Corruptions again. The issue isn't that designers can't dream big enough, it's a question of what can the game support being made right now?
It's easy to think about what could be if everything had a little more time. Halondrus was famously reworked from a very unsatisfying PTR encounter to one of the most memorable progression bosses of all times, while others that didn't receive that treatment are only remembered because of how hard they got cheesed or trivialized. It's difficult to make changes late in the cycle, since art and voice lines are already set, so there's a fear that developers don't want to take risks and just go with the safest design option.
That said, WoW has also had its share of emergent moments over the last few expansions. Bubbles and Bubbles Jr. were not planned, but a fantastic confluence which became a much bigger cultural touchstone. Now we have a setup which, years later if Bubbles Jr returns as a delve boss or something, players will look back and say "hey, I remember that guy!"
A lot of design is emergent as well. A number of really cool things were added to the game simply because a designer with a passion decided to make them more interesting than a reward on a renown track.
Scarizard (paraphrased)
Jeff Grow does professions and secrets; he was assigned to do customizations for Druids in the Amirdrassil patch, and he decided to say "let's have an unlock condition for this, not just throw it on a renown, let's come up with a fun and unique way." And so you had to go travel around the different moon wells in the base game, and that stuff was really cool.
He used to be an escape room designer, which is another very fun thing. That's something I want to learn from him and he's offered to talk with me more about. I think he was also involved with the the the Warlock pet customization where you have to take a book to the Legion (Antorus) portal fight, put the book through and then a demon came out. That shit rules, man.
Scarizard's greatest passion, which he didn't know until he worked on WoW, is actually for naming items, tier sets, and writing flavor text.
Scarizard (paraphrased)
No shade to the Blizzard people of old, but if you go look I think there's a generational like nine-year run of every Hunter tier set being called "stalker's battlegear," right? And it's like, look... we know you and everybody's got deadlines, but let's imagine something a little more.
And so I pushed really hard when we all brought tier sets back in Sepulcher. I only get to do a few of those and nobody technically paid me to do this, but I wanted to imagine "what is Zerith Mortis?" Zerith Mortis is the blueprint of how life is created in a way, right? It's this peek behind the veil of the makers of the universe or whatever, right? Something like that, I know it's all it's all very up in the air
So, to me, the names should evoke this, or they should feel like they're almost like archetypal, like you're looking at what the first ever Death Knight would have worn, right? Like when some untold alien god made a blueprint a death knight, that's what it looked like, right? And so every single one since then, I tried to think like what is a theme very broadly that we could apply to a patch and then drill it down.
(note: somewhat ironically, the Shadowlands Season 3 Hunter set was still called Godstalker's Battlegear)
Similarly, the Demon Hunter set in Dragonflight Season 1 was named based on the head canon that Demon Hunters just found out dragons exist and they love the idea of flying like them, so now they have a flight suit. Likewise Warlocks were selling contraband in the Liberation of Undermine, and if there were a way for the game to let them turn people half-demon in exchange for gold cap, they'd probably do it! It's fun to imagine these things, though between 13 different classes you don't always get there.
When done right, flavor text is some of the most poignant and fun writing that people can do. It's funny to Scarizard, because even players who claim to care about lore the least make an exception for items they think are really cool. If something resonates with people, it will break through those barriers, like all of the frat bros who loved Halo and tried to pretend they didn't care about what was happening during its campaign or their feelings about Master Chief and the Flood.
When you go into the world an loot an item, you don't think about the guy named Phil who put that drop there, its become expected that a bear should drop bear meat and bosses drop weapons or armor. The Oath-Breaker's Recompense from Nexus-King Salhadaar is one of the best combinations of name and flavor text, but the immersion of WoW is so deep that you just accept the fact that it's a thing Slahadaar would have been carrying around. That veneer of fantasy is very meaningful to him.
Scarizard isn't sure how he feels about Apex talents yet, he doesn't really "get" them, but is cautiously optimistic. He's the kind of person whose whole thing is to take a big swing or don't swing at all. He feels like Apex talents sound a bit like Azerite armor in that they might be fine gameplay wise, but he's not sure why they're being introduced or what they're solving.
Concerns Housing Lacks Universal Appeal
Housing is a huge feature that people have been yelling about forever, but there is a little fear that it won't be as big as the developers are hoping and perhaps needing it to be. Certainly it will help bring a lot of new people to the game, and there's a subset of current players who will like it, but also competitive players who won't care at all about it.
In the same way, he thinks the new Devourer Demon Hunter is sick, though understands why people who don't play DH may feel like there isn't as much to get excited about. Side note: Scarizard wanted so badly to put an intellect warglaive on the Soul Hunter's loot table that players could see in the journal but nobody was eligible to loot. The Miniature Singing Stone in Dragonflight's Nokhud Offensive was similarly created with Augmentation Evokers in mind, before they were actually added to the game.
Some Trinkets Never Get to Shine
On one level, some people will use every trinket, because the amount of people who play the game and the way they play it is so huge and different that you want to spread things out in a way that guarantees everyone can get something everywhere. Not everyone is going to be a higher information player who gets into sims and metas and the like.
Some of the items are just older too. So'leah's Secret Technique was quite good when it came out in Shadowlands, partially because there was no upgrade system and so Tazavesh loot was made just a little bit better on purpose, just like raid loot often might be.
Tuning is very difficult, despite the team doing more trinket tuning in the last two expansions than ever before. The hard part is not knowing exactly what classes and situations will pop off until it happens, so you try to make sure everything is covered. Where players use their lust or other cooldowns varies between the top-end Race raider, the middle progression players, and the low-end casual players, so their needs are different and the perception of value for these effects may change in unpredictable ways.
It's not the most satisfying answer, but you try to cover all scenarios, so that when odd situations arise, the tools are already there. It sucks to look back on the amount of time and effort spent on creating a tool that wasn't used because that situation never came up, but they're not purposefully trying to mix in bad choices to trap players - there is an element of random happenchance.
What's really challenging for WoW is the acquisition model and the modernization of WoW. Every now and then they'll add something fun and unique, like the Charged Stormrook Plume from Rookery or Zaqali Chaos Grapnel from Aberrus which also add mobility, and they didn't ruin PvP or any other aspect of the game. If they were so powerful that players felt they were required for a particular competitive edge, then they would start to sour on the idea - they'd stop being seen as cool additions and start being seen as annoying requirements. If everyone feels like they need a dash, it's probably better as a talent or something else more baseline than a piece of gear.
Inevitably, something breaks containment and is completely imbalanced, but if you want to give something a strong niche, it needs to be worse the rest of the time, and sometimes it just turns out that there isn't a situation extreme enough for that niche to shine in the current content.
Hard Mode Tazavesh
Scarizard had nothing to do with either the old or new versions of Tazavesh. The only thing he did for the original version was change the hard mode loot tag from Mythic to Priceless, in order to better indicate why those drops had a higher item level and didn't come from a Mythic+ dungeon.
There was a long-running back and forth at Blizzard about the creation of a new hard mode Tazavesh. They wanted players to experience the full uninterrupted version, though encounter designers weren't interested in spending time creating new mechanics if there wasn't a compelling reason to do it. At the time, they were targeting something closer to a +5 or 6, but Delves already fit into that space.
Tazavesh was a chance for players to see the hard version of those bosses as sort of a "mini -raid" experience, similar to Dawn of the Infinites. One of the best parts of working on WoW is that it's been around for 20 years, so there's a lot of cool stuff to pull from. Dawn of the Infinites just gave players a ton of crests, but it also came out in the middle of the patch, serving as a soft replacement for your 15th heroic raid clear.
The idea of a Hard Mode Tazavesh with limited attempt was an effort to guarantee that people would be thinking about it, attempting it, and trying it week after week. Certainly some players have not been happy with the potential for failure, but Scarizard is a big advocate for people who mostly do dungeon content to earn Mythic gear.
At the same time, there are many reasons it couldn't have uncapped attempts, such as the extreme impact it would have on promoting sales. Despite the hardships, HM Tazavesh has a lot of features to help players succeed, such as the lack of a timer allowing them to continually wait for cooldowns, and that potential for failure means that succeeding in HM Tazavesh feels very meaningful.
There's a fundamental issue in the way people play WoW that needs to be addressed, part on them individually and part on WoW. Too many players see others success as a failure on their part, where anything they don't have constitutes as an innate handicap or loss.
Scarizard (paraphrased)
WoW is a very anti-social game, but furthermore, it is a game that breeds anxiety in a lot of people, because there is this idea of "well if I am not good enough" or "if I'm not prepared enough...." right? How many times both when doing raid renown, and even the cloak, the cloak which was nothing. It had six ranks, I blinked and it was over, I went to go turn in my little thingies before raid and I was like "what it's over, what do you mean?"
But every time one of these things happens, Wowhead comments are a cesspool... shout out to my Wowhead commenters: get therapy. If you go look in these places you'll find people who say and mean this from their heart... they'll roll their eyes and say "great, now someone's going to inspect to see if my cloak's high enough level before I can get into a group."
Where does that come from?! It comes from the fact that WoW currently is big enough that it gives people anxiety about the feeling of being behind or bad, but not because they're like "I feel bad that I'm playing bad. I don't want you to see me being bad. I don't want to be acknowledged as bad by you. I don't want to be shamed by you, and I don't want to feel shamed by making your group worse because I'm there."
So, now this is very philosophical, and you can't say a video game can solve all of these problems, right? But if you think about Legion, and I think Legion was maybe right when the rubber was hitting the road on some of this stuff. I think Max has talked about this a few times where the the legendary acquisition stuff is not bad if you never had the expectation of getting one, right? But you see stuff like Fyr'alath the Dreamrender or Nasz'uro, the Unbound Legacy, everybody is frothing at the mouth, because the existence of it means I must have it and not having it is bad, right? Not having it tricks my brain into saying I'm having less fun, but it makes me feel bad that you have to play with me, because I suck ass cuz I don't have the thing yet, right?
The solution isn't to just not design cool stuff anymore, but it's a very difficult problem to solve. It's important for people to have access to things, but also important to keep the rewards meaningful.
Scarizard (paraphrased)
There is a fundamental shift in the way that people play games period along with how people play WoW that I think needs to be addressed. Part of it is on them individually, part of it is on is on WoW, right? Because the upsides to something like artifact power is that nobody can take that away from you, when you're doing your own stuff on your own time, right? Every little bit of
investment you made into your character mattered. When I got the little talents on my twin prince blades
or whatever, I pogged because I knew not everybody had it. Not because I'm like I wanted it to be exclusive, but it said
something about me. It said something about my level of commitment. And when someone in my raid group didn't have their thing maxed out, I didn't think, "Wow, what a slob loser who expects to be carried," it made me think, "oh, they're not where I'm at. Can I help them get where I'm at?"
And maybe I'm a normal person. But I'm just saying that that there's a level to that, which is you are allowing people to lay claim to their progress in a way that feels good. But the the flip side of that is again as you've noted, as I think as everybody noted, if you did that today, people would say "every week I have to do my bare minimum thing, because if I don't do it, I don't meet the bar."
