Overwhelmingly, the discourse I see around WoW’s recent changes (name and art changes) is based on the belief that it’s the higher-ups attempting damage control, as opposed to the changes being the decision of the rank-and-file pushing for those changes in spite of the higher-ups decisions. I want the believe the latter, but I’ve also not seen any communication from the devs on this front
My observations of this event suggest this is primarily because the response from the community to these changes was rather vicious, especially to the public-facing members of the dev team. That response had a severe chilling effect that stopped most of the wow devs I know on twitter from talking about it publicly. Here is [Valentine Powell's initial tweet]:
If you look at the responses to this tweet, many of them are accusatory and vicious. Many of the non-dev responses to several of the following tweets were also fairly spicy. Powell later had this to say about the responses:
It was also mentioned here by a senior systems designer:
And another from another WoW game designer:
There was also some further discussion later on this as well:
And a senior encounter designer on wow had this conversation:
Basically, some of the devs tried to say that these changes came from them, got dogpiled and yelled at by angry gamers, and they all backed off because nobody likes getting attacked when they don’t have to be.
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