This week Tom Chilton revealed that he is leaving the Blizzard World of Warcraft dev team. Apparently he is moving to another dev team within Blizzard and working on an unannounced project.
If you love MMORPGs and WoW his departure is cause for celebration. As Game Director for WoW since the poorly received Cataclysm expansion, he has presided over the decline of this once great MMORPG which once boasted 12.5 million world wide subscribers in it’s heyday after the release of their Wrath of the Lich King, to 5.5 million subscribers well after the release of Warlords of Dreanor. With such an abysmal track record that undeniably lost millions of dollars for Blizzard, he should have been fired or transferred long ago.
Many WoW fans will remember his flippant answers and smug smirks during his many BlizzCon appearances. After years of observation, I have come to believe that Tom never understood nor cared about the deeper aspects of fantasy virtual worlds. He had no real interest in the social aspects of MMOs nor did he care about role-playing despite being in charge of a role-playing virtual world. He never seemed to have a thoughtful vision for virtual worlds and instead seemed to care more about his personal love of PVP. The anti-social, dumbed down, conveyor belt, junk food MMO of today is partially due to the failed stewardship of Tom Chilton. You reap what you sow.
Tom Chilton will forever be known as the Blizzard dev that lead the B team on WoW. The infamous B team — a group of second stringers at Blizzard — managed to almost destroy the WoW franchise as the A team — all their best talent — left WoW to work on their top secret Titan MMO. Millions of dollars and many years later with no MMO like EverQuest to steal ideas from, the A team utterly failed to create a new MMO. And that is a story for another day.
It is interesting that current WoW Creative Director Alex “Furor” Afrasiabi was bypassed for this role of Creative Director. We can only speculate as to why. It may be due to the fact he was working with the A team on Titan and lost his connection to WoW and lost some momentum climbing the corporate ladder in the process.
Replacing Chilton will be Ion Hazzikostas. Ion is a rising star at Blizzard. I have a lot of respect for this man. In a recent interview while discussing the Nostalrius issue, he actually admitted in great detail that WoW leveling experience is “pretty broken” — his exact words.
He could only know this by actually playing the MMO he is working on. I like this guy already. Sadly in the MMO industry most executives and too many devs do not even play their MMOs and nor do they play other MMOs. This is a dirty little secret that they don’t want you to know and probably explains why so many MMO studios are disconnected from their players.
Now that he is in charge of the franchise, what is not yet clear is Ion’s vision for WoW. What does he believe about MMORPGs? Where does he want to take the genre and WoW? Will he continue to exhibit the humility and honestly about the woeful state of WoW made abundantly clear by the Nostalrius legacy issue? Will he stand up for the players instead of taking sides with out of touch executives and the gaming media complex obsessed with social justice? Will he bring WoW back to its roots? Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
Now that Ion is essentially in charge of WoW, I have some faith that he can help to reverse some of the bad design decisions that Tom Chilton allowed to creep into WoW. I sincerely hope he will help put this venerable MMO back on the right course and help make the MMORPG genre great again.
-Wolfshead
LOL! Ion is the worst choice for Game Director of WoW! This guy does not understand class balance at all. This is evident in his last Q&A in which he basically said ” If we buff frost mages too much, the fire mages will, in turn, get angry at us”. Lots of classes in Legion at vastly overpowered or underpowered because of him and the class balance team. Peope literally gets denied from groups just because they are playing a vastly underpowered spec. I have no faith in his ability to fix this horrific class balance.
There’s an entire thread picking up momentum on the bnet forums placing votes of ‘no confidence’ in this turkey and his ‘team’.
Of course, Blizz thought they’d be smart and remove the original thread, but the OP opened another one. Let’s see them keep trying to remove it. Another one will always spring up in its place.
The player base has spoken and we do NOT pay Blizz to treat us like crap.
I share your sentiments on Tom Chilton. He always answered in that style, starting in his Ultima Online times already. He often made fun of the people asking and gave inane answer, so I really wondered why he still quite often was allowed to do Q&A stuff.
WoW PvP never went beyond Tarren Mill level participation and its quality and popularity never really started flying. The e-Sports attempt lately resulted in a cheap title bribe to make people watch the live stream of Arena teams running around pillars to break LoS.
I would like to pick up what Anonymous said about class balance, they are not really doing well there. Death Knight and Warlock were very much affected, the Frost DK went from zero to almost hero a few days ago, literally. While Warlocks, getting used heavily in Arena PvP only, have quite some issues. Had to delete a lot of text, no point to go into detail there.
And yes, Frost Mage has problems, too. No longer good in PvE and they neutered them as a spec for PvP. So, all in all I can very much agree to Anonymous statement above.
About Ion, would not call him the worst choice ever, but I am also concerned about him and the rest of the “B-Team”. They did something really good with the Broken Isles, world quests and the world itself, more beautiful than ever, that really works out nicely.
The problem with the B-Team is, their attitude even towards constructive criticism, see class balance, is that of Elitist Jerks. That’s the origin of many team members, recruited from this forum/guild. Their attitude is still mostly jerkish and they also have inherited this bad and childish habit of not admitting even blatant and major mistakes and acting accordingly.
As stated above, quite a lot of “B-Team-filler” at Blizzard got recruited from the theorycrafters there. And while the terrain and looks got quite improved, the new Mythic+ dungeon stuff is still quite rough. Dungeons now take a lot longer, especially Karazhan, in TBC a raid, is a lot of walking. Back to the good old times? Not really working out IMO. But I think they are at least trying.
Right now they are actively discouraging using the LFG matchmaking tool by switching it off for Mythic and Mythic+ dungeons, and making many quests and rewards exclusive to the higher difficulties. Which got tuned down a lot on the other hand, Mythic is easier than in Warlords of Draenor.
I really wonder that Chilton doesn’t retire. He was with WoW from the beginning, but I fail to see his positive influence on the game. And unlike Kaplan and some others who really left behind their high school bravado and attitude, I didn’t get the impression from his appearances. Kalgan didn’t evolve.
So if he is working on something MMOish, I am not convinced of the success. As I don’t see how he positively affected Ultima Online or WoW. The last decade+ saw the decline of WoW and the MMO genre in general, lots of WoW challengers and alternatives failed, but in the end the market shrunk, MMO blogs and discussion died. Lots of disillusionment.
This is said, while Hearthstone might be super successful, it’s not really for me or what I expect from Blizzard. Same for Overwatch, which is not as popular among players as the press wants us to believe.
We must hope for young new talent to make something out of WoW and possibly new Blizzard Projects. Hope old Kalgan doesn’t get in their way.