WotC How new Wizards of the Coast head John Hight turned around World of Warcraft

[Mecheon]

I think the PvP and battle royale nature of Plunderstorm were probably a big curveball for many existing WoW players, including the largely chill pet collector community, who suddenly felt compelled to go get curb-stomped in PvP for new pets. But the basic idea of "let's take these existing assets and do something fun and crazy with them" was a great idea.

As a PvE nerd...

I became the worst. Y'know the worst people there, the small vulpera types jumping around and just being little terrors?

That was me.

I earnt that pirate set and parrot

 

[Aldarc]

How was Planescpe mishandled?

I see you chose to bite at the bait.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Bringing back beloved settings is listening to the fans though. They bungled the execution and put out some bland and uninspiring products, but they at least attempted to do what players asked for. You can listen to what people want and still suck at delivering it successfully.

Old School Blizzard just would've tried to convince players that they don't actually want Planescape or Spelljammer, and refused to publish anything in those settings.

Counter argument, they listened to the marketing data not the fans, if they'd listen to fans of these settings they wouldn't have bundled it.

They'd have gotten the right people involved, Spelljammer should have been lead by Jeff Grubbs, he offered, and it's what Spelljammer fans wanted, instead it was lead by folks on the D&D team who are mostly horrible at setting products. The best setting products in 5e were all done by folks outside of the D&D team. Eberron, Wildemount, Theros, Ravnica, and Radiant Citidel were all lead by folks not on the D&D team.

 

[Echohawk]

They bungled the execution and put out some bland and uninspiring products, but they at least attempted to do what players asked for.

Bungled according to whom?

RPGGeek ratings
2e Planescape Campaign Setting: 205 ratings, average 8.45
5e Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse: 3 ratings, average 9.33

2e: Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures in Space: 69 ratings, average 7.43
5e: Spelljammer: Adventures in Space: 8 ratings, average 6.74

2e: Ravenloft: Realm of Terror: 82 ratings, average 7.64
5e: Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft: 20 ratings, average 7.81

 

[Aldarc]

Bungled according to whom?

RPGGeek ratings
2e Planescape Campaign Setting: 205 ratings, average 8.45
5e Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse: 3 ratings, average 9.33

2e: Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures in Space: 69 ratings, average 7.43
5e: Spelljammer: Adventures in Space: 8 ratings, average 6.74

2e: Ravenloft: Realm of Terror: 82 ratings, average 7.64
5e: Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft: 20 ratings, average 7.81

I would air some caution here. As a consumer who reads reviews for non-TTRPG products, I don't just look at the rating; I also look at things like how many people have reviewed the product, as that has a larger sample size behind the rating.

For example, the 5e Planescape has a 9.33 rating on this website, but it also only has 3 ratings as compared to the 205 ratings for the 2e Planescape book. So if I was going into this without prior awareness of these products, I would potentially be more drawn to look at the 2e product. It may have a lower rating, but it also has 205 souls invested enough in rating it, and there will likely be higher quality reviews that I could read about the product. And when I look at the spread of ratings, I think that it's a good spread that is mostly 10, then 9, and then 8. So to have that many people satisfied is a good sign.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Interesting article, I'm not sure whether anything from WoW necessarily carries over to DnD, but one of the lessons that could be relevant is how WoW made giant improvements recently by starting to actually listen to what players were asking for and actually doing it instead of always trying to convince their customers that "you think you want X but you really don't", and that the developers always knew better.

That might not change DnD as much since WotC has generally been more receptive to considering player opinions than Blizzard ever was, but it can't hurt.

we have less lines of communication than wow.
hell what do we even want any more?

 

[Mind of tempest]

That might be really cool. Or he might be brought to heel by Hasbro’s corporate culture.

Here’s to hoping Dark Sun and Mystara return.

mystara could be done with the right team, also the dog folk could sell the product of the furries alone.
but I can see darksun might have some taste issues but stranger setting with psionics as a class like eberron with artificers could do well

 

[WisdomOfWombats]

Counter argument, they listened to the marketing data not the fans, if they'd listen to fans of these settings they wouldn't have bundled it.

They'd have gotten the right people involved, Spelljammer should have been lead by Jeff Grubbs, he offered, and it's what Spelljammer fans wanted, instead it was lead by folks on the D&D team who are mostly horrible at setting products. The best setting products in 5e were all done by folks outside of the D&D team. Eberron, Wildemount, Theros, Ravnica, and Radiant Citidel were all lead by folks not on the D&D team.

What is "best" is always a matter of personal taste. Wildemount is a setting guide more in line with older editions of the game. It's meaty, it's packed, and you need time to digest it. I love Wildemount. Eberron is a bit lighter on the setting aspects and already focuses more on playable content. Theros and Ravnica have thread-bare settings. The meat of the books lies in the gods and guilds. It looks like the D&D department wasn't allowed to add anything to the setting lore. Thus, it's focusing on adventuring material like gods, guilds, and connected adventuring sites. Radiant Citadel isn't even primarily a setting guide, but an adventure collection.

Also. the page count between the initial Planescape and Spelljammer boxed sets, and the new 3-book-sets was about the same as an introduction to the setting. Both settings have added a lot of lore after the initial boxed sets, and so we older people expect that to be present in the new editions. But the goal seems to have shifted to delivering more immediately gameable content as oppossed to lore-heavy books.

 

[Mind of tempest]

One thing which was vital to turning WoW around was that the stuck-in-their-ways people who were in charge of WoW prior to Hight were gone.

He didn't have to remove most of them, because they mostly abandoned ship due to being adjacent to various horrifying scandals/allegations, but them being gone was vital.

This is what allowed them to become more creative, experimental, etc.

That's not going to be possible as long as Crawford and Perkins are in charge, frankly. They've both shown that they're actively opposed to doing anything particularly creative or experimental, and not really interested in trying stuff out. They both want a single, unified, monolithic D&D.

I can get unified in the sense that all parts can be used with all other parts but monolithic does nothing, they need some more experimental voice on the team to counter them

 

[Echohawk]

I would air some caution here. As a consumer who reads reviews for non-TTRPG products, I don't just look at the rating; I also look at things like how many people have reviewed the product, as that has a larger sample size behind the rating.

I agree 100%. My point was not that RPGGeek ratings are a particular authority on product quality, but to highlight that claims of WotC "bungling" 5e setting updates seldom seem to be based on anything more that "I didn't like it so it must be a failure". A look at some actual ratings (however imprecise) doesn't really support claims of bungling.

For the record, my personal views are that 5e Spelljammer missed the mark, 5e Planescape was fairly decent although limited in what it covered, and 5e Ravenloft was a great product provided that you don't care at all about the setting's 2e/3e continuity. None of those opinions qualify me to make sweeping statements about how successful those products were.