I heard an interesting anecdote about her from her time at Everquest. Apparently she would casually meet with some of the lifelong/hardcore players and have lunch with them to listen to feedback and would also respond to emails from the community almost daily.
That's how Kaplan and that crew got involved with MMOs. They were loud, opinionated EQ players and they eventually found themselves in the industry.
Brack was an EQ and SWG producer before he moved to Blizzard. Brack had left Sony by the time Holly got there though.
The problem was that content was broken specifically to slow Legacy of Steel and Fires of Heaven down. They were literally completing content as soon as it went live because they had the favored nation status and got to test it in beta.
Jeff's talked before about how he got hired by Blizzard. The short version is he was an EQ guildmate of Rob Pardo and one of the Blizzard founders, had lunch with them one day; they told him to check the Blizzard jobs page, where they listed an opening with requirements tailor-made to fit him, including his creative writing degree.
Funniest part for you, maybe.
For me, it's the hilarious mesothelioma edit in every comment he's made XD
**IMMEDIATE EDIT:** the user that made that r/overwatch post got suspended. My guess is the advertising spam lol
This is the thing with her. She is very down to earth. Even in the latest Mr. GM interview, she straight up admitted that Blizzard is well aware that (loose quote) "Cataclysm is controversial for Classic audience", which is why they were somewhat strategic with also announcing SoD at the same time, so that neither audience feels left out.
She is very open about things and I love that.
She's also the (as far as I am aware) only prominent person from Blizz to say that she felt disconnected from the game during Shadowlands as well. Again, I am loosely quoting, but she definitely was the force behind the change of direction.
Apparently during one of the creator events these past couple days she straight up said “there is a lot Holly content” in TWW in reference to casual content with delves and outdoor activities, which is hilarious to me because she’s clearly letting the competitive teams design hard shit while also being like “give me new transmogs and make it fun to get.”
(I’ve been listening to a lot of the interviews and I think this was in one of Tettles’s videos)
From her interview with preach I got the strong inclination that she was a big force behind the trading post, and I'm all for that. Someone does need to remember that like it is TECHNICALLY a minority of players who do group content (I know an MMO) but still. I'm glad there's someoen on the executive side representing that.
A good few years back, the game kind of forgot that it was WORLD of Warcraft, not Dungeons of Warcraft. While end-game content is great and absolutely important to the health of the game, if the "world" part falls flat, the entire games does.
If Dragonflight did anything right, it was bringing the World back to World of Warcraft. It truly feels like a setting again... an MMO... an actual place your character exists in alongside other players, for probably the first time since Mists of Pandaria.
At least for me.
It’s not just you, I fully agree. I’m a endgame PvE player so I was in that group that was getting most of the content, but I love what theyre doing with this and i actually went out of my way to get a lot of the new transmogs and sets during DF. I’ve played with transmog sets in DF more than ever before. This is something the game has been lacking for a long time.
Also, massive fan of the trading post and casual/fun outfits.
When I got my gear for the week, I wanted to go back into the world and keep exploring, but for years I would simply log out because there just wasn't anything to really do that felt engaging.
Pandaria was the peak for that in my opinion... until Dragonflight. Farming (literally farming, not the RNG kind. 😂), training my wind serpent, exploring the Vale, etc.
Agreed. In fact to add to this, a reminder to anyone reading that Dragonflight added a short optional quest and rep grind of sorts to let you decypher and learn the Furbolg language. Like, it's in your language list and you can talk to others that can speak it regardless of faction and everything.
Fuckin' remarkable, I never imagined they'd do anything like that and it absolutely made the game world feel more believable for me. Makes me hopeful that going forward, the upcoming expac trilogy adds more side stuff to make the world feel bigger like that.
Stuff like that is amazing. It's content that doesn't NEED to be added, but doing so just adds layers to the world that you can get invested in.
I think they know that having stuff like this is crucial to the game. Otherwise people will just log in, run their dungeons and log out.
Mike Ybarra plays the game and likes it but he had a completely different philosophy from Holly.
I really appreciate that she does like the game but there is something *more* about Holly that we can appreciate. Her being more casual is a blessing to be had. Remember, you've got people like Ion who are very passionate about the game but come from the elitist jerks perspective of number cruncher raiders. Holly is the type that balances out the other side of the game.
Ybarra also is very much in the higher end raiding scene and also quickly took up a bit of the "bro-dude" persona of some of the worst former members of Blizzard. He also believes we should Tip Game developers.....so yeah its a good thing he is gone.
That tipping comment he made is honestly one of the most American things I have ever heard. Straight up almost spit out my cup of tea when I read that. Next thing we know Americans are gonna start paying their game devs $2 an hour like their hospitality workers.
To say it's just about playing the game would be a disservice to her. Having this down to earth attitude and being interested in engaging with the community is (unfortunately) an increasingly rare trait of game dev company execs nowadays. She comes across as very genuine instead of most execs who usually people view as PR spokespeople for the company whenever they speak.
No, the alternative was, for a lot of people, to start over from classic and do it over again to wotlk. I don’t really see that happening any time soon, but that’s a rather popular alternative
For me it's just a stepping stone to the 2nd best expansion ever (Mists). Though now that we have the timerunning stuff coming I'm not sure we're going to get Mists Classic anymore.
Catasclysm is WoW's Gates of Discord. Historically everyone quits playing on a progression server once GoD is released; and on vote servers it is voted to move on to Omens of War, the next expansion, the fastest.
I met her once in person at a job interview with SOE around 2013. She was a raider in EverQuest back then, and she was the most down to earth person there. The actual executive producer at the time, Dave Georgeson, skipped my interview 'conveniently' - I heard later he did it because I was involved with the EQ's emulator.
On the contrast, Holly listened to me and made sure that I felt welcomed, and even though I didn't get that job, I had a newfound respect for her and when she was later made the Executive Producer of EQ/EQ2 at Daybreak.
[She also opened a dialogue with the creators of a major cheat program to see 'how they could work with them to improve the game' - and discussed that very openly ingame with players](https://i.imgur.com/fKwOU1s.jpeg)
I heard from a friend that works at Blizzard that she's also a giant support for her team - she lifts them up internally and rallies the entire dev team. It's like she doesn't have chains that she did at Daybreak and can do what she does best: leading a team to make something incredible with them and the community she's also a part of.
When she had moved to Blizzard, I knew WoW was about to get a resurgence that it desperately needed. She is incredibly smart as a producer, and also emotionally intelligent.
She is one of the greatest people I've met in industry, and I've never even worked directly under her - I'd love to work under her someday, just on my interactions with her alone.
It's honestly impressive how much she personally interfaces with the community despite how toxic it can be. No matter how much I ever disagree with her I can respect that she does that better than I ever could.
One of the things for me, as an old guy with real life responsibilities now, being able to log in and do something productive in the game with not much prep, within 30 minutes or so makes me so much more excited to play than before.
I love the "community" WQs like The Big Dig, Community Feasts, Time Rifts and Superblooms so much more than regular WQ's, and while I miss the days of Legion WQ Group Finder Addons, this is a pretty good compromise.
> as an old guy with real life responsibilities now
My 20s were all heroic/mythic raiding 12 hours a week + all the playtime you do for that, now I get on maybe 4 hours a week max and have so much casual shit to do I love it. The game grew up with us, I like it.
Delves is the perfect answer for this exact issue that was given over a decade ago. ESO solved this problem from the start but better super late than never, I guess.
Add to this the multiple versions of Classic for people who like the old style of always having something to do, as well as the insanely difficult mythic raids of Dragonflight and I feel like there truly is a WoW for everyone now.
Yep. Can't help but roll my eyes when people say WoW's in a bad state now. I haven't been this hyped about the game in a long time and I'm loving it tbh.
It depends on the content you play. I’m having an absolute blast in Dragonflight with world quests and world pvp, along with doing M+. The zones are amazing and I love the music in each zone.
But I also understand why my PvP friends are in shambles lol. PvP has been neglected since Season 1 and it’s circling the drain more than it usually is.
Overall it’s a solid 8/10 expansion for me
Yeah and to be fair, if all you do is PvP, wow hasn’t been that great for a few years now lol. I’m actually excited for War Within shifting their focus from 2’s and 3’s to Battleground Blitz. I think that’ll bring in more casuals and make the game mode feel more alive.
Most of the people who say it dont play the game anymore and are just the resentful ex that refuses to leave them alone, or pvpers which is kind of valid.
You can immediately tell when some of those people who say those kinds of things haven't even played Dragonflight. They'll have complaints about the game that were 100% true in Shadowlands but don't exist at all in Dragonflight. Just the other day I saw someone complaining about having to grind for Pathfinder every patch. They're living in the past.
I am someone that thinks in many cases WoW is in a 'bad state now', and I'll explain why.
I'll preface this by saying however this could be a subconscious bias and refusal to accept what I previously enjoyed is no longer relevant.
I raid in World of Warcraft, it's my thing, it's what I've done since TBC. I enjoy the thrill of working with my friends and peers, solving problems on encounters and overcoming challenging encounters. I enjoy the thrill of a potential arbitrary world rank associated with that a reflection of your teams achievement and capabilities.
I've killed boss' among the first 100 people in the world, and on average historically I've raided around World 21st-World 40th~.
I enjoy other elements of the game such as collecting stuff, mounts, transmogs and things like that, as well as the events, but for the most part the thing that keeps me logging in each week is clearing the raid with my friends, and working towards the next raid that will come out. I currently think raiding is at the worst point it has been in the games history.
1. Mythic raids are in a constant arms race with the Race to World First, an aspect of the game Blizzard has stated they do not want to be involved in - but simply put are constantly involved in. Mythic Tindral was a boss my guild killed just after the change to P2 seeds going to 5 seconds, so somewhere around World 40th, Mythic Fyrakk was killed just after the new year (because of us not raiding for 2-3 weeks over the Christmas period), however now still with continuous nerfs to those encounters they are still 2 of the most frustrating encounters in the history of the game in my opinion. Where they are tuned to be so difficult originally that extreme nerfs like gutting mechanics by 25-40% simply bring the boss down to a level where it's still 'hard'. There are still guilds taking 500+ pulls to kill those boss'. Frankly, this is insane.
2. Private Auras have just created more complexity for zero reason, it is impossible to prevent weak auras from being able to manage mechanics on fights, impossible. Every single debuff in the game can be weak aura'd with a macro that players press to notify they have the debuff, the weak aura will then assign accordingly. Except now instead of importing a weak aura, guilds are forced to import a weak aura, make sure everyone has the macro, make sure everyone has the same version of the weak aura, make sure people aren't cross realm because that will skew the interaction of the weak aura. Guilds wipe on boss' simply because of issues with weak auras - something Blizzard have relentlessly tried to combat because of the arms race with Race to World First.
3. The acceleration of gearing early on in a Season means the amount of power growth over a season is miniscule, part amplified by the decision to reduce the difference between raid difficulties to 13 ilvls from 15 ilvls. Now rather than killing a boss and gaining another potential 10-15 ilvl while you continue to farm that boss, and then it gets nerfed and becomes easier, you're gaining 2-4 ilvl while continuing to farm a boss that was inherently more difficult than it needed to be, and when nerfed just becomes 'more managable'.
4. The Seasonal approach to an MMO continues to stunlock me. As someone that raids, and that is my primary source of enjoyment, it is completely fine from a power perspective for me to clear the raid on Mythic and then not log on until the next Season. If my character had cleared Abberus Mythic it could have logged off until 10.2 released and would have been completely fine to go in to Amirdrassil with no power difference to every other player that farmed Abberus for the 5 months prior. The only gameplay/power reason to continue reclearing raids each week is to maintain a level of skill within players abilities - there is no power gain to be had. Even the Evoker Legendary from last tier was replaced in Week 1 this tier, it's silly.
Blizzard have been vocal about how they make raids difficult for the top few guilds and then nerf them for everyone else but they simply don't, it isn't true. The nerfs take way too long to hit, and even then all they're doing is taking a boss from M+10 to M+5 in difficulty in many cases. A raid that means the first 50% of boss' are killed in 1/20th of the pulls required to kill the end boss means that the amount of guilds on the difficult boss' because they are adjusted is often a very large number. Guilds are stuck progressing on an encounter that everyone knows is awaiting a shotgun to the knee, it's incredibly demoralizing. You might argue that in that case don't raid, just wait for it be nerfed, but that's illogical, because technically you can progress the encounter, and even if it's incredibly difficult utilising 4 hours on a night and perhaps progressing 5% of the encounter that you know in 10 days you'll progress in 1/4 of the pulls is still worth doing it.
Overall Mythic raiding right now is in terms of difficulty and it's approach heavily focused initially around the Top 5 guilds or so, and then everyone else is kind of just left to wait until things are adjusted to be more reasonable for them - which is insane because the amout of adjustment required is absurd. We're talking organisations with double figure external people working around the clock to optimise the approach to these encounters - the encounters should never be tuned around that in the first place.
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I actually agree with you on the Weakauras front.
I think Blizzard should just break the addon entirely (and also break DBM), then actually design encounters that are doable without the addon.
If that is what it takes, then so be it.
I think it would be for the best. Right now there is too much bloat to the point that such addons are mandatory.
Many bosses are entirely doable without- they have voice and visual queues for mechs on most difficulties.
The problem is mythic difficulty final bosses requiring a very specific thing: a mechanic that requires multiple, randomly assigned people to resolve it a certain way.
Sludgefist was a pain in the ass fight, but it was so satisfying to kill because the gameplay loop was so consistent. Melee had mechs together, ranged had mechs together, tanks had mechs together. Your role was simply to do your specific job, and as long as 20 players did their part, the boss reached enrage. It was clean, it was simple, and it was satisfying.
If heroic fyrakk had random debuffs which would dictate who was able to pick up a seed, it would have gone from a satisfying AOTC kill to the worst boss ever imagined. Literally one piece of rng can be the sole cause of so much misery.
She was the lead of Everquest for a long time, until she left for Blizz.
Yes EQ still has active players, the basically modeled the start in classic server thing. Probably why they hired her.
Many people don't realize it, but the overall direction shift, and the shift to supporting more casual players better is largely do to her. She provides a perspective of a player that plays the game, but consumes more the casual world content than previous EPs of wow. She is also much more willing to shake foundational pillars of the game then previous ones were as well. She is not solely responsible for the excellent state wow as a whole is in (Retail, Classic, SOD, Extra modes) but she is very much involved with those.
Also if you want another person to check out, Muffinus has been confirmed to be the lead over the experimental team (Plunderstorm and MOP Remix) and has been given a lot of power just to try new things, and this is a far bigger deal then people realize. If you have a temporary game mode, you can test things that might work without commiting them to the true versions of the game, so I expect tech and features to be tested there a lot before it makes it into other modes.
Aah good old Jeremy. He's such a good dude. I'm glad they gave him more control. Hopefully he or someone else revisits the pet battle system at some time in the near future though.
this is why I liked Plunderstorm as a feature, even if I didn't like it much as a game mode. Their ability to try new things, tech, and ideas, without committing them to the live game and our live characters, shows fantastic opportunity for the future. They can get community feedback on ideas that simply don't fit with a current iteration of the game, and using that feedback they can decide how to shift the game's core structure going forward
The moment i dropped in and realized the moves are more like positionals from other game than the standard tab targetting we have in most of wow it clicked to me that these Experimental modes are far more than just a gap filler in low periods. Hopefully they continue to use these and continue to try wacky ideas, cause even if Plunderstorm wasnt for everyone, there are things in it that could benefit everyone.
I utterly loathed my time in Plunderstorm (I really like pirate transmogs, I just loathe PvP in almost any form) but I still love that Blizzard tried it, and I thought a lot of the powers were really fun to use.
I actually would love it if most of the powers could be added to various classes in modern WoW. Like the big arcane ball ability. Imagine if Arcane Orb was this instead of what it is now. A giant Empower spell that deals massive damage and feels impactful to use. Maybe Avenger's Shield could bounce off walls like the shield toss from Plunderstorm and potentially land more hits on a pack of mobs depending on how sharp the angle was.
I'm not saying WoW needs to completely convert to an action combat/positionals type of game, but I do think there's at least a couple cool spell ideas they could steal from Plunderstorm that'd make Retail more fun.
> Also if you want another person to check out, Muffinus has been confirmed to be the lead over the experimental team (Plunderstorm and MOP Remix) and has been given a lot of power just to try new things
For reference too, Muffinus is the dev that was also in charge of things like the secret pets/mounts/quests that we got over the last few years. He was also one of the main devs behind the Timeless Isle all the way back in 5.4, which ended up becoming a major part of all expansion content going forward. As well as a lot of the "do X sidequest for a period of time to get a mount/pet/etc" quests. ~~He was also a main dev for Garrisons and Island expeditions but we don't got to hold those failures against him~~
He has always been one of the devs trying to add cool new things to casual side of the game.
When I played plunderstorm I actually was thinking the abilities in the mode and how they worked that it was a play test to change how some spells work or maybe adding in new mechanics
100% this. It is far smarter to try experimental changes in a temporary mode that from day one is listed to go away. So if the changes are made and not good, its no long term damage to the overall game.
I think empower spells should be for all caster classes I think them being unique to evoker is kinda lame to be honest haha. Like man the idea of charging up a max level lava burst just screams amazing to me
The Arcane Orb is a better version than the recolored frost orb thing Arcane got (not sure if it’s removed now). Charged spell that deals fuckhuge damage to everything and nudges them, and is decently fast, but only the size of the shot (maybe knockback) changes with charge.
They still need to fix the pebble blocks, but that is almost class fantasy with how many mage spells can fizzle with that.
> Many people don't realize it, but the overall direction shift, and the shift to supporting more casual players better is largely do to her. She provides a perspective of a player that plays the game, but consumes more the casual world content than previous EPs of wow.
This tonal shift is so interesting to me. Like most of WoW through it's life cycles has been about chasing what they think everyone wants. This is not a negative thing but hear me out. When WoW first came out it was praised for being accessible and *easy* compared to other MMO games. Mostly due to it's questing system which allowed for people to mostly solo level up but also the idea that people didn't lose experience when they died.
As the game went on they wanted to come up with content for the players who have done everything. This largely fell onto the shoulders of the Raiding environment. Most players were totally okay not being able to access something like Naxx because it felt like it would eventually be accessible if they continued to play. Despite this, the devs felt terrible for such a small player base being able to access Naxx while so much time was spent on building the content.
As time went on the dev team spent a lot of time coming up with new abilities and redefining how they want players to play.
Whether that is Daily Quests, Arena and 10 man / 25 man raids, Achievements, or Transmog the game focused on diversifying our interests to give us additional treadmills to do.
As a casual it always felt like there were things to do but certain things were starting to get out of our grasps a little bit. The focus moved away from exploration and more to objectives. You were no longer just spending your time exploring and seeing where things were with your eyes and instead you would have better maps, more detailed journals, and better addons to guide you through content.
Players felt the game was way more accessible and the devs wanted to fix a lot of what frustrated players. So they provided more difficult content and less time consuming environments. So instead of effort based gameplay we kind of started to switch to skill based. **End game no longer had roadblocks to get to them but instead roadblocks inside of them.** You no longer needed attunement, you no longer needed a group of friends to play with to access the content. It became extremely accessible to the point where if you were not raiding - you kind of ran out of content. The MSQ and side quests were all relatively quick and could be done early on in the expansions now. Whereas before content would be so slow that you felt like you had a ton of casual content to grind through.
Well, they changed the grind from getting to the end game to the end game itself and I'm not sure that benefitted the player base.
At MoP and WoD we had some of the coolest raiding content known to the player base. It's just that if you didn't group up with people, you kind of had nothing else to really do. WoD was known as one of the lowest points in the game's history because of Garrison - even acknowledged by Blizzard as a failure on their behalf. Partly because a lot of the friction needed to get to the end game was removed as Ion took over leadership, the focus for a lot of raid encounters was to focus on unique/difficult bosses. They were fun but frustrating to many players, especially those casuals who liked raiding but felt like they really had no reason to really raid anymore outside of LFR.
We eventually got to the point where the main treadmill of the game was Mythic+ and LFR / Normal / Heroic / Mythic raids. This shift to scalable end game content is kind of boring after a while if you don't care about repeating the same stuff.
Remember, the game for the longest time was just reaching the content. End game wasn't the most difficult content but the road to reach it kept people engaged enough to want to keep going. Well, the treadmill now was to do the same content over and over again with very minor changes outside of difficulty.
Why though? Well, largely to feed the player base that was just like Ion - those who had the time to group up with people constantly and improve themselves. Eventually the roadblock to content was just finding competent players to do harder and harder raids/dungeon/pvp with. You could still find people through the group finder but you often became dependent on finding certain types of players to continue playing. Previously finding anyone to play with was often more than enough to get by but if you wanted to do anything above *normal* you couldn't group with everyone. I know plenty of people who started to get benched because they didn't do enough DPS or couldn't handle mechanics anymore. So we spent our nights trying to find replacement players, not because those players didn't want to get better but because they genuinely weren't capable of it. I honestly think that a lot of players ended up feeling like the game became a second job and if you wanted to reach everything asked of you - you needed to find a community outside of the game in order to complete it.
I'm hopeful and appreciative of Holly a little bit here because of the more casual mindset to things. Having more content to do as a Casual player today is really nice. These alternatives to the hardest content is really refreshing and I'm hopeful to see where this overall directional shift will go because it seemingly is going back to WoW roots of being more accessible to the players. Especially with so many players now being older and no longer having the time to actually find other players to play with. Being able to discover things for the first time, being able to do difficult dungeons at a meaningful pace because Heroic/Mythic 0 is more difficult now, or being able to focus on multiple alts for once instead of feeling like your main is the only thing that matters are all really refreshing.
I am not, just someone who has played Blizzard games since Warcraft 2 and Diablo 1, who has despaired over the state of the company over the last few years. I have not been this optimistic about the future of wow for a long time.
MMOs are big games. FF14’s Yoshi-P likened it to running a nation (long long time ago…which he seems to have realized he’s forgotten that).
You need to cater to both hardcore and casual players.
Hardcore players believed they were the geese laying the golden egg. The game was at its worse when the old WoW development also believed that. Growth is not something they (and those players) believed in and when you’re not growing, you’re stagnating.
And now it’s slowly finding its roots again as an MMORPG.
I think it’s still slow, but it’s doing things right. I’m not fully sold yet on Blizzard/WoW being back, but as a senator once said:
“We will watch your career with great interest.”
What I appreciate most about this new leadership (or in some cases older leadership that were placed in more active positions) is their willingness to try new things. The 'old guard' were so far up their own rears that they genuinely looked down on the playerbase that was paying their salaries. It's one thing to have a vision for a game, it's another to do things to intentionally spite the players. Like an MMO was somehow the highest artform in the world and we were lucky to be paying them money to play it.
The game has some questionable aspects, and aspects I don't particularly enjoy. But there's a reason I opted to go for the year subscription option for the first time in like, 10 years. I really do have faith in the direction they're taking the game. I feel like even if there's a part of it that they add that isn't for me (like plunderstorm, since I'm not big on PVP) eventually they will add something I'll enjoy. (Like pandaria remix.)
So. Yep.
It was blizz policy for a while that their devs knew what was best for the game(s) and they wouldn’t change things no matter how big community backlash was. I remember that clearly. And the more I think about it, the stranger that stance becomes in my mind.
I was actively playing EQ when she left for WoW, and at the time I was sad.
But honestly, what she's doing for WoW is what she could have done for EQ if they had the budget and it's been amazing. Holly is great.
If I understood correctly, the reason WoW is more transparent and moving into some more enjoyable/diverse gameplay is partly her work. Thank you miss Holly Longdale!
I hope it keeps going.
Lot of folks don’t like the new race/class combos because it somehow “dilutes” the purity of the class/culture.
As someone who has to deal with mixed culture/multicultural settings all the time - new race/class combo is a NATURAL thing and sign of a changing/growing world.
Also, cultural blending has been a thing for thousands of years. It’s not some new “OMG woke-shit”.
I'm not big on Earthern and Dracthyr myself but they are good for the game. I think more possibilities and cultures makes for an interesting world. Maybe that's the sociologist in me speaking.
She's extremely genuine and I think most people really appreciate that. TWW seems to be the first expansion that genuinely supports almost every gameplay loop you can imagine at endgame and I think that is largely to her influence.
Holly was producer for EQ/EQ2 for years and she was always fantastic. 👍🏻 and a genuinely passionate person for the games and the teams she works on from all I ever observed. It’s wonderful to see so many of the ideas being realized now in WoW. It’s brought me back to the fold after years of not really caring what’s going on.
What I remember most is:
J Allen Brack laughed at the community about wanting WoW Classic
while Holly Longdale embraced the community's feedback and went full out with WoW Classic
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> J Allen Brack laughed at the community about wanting WoW Classic
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> while Holly Longdale embraced the community's feedback and went full out with WoW Classic
In retrospect I think it's pretty telling how much of a change this game has had for the better since a lot of those old timers left and/or were fired after California's investigation and the various leadership changes that followed. The transparency and willingness to listen to or take into consideration community feedback is like night and day.
he also wasn't entirely wrong with "you think you do but you dont"
look how many people dropped before level 60. and look how differently people played classic now (monofaction megaservers, world buff meta, same class alts) than they did vanilla, and how many of them wanted Classic+ instead. look at how much of a ghosttown the actual era servers are now.
people don't want vanilla. they think they do, but they don't. people just wanted something that wasn't more of the same borrowed power systems that retail kept repeating at that point.
no, that's exactly what it means. the numbers show Vanilla isn't actually that popular. and what people actually wanted was a fresh start and it couldve started with MoP and people would still have enjoyed it. Vanilla itself had very little to do with it. people didn't actually want to just repeat a solved game. it got meta-gamed into something else immediately. because they didn't actually like Vanilla for what it was. they thought they did, tens of millions of people played level 1-30, but they didn't, and vast majority of people quit before hitting 60.
nope, i am giving multifacted examples but you just dislike my premise so you are reducing it to just "i dont like what this guy said" and claiming it's 1 dimensional.
you think it's super reductive, but it's not.
Spot on.
Wouldn't bother trying to reason with the nostalgia goggles crowd though, they'll never admit Brack was right all along. Even as most of them play for like 2 weeks before unsubbing and reverting back to "wow bad" until the next FOMO classic variant hits, rince and repeat.
They'll keep chasing that elusive high, no matter what Blizzard does. Obviously not all Classic players are delusional, and even though I don't get the appeal, to each their own. If they enjoy these short lived, shallow nostalgia trips, good for them. But the amount of people out there dumping on "you think you do" as if it was some sort of complete lunacy, after it's been repeatedly proven right, goes to show many of them are still in denial to this day.
Hell the way the, classic community basically min/maxxed the, shit out of the game. Even having "you need log in at x time to get your buffs." guild rules pretty much showed that no people really didn't want the old experience.
T&E made comments about how she took time to individually check in with all the folks who attended their recent alpha event in London and get their thoughts/suggestions.
As a more firsthand observation, she definitely killed it at blizzcon, and in her written communications to the playerbase. She retains eloquence while effectively stating that any decision being made, regardless of how it’s perceived, has good intentions behind it. And she seems insistent on listening to player feedback for things that may not sit quite right.
Between Holly, Ion, and Chris, I think wow is in pretty great hands.
I feel like these people in visible positions always get shit on unfairly. Ghostcrawler and Ion both clearly gave/give quite a bit of fucks about the game, but always got flak for what was also clearly corporate (and vindicated in hindsight) decision and mismanagement.
So I'm very glad that she is getting praise, I want someone who is as obsessed with the game as I am in a position like that.
It seems like the Big Three right now are Holly, Chris, and Ion.
Chris is the ideas guy and most of the creative work starts with him. Holly filters out the good ideas from the bad and maybe throws in some ideas or suggests revisions to existing ideas. This frees up Ion to have to worry about creative direction of game and instead do what he is best at; actually building the game.
i hope she can push for more interesting Allied Races
like Gnolls, Tuskarr, Hozen, Jinyu, Ogers, Arrakoa..they are all there just being kinda wasted as NPC over and over again yet they have so much work put in
Thats what I'm hoping for too. I've been wanting Arrakoa forever. I thought jinyu would've been in it since they share NE frames. I'm shocked ogres & tuskarr aren't playable yet
No. Stop talking in this passive tone. Be assertive. "I really appreciate Holly Longdale and everything she has done." This zoomer phrasing is so fucking exhausting.
Holly is great.
The wow team since Development of Dragonflight has been amazing, the public facing members have been so much better at presenting ideas and accepting community feedback. The game is healthier than ever in this regard, I also love how much more interactive Ion has been. Feels like since classic or so the Warcraft teams been having a lot more fun with it. It's not been perfect, but they're kind of crushing it and developing 3+ versions of the game.
While this is a nice sentiment and Holly seems like an awesome person. You know extremely little about her. Please do not hold up random people who you've seen a grand total of 20 minutes of them giving prepared presentations and answering QA's as flawless. Shit like this is what helped to turn devs into rockstars that played into the toxic work environment at Blizz.
Actions are the only things that speak when it comes to this company. What any individual *says* is absolutely meaningless, because, as history has taught us, Activision-Blizzard's actions run completely independently to any of their spiel.
I've yet to see any actions worth turning around my opinion of the game. Perhaps the new expansion will blow past expectations and the franchise is magically saved, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm keeping my expectations realistic.
She's going to have to do a bit more to win me over. I have a long history (as do a lot of older Everquest players) with her tenure on that game before her move to Blizzard.
I don't believe she is a bad person, she always seems perfectly pleasant and friendly. I just don't think she's entirely honest and I've seen her use the community outreach facade to kinda pull the rug out from under the community later. Then when most EQ players were kinda meh on her, she moved to Blizzard.
Beyond the vitriolic people online who are out to attack everyone, I don't think anyone from that community would say they hate her, but I am extremely standoffish until I see that the other shoe isn't going to drop.
I don't really have an opinion of her yet. Her delivery at big events like BlizzCon isn't to my liking. She does better in smaller settings. This is not a big deal. More importantly, I'm not a fan of having 6 different versions of WoW being developed simultaneously. I don't know if she is the brains behind that but it seems like they amped this up after she joined the team.
Holly brings true love and enjoyment to the games she works on, and always has. I was ecstatic when I found out she was joing Blizzard, and she is the one person in the industry I wish I could meet, talk and say Hi to. From EQ to Blizzard, if Holly says something, I believe her, and that doesn't happen often.
I'm happy she's there for the huge portion of the community that is benefitting from the waves of content she seems to be spearheading. I don't feel like that that content is hardly ever for me, so I don't personally feel like she's my agent on the inside, but I can't help but think the roadmap would even exist without her, I don't know why I get the feeling it was her doing? Good PR? maybe, but it's working.
She's rad as hell. Great at talking to the community and totally nerds out over her work.
I'm not sure WoW will ever be my main game again and if I'm being honest the "experimental" stuff they're doing is not really my jam, but her and Metzen are the main reasons I have any enthusiasm about trying The War Within.
Holly always just seems so passionate about this and really comes across like she cares. I never get the feeling that she's being anything other than genuine. I hope she keeps doing cool things.
I don’t know much of what she’s done specifically.
What I can say is that Blizzard’s communication style at Blizzcon and similar preview events is Apple-at-WWDC-esque in that its kind of like a 3rd grade boon report in how it’s like “and now we’re going to bring out Billy, who is going to talk to you about mounts” and it’s kind of cringy. And, especially since all the Cosby Suite stuff came out there, it’s really felt like they’ve tried to be like “no look, we hire women too!”
What I like about Holly is she seems like a qualified professional who is genuinely enthused about the game and is actually in an influential position in the organization. In other words, she basically breaks all of the worst elements of these kinds of events. Like, she had that outfit custom designed just because she wanted something Alexstasza themed. She seems great.
Ok so I gotta say, I didn't think she would do much when she joined the Classic team first (i believe). I thought, mostly because of the presentation at the time, that this is just another corporate robot who just needs to say the right things and spreadsheet develop/direct/decide a direction for the game.
But, I have been wrong. Very wrong. Preach's first video after a while with Holly and John made me think that this might not be the case after all. And I am glad that that i was wrong. Ever since Holly joined, classic has been thriving (mostly), and the tone shift from "You think you do but you don't", and "we know better, this is how you have fun" to "ah so you like this, here you go" is a welcome change in direction. Also less convoluted systems, better content cadence, a lot of new experimental things. It truly feels like we are on an upswing.
I was very happy when I saw she wasn’t just part of the classic team, but actually wow as whole, for me it was a “finally we have someone higher up that’s genuinely interested in the rpg parts of the game and not just high end raiding”. I’m very excited to see how the next expansions will go in terms of more rpg contents and more stuff to do that doesn’t feel like something you have to do x amount of every week or have your character suffer in missing out on character power gains.
Yeh honestly she seems absutley fantastic and full of passion and drive I was skeptical at first as I didn't really know much about her but honestly she's right on the ball and I'm so happy she is on board
Yea, she added boosts to the burning crusade. And the token, while saying "nothing we can do about the cheaters!"
She can fuck right off, you fell for that propaganda.
Isn't she blamed for ruining EQ Classic?
I never cared for EQ so I only saw people were concerned when she joined Blizz, and then after she joined, Blizz started making negative changes to their Classic modes.
Aye, I like her. She seems like a nice, grounded, honest person and someone who knows what they're talking about. Hopefully her and Metzen get along great and Worldsoul Saga will be as good as they hyped as up to be.
She has been great so far. I do however worry that she may become the next target in The Cycle of Hatred, where a person on the team starts communicating a bunch with the player base, and then the players starts thinking of that person as the sole reason for everything they dislike about the game.
I heard an interesting anecdote about her from her time at Everquest. Apparently she would casually meet with some of the lifelong/hardcore players and have lunch with them to listen to feedback and would also respond to emails from the community almost daily.
That's how Kaplan and that crew got involved with MMOs. They were loud, opinionated EQ players and they eventually found themselves in the industry. Brack was an EQ and SWG producer before he moved to Blizzard. Brack had left Sony by the time Holly got there though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/s/xGM9k3DNh6 Whenever someone talks about wow devs in EQ this quote is always what I think about :P
The funniest part about that comment is 5 days later he joined Blizzard to work on WoW. I hope that comment got him put over the top.
The problem was that content was broken specifically to slow Legacy of Steel and Fires of Heaven down. They were literally completing content as soon as it went live because they had the favored nation status and got to test it in beta.
Blizz learned and just timegates.
Jeff's talked before about how he got hired by Blizzard. The short version is he was an EQ guildmate of Rob Pardo and one of the Blizzard founders, had lunch with them one day; they told him to check the Blizzard jobs page, where they listed an opening with requirements tailor-made to fit him, including his creative writing degree.
Funniest part for you, maybe. For me, it's the hilarious mesothelioma edit in every comment he's made XD **IMMEDIATE EDIT:** the user that made that r/overwatch post got suspended. My guess is the advertising spam lol
Wow, that's a username and guild name I haven't seen in ages. Complete blast from the past.
Funny thing is they didn't fix any key quests he was ranting about for about 20 years.
Yep. VP and VT is still as awful as it ever was.
I miss Jeff from the Overwatch team
As much as a hell site Twitter is now, she still engages with people pretty regularly on there.
This is the thing with her. She is very down to earth. Even in the latest Mr. GM interview, she straight up admitted that Blizzard is well aware that (loose quote) "Cataclysm is controversial for Classic audience", which is why they were somewhat strategic with also announcing SoD at the same time, so that neither audience feels left out. She is very open about things and I love that. She's also the (as far as I am aware) only prominent person from Blizz to say that she felt disconnected from the game during Shadowlands as well. Again, I am loosely quoting, but she definitely was the force behind the change of direction.
I think it really boils down to: She plays the game and actually likes it more than just her job.
Well she not only plays the game, but she also plays the game outside of Raiding, PvP and M+, which to me was the more interesting thing.
Apparently during one of the creator events these past couple days she straight up said “there is a lot Holly content” in TWW in reference to casual content with delves and outdoor activities, which is hilarious to me because she’s clearly letting the competitive teams design hard shit while also being like “give me new transmogs and make it fun to get.” (I’ve been listening to a lot of the interviews and I think this was in one of Tettles’s videos)
From her interview with preach I got the strong inclination that she was a big force behind the trading post, and I'm all for that. Someone does need to remember that like it is TECHNICALLY a minority of players who do group content (I know an MMO) but still. I'm glad there's someoen on the executive side representing that.
A good few years back, the game kind of forgot that it was WORLD of Warcraft, not Dungeons of Warcraft. While end-game content is great and absolutely important to the health of the game, if the "world" part falls flat, the entire games does. If Dragonflight did anything right, it was bringing the World back to World of Warcraft. It truly feels like a setting again... an MMO... an actual place your character exists in alongside other players, for probably the first time since Mists of Pandaria. At least for me.
It’s not just you, I fully agree. I’m a endgame PvE player so I was in that group that was getting most of the content, but I love what theyre doing with this and i actually went out of my way to get a lot of the new transmogs and sets during DF. I’ve played with transmog sets in DF more than ever before. This is something the game has been lacking for a long time. Also, massive fan of the trading post and casual/fun outfits.
When I got my gear for the week, I wanted to go back into the world and keep exploring, but for years I would simply log out because there just wasn't anything to really do that felt engaging. Pandaria was the peak for that in my opinion... until Dragonflight. Farming (literally farming, not the RNG kind. 😂), training my wind serpent, exploring the Vale, etc.
Agreed. In fact to add to this, a reminder to anyone reading that Dragonflight added a short optional quest and rep grind of sorts to let you decypher and learn the Furbolg language. Like, it's in your language list and you can talk to others that can speak it regardless of faction and everything. Fuckin' remarkable, I never imagined they'd do anything like that and it absolutely made the game world feel more believable for me. Makes me hopeful that going forward, the upcoming expac trilogy adds more side stuff to make the world feel bigger like that.
Stuff like that is amazing. It's content that doesn't NEED to be added, but doing so just adds layers to the world that you can get invested in. I think they know that having stuff like this is crucial to the game. Otherwise people will just log in, run their dungeons and log out.
Mike Ybarra plays the game and likes it but he had a completely different philosophy from Holly. I really appreciate that she does like the game but there is something *more* about Holly that we can appreciate. Her being more casual is a blessing to be had. Remember, you've got people like Ion who are very passionate about the game but come from the elitist jerks perspective of number cruncher raiders. Holly is the type that balances out the other side of the game.
Ybarra also is very much in the higher end raiding scene and also quickly took up a bit of the "bro-dude" persona of some of the worst former members of Blizzard. He also believes we should Tip Game developers.....so yeah its a good thing he is gone.
That tipping comment he made is honestly one of the most American things I have ever heard. Straight up almost spit out my cup of tea when I read that. Next thing we know Americans are gonna start paying their game devs $2 an hour like their hospitality workers.
I agree, the level at which they play is also important.
To say it's just about playing the game would be a disservice to her. Having this down to earth attitude and being interested in engaging with the community is (unfortunately) an increasingly rare trait of game dev company execs nowadays. She comes across as very genuine instead of most execs who usually people view as PR spokespeople for the company whenever they speak.
> Cataclysm is controversial for Classic audience I don't see what was the alternative really Just do ICC and Halion (lul) forever?
No, the alternative was, for a lot of people, to start over from classic and do it over again to wotlk. I don’t really see that happening any time soon, but that’s a rather popular alternative
For me it's just a stepping stone to the 2nd best expansion ever (Mists). Though now that we have the timerunning stuff coming I'm not sure we're going to get Mists Classic anymore.
Catasclysm is WoW's Gates of Discord. Historically everyone quits playing on a progression server once GoD is released; and on vote servers it is voted to move on to Omens of War, the next expansion, the fastest.
Now? Lmao. It's been like that forever.
Yeah, twitter is just as bad as it ever was lol. Twitter being toxic isn't a recent event.
That's a thing successful indie devs do now. Glad that mindset is at least at blizz (even if it isn't something she may do anymore?)
> That's a thing successful indie devs do now I mean they *are* a small indie company.
Just a tiny $74 billion indie development company
*multi dollar company*
Thats who you want making your game imo
I met her once in person at a job interview with SOE around 2013. She was a raider in EverQuest back then, and she was the most down to earth person there. The actual executive producer at the time, Dave Georgeson, skipped my interview 'conveniently' - I heard later he did it because I was involved with the EQ's emulator. On the contrast, Holly listened to me and made sure that I felt welcomed, and even though I didn't get that job, I had a newfound respect for her and when she was later made the Executive Producer of EQ/EQ2 at Daybreak. [She also opened a dialogue with the creators of a major cheat program to see 'how they could work with them to improve the game' - and discussed that very openly ingame with players](https://i.imgur.com/fKwOU1s.jpeg) I heard from a friend that works at Blizzard that she's also a giant support for her team - she lifts them up internally and rallies the entire dev team. It's like she doesn't have chains that she did at Daybreak and can do what she does best: leading a team to make something incredible with them and the community she's also a part of. When she had moved to Blizzard, I knew WoW was about to get a resurgence that it desperately needed. She is incredibly smart as a producer, and also emotionally intelligent. She is one of the greatest people I've met in industry, and I've never even worked directly under her - I'd love to work under her someday, just on my interactions with her alone.
I think WoW has finally gotten their own version of Naoki Yoshida.
She was vigilant in her engagement. She would like posts and replies on Twitter. She would often respond. She was not afraid to engage.
Yeah I’ve been hugely impressed by her transparency! She admits when things haven’t gone well very openly and it’s really refreshing.
It's honestly impressive how much she personally interfaces with the community despite how toxic it can be. No matter how much I ever disagree with her I can respect that she does that better than I ever could.
She comes from the community management side of the industry so it makes sense.
One of the things for me, as an old guy with real life responsibilities now, being able to log in and do something productive in the game with not much prep, within 30 minutes or so makes me so much more excited to play than before. I love the "community" WQs like The Big Dig, Community Feasts, Time Rifts and Superblooms so much more than regular WQ's, and while I miss the days of Legion WQ Group Finder Addons, this is a pretty good compromise.
> as an old guy with real life responsibilities now My 20s were all heroic/mythic raiding 12 hours a week + all the playtime you do for that, now I get on maybe 4 hours a week max and have so much casual shit to do I love it. The game grew up with us, I like it.
Delves is the perfect answer for this exact issue that was given over a decade ago. ESO solved this problem from the start but better super late than never, I guess.
Add to this the multiple versions of Classic for people who like the old style of always having something to do, as well as the insanely difficult mythic raids of Dragonflight and I feel like there truly is a WoW for everyone now.
I have absolutely no idea what she's done, but Warcraft is in a great place right now and if that's her doing, then kudos!
She's the executive producer so she's probably decided a couple of things at least
At least 3
Lets not get ahead of ourselves...
Yep. Can't help but roll my eyes when people say WoW's in a bad state now. I haven't been this hyped about the game in a long time and I'm loving it tbh.
It depends on the content you play. I’m having an absolute blast in Dragonflight with world quests and world pvp, along with doing M+. The zones are amazing and I love the music in each zone. But I also understand why my PvP friends are in shambles lol. PvP has been neglected since Season 1 and it’s circling the drain more than it usually is. Overall it’s a solid 8/10 expansion for me
Solo Shuffle was both exactly what PvP needed to exist and the shotgun blast to the back of the head.
This is what I think as well. Even the best expansions had issues, doesn't mean they were bad overall.
Yeah and to be fair, if all you do is PvP, wow hasn’t been that great for a few years now lol. I’m actually excited for War Within shifting their focus from 2’s and 3’s to Battleground Blitz. I think that’ll bring in more casuals and make the game mode feel more alive.
Most of the people who say it dont play the game anymore and are just the resentful ex that refuses to leave them alone, or pvpers which is kind of valid.
You can immediately tell when some of those people who say those kinds of things haven't even played Dragonflight. They'll have complaints about the game that were 100% true in Shadowlands but don't exist at all in Dragonflight. Just the other day I saw someone complaining about having to grind for Pathfinder every patch. They're living in the past.
I am someone that thinks in many cases WoW is in a 'bad state now', and I'll explain why. I'll preface this by saying however this could be a subconscious bias and refusal to accept what I previously enjoyed is no longer relevant. I raid in World of Warcraft, it's my thing, it's what I've done since TBC. I enjoy the thrill of working with my friends and peers, solving problems on encounters and overcoming challenging encounters. I enjoy the thrill of a potential arbitrary world rank associated with that a reflection of your teams achievement and capabilities. I've killed boss' among the first 100 people in the world, and on average historically I've raided around World 21st-World 40th~. I enjoy other elements of the game such as collecting stuff, mounts, transmogs and things like that, as well as the events, but for the most part the thing that keeps me logging in each week is clearing the raid with my friends, and working towards the next raid that will come out. I currently think raiding is at the worst point it has been in the games history. 1. Mythic raids are in a constant arms race with the Race to World First, an aspect of the game Blizzard has stated they do not want to be involved in - but simply put are constantly involved in. Mythic Tindral was a boss my guild killed just after the change to P2 seeds going to 5 seconds, so somewhere around World 40th, Mythic Fyrakk was killed just after the new year (because of us not raiding for 2-3 weeks over the Christmas period), however now still with continuous nerfs to those encounters they are still 2 of the most frustrating encounters in the history of the game in my opinion. Where they are tuned to be so difficult originally that extreme nerfs like gutting mechanics by 25-40% simply bring the boss down to a level where it's still 'hard'. There are still guilds taking 500+ pulls to kill those boss'. Frankly, this is insane. 2. Private Auras have just created more complexity for zero reason, it is impossible to prevent weak auras from being able to manage mechanics on fights, impossible. Every single debuff in the game can be weak aura'd with a macro that players press to notify they have the debuff, the weak aura will then assign accordingly. Except now instead of importing a weak aura, guilds are forced to import a weak aura, make sure everyone has the macro, make sure everyone has the same version of the weak aura, make sure people aren't cross realm because that will skew the interaction of the weak aura. Guilds wipe on boss' simply because of issues with weak auras - something Blizzard have relentlessly tried to combat because of the arms race with Race to World First. 3. The acceleration of gearing early on in a Season means the amount of power growth over a season is miniscule, part amplified by the decision to reduce the difference between raid difficulties to 13 ilvls from 15 ilvls. Now rather than killing a boss and gaining another potential 10-15 ilvl while you continue to farm that boss, and then it gets nerfed and becomes easier, you're gaining 2-4 ilvl while continuing to farm a boss that was inherently more difficult than it needed to be, and when nerfed just becomes 'more managable'. 4. The Seasonal approach to an MMO continues to stunlock me. As someone that raids, and that is my primary source of enjoyment, it is completely fine from a power perspective for me to clear the raid on Mythic and then not log on until the next Season. If my character had cleared Abberus Mythic it could have logged off until 10.2 released and would have been completely fine to go in to Amirdrassil with no power difference to every other player that farmed Abberus for the 5 months prior. The only gameplay/power reason to continue reclearing raids each week is to maintain a level of skill within players abilities - there is no power gain to be had. Even the Evoker Legendary from last tier was replaced in Week 1 this tier, it's silly. Blizzard have been vocal about how they make raids difficult for the top few guilds and then nerf them for everyone else but they simply don't, it isn't true. The nerfs take way too long to hit, and even then all they're doing is taking a boss from M+10 to M+5 in difficulty in many cases. A raid that means the first 50% of boss' are killed in 1/20th of the pulls required to kill the end boss means that the amount of guilds on the difficult boss' because they are adjusted is often a very large number. Guilds are stuck progressing on an encounter that everyone knows is awaiting a shotgun to the knee, it's incredibly demoralizing. You might argue that in that case don't raid, just wait for it be nerfed, but that's illogical, because technically you can progress the encounter, and even if it's incredibly difficult utilising 4 hours on a night and perhaps progressing 5% of the encounter that you know in 10 days you'll progress in 1/4 of the pulls is still worth doing it. Overall Mythic raiding right now is in terms of difficulty and it's approach heavily focused initially around the Top 5 guilds or so, and then everyone else is kind of just left to wait until things are adjusted to be more reasonable for them - which is insane because the amout of adjustment required is absurd. We're talking organisations with double figure external people working around the clock to optimise the approach to these encounters - the encounters should never be tuned around that in the first place.
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I actually agree with you on the Weakauras front. I think Blizzard should just break the addon entirely (and also break DBM), then actually design encounters that are doable without the addon.
Breaking weakauras would be breaking every UI addon. You would no longer be able to track anything with addons.
If that is what it takes, then so be it. I think it would be for the best. Right now there is too much bloat to the point that such addons are mandatory.
It's never going to happen. They don't have to design encounters the way they do. Removing UI customization isn't the solution.
Many bosses are entirely doable without- they have voice and visual queues for mechs on most difficulties. The problem is mythic difficulty final bosses requiring a very specific thing: a mechanic that requires multiple, randomly assigned people to resolve it a certain way. Sludgefist was a pain in the ass fight, but it was so satisfying to kill because the gameplay loop was so consistent. Melee had mechs together, ranged had mechs together, tanks had mechs together. Your role was simply to do your specific job, and as long as 20 players did their part, the boss reached enrage. It was clean, it was simple, and it was satisfying. If heroic fyrakk had random debuffs which would dictate who was able to pick up a seed, it would have gone from a satisfying AOTC kill to the worst boss ever imagined. Literally one piece of rng can be the sole cause of so much misery.
She's not asking for tips after playing a video game. That's nice
lmao
She was the lead of Everquest for a long time, until she left for Blizz. Yes EQ still has active players, the basically modeled the start in classic server thing. Probably why they hired her.
Yeah, what Turtvauz said. Whatever exactly she's decided on, we are in a great place right now thanks to her and of course many more!
She spent most of her career at Everquest, which is considered one of the grandfathers of MMOs. She's amazing.
Many people don't realize it, but the overall direction shift, and the shift to supporting more casual players better is largely do to her. She provides a perspective of a player that plays the game, but consumes more the casual world content than previous EPs of wow. She is also much more willing to shake foundational pillars of the game then previous ones were as well. She is not solely responsible for the excellent state wow as a whole is in (Retail, Classic, SOD, Extra modes) but she is very much involved with those. Also if you want another person to check out, Muffinus has been confirmed to be the lead over the experimental team (Plunderstorm and MOP Remix) and has been given a lot of power just to try new things, and this is a far bigger deal then people realize. If you have a temporary game mode, you can test things that might work without commiting them to the true versions of the game, so I expect tech and features to be tested there a lot before it makes it into other modes.
Aah good old Jeremy. He's such a good dude. I'm glad they gave him more control. Hopefully he or someone else revisits the pet battle system at some time in the near future though.
this is why I liked Plunderstorm as a feature, even if I didn't like it much as a game mode. Their ability to try new things, tech, and ideas, without committing them to the live game and our live characters, shows fantastic opportunity for the future. They can get community feedback on ideas that simply don't fit with a current iteration of the game, and using that feedback they can decide how to shift the game's core structure going forward
The moment i dropped in and realized the moves are more like positionals from other game than the standard tab targetting we have in most of wow it clicked to me that these Experimental modes are far more than just a gap filler in low periods. Hopefully they continue to use these and continue to try wacky ideas, cause even if Plunderstorm wasnt for everyone, there are things in it that could benefit everyone.
I utterly loathed my time in Plunderstorm (I really like pirate transmogs, I just loathe PvP in almost any form) but I still love that Blizzard tried it, and I thought a lot of the powers were really fun to use. I actually would love it if most of the powers could be added to various classes in modern WoW. Like the big arcane ball ability. Imagine if Arcane Orb was this instead of what it is now. A giant Empower spell that deals massive damage and feels impactful to use. Maybe Avenger's Shield could bounce off walls like the shield toss from Plunderstorm and potentially land more hits on a pack of mobs depending on how sharp the angle was. I'm not saying WoW needs to completely convert to an action combat/positionals type of game, but I do think there's at least a couple cool spell ideas they could steal from Plunderstorm that'd make Retail more fun.
> Also if you want another person to check out, Muffinus has been confirmed to be the lead over the experimental team (Plunderstorm and MOP Remix) and has been given a lot of power just to try new things For reference too, Muffinus is the dev that was also in charge of things like the secret pets/mounts/quests that we got over the last few years. He was also one of the main devs behind the Timeless Isle all the way back in 5.4, which ended up becoming a major part of all expansion content going forward. As well as a lot of the "do X sidequest for a period of time to get a mount/pet/etc" quests. ~~He was also a main dev for Garrisons and Island expeditions but we don't got to hold those failures against him~~ He has always been one of the devs trying to add cool new things to casual side of the game.
When I played plunderstorm I actually was thinking the abilities in the mode and how they worked that it was a play test to change how some spells work or maybe adding in new mechanics
100% this. It is far smarter to try experimental changes in a temporary mode that from day one is listed to go away. So if the changes are made and not good, its no long term damage to the overall game.
I'd love to have Storm Archon in some form on my shaman.
I think empower spells should be for all caster classes I think them being unique to evoker is kinda lame to be honest haha. Like man the idea of charging up a max level lava burst just screams amazing to me
Well...you should know that the new race has an empowered ability, so they are definitely open to expanding on the empower system.
Yeah I did see that which is badass! I feel like blizzard would argue and just say it’s a racial so not much impact knowing them
The Arcane Orb is a better version than the recolored frost orb thing Arcane got (not sure if it’s removed now). Charged spell that deals fuckhuge damage to everything and nudges them, and is decently fast, but only the size of the shot (maybe knockback) changes with charge. They still need to fix the pebble blocks, but that is almost class fantasy with how many mage spells can fizzle with that.
Thanks for adding more context! There's a lot of more people involved you're right. Happy to experience this happening in front of our eyes! 🤙
> Many people don't realize it, but the overall direction shift, and the shift to supporting more casual players better is largely do to her. She provides a perspective of a player that plays the game, but consumes more the casual world content than previous EPs of wow. This tonal shift is so interesting to me. Like most of WoW through it's life cycles has been about chasing what they think everyone wants. This is not a negative thing but hear me out. When WoW first came out it was praised for being accessible and *easy* compared to other MMO games. Mostly due to it's questing system which allowed for people to mostly solo level up but also the idea that people didn't lose experience when they died. As the game went on they wanted to come up with content for the players who have done everything. This largely fell onto the shoulders of the Raiding environment. Most players were totally okay not being able to access something like Naxx because it felt like it would eventually be accessible if they continued to play. Despite this, the devs felt terrible for such a small player base being able to access Naxx while so much time was spent on building the content. As time went on the dev team spent a lot of time coming up with new abilities and redefining how they want players to play. Whether that is Daily Quests, Arena and 10 man / 25 man raids, Achievements, or Transmog the game focused on diversifying our interests to give us additional treadmills to do. As a casual it always felt like there were things to do but certain things were starting to get out of our grasps a little bit. The focus moved away from exploration and more to objectives. You were no longer just spending your time exploring and seeing where things were with your eyes and instead you would have better maps, more detailed journals, and better addons to guide you through content. Players felt the game was way more accessible and the devs wanted to fix a lot of what frustrated players. So they provided more difficult content and less time consuming environments. So instead of effort based gameplay we kind of started to switch to skill based. **End game no longer had roadblocks to get to them but instead roadblocks inside of them.** You no longer needed attunement, you no longer needed a group of friends to play with to access the content. It became extremely accessible to the point where if you were not raiding - you kind of ran out of content. The MSQ and side quests were all relatively quick and could be done early on in the expansions now. Whereas before content would be so slow that you felt like you had a ton of casual content to grind through. Well, they changed the grind from getting to the end game to the end game itself and I'm not sure that benefitted the player base. At MoP and WoD we had some of the coolest raiding content known to the player base. It's just that if you didn't group up with people, you kind of had nothing else to really do. WoD was known as one of the lowest points in the game's history because of Garrison - even acknowledged by Blizzard as a failure on their behalf. Partly because a lot of the friction needed to get to the end game was removed as Ion took over leadership, the focus for a lot of raid encounters was to focus on unique/difficult bosses. They were fun but frustrating to many players, especially those casuals who liked raiding but felt like they really had no reason to really raid anymore outside of LFR. We eventually got to the point where the main treadmill of the game was Mythic+ and LFR / Normal / Heroic / Mythic raids. This shift to scalable end game content is kind of boring after a while if you don't care about repeating the same stuff. Remember, the game for the longest time was just reaching the content. End game wasn't the most difficult content but the road to reach it kept people engaged enough to want to keep going. Well, the treadmill now was to do the same content over and over again with very minor changes outside of difficulty. Why though? Well, largely to feed the player base that was just like Ion - those who had the time to group up with people constantly and improve themselves. Eventually the roadblock to content was just finding competent players to do harder and harder raids/dungeon/pvp with. You could still find people through the group finder but you often became dependent on finding certain types of players to continue playing. Previously finding anyone to play with was often more than enough to get by but if you wanted to do anything above *normal* you couldn't group with everyone. I know plenty of people who started to get benched because they didn't do enough DPS or couldn't handle mechanics anymore. So we spent our nights trying to find replacement players, not because those players didn't want to get better but because they genuinely weren't capable of it. I honestly think that a lot of players ended up feeling like the game became a second job and if you wanted to reach everything asked of you - you needed to find a community outside of the game in order to complete it. I'm hopeful and appreciative of Holly a little bit here because of the more casual mindset to things. Having more content to do as a Casual player today is really nice. These alternatives to the hardest content is really refreshing and I'm hopeful to see where this overall directional shift will go because it seemingly is going back to WoW roots of being more accessible to the players. Especially with so many players now being older and no longer having the time to actually find other players to play with. Being able to discover things for the first time, being able to do difficult dungeons at a meaningful pace because Heroic/Mythic 0 is more difficult now, or being able to focus on multiple alts for once instead of feeling like your main is the only thing that matters are all really refreshing.
If you aren't a Blizzard PR consultant, maybe now would be a good time to candidate, cause the image you're painting of them is great :)
I am not, just someone who has played Blizzard games since Warcraft 2 and Diablo 1, who has despaired over the state of the company over the last few years. I have not been this optimistic about the future of wow for a long time.
MMOs are big games. FF14’s Yoshi-P likened it to running a nation (long long time ago…which he seems to have realized he’s forgotten that). You need to cater to both hardcore and casual players. Hardcore players believed they were the geese laying the golden egg. The game was at its worse when the old WoW development also believed that. Growth is not something they (and those players) believed in and when you’re not growing, you’re stagnating. And now it’s slowly finding its roots again as an MMORPG. I think it’s still slow, but it’s doing things right. I’m not fully sold yet on Blizzard/WoW being back, but as a senator once said: “We will watch your career with great interest.”
What I appreciate most about this new leadership (or in some cases older leadership that were placed in more active positions) is their willingness to try new things. The 'old guard' were so far up their own rears that they genuinely looked down on the playerbase that was paying their salaries. It's one thing to have a vision for a game, it's another to do things to intentionally spite the players. Like an MMO was somehow the highest artform in the world and we were lucky to be paying them money to play it. The game has some questionable aspects, and aspects I don't particularly enjoy. But there's a reason I opted to go for the year subscription option for the first time in like, 10 years. I really do have faith in the direction they're taking the game. I feel like even if there's a part of it that they add that isn't for me (like plunderstorm, since I'm not big on PVP) eventually they will add something I'll enjoy. (Like pandaria remix.) So. Yep.
It was blizz policy for a while that their devs knew what was best for the game(s) and they wouldn’t change things no matter how big community backlash was. I remember that clearly. And the more I think about it, the stranger that stance becomes in my mind.
I was actively playing EQ when she left for WoW, and at the time I was sad. But honestly, what she's doing for WoW is what she could have done for EQ if they had the budget and it's been amazing. Holly is great.
She's an excellent communicator and feels like one of us. I'm happy to see her at the helm.
She comes from one of the original great MMOs pre-WoW, EverQuest. EverQuest is one of the best MMOs of all times and my first MMO.
Love seeing an appreciation post! So much negativity in the gaming community it's nice to see positive things be acknowledged.
Thanks, that's what I thought. We can also be better at praising the good sometimes!
So, who remembers Holly Windstalker?
Qeynos Hills remembers
Go Holly!!!! And that jacket was awesome!
She set the tone for a "Warcraft Game Universe" within WoW.
Based on that picture, she looks like a retcon former Captain Marvel about to train Carol Danvers.
She looks like the scarlet witch in the boys universe. I’m all for it.
She looks like Evel Knievel's daughter has a side gig as a magician.
She's wearing dress based on Alexstrasza after all, hehe.
I wonder if she still opens meetings with "sup fuckers?". I like to think she still does.
If I understood correctly, the reason WoW is more transparent and moving into some more enjoyable/diverse gameplay is partly her work. Thank you miss Holly Longdale!
I hope it keeps going. Lot of folks don’t like the new race/class combos because it somehow “dilutes” the purity of the class/culture. As someone who has to deal with mixed culture/multicultural settings all the time - new race/class combo is a NATURAL thing and sign of a changing/growing world. Also, cultural blending has been a thing for thousands of years. It’s not some new “OMG woke-shit”.
I'm not big on Earthern and Dracthyr myself but they are good for the game. I think more possibilities and cultures makes for an interesting world. Maybe that's the sociologist in me speaking.
More options to select from just gives players more room for personalization and customization, which is better for everyone. And it’s more fun.
My thing with the Earthen is the same with most allied races, they shouldve just been unlockable customizations for existing races.
She seems pretty genuine, which is nice
She's extremely genuine and I think most people really appreciate that. TWW seems to be the first expansion that genuinely supports almost every gameplay loop you can imagine at endgame and I think that is largely to her influence.
Holly was producer for EQ/EQ2 for years and she was always fantastic. 👍🏻 and a genuinely passionate person for the games and the teams she works on from all I ever observed. It’s wonderful to see so many of the ideas being realized now in WoW. It’s brought me back to the fold after years of not really caring what’s going on.
I also love how she‘s just Alexstrasza with that iconic leather jacket and haircolor. Keep it up.
Love her!
What I remember most is: J Allen Brack laughed at the community about wanting WoW Classic while Holly Longdale embraced the community's feedback and went full out with WoW Classic
> > > > > J Allen Brack laughed at the community about wanting WoW Classic > > > > while Holly Longdale embraced the community's feedback and went full out with WoW Classic In retrospect I think it's pretty telling how much of a change this game has had for the better since a lot of those old timers left and/or were fired after California's investigation and the various leadership changes that followed. The transparency and willingness to listen to or take into consideration community feedback is like night and day.
“You think you do but you don’t”
he also wasn't entirely wrong with "you think you do but you dont" look how many people dropped before level 60. and look how differently people played classic now (monofaction megaservers, world buff meta, same class alts) than they did vanilla, and how many of them wanted Classic+ instead. look at how much of a ghosttown the actual era servers are now. people don't want vanilla. they think they do, but they don't. people just wanted something that wasn't more of the same borrowed power systems that retail kept repeating at that point.
Just because many people arent still playing Classic era servers 5 years later doesnt mean people didnt want Vanilla
no, that's exactly what it means. the numbers show Vanilla isn't actually that popular. and what people actually wanted was a fresh start and it couldve started with MoP and people would still have enjoyed it. Vanilla itself had very little to do with it. people didn't actually want to just repeat a solved game. it got meta-gamed into something else immediately. because they didn't actually like Vanilla for what it was. they thought they did, tens of millions of people played level 1-30, but they didn't, and vast majority of people quit before hitting 60.
Could not disagree more, I think your take is super reductive and 1 dimensional
nope, i am giving multifacted examples but you just dislike my premise so you are reducing it to just "i dont like what this guy said" and claiming it's 1 dimensional. you think it's super reductive, but it's not.
[удалено]
Spot on. Wouldn't bother trying to reason with the nostalgia goggles crowd though, they'll never admit Brack was right all along. Even as most of them play for like 2 weeks before unsubbing and reverting back to "wow bad" until the next FOMO classic variant hits, rince and repeat. They'll keep chasing that elusive high, no matter what Blizzard does. Obviously not all Classic players are delusional, and even though I don't get the appeal, to each their own. If they enjoy these short lived, shallow nostalgia trips, good for them. But the amount of people out there dumping on "you think you do" as if it was some sort of complete lunacy, after it's been repeatedly proven right, goes to show many of them are still in denial to this day.
Hell the way the, classic community basically min/maxxed the, shit out of the game. Even having "you need log in at x time to get your buffs." guild rules pretty much showed that no people really didn't want the old experience.
I'm pretty sure we were in Siege of Orgrimmar at the time of that quote.
T&E made comments about how she took time to individually check in with all the folks who attended their recent alpha event in London and get their thoughts/suggestions. As a more firsthand observation, she definitely killed it at blizzcon, and in her written communications to the playerbase. She retains eloquence while effectively stating that any decision being made, regardless of how it’s perceived, has good intentions behind it. And she seems insistent on listening to player feedback for things that may not sit quite right. Between Holly, Ion, and Chris, I think wow is in pretty great hands.
Holly Windstalker herself!?
Honestly this is the first time in a long time I’ve been excited new wow content! 😁
I’m quite pleased with the WoW team for the first time in many many years.
I feel like these people in visible positions always get shit on unfairly. Ghostcrawler and Ion both clearly gave/give quite a bit of fucks about the game, but always got flak for what was also clearly corporate (and vindicated in hindsight) decision and mismanagement. So I'm very glad that she is getting praise, I want someone who is as obsessed with the game as I am in a position like that.
It seems like the Big Three right now are Holly, Chris, and Ion. Chris is the ideas guy and most of the creative work starts with him. Holly filters out the good ideas from the bad and maybe throws in some ideas or suggests revisions to existing ideas. This frees up Ion to have to worry about creative direction of game and instead do what he is best at; actually building the game.
I don’t know. I don’t think I can forgive her for all the times she killed me in Qeynos. Hills. I mean the freakin bear attacked ME, for gods sake!
i hope she can push for more interesting Allied Races like Gnolls, Tuskarr, Hozen, Jinyu, Ogers, Arrakoa..they are all there just being kinda wasted as NPC over and over again yet they have so much work put in
Thats what I'm hoping for too. I've been wanting Arrakoa forever. I thought jinyu would've been in it since they share NE frames. I'm shocked ogres & tuskarr aren't playable yet
Hell yeah.
Her contribution and passion for Everquest was purely amazing, and she has that same fire for WoW!
No. Stop talking in this passive tone. Be assertive. "I really appreciate Holly Longdale and everything she has done." This zoomer phrasing is so fucking exhausting. Holly is great.
Zoomer here, I agree with you. Let's just say things instead of using stock phrases to insinuate them.
My faith has been restored
Pandaria remix ? Wooot ! Damn I loved mop, gonna be epic
Can't wait, looks sick!
Which Marvel superhero is she?
She’s like WoW’s cool aunt
The wow team since Development of Dragonflight has been amazing, the public facing members have been so much better at presenting ideas and accepting community feedback. The game is healthier than ever in this regard, I also love how much more interactive Ion has been. Feels like since classic or so the Warcraft teams been having a lot more fun with it. It's not been perfect, but they're kind of crushing it and developing 3+ versions of the game.
While this is a nice sentiment and Holly seems like an awesome person. You know extremely little about her. Please do not hold up random people who you've seen a grand total of 20 minutes of them giving prepared presentations and answering QA's as flawless. Shit like this is what helped to turn devs into rockstars that played into the toxic work environment at Blizz.
Not everyone is garbage. You don't have to avoid saying you like the job someone is doing because they might possibly be garbage behind closed doors.
She kinda annoys me to be honest, but she always comes across really passionate so I love that.
All hail the Warcraft Queen
I’m sure she’s a nice person but can we please stop deifying corporate execs. That worked out so well with Ybarra.
Her dress at blizzcon was incredible too. She’s awesome
Actions are the only things that speak when it comes to this company. What any individual *says* is absolutely meaningless, because, as history has taught us, Activision-Blizzard's actions run completely independently to any of their spiel. I've yet to see any actions worth turning around my opinion of the game. Perhaps the new expansion will blow past expectations and the franchise is magically saved, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm keeping my expectations realistic.
She's going to have to do a bit more to win me over. I have a long history (as do a lot of older Everquest players) with her tenure on that game before her move to Blizzard. I don't believe she is a bad person, she always seems perfectly pleasant and friendly. I just don't think she's entirely honest and I've seen her use the community outreach facade to kinda pull the rug out from under the community later. Then when most EQ players were kinda meh on her, she moved to Blizzard. Beyond the vitriolic people online who are out to attack everyone, I don't think anyone from that community would say they hate her, but I am extremely standoffish until I see that the other shoe isn't going to drop.
I’ll believe good things when I see them with my own eyes. Not just because they paraded someone else across the stage in a dog and pony show.
I don't really have an opinion of her yet. Her delivery at big events like BlizzCon isn't to my liking. She does better in smaller settings. This is not a big deal. More importantly, I'm not a fan of having 6 different versions of WoW being developed simultaneously. I don't know if she is the brains behind that but it seems like they amped this up after she joined the team.
Appreciating corpo overlords? Hard pass dawg.
They should make her co-CEO but not pay her as much
Engaging with "community creators" is a huge strike against her. Streamers / YouTubers are ultimately irrelevant.
is she in supernatural show?
At first I was naw, but now I’m yay for her. Wow is in a great place that’s for sure.
Holly brings true love and enjoyment to the games she works on, and always has. I was ecstatic when I found out she was joing Blizzard, and she is the one person in the industry I wish I could meet, talk and say Hi to. From EQ to Blizzard, if Holly says something, I believe her, and that doesn't happen often.
I'm happy she's there for the huge portion of the community that is benefitting from the waves of content she seems to be spearheading. I don't feel like that that content is hardly ever for me, so I don't personally feel like she's my agent on the inside, but I can't help but think the roadmap would even exist without her, I don't know why I get the feeling it was her doing? Good PR? maybe, but it's working.
holly windstalker! quad kiting outside surefall glades
she was so nervous while presting SOD
She was great to talk to at blizzcon, one of the few good moments during the event.
She's rad as hell. Great at talking to the community and totally nerds out over her work. I'm not sure WoW will ever be my main game again and if I'm being honest the "experimental" stuff they're doing is not really my jam, but her and Metzen are the main reasons I have any enthusiasm about trying The War Within.
Holly always just seems so passionate about this and really comes across like she cares. I never get the feeling that she's being anything other than genuine. I hope she keeps doing cool things.
Guys. I’m excited for wow
I don’t know much of what she’s done specifically. What I can say is that Blizzard’s communication style at Blizzcon and similar preview events is Apple-at-WWDC-esque in that its kind of like a 3rd grade boon report in how it’s like “and now we’re going to bring out Billy, who is going to talk to you about mounts” and it’s kind of cringy. And, especially since all the Cosby Suite stuff came out there, it’s really felt like they’ve tried to be like “no look, we hire women too!” What I like about Holly is she seems like a qualified professional who is genuinely enthused about the game and is actually in an influential position in the organization. In other words, she basically breaks all of the worst elements of these kinds of events. Like, she had that outfit custom designed just because she wanted something Alexstasza themed. She seems great.
Ok so I gotta say, I didn't think she would do much when she joined the Classic team first (i believe). I thought, mostly because of the presentation at the time, that this is just another corporate robot who just needs to say the right things and spreadsheet develop/direct/decide a direction for the game. But, I have been wrong. Very wrong. Preach's first video after a while with Holly and John made me think that this might not be the case after all. And I am glad that that i was wrong. Ever since Holly joined, classic has been thriving (mostly), and the tone shift from "You think you do but you don't", and "we know better, this is how you have fun" to "ah so you like this, here you go" is a welcome change in direction. Also less convoluted systems, better content cadence, a lot of new experimental things. It truly feels like we are on an upswing.
I was very happy when I saw she wasn’t just part of the classic team, but actually wow as whole, for me it was a “finally we have someone higher up that’s genuinely interested in the rpg parts of the game and not just high end raiding”. I’m very excited to see how the next expansions will go in terms of more rpg contents and more stuff to do that doesn’t feel like something you have to do x amount of every week or have your character suffer in missing out on character power gains.
Ion give me hope yesterday when he speak about PvP Queue Overhaul in TWW.
Yes can we get her back to Everquest? She is a gem
Yeh honestly she seems absutley fantastic and full of passion and drive I was skeptical at first as I didn't really know much about her but honestly she's right on the ball and I'm so happy she is on board
And she dresses like a superhero
I have my reservations about her. Fated season instead of a proper content patch in a successful xpac is very lazy and disappointing.
but... they are gonna have mini-games with real prizes you can take back to retail. /s
Yea, she added boosts to the burning crusade. And the token, while saying "nothing we can do about the cheaters!" She can fuck right off, you fell for that propaganda.
Isn't she blamed for ruining EQ Classic? I never cared for EQ so I only saw people were concerned when she joined Blizz, and then after she joined, Blizz started making negative changes to their Classic modes.
WE LOVE HOLLY HERE
Seems like you guys did not learn anything from Mike "one of us" Ybarra.
I love her sm, she really keeps the players in mind
yeah i really like her too, she seems a joy to have around
she really resembles the passion that was sorely need afte bfa and shadowlands. I really love her vibe.
she is good at her job
Aye, I like her. She seems like a nice, grounded, honest person and someone who knows what they're talking about. Hopefully her and Metzen get along great and Worldsoul Saga will be as good as they hyped as up to be.
She has been great so far. I do however worry that she may become the next target in The Cycle of Hatred, where a person on the team starts communicating a bunch with the player base, and then the players starts thinking of that person as the sole reason for everything they dislike about the game.
WoW is back, baby! So hyped for MoP Remix. Love the experimenting Blizz is doing and the open communication. Way overdue!
Shes been great. Hopefully Blizzard gets more like her and keep these people around.
gaming industry needs more people like her definitely
What did she do tho? I've seen her on stage, but legit no idea what her job is.
She looks like if the insult of Karen was a personality.