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![]() It does mean sometimes that people who datamine will see discarded experiments, failed ideas. “And that empowers the team to make as much content as we are able to and to just move as quickly as we do. “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. 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. ![]() 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. 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.īut 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. 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. 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. But I'm really excited about everything that's ahead for players.” A Very Loose Battle Pass And we do everything we can as leaders of the team to try to steer through those uncharted waters. The last three years have been a time of change and just navigating unprecedented circumstances together. Hazzikostas adds, “It's time of change across the industry, across the world, really. 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’ 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. “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.” “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. 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.” 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. 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. As a specific example, Hazzikostas offers the just-released new cross-faction guild play feature, which debuted in patch 10.1.
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