World of Warcraft Leads Explain How Faster Release Cadence Helps Development Team Avoid ‘Heroics’

World of Warcraft’s community has been rather high on the latest expansion, Dragonflight, for a number of reasons. Among them is the general feeling that – contrary to the previous expansion, Shadowlands – there’s always plenty to do. And yet, World of Warcraft leads say that while the release cadence is faster than ever, shifts in how they pace and announce these updates are helping the team avoid crunching to make them happen.

Speaking to IGN, game director Ion Hazzikostas says that the team heard the “tremendous amount” of feedback about content drought in Shadowlands, and began work to retool its public test realm (PTR) so the company could have two PTR builds running at the same time. World of Warcraft’s public test realm is essentially a separate version of the game that allows the public to test game updates before they’re released in the official version of WoW. And having two up at once means the team can run public testing for multiple updates at once, allowing the team more time and flexibility as they tweak new features for official release.

“It was something we actually didn’t have the technical ability to do before,” Hazzikostas explains. “And in accomplishing that, I think we also have given the team a lot of flexibility, which is actually a strength. It can sound like this is a grueling pace that we’re setting, but in a lot of ways, done right, I think it actually gives the team more freedom.”

As a specific example, Hazzikostas offers the just-released new cross-faction guild play feature, which debuted in patch 10.1. He says the original plan was to have it out in 10.0.7, but the team realized it was too buggy and would require “heroics” to make happen. In the past, Hazzikostas says, pushing a feature like this would have meant players would have to wait roughly five months or more to get their hands on something the developers had been teasing for an imminent release. But with a more regular cadence of updates, it was an easy decision to simply bump the feature to the next patch, avoiding the team having to push itself “needlessly.”

“The metaphor we use internally, it’s like there’s a ship leaving the dock every eight or so weeks now, and if the thing you’re trying to get out there doesn’t make it onto this one, it’s okay,” he says. “There’s another one that’s starting to load up right after…It’s energizing for our players, but it also gives the development team much more flexibility in moving things around, just getting them out into players’ hands, but doing so with more agility.”

Hazzikostas’ description is encouraging, but is somewhat at odds with the recent claims made by multiple Blizzard employees on social media that the team was making “crisis maps” of what features to ship following a rash of departures at the studio. When I bring up those reports to Hazzikostas and WoW executive producer Holly Longdale, Longdale denies there are any concerns about features being scrapped or delayed for this reason, saying, “Nope, we’re good.”

Hazzikostas adds, “It’s time of change across the industry, across the world, really. The last three years have been a time of change and just navigating unprecedented circumstances together. And we do everything we can as leaders of the team to try to steer through those uncharted waters. But I’m really excited about everything that’s ahead for players.”

A Very Loose Battle Pass

One struggle that World of Warcraft has dealt with for years is the pervasiveness of datamining, where players will comb through the game’s files on both the live version of WoW and its PTR to learn every minor detail about everything – including elements the team would rather leave unseen. For much of WoW’s content, this isn’t an issue – enemy information, spells and abilities, mechanics, and more are naturally going to be uncovered as they arrive on the PTR, and that’s intentional. But especially in recent years, Blizzard has had to go to extra lengths to ensure that especially spoilery story content isn’t findable on the PTR.

But even beyond the obvious elements like cutscenes and certain dialogue that will spoil the direction of Blizzard’s story, even in recent patches dataminers have found elements on the PTR that have led to rampant speculation about where the game is going. One example involves Dragonflight’s new class, Dracthyr Evokers, for which dataminers found a number of clues suggesting a new specialization may be on the horizon. Hazzikostas has elsewhere deftly skirted the rumors of an imminent tank spec for the dragon race, but said a bit more when I asked him about the challenges of both keeping actual secrets and addressing unwarranted speculation.

Boy, is there something magical about something you never knew was coming.

“The way we build World of Warcraft is a lot of very direct access by the entire development team to just work on live data and tinker,” he says. “And that empowers the team to make as much content as we are able to and to just move as quickly as we do. It does mean sometimes that people who datamine will see discarded experiments, failed ideas. And if in the original, back in Dragonflight and 10.0, there were tons of abilities people were speculating about, it was like, yeah, those were internal abilities that we tested and decided they weren’t going to be fun, but there’s still vestiges of them there in the data.

“We could overhaul our process to change that, but it would slow us down. It would limit our ability to make as much WoW for people as we do, and that’s not worth it. All of that said, boy, is there something magical about something you never knew was coming.”

Longdale adds that this dovetails into larger Blizzard initiatives to be as transparent as possible about the direction of World of Warcraft via larger content roadmaps, which the team introduced with Dragonflight. The roadmaps, she says, aren’t just to cue the community into what’s coming next – they’re also about adding context to community conversations about the future. This level of communication has helped spark much of the positive reception to the recent pace of content, and Longdale confirms we’ll continue to see new roadmaps released once the current one expires.

Still, even with the positive reception to more frequent content rollouts, Longdale says that balancing their pace can be tricky. Releasing new content too quickly can become overwhelming for players who don’t spend hours and hours playing, meaning the team needs to constantly consider all different playstyles when planning future update content and timing.

One way the WoW team has managed that lately has been through the introduction of the Trading Post – a hub where players can receive currency each month for doing just about any activity in World of Warcraft, and then spend that currency on various cosmetic items such as mounts, armor appearances, and more. It’s a way to reward players consistently regardless of the type of content they’re doing, while also giving those who burn through new major updates quickly a reason to keep dipping back into the game.

To my ear, it sounds a little bit like a built-in “battle pass”, similar to Fortnite’s, – but Hazzikostas says the idea was only inspired by the the concept “very loosely.” He says the Trading Post is more like just another “bar” to fill in World of Warcraft, like an EXP bar or a reputation bar, but one that can be filled by any person’s unique playstyle rather than completing one specific challenge.

“We’ve heard feedback from a lot of players, not quite criticism, but almost disbelief, [that the Trading Post currency] is super mistuned or wrongly tuned,” he continues. “‘[That they] just filled it up automatically by playing the game. It’s like, that’s the point. That’s the secret. The intent is a wide variety of activities, but whether you’re someone who just runs a lot of dungeons, whether you’re someone who plays a bunch of alts and quests, whether you’re someone who PVPs. Each one of those paths should give you the ability to fill the bar, collect your tender, enjoy the rewards that you choose. So it’s really more of just a thank you for playing the game and a way for people to continue to customize how they want to express themselves.”

The Aging Anti-Toxicity Machine

While most of our conversation has focused on larger content update schedules and Blizzard’s plans for the future, I also chatted with Hazzikostas briefly about another ongoing World of Warcraft problem: toxicity. Like all online games, WoW has grappled with toxicity since it first came out. But as newer games release with more modern moderation and reporting tools, WoW’s also begun to show its age, and in the recent expansion especially I’ve noticed the community growing more and more frustrated with rude, cruel, or outright hateful player behavior in dungeons, raids, and other types of group content.

Hazzikostas knows this is a problem, noting that it’s not just an issue at high-level endgame content. It’s also rampant in the leveling experience where new players just trying to learn how to play end up on the receiving end of toxic behavior from experienced players. He says WoW is in frequent communication with the Overwatch team to discuss anti-toxicity measures, better ways to process reports, and how best to weed out toxic players. But it’s an ongoing process.

Someone who’s just being incredibly hostile to you as an individual…That’s something that was a bit of a blind spot for us.

“I think back in the day a lot of WoW’s reporting was really more designed around spam and offensive things and big public channels and all right, we have systems in place to handle this,” he says. “It was less targeted at someone who’s just being incredibly hostile to you as an individual in party chat or via a single tell, without tons of people available to report. That’s something that was a bit of a blind spot for us, and I think we’ve made steps towards improving it, but we have a lot more work to do there.”

One way he says WoW is trying to tackle this problem is by leveling the playing field between new players, returning players, and veterans as much as possible. For instance, this is part of why Blizzard introduced “seasons” to Mythic dungeons, effectively putting a different set of dungeons in the spotlight each season for WoW’s most challenging dungeon content. A player joining in halfway through Shadowlands might get yelled at by players who had been running Sanguine Depths for ten months straight and expected those joining their group to know everything. That problem is reduced when the dungeon available change semi-frequently, forcing everyone to start fresh. And as part of a similar philosophy, he says WoW is working on more tools to improve matchmaking, so that players can group with other players who have similar experience levels and expectations.

“Now, of course, within all of that outright hostility, insulting, language that is alienating, none of that is ever welcome,” he adds. “And that’s what we need to compliment our social design efforts with. So multi-pronged battle, one that we value fighting very highly.”

Another system that plays into this is the loot system, which Blizzard changed to a “Group Loot” system in Dragonflight where every player involved in a raid or dungeon fight can roll “Greed,” “Need,” or “Pass” on a piece of loot that drops. There are certain safeguards in place to stop players from rolling “Need” on pieces they already have, and a new function in the latest patch adds “Transmog” to the rolls so players who want a piece just to look cool have their own option. Largely, the community has received this fairly well…in most types of content. Some believe that LFR, an easier raid difficulty that groups random players together for WoW’s largest-scale PvE battles, would benefit from a more individualized loot program to keep players from rolling on things they don’t really need, or bullying players into giving up items they do need.

Hazzikostas isn’t so sure, though.

“We’ve considered increasing the overall quantity of loot that drops in LFR to make up for it,” he says. “But ultimately it’s interesting…what it boils down to is the player’s psychology. We tuned the system around the assumption that everyone would ‘need’ everything that they see, and if someone passes, that’s just helping everybody else because this is the same thing that was effectively happening, just behind the scenes, in a personal loot world. But at the end of the day, it’s the same overall expected path to acquiring the loot. Sometimes we want to make sure that players aren’t feeling frustrated at their fellow players too much. And so that’s what our continued focus revolves around.”

Loot, like reporting systems, dungeons, content updates, and everything else, is a constantly-evolving beast in World of Warcraft, now on the second season of its ninth expansion. The future ahead is a busy one: a new raid opens next week, there are planned mid-sized patches in the summer and fall, and another major patch to follow as Dragonflight enters its second year. Finally, at the end of all that, we’ll know how well Blizzard’s crack at a faster update cadence and public content roadmapping works, both for the studio and the community.

In the meantime, we also spoke to Hazzikostas and Longdale about AI use at Blizzard, and Hazzikostas told us what expansion ChatGPT told him World of Warcraft should do next. World of Warcraft: Dragonflight patch 10.1, Embers of Neltharion, is out now.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.