Warcraft VP on Blizzard's mistakes over the past 20 years: "We should have listened to more"

World of Warcraft will celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2024. The head of the franchise said that there was one thing the company could do better: listen to their players.

Holly Longdale, who spent a lot of time on EverQuest 2 and EverQuest 2, joined the WoW team in 2020 to work on WoW Classic. She quickly became the leader for all WoW games and is now the VP and Executive Producer for the series. Three things have marked her tenure at the company: more in-game content; more transparency about what's coming and more adherence to deadlines.

I asked her to look back at the history of the game, both before and after joining the company, and what one thing she would change.

"I'll be talking about this through the lens of [experienced] a significant part of my journey as a former player and a recent journey of a very humble, lucky leader in this team," said she. "I think we should've listened more to the players."

Longdale joined WoW at a time when the balance between what players want and what will not break the game had swung far in the other direction. The company was shocked by the response to the Shadowlands expansion. Players' feedback, which demanded more flexibility with the game's covenant factions, and criticized storyline trends, felt largely ignored. Subscribers left, and the game's future was in grave danger.

The company as a group recommitted to taking feedback from players into account when it released the Dragonflight expansion. The result was dramatic.

Longdale said that it's easy to understand why developers of Warcraft and other titles have difficulty balancing player feedback. She said that 20 years ago game development was more of an art than a science.

She said, "I think that in the past, game design was not a real job." "It was a bunch incredibly passionate geeks who figured out how to turn tabletop gaming into 3D. So I think a lot was done based on their instincts.

She said that the way players can give feedback, and the platforms available to them, has also changed dramatically.

"We didn't have as much depth in social media." She said that we had forums and they were the focal point for all feedback. But it wasn't reflective. "It's a kind of evolution that has been two pieces, which is listening and observing from the other side."

She said that the strategy is to use social listening tools in order to understand what problems players are experiencing, and then use more sophisticated analytics within the game to determine what those problems are.

Longdale said, "So we are listening to the community and being able verify the discussions." "Now that we have the data and technology to map these two, it's possible to map them. Whoa, did we miss something? Then checking to confirm that, "Oh yeah, this is a problem."

She said that the team will look at the actual statistics with a critical eye if they hear complaints from the community.

"Like my class is a catastrophe." She said that you would get a lot of support and commentary for your ideas. Then you make a modification and it would break everything else. "Balance is an example."

She said it took too long to reply to Shadowlands players, adding that both the pandemic as well as working conditions played a role. "It took us longer to create the content than we had hoped. We were committed to getting it out there but it wasn't good enough. We looked at it very deeply, and we still do. It's a guide for where we are going."

The War Within, the 10th expansion of World of Warcraft, is available today for early access players and on Monday to all players at 3pm Pacific time.