The WoW Diary Quotes

“A couple of coworkers and I went to see the movie Collateral one evening. When we came back to the office around 11:00 (to go back to work), we ran into Chris Metzen sitting in the hallway. Upper management was making an effort to stay late with the team to show solidarity, and tonight was Chris’s night. He was playing the new beta and preparing for the final boss fight in Gnomeregan. Dungeon crawls were far more intense than anything he was used to, and he told the people standing behind his desk that he actually felt nervous before the fight. “Dude, my heart is pumping so hard right now, I’m gonna have a fucking heart attack. Just look at my hands, they’re shaking. I’ve never been so nervous about a game before this!” As his party prepared to fight the Gnomeregan end boss monster, Mekgineer Thermaplugg, Chris typed, “Remember guys, he’s just a gnome!” After a heated battle, Chris died screaming, seconds before the boss collapsed. This was before players received postmortem credit for kills, so Chris couldn’t complete his dungeon quest. He was so disappointed, he immediately went home. When I told Jeff what had happened the next morning, he laughed and replied, “Ouch. That really sucks. We should give kill-credit to everyone in the party, dead or alive.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development

“The list of intended features was long and seemingly unrealistic for a team so fatigued by the past years’ effort—but they all sounded like good ideas. The producer’s schedule was a bit ambitious, but the September 15 deadline was the first hard date the team had ever discussed…however, we still couldn’t tell if we were near the top of the mountain or if there was yet another rise over the ridge. One thing was true: We were exhausted and sick of WoW. We worked on it all day, played the test on weekends, and talked about it over every lunch and dinner. When we talked to someone outside the company, it was often the only topic of conversation they were interested in. It was decided for the last two weeks of February the team would work only forty hours a week—late nights would return again in March. But some were working those hours anyway. For the most part, morale was low among half of the employees. Some were doubting that our workload would subside after shipping, because there would be so many bugs to fix and pressure to create more content. With the game still unfinished, and with the imminent expansions and live updates ahead, we were beginning to wonder if we were ever going to reach a conclusion. The team’s spirits were somewhat buoyed by the enthusiasm of the design staff, who were coming in to work on weekends. But even the designers agreed that they never wanted to work on another MMO. They were just too hard and too risky, and took too much time and effort to make.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development

“It was fair to say almost everyone was burned out by now. Morale was so low that the team, as a whole, didn’t crunch. The artists didn’t need to review their work in meetings anymore because everyone had the Warcraft look-and-feel down; they just moved from one art task to the next. Programming inched forward, mole-like, worrying only about the task immediately in front of them. Releasing the game in February didn’t look likely anymore. That meant more time crunching and bug hunting, and few were happy at the prospect. The game designers had the functionality they needed, but wowedit’s tools weren’t streamlined because David Ray had been reassigned to working on the god tool, an application that would be used by our GMs for in-game customer support. Most of the designers were too busy to socialize. The classes and combat were getting overhauled again, and the item system was getting revisited by adding procedurally created items to keep the loot tables feeling fresh. This meant possible delays for the friends-and-family alpha test, and everyone was tired of telling their nearest and dearest that our game wasn’t ready to play yet (and that they’d be the first to know when it was). Even the producers had resigned themselves to the fact that we wouldn’t be shipping in the first quarter of 2004. They were seeing stability problems, and we were having a hard time getting a playable build. This made things especially hard for the game designers, who needed to test their data, but no one was really coming down on the programmers, as they were already haggard. Nevertheless, when the game crashed, people were getting visibly upset. Our shipping date was pushed to June, although some people doubted even that was possible.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development

“One of the more amusing ideas was an “Australia server” for all the abusive and law-breaking players: Instead of canceling their account and losing customers, we would sentence offensive players to an exile server unsupported by the GM staff.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development

“Artist and EverQuest veteran Roman Kenney was well-known for being the most creative exploit-finder in the company. When game designers blocked off unplayable zones with killer mobs, Roman figured out ways past them. For instance, he once performed an action that caused his character to dismount from a flying taxi, dropping him from the flightpath into an off-limits, high-level zone below. His hijinks didn’t stop there. After retrieving his corpse (he died from falling damage) in the forbidden area, he found partially implemented vendors who sold weapons that were better than what was available in the newbie zone loot tables. He clicked on the high-level weapons, linking the stats in world-chat, and asked if anyone wanted to buy them. People enthusiastically made offers thinking he had looted them off mobs. He purchased the weapons from the vendor and resold them for a huge profit. The game designers were amused at his ingenuity, even if it sullied the game’s economy, so they quickly removed dismount actions from our flying taxis to prevent further such excursions.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development

“Our guild features were recently implemented by Jeremy Wood, who tested his new code with interior level designers Cameron, Dana, Jose, and Aaron by making them officers and allowing them to invite and promote other players. It was a lackluster test because there wasn’t very much to do other than using guild-chat to chat about the guild-chat feature—which wasn’t a very exciting discussion—but that was the first WoW guild-chat conversation, nevertheless. And what was the first WoW guild christened? “Assmaster.” Jeremy reused the name Assmaster as the first team arena name, too. The moniker foreshadowed the level of sophistication the game would soon enjoy. Whenever fans are given a modicum of creative control in a computer game, they fill it with penises and profanity, and developers aren’t any better.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development

“These were the horror stories I’d heard from job candidates coming from other companies. I interviewed veterans who’d worked for eight years in top studios and never shipped a game because of cancellations and changes from marketing. Some publishers didn’t allow their developers to play games, even after-hours (this was especially strange to us, since Blizzard encouraged this, stocking its hallway game cabinets with free copies of games for people to check out on a first-come, first-served basis). Yet some studios considered familiarity with other games bad for morale and prevented their employees from hanging posters from other projects or properties (including movies) because they didn’t reinforce “team spirit.” Many studios were highly structured, politically driven machines where argument was frowned upon and decisions were made by a small number of people. But the most common flaw in the industry at the time was its shortsighted nature—treating employees as temporary or easily replaced assets. Dev teams were often rebooted between projects, wiped before they ever established a rhythm or voice of their own. It was no wonder Blizzard retained its employees longer than other companies.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development

“Gameplay trumps everything, and finding fun is more important than conventional wisdom, licensing trends, publicity, analytics, innovation, monetization, or any other facet of the entertainment business. If fun was expensive to find then so be it.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development

“Another marketing myth Blizzard dispelled after Diablo II was released was the danger of missing holiday sales. When Diablo II slipped into the next year, our sales were still as strong as we had predicted for Christmas. After that Blizzard stopped bending over backwards trying to ship before the end of the year.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development

“Mark and Shane, the team leads, were very conscious of not burning everyone out because of their experience on StarCraft. They had both been associate producers on the project and vowed to avoid pushing Team 2 as hard as the StarCraft devs were pushed. StarCraft’s dev cycle was nightmarish in that the goal posts were always moving. Whenever they crossed the finish line, Allen Adham found room for improvement, saying the game wasn’t polished enough, and asked everyone if they could hunker down for a few weeks longer. Whenever the next deadline was reached, another issue would arise and it was extended again, prolonging the crunch of late hours. The light at the end of the StarCraft tunnel always turned out to be a mirage. Each “final” sprint collided directly into another. And then another. Fans camped out in Blizzard’s parking lot and counted the cars, reporting on websites how many people were working at night. StarCraft’s drop-dead due dates were missed again and again until it was over a year later. Shane reminisced how people slept in sleeping bags on the floor. Showers and meals were skipped. To this day, few people who served on the StarCraft team play the game. Both Shane and Mark agreed that people weren’t as productive when exhausted and it just wasn’t worth it. Allen Adham’s nerves had been so worn out he left the company he founded until Blizzard convinced him to help out on WoW years later. In the wake of StarCraft’s quality-of-life costs, Shane and Mark vowed they’d never push a team like that, and their solution was to start the late nights early.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development

“Nobody grins more on their first day on the dev team than someone from QA. Contrary to what people believe, QA people don’t sit around playing games all day. Although they’re the first people to see new titles, one can’t describe their day-to-day routine as fun. It takes meticulous effort to write and verify bug reports. Developers fix bugs at their own pace, after which it becomes QA’s responsibility to test and verify whether the proper adjustment has been made. Some bugs are trivial or are duplicates of others; some are fiendishly difficult to solve and take months or even years to address. Other entries aren’t even bugs and are dubbed “working as intended.” When a problem is discovered by QA, it has to be verified by senior QA staff members. Josh Kurtz described nightmarish experiences he had isolating a bug that occurred whenever a player attacked a monster in Diablo II’s expansion. To eliminate the possibility that a weapon was the culprit of the bug, Josh had to attack a dummy monster using every weapon in the game, a process that took hours. Tasks like these might be split among QA people or sometimes they fell to just one unfortunate soul to sort out. After every weapon was checked, Josh reported the results. The programmers or designers would change something, and Josh would then have to retest every weapon and report results again. The developers would change something else, and Josh would need to test everything again to make sure the bug hadn’t reactivated. And again. After doing something like this repetitively for hours, for days, for weeks, and sometimes for months, QA drudgery feels less like being in a computer game company and more like a psychological experiment. These entry-level positions are minimum-wage jobs, but people endure the experience just for a chance at getting a development position, becoming a QA lead, or attaining some other non-developer position. But everyone’s goal is the same: escape from QA.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development

“They even tried to fill the spots internally with candidates from quality assurance (QA), but that proved a fool’s quest because 3D level design skills took years to develop.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development

“By creating so many quests, WoW had accidentally created compelling solo content, which arguably became the game’s strongest ingredient for success with the broad market of casual players.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development