Blizzard Is Quietly Rehiring Veteran WoW Developers

[00:02] find myself trapped inside some sort of bizarre dark void, we've got more as Blizzard fans, we've kind of learned something over the years. And that's the games really aren't made by abstract notions like companies or logos. They're

[00:16] They're made by the people who actually work on them. So, when one of the most history quietly walked back through the door, yeah, you you do kind of pay attention. Uh the guy's name is Johnny Cash. He left to work in Fortnite 4

[00:29] years ago. And this is the guy who led and built Legion's artifacts, who helped with the concept of class order halls, and who ran one of the most memorable patches in WoW's history, patch 7.3's assault on Argus. Now, he's back,

[00:44] it turns out, he's actually not alone we've been tracking of senior talent walking back into Blizzard. But there's another side to this story. It's all got to do with event timings, the PTR build,

[00:58] and basically Blizzard may be dangled doing potentially a 2-week delay in a patch. And now it seems that that is dead. But what is buried in the dates that we've seen hit the PTR is basically, well, realistic launch dates

[01:13] Warcraft. So, suffice it to say, we have a lot to talk about. Right. So, the intro may just sound like I'm kind of glazing Johnny Cash in particular, but really features in WoW literally do survive based on if someone

[01:27] at the team actually wants to go and do the feature. I mean, did you notice that Midnight was missing two major staples, which are it had no new pet battle system content. It was actually the first expansion in 12 years to go

[01:40] without that. And also, skywriting races are just gone. Now, these were notoriously like small-scale things that were made by a few people at most, they're clearly not important enough for

[01:53] Blizzard to maintain those features when someone leaves or team tasking constraints change. Basically, whenever those people leave, well, experience and knowledge just walks out the door. Now, Cash leaving, as an example, could be

[02:07] off pet battles because he was the one who made them back in Mists. So, perhaps with him back at Blizzard, well, they've now got a senior dev with 8 years of experience and the exact knowledge of

[02:20] why people liked past systems like, as an example, artifacts. Now, in his LinkedIn, he actually calls out how he used class fantasy to make the artifacts and their quest lines feel so special. Now, of course, I'm not saying that

[02:33] class halls back or anything like that, but I think what it does say is that Blizzard fighting for that kind of content in the future. That's pretty good. And I've actually got a little bit more precedent to go on here because

[02:47] Johnny Cash is not the only returning dev who would appear to have some impact. The next is Jeff Hamilton, a senior designer that left for Riot and was the guy most famous for BFA's corruptions and perhaps most infamous

[03:01] for a few Maw-related things, but there are echoes of his work everywhere across the game. I mean, for one example, 1207's Onyxian power-up feels like it's got some of his influence on it, and the ground mount-only world content in

[03:14] different flavor to say Midnight Bastion's. I wouldn't be surprised if he was perhaps consulted for some of his experience. You know, as the guy who designed the Maw, he probably knows better than anyone how to avoid the

[03:28] many, many problems that that thing has. There's another person then, Graham Berger, who you may have seen on camera. Preach once interviewed him for a video and came away basically calling him the future of WoW combat. Not long after

[03:43] that, he left the company, but we may best know him as the lead behind the Evoker, which did turn out to be fairly amazing class in how it plays. I mean, yes, it's a bit niche, but the people who love it really do love it. And as

[03:55] wrinkles, it does now fit into the game pretty well. Other than that, he's another dev who was forged in the fires of the Shadowlands. That's a chaotic time where the team learned loads of lessons. So, if anyone is to know what

[04:09] went wrong with the borrowed power designs of that expansion, it's probably the likes of him. Now, he's been back at Blizzard for almost 6 months, which means we should start to see a little bit of that influence and expertise back

[04:21] just some examples. The bigger story here is maybe why are Blizzard rehiring old devs who left? Well, let's be real. From just the ones that we know about, Blizzard have reclaimed years upon years

[04:33] of senior developer experience. These are designers who spent years in the trenches learning from mistakes and crucially learning how to not fill the game with bugs. They've went on to different places. They've probably

[04:45] gained new and different experience there. So, returning to Blizzard, contribute. And really, almost every successful games company knows that experience matters. That people matter because they ultimately are the people

[04:58] rehires help show that Blizzard kind of gets that, which should mean maybe some good when experience walks back in the door. Though, I would be remiss not to

[05:10] mention that the games job market is really, really messed up right now. Um I'm pretty sure a few of them have had a few like you know, layoffs, companies going under, that kind of thing. So, ultimately, this also kind of reflect

[05:25] the job market within games. So, with there being so many devs basically looking for work, I'd imagine that senior staff with experience on WoW are when it comes to Blizzard's hiring decisions. But of course, it doesn't

[05:39] matter how many developers you have if you have an 8-week patch cycle, that basically means the game is going to be full of bugs. And maybe that's about to change. In the latest public test realm,

[05:51] Blizzard pushed a change to the in-game calendar. And naturally, this is next patch day because the in-game calendar does end up mattering quite a bit. And in this case, it's even our next two patch days. So, let me explain.

[06:05] Turbulent Timeways was originally slated to start the 16th of June and end on the 25th of August. That would be 10 weeks long, of course, to cover all 10 expansions of Timewalking, which does make sense. But what doesn't really make

[06:18] sense is randomly cutting the thing down to only six weeks. Why would Blizzard remove an entire month from this event? Well, I can only think of one good way for patches. You see, events like this almost always end right as a new

[06:35] patch launches. Now, if you read it that way, seeing these timings is a soft announcement. Essentially, the patch 12.1 lands on August 11th, which would be 16 weeks after the patch we're on right now launched, which of course is

[06:48] 12.0.5. Don't forget that we've also got 12.0.7 coming in before that. Now, if two patches is 16 weeks, then we're probably getting our Showdowns, Heroic World Tour, and the U 1 boss raid on June 16th, which of course was the

[07:03] original planned date for the Turbulent Timeways event. And believe it or not, that's eight weeks after 12.0.5. Blizzard aren't budging even though this plan has given us some of the worst patch launches in

[07:16] the game's 20-year history, which really does blow because the patches themselves That said, I'm not really surprised about this. Blizzard's leadership cares about the schedule more than our immediate experience. So much so that

[07:29] Paul Kubit, an associate game director, flat-out dodged the question whenever When someone clearly near the top of the food chain can't even hold a conversation about it, I think it is kind of time to be worried. I think one

[07:41] of the reasons why is probably they're managing their own production schedule internally. You know, if they bump a few things, it basically could cause a little bit of a well, a big car pileup, but game developers in production.

[07:55] Now, maybe the conversations we want to see externally are still happening internally. Now, I say that because the Turbulent Timeways was originally slated to end on the 25th of August. Now, if that was the planned date, then it would

[08:08] have left two extra weeks in the pipeline for 12.1, which isn't a lot, pipeline for 12.1, which isn't a lot, but hey, two weeks on say 12.0.5 sure would have helped it get over the finish line in a less chaotic state. And now,

[08:20] of course, Blizzard ultimately moved it back. We're not sure what they'll commit to, but maybe they've had a special reason this time. And that reason could be BlizzCon because as soon as the Timeways event went up, people started

[08:33] to worry about overlaps happening. Basically, if the patch was August 25th, then the early season would run right into BlizzCon, and that would cause some clash pretty hard with Mythic raiders, and of course, well, the WoW devs who

[08:47] First and also make sure the damn thing doesn't break could be a little bit busy think we can all agree there would be a problem of split focus just because BlizzCon is so damn important to this company as it should be. It really is

[09:01] important. So then, it looks like Blizzard may have been factoring in a delay based on some of that PTR calendar funniness. Maybe there was going to be an extra two weeks in the pipeline for 12.1. Perhaps BlizzCon got in the way,

[09:14] exactly know. We're kind of reading tea leaves here. But my takeaway is probably that this is bad news for the next little while and potentially good news in the long run because hey, maybe all those returning senior staff will help

[09:29] get some of these things right cuz you see that institutional knowledge? That's the type of thing that can prevent bugs in a really powerful way. I'll give you a really good example, right? So, the problem that happened with the bad luck

[09:43] protection, sorry, the duplicate protection failing with recent bonus rolls was basically just because of server config differences between their own internal test environment and public servers. Now, I really am shocked that

[09:56] documented, but nobody had time to look at it. Whatever. But that's the sort of thing where people who have loads of experience on this game will have an intuition for problems like that. Obviously, if those people are away at

[10:10] another company, then yes, while the company may technically retain some of some documentation for say a known issue, well, it only matters if someone reads the damn thing. It only matters if there's a process that's realistic that

[10:25] companies lean in that sort of thing that can end up leading to a hell of a lot of bloat. Where ultimately, if you've got some turbo experience that with finely honed intuitions about the product, about the code base, all that

[10:39] well, then there's just loads of problems you'll never run into because an intuition'll pop into their head. They'll get a spidey sense for bugs. And well, that's just one of those soft factors that you can't really Well, you

[10:53] can't really plan to get it back. At best, you need to plan to not lose it in lesson they've learned. But of course, we can't always be playing defense. We can't be developing from a position of fear of the player base. As a ex-WoW

[11:06] designer from way back in the day, Kevin Jordan would always say, "Fear knows no love. Developing out of fear is maybe not uh the best thing." And a part of that future is heroic war tier. There could be issues with how it

[11:20] gets into the game. But I will tell you what, it is so so goddamn interesting. testing, and you can learn all about it in this video next.