Warcraft VP on what Blizzard should've done differently over the last 20 years: 'We should have listened more'

World of Warcraft celebrates its 20th year in 2024, and the head of the franchise says there is one big thing the company could have done better: listen to its players.

Holly Longdale joined the WoW team to work on WoW Classic in 2020 after a long stint on EverQuest and EverQuest 2. She swiftly became the lead for all WoW titles and now she's the VP and executive producer for the series. Her era at the company has been marked by three things: a lot more in-game content, a lot more transparency on what's coming when, and a lot more adherence to deadlines.

I asked her, looking back over the game's history both before and after she joined the company, what the one thing she might change would be.

«I think I'll talk about this with the lens of [experiencing] a large part of the journey as a player, and a recent journey as a very humble and lucky leader on this team,» she said. «I think we should have listened more to the player base.»

WoW executives have always had to navigate the delicate balance of what players ask for and what won't break the game, but that balance had swung quite far towards ignoring that feedback by the time Longdale came on board. The response to the game's Shadowlands expansion, where player feedback demanding more flexibility in the game's locked-in covenant factions and decrying storyline trends felt largely ignored, was an eye-opener for the company. Subscribers fled, and the game was in serious jeopardy.

The company as a whole made a recommitment to taking player feedback into account in the subsequent Dragonflight expansion, and the turnaround has been dramatic.

Longdale said it's not hard to understand why developers for Warcraft and other titles in the industry sometimes have trouble with how to balance player feedback. Particularly 20 years ago, game development was more art than science, she said.

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