World of Warcraft celebrates its 20th year in 2024, and the head of the franchise says there is one big thing the company could have done better: listen to its players.
Holly Longdale joined the WoW team to work on WoW Classic in 2020 after a long stint on EverQuest and EverQuest 2. She swiftly became the lead for all WoW titles and now she’s the VP and executive producer for the series. Her era at the company has been marked by three things: a lot more in-game content, a lot more transparency on what’s coming when, and a lot more adherence to deadlines.
I asked her, looking back over the game’s history both before and after she joined the company, what the one thing she might change would be.
“I think I’ll talk about this with the lens of [experiencing] a large part of the journey as a player, and a recent journey as a very humble and lucky leader on this team,” she said. “I think we should have listened more to the player base.”
WoW executives have always had to navigate the delicate balance of what players ask for and what won’t break the game, but that balance had swung quite far towards ignoring that feedback by the time Longdale came on board. The response to the game’s Shadowlands expansion, where player feedback demanding more flexibility in the game’s locked-in covenant factions and decrying storyline trends felt largely ignored, was an eye-opener for the company. Subscribers fled, and the game was in serious jeopardy.
The company as a whole made a recommitment to taking player feedback into account in the subsequent Dragonflight expansion, and the turnaround has been dramatic.
Longdale said it’s not hard to understand why developers for Warcraft and other titles in the industry sometimes have trouble with how to balance player feedback. Particularly 20 years ago, game development was more art than science, she said.
“I think quite often in earlier times, game design wasn’t even a job really,” she said. “It was a bunch of super incredibly passionate geeks figuring out how to make tabletop gaming into 3D. So I think there was a lot of going on their best instincts.”
The ways players give feedback and the platforms they can use also changed dramatically, she said.
“We didn’t have the same depth of social media. We had forums, and that was sort of the center point of all feedback, which wasn’t really reflective,” she said. “So it’s kind of two pieces that have been a bit of an evolution, which is listening more and observing on the other side.”
The strategy now is to use those social listening tools to hear what issues players are raising, then to use more sophisticated in-game analytics to figure out what the scope of problems truly are, she said.
“So listening to the community, and being able to verify the discussions,” Longdale said. “Now we have the technology and the data to be able to map those two. Like, whoa, did we really miss something? And then checking to verify that, oh yeah, this is an issue.”
Class balance is one place where the team looks at actual stats with a critical eye when they see complaints in the community, she said.
“Like, oh, my class is a disaster. And you get a wealth of commentary and support for those ideas, and then you make a change and then it breaks everything else,” she said. “Balance is a big example.”
It took too long to respond to players in Shadowlands, she said, adding that the pandemic and working conditions were a factor. “It took longer to make the content than we would’ve liked. We remained committed to get it out there, but it wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t the right stuff. And we looked at that very deeply and we still do to use it as guidance for where we’re going.”
World of Warcraft’s 10th expansion, The War Within, launches today on early access and Monday for all players, both at 3 pm Pacific time.