Lately, Ion has also done a lot of magazine and fan site interviews, where the interaction is 1:1 in a more protected state – a professional journalist isn’t going to come into an interview and ask the kinds of questions a forum-goer would.My assessment of Ion is thus – I think, somewhat due to projection and filling out what I know of him by using interactions I’ve had and witnessed, is that he is passionate about WoW and wants what he believes is best for the game. While the original team featured some people who were pulled in because they were in EQ guilds with Blizzard staff (most notably Jeff Kaplan), Hazzikostas was in a similar but different role. GC’s trolls at least had ammunition to use, and GC wasn’t afraid of wandering onto the metaphorical battlefield to take it away. I think that his biggest failing as a designer is that he does not communicate that vision well at all, he doesn’t negotiate with players well, and he uses means of communication that are often one-sided or heavily filtered to interact with the fan community.

Serving in this role from Wrath through Warlords of Draenor, a period for PvE content that is probably among the best in the game, Ion rose within the team to a lead game designer, and eventually, as Legion ramped up, assumed the game director role in an acting capacity.Ion in this role is where most players will express distaste for the man, and in many ways, I don’t blame them. Commentaire de Palmik Hi, Could anybody tell me, what Gurgthock says whe you accept quest from him? Sometimes, I get nervous when 1 person out of 80+ readers a day has a comment that is not in agreement with a post I wrote – I can’t imagine the pressure that would exist if one thing I signed off on for an audience of millions made someone unhappy enough to @ me on Twitter or start a thread on a forum about how bad I am at my job.Now, he’s been doing design for over 10 years, so I won’t claim he is “new” to the industry anymore, and I think that Blizzard is risk averse enough that he wouldn’t be in the role he’s in unless they saw something in him – so what is that something?A part of it is, I think, that he seems unwilling to rock the boat. It's fine so long as you aren't getting gear that is vastly higher than your AP level. The two guys that talked about Island Excursions talked about it with a great passion, and it probably could have been a great feature, but when they linked it to the necklace as a weekly must do with minimal rewards initially it fell flat for me. I’ve spoken with him a small number of times, once in his office during my visit to Blizzard last year, and the rest in the Hilton bar on the last night of a few Blizzcons, and he was always engaged and asked a lot of pointed questions of me about what I was excited about in-game. There’s this pervasive almost taunting of the man, decrying his “ruining” WoW, giving him snide and dismissive nicknames, and I think that it often gets worse than it did with Ghostcrawler because Ion doesn’t speak up or confront it as often as GC did. In a way, clearing the path for classic actually does this better – Classic will, like it or not, inflate MAU numbers substantially because of how long it will take to accomplish many tasks in the game.However, most of this last paragraph is projection, because having had an actual conversation with the guy, I don’t think that he is some malevolent force that is ruining “my” game.

If I were to read into his personality too much from the outside, I think the conflict aversion we see in his approach to discussing the game definitely carries over into his duties as an approver – I’d have a hard time telling a designer “no” to something they spent several weeks designing and creating from scratch, even if it is awful.I do think the elements of the team that have had strong local leadership remain strong – art, worldbuilding, music and the like – but those elements that are more intertwined with the gameplay side of things are probably more reliant on the game director driving a central vision.I think the one thing he has going in his favor is that the cycle of WoW quality dictates that an even-numbered patch cycle is “bad” – so long as the lessons learned lead to a better 9.0, BfA will be the worst expansion still, but less of an outlier since it still fits the trend we’ve seen for a decade now.I guess if I remove myself from not being happy with the current game, I feel sort of bad for him in a way – I can see from a human angle that the role he’s in has no real peer (to your point), is one that he ascended to relatively quickly, and has immediately made his name a punchline among certain parts of the audience.

He’s definitely 1 for 1 with me, and I certainly hope he finds his groove before 9.0.Going to go on a limb here… Ion is the game director because they can’t find anyone else who wants the job.