Epicmission48: Finally! Been waiting to watch this thank you for making it public!

CharlieJapan: Watching Ion Hazzikostas’ lecture completely changed my perspective of him. I have a much better understanding now of where he and his team are coming from, and I genuinely appreciate the reasoning and passion behind their work.

ruggjay: This was actually fantastic, thank you Ion

Kelskore: man i really like ion. I can tell he is a super earnest guy who is just trying to make the best game he can. He goofs up sometimes sure but he is always trying.

falynnbeyon: Thank you! Have been looking for this.

Adrenaliinz: Ion's the best!

shibii: Natural speaker, he’s not a burden to listen to. Good talk there!

dochedgehog: yall just gonna eat it all up again

10 years of "working out" what the community wants as if theyd planned it all out

nah, the yes men approach spreading around right now is driving me to a long break. Theyre literally timegating the fuck out of the game as we speak

ski_ba: >shows preferred paths example

>nukes addons and WAs

>refuses to elaborate

JamesOfToya: The legend himself!

neugassh3570: its crazy that Ion still has a job

mcdonaldolds: how many times are you gonna hear the same complaints and still keep doing the same thing

keihndeth: Ion and his philosophy killed this game

arizothwow1: I love this game so much that not even the bad times has made me quit.

oleglinkov: wow. so after 20 years, their takeaways are - ignore problems until very last moment (and maybe it will be someone else pain to solve) and change your design often, so that players don't have time to react with negativity. no wonder the only good thing about WoW nowdays is its art.

Voodookillers: thx! some very interesting stuff hearing from Ion.

Dwesk: A lot of great insights but I still absolutely dislike the design philosophy of reaching max level being a single weekend rushed ordeal rather than a couple month spanning journey. I'm fully aware the average 16-30 year old gamer is very different nowadays to the ones from 15-20 years ago and people love to level alts and minmax everything, be "efficient" so to speak, but boy does it hurt the game's legacy I feel.

paragonexperience: Ion is one of the worst people to say this, he never met the players where they are. And did everything they hated

coolguyASDQWEFEWFADSFAS: this is good, but I would rather watch it with a streamer pausing it to reiterate points he just said to milk it for an extra 40 minutes.

Empire441: >your goal is not actually balancing numbers, your goal is to balance how people feel about those numbers, and how they feel about their time playing the game.

THERE IT IS DUDE

vasileiosandreanidis2153: Wow seized to be an adventure a long time ago. It is more of a theme park now where different tastes can be accommodated, yet not satisfied to their fullest. The game seems to lack a solid purpose, an identity. :(

edhu9: So ironic Ion talking about "out of touch" devs when the WoW team has been out of touch from their community for a long time. Pushing borrowed powers, time gating events, cathering to the 0.000000000001 % of player base who just wanna do mythics, aggressive microtransactions, etc, You think you do but you don't.

Bramandin: I wonder how is Ion not ashamed to stand on that stage after how badly he abused and mishandled WOW for 20 years. So many things he lists as core parts of what playing World of Warcraft today are widely understood detriments that drive people away from the game in droves. For example, leveling being "10 times as fast" as he puts it, having new players arrive at max level without understanding anything and being gate-kept out of end game content by older players who don't want to carry them on their backs.

Surreal speech, I just have no words.

SodamInsane: Thank you

Jun 03 2025

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