Blizzard Confirms Major Midnight Changes in Exclusive Icy Veins Interview

On October 2, Icy Veins had the privilege to sit down with Senior Game Director Ion Hazzikostas and Lead UX Designer Crash Reed to ask a multitude of questions about the new Midnight expansion. They both shared insights into what’s coming during the Midnight Alpha, went into great detail about upcoming changes to the functionality of many Add-ons, and teased what players can expect in the second chapter of the Worldsoul Saga.

We’d like to thank Blizzard Entertainment for granting us this chance to pose our most burning questions!

Interview Participants

Ion Hazzikostas (he/him), Senior Game Director, overseeing high-level Midnight development, with a focus on Add-on changes
Crash Reed (he/him), Lead UX Designer, involved in many new quality-of-life UI improvements, especially around the new Add-on changes
Stan Duris (he/him), Editor-in-Chief at Icy Veins
Jörn Thieme (he/him), Icy Veins Section Manager for Retail WoW and Guide Writer

Interview Summary

Here are some of the highlights of the interview:

Housing

Housing decor will be acquired largely through achievements and completing objectives within the game. While there are no plans for it at this time, Blizzard is not counting out the possibility of having a rare drop or two in the future, but for the time being this is not a thing.
Raid trophies will be focused on current raids, not Legacy ones, but there might be opportunities for i.e. Onyxia’s head or similar famed items from past eras.
Neighborhoods offer another avenue for players to truly live together harmoniously regardless of faction allegiance, but some minor cross-faction issues in the outdoor world will continue to exist in Midnight, at least for now.

Class Design and Gearing

Blizzard is happy with how Hero Talents have turned out, and while some classes and specs have been very healthy throughout The War Within with all Hero Talents being viable, others have used the same Hero Talents the entire expansion, which will be looked into.
Apex talents aim to allow players to feel more powerful, without unduly adding even more choice or complexity to your talent loadouts across different types of content or encounters. The team will continue to be mindful of not adding more complexity to classes when granting players new power.
Players were often presented with very complex rotational priorities and numerous buffs and procs to keep track of, that were only possible through the usage of very complex WeakAuras or Add-ons. This is not good design, and Blizzard is attempting to change the design or functionality of these rotational abilities so human players can play the game efficiently and optimally, without having to rely on many different Add-ons to distill complex information for them.
The team is aware that players often feels like many item-slots are locked in with choices that have no alternative, from tier-sets to embellished items or cantrip items. While Best-in-Slot lists are important to high-level players, that doesn’t mean items not on those lists are bad, or unusable.

Raid & Mythic+

The Dreamrift is expected to be more of a fun 1-boss raid that complements the two main raids, while the Voidspire and March on Quel’Danas are going to have a familiar progression curve with very challenging final bosses.
The final boss of the March on Quel’Danas will not be tested during Beta, and even the final boss of the Voidspire might only be testable on lower difficulties, but a final decision on this has yet to be made.
The goal of this staggered raid release is to have a 9-boss tier, where players, guilds, and raids have more flexibility as to what boss to tackle next.
Dungeon and Encounter design will be done in a way that constantly keeps the Add-on changes in mind.
Dungeon and Raid Mechanics are likely going to be more forgiving, whether it is giving players more time to react, or dangerous abilities affecting fewer players than before.
The overall expectation of how easy it is to clear a raid will not change, and if a mid-tier boss used to take 40-50 pulls in Dragonflight or The War Within, it’ll take 40-50 pulls in Midnight too – but less time will be spent on fidgeting with WeakAuras and Add-ons!
Players and guilds attempting to circumvent the new Add-on restrictions will be disciplined, but hopefully it won’t come to that.
Combat and Encounter designers are mindful of the changes to the Add-on landscape, and we might see fewer abilities thrown at players in any given pack of enemies.

UI & UX Improvements

Anything that would be customizing the way the UI looks will still be possible. If something can be shown through the Cooldown Manager or Boss Mods, Add-ons will be able to customize it visually and audibly – as long as it is using data and information provided by the Blizzard tools.
Accessibility is very important to the team, and if a feature is missing that players had access to prior to the changes, players are encouraged to reach out and communicate those issues. The ideal way to do so is by using the official forums!
Add-ons will no longer be able to read the Combat Log or Combat Chat Messages inside a dungeon or raid. Only information provided through the Blizzard tools can be used and customized.
New tech called Secret Values and Secret Aspects was developed and communicated to Add-on developers, outlining the exact limits and opportunities the new system enables.
The goal for the new Blizzard Add-ons, like Boss Mods or Nameplates, is that it doesn’t take players multiple hours to set them up before they can play the game.
While you won’t be able to actively track other players’ cooldown states, players will still be able to use in-game notes to plan and map out their cooldowns, so healers and raid leaders can hopefully sleep a little easier. 😉
Blizzards plans to ensure that thousands of Add-on developers will gain access to the Alpha as early as possible to help contribute towards a smooth transition going into Midnight, once these restrictions on Add-ons come into play.
Belo’ren, the first boss of March on Quel’Danas, is available for testing right now already. The goal is for players toprovide feedback on this new environment as early as possible. This is not a tuning or mechanics test, but aims to figure out which features or customization options players are missing still.
Blizzard is looking into improving players’ abilities to communicate with one another quickly. While there are no specific announcements to be made at this time, the Ping system in particular was brought up as a way for players to execute mechanics in encounters even without the help of multiple Add-ons.
The initial rollout of the damage meters will not include support for Augmentation Evokers. However, it is something the team would like to do, as the new damage meters are going to be a true depiction of all damage, without synchronization issues or players not being tracked due to being too far away from one another or being in different phases.

Full Transcript

The below responses have been edited slightly for readability purposes.

Icy Veins: Players are very excited about raid boss trophies, but how exactly will they be acquired? Are they boss drops, or granted through achievements, and will these be focused on new final bosses of raids, or will we be getting Legacy ones too, i.e. a unique Halondrus or Painsmith trophy?

Ion Hazzikostas: The details of how individual pieces of decor are acquired are still being figured out, but I think philosophically most of these are going to be tied to achievements or completion of objectives. That’s not to say that we couldn’t down the line have a very rare drop like we have mounts or the like, but I think in general we’re looking more to tie the character’s accomplishment of some objective to them earning the decor in a more direct way. I don’t believe there are Halondrus or Painsmith trophies planned at this point, but there may be some iconic ones like a Onyxia head that you may think of from past eras, but for the most part, we’re gonna be focused on current raids going forward. We also wanna be mindful as we introduce a new type of cosmetic collectible to make sure that we’re not frustrating collectors who may have spent the last few years completing a given raid, kind of ticking off every possible transmog and mount drop from that raid, we don’t wanna now tell them “Okay, you thought you were done with Ulduar, well, it’s time to farm Ulduar again for this new housing thing.” So, we wanna be careful with that as well.

Icy Veins: With a full expansion’s worth of Hero Talent experience behind us, what were or still are some of the biggest challenges in designing two divergent playstyles across every spec? Did you feel this system is a success across the board, or are there specific classes, specs, or even themes relating to Midnight that you want to explore with heightened focus?

Ion Hazzikostas: Combat designers would be better to answer this in really great detail, but I think I can say that at a high level, we’re happy with how hero talents have played out. I think the biggest challenge has always been having a single shared tree that needs to work in some cases for two specs with very different themes or playstyles. Those have been some of the more challenging for the designers to kind of bridge and come up with something that feels satisfying for both. Looking at the health of the system, there are some classes that have been very healthy throughout the expansion; there are others where we kind of see a very clear 1 to 1 mapping of this spec basically always uses this hero talent tree. I think those are some of the ones we looked to adjust or, in some cases, even redesign as we move forward into Midnight. One of our original goals with Hero Talents was to add meaningful new power, meaningful new thematic flavor to classes in War Within; some choice, but to do so without adding tremendous complexity. Something, as we said coming into War Within, we’re very mindful of, say, just giving people 10 new talent points to spend in existing larger trees, what that would do in terms of all the possible combinations. I think the systems, classes, specs, and choices you make within them are at an appropriate level of complexity at this point. I think it’s quite high, so we’re looking to add more power, we’re looking to add more progression, without too much complexity. That’s part of the thinking that also led us to Apex talents as one of our core systems for Midnight, because again we’re just trying to make some vehicles to give players new power, new things to get excited about, without adding too many more choices that you feel like you need to move back and forth between encounters, or between pieces of content.

Icy Veins: Midnight launches with multiple raids in a staggered release. Will all 3 final bosses be untested during the Beta, and can we expect the final bosses of the first two raids to be true end-boss challenges, or will that be reserved for whoever awaits us at the end of the March on Quel’Danas?

Ion Hazzikostas: So, the Dreamrift Raid, which is a 1-boss raid, I would expect that to be tested on beta, and I think that is more of just a standalone Onyxia-style raid, it’s a fun complement to the other two. (thinking) I can say for sure say the last boss of March on Quel’Danas will not be tested, I’m not sure about the last boss of Voidspire, we may do that on a lower difficulty, I think that’s a “To Be Determined” as we move forward. Tuning is also still in flux, but I think we want to make sure that when it first releases, the final boss of Voidspire is a serious test for the guilds that are coming in at that point, and then when March on Quel’Danas releases later on, we’ll also want to make sure that that final boss lives up to expectations as well.

In some sense, I think players can view this as a 9-boss tier that is going to have a standard tuning curve along those lines, but have more choice and flexibility in which piece of it players want to approach in a given evening.

Icy Veins: With the planned changes to the Add-on system, how do you expect this will change the landscape of the raiding scene as a whole, in regards to the encounter design and how forgiving certain mechanics are going to be?

Ion Hazzikostas: I think… They’ll be as forgiving as they need to be. I think the big part of why we are doing this change on an expansion boundary is that it gives us the chance to really build a full eco-system of content; all of our new dungeons, all of our new raid encounters, with this new world in mind. Our commitment is to preserve a similar level of difficulty to what players have been used to, but replicate that level of difficulty in a world where the add-on playing field is now level. And so that may mean that certain mechanics that we had to tune to a certain level of challenge, knowing, frankly, that at least at Mythic levels players were going to use WeakAuras, were going to use Add-ons to help solve them, we may need to relax the tuning of those things a little bit. We may need to give you a couple more seconds to get to whatever you need to soak or spread out, or have one fewer player targeted than we would have targeted otherwise. But at the end of the day, if you’re accustomed to, say, boss 6 of a Mythic raid taking your guild 40 or 50 attempts to defeat, our expectation is that boss 6 should take your guild 40 or 50 attempts to defeat in Midnight, but hopefully you’re spending more of that time actually playing the encounter instead of setting up Add-ons and playing that side of things.

Icy Veins: Back in the day, we saw severe punishments for AVR Add-on users. Can we expect to see similar action for those who try to circumvent the new changes and limitations with unsanctioned third-party tools, if something like the “sneak.lua” incident were to occur in Midnight?

Ion Hazzikostas: So, I guess technically speaking, I could be misremembering, but I don’t believe we punished people who used AVR, we just broke the AVR Add-on. Our general philosophy has been that if our Add-on Lua allows something, if you can just do something using an Add-on in our client, that’s not cheating, really, but if we don’t like what it’s doing we will change the rules to stop that from being possible. Whether that was attaching lines to nameplates back in Legion, or other things that we saw at different times. All that said, we’ve always taken any sort of true third-party tool use or client modification basically as hacking. We’ve taken that very seriously. That is cheating, that is a violation of our terms of use, and guilds that are trying to use tools completely outside of the game client to circumvent these restrictions, that will be taken seriously, those guilds will be punished, those players will be banned. I hope it doesn’t come to that.

Icy Veins: Given the success of Resilient Keys, is there any interest in revamping Mythic+ as it relates to key acquisition, specifically when it comes to pushing and rerolling keys to get a specific dungeon?

Ion Hazzikostas: Not currently. I think we’re happy with how the changes in War Within have played out. I think we’re more focused on micro-level changes to the flow of dungeons, to the number of abilities that we’re throwing at you at one time, trying to be mindful of what the add-on landscape changes will do in the dungeon space. But I think at the high end of keys, there is some… Part of this system, a core part of the system, is it not being trivial or guaranteed to get a push key of a specific dungeon that you’re aiming for. That raises the stakes somewhat. I think it makes playing on live different than practicing on a test realm or tournament realm, where you can just run the same key over and over and over again. I think that’s just a part of the organic nature of the system as players look for specific keys they’re interested in and form groups around them, and I think we’re not looking to change that in the near future.

Icy Veins: Since the beginning of Dragonflight, thanks to the return of the more advanced and more in-depth talent trees and hero talent, a lot of classes have gained a lot of complexity. This came with a need to track more complex rotational aspects through WeakAuras and Add-ons. Now that these are, in essence, being taken away or at least limited to some degree, many players worry that a lot of the customization options that they are used to, especially on visuals and audio, will offer reduced accessibility. What would you like to say to players who really worry about not being able to highlight certain elements of an encounter or a specific mechanic anymore?

Crash Reed: I can talk about what we are still allowing for those addons. So, anything that would be customizing the way that it looks will still absolutely be available. So if you were to take our cooldown manager and look at all of those different elements, the things that are happening… As long as the addon is not trying to parse or read the combat, then they are fully able to make something bolder, make something bigger, make something look a certain way, as long as it’s using the data that is being provided through our tool. So that will absolutely still be available. In terms of accessibility, one of the things we want to make sure that we are working on is… as we started approaching this we definitely look at the high information players that are mythic runners and high-end raiders, but this is also an attempt to make sure we are tackling people who just wanna go out and adventure in the world, and we are also trying to tackle as many accessibility requests as we can under the hood. The way we are treating this design is absolutely an open dialogue with the community, so this is just our first set. What we want to avoid launching is a gigantic, robust over-the-top tool that then takes hours and hours for players to set up, that can be daunting and intimidating. So, instead, we would like to try to offer only what we feel is nice and tight, and in what is exact, but if we miss something, if something is not there, we’re absolutely open to continuing to add and evolve. I think the Cooldown Manager is a perfect example of that, where we put something out early, knowing that it didn’t have all of the features, because we wanted players to give us the needs in return, instead of trying to approach it as ‘we know best’ and we wanna have that open dialogue back and forth.

Icy Veins: This is something that just came out yesterday: You outlined the terms and usage of Secret Values and Secret Aspects as part of how Add-On developers will be able to access information inside the game. Can you maybe explain this in layman’s terms, how this is going to affect Addon developers’ ability to access the information supplied through the Blizzard Nameplates, Bossmods, and Damage Meters, and then adjust the presentation on a visual and audio level?

Crash Reed: So… I think, speaking with our technical side, there’s a blog that went [will go] out that would be able to dive much, much deeper into the technical aspects of what that actually looks like. So, I wouldn’t be able to speak 100% on that, but I would say what that is doing is it’s keeping those combat values ‘Secret’. And so as that information is being put out, the addon authors would be able to latch onto that, so if a buff was to come up said that you have “this”, they would know that information. What they wouldn’t know is exactly what buff it is. They wouldn’t be able to tell what that buff is, those durations, those things… Those values are being provided via our secret values, that system. So that would be the crux of it, is that you won’t have the ability to parse that combat log, and instead you’ll be taking the data that is being provided, and then you’re able to use customization on top of those.

Icy Veins: You mention that one thing that will no longer be possible is that Combat Log Events and Combat Log Chat Messages can no longer be parsed through Addons whatsoever. Unfortunately, there are quite a few spec-unique abilities, buffs, say for example Shadow Techniques for Subtlety Rogues or Tempest for both DPS Shaman specs, that heavily rely on reading information from the Combat log to even be able to provide information on when this proc is going to occur. Will that still be possible with the new system, or will the abilities be adjusted to make sure that the players have all the information they need to really play their rotation to the fullest?

Ion Hazzikostas: The sorts of abilities you mention are a lot of the things that our combat team has been taking a close look at. I think when we first began this conversation with the community earlier in the spring, 6-7 months ago, we talked about addon philosophy. The feedback we heard from the community was very important to us. A lot of the combat changes that we’ve seen roll out in this past week aren’t things that necessarily have been planned for years. Some of them are really responses to what we heard from the community where they very correctly pointed out ‘well if you’re gonna disable the ability of addons to read real-time combat information, how am I possibly supposed to keep track of my Outlaw Rogue priorities or when to use this shadow priest ability cause there’s so many different variables involved that I dont know how to track without having a weakaura for it. And our response was, ‘you’re right – wait a minute, is that good design? Should we be making a class ability or a talent whose optimal use requires you to make a split-second decision based on whether you have more than N stacks of this, is the cooldown of this thing below Y seconds etc. Like, you know, many of the decision trees you build out on Icy Veins as you lay out optimal rotations. If it’s not really humanly possible to check, and compute, and track all of those things, why are we asking you to do it, and is that reasonable? Is that good design even? And I think the conclusion we came to is that in many cases it wasn’t great design, but it had been propped up and kind of papered over by addons solving the problem for players, when that should’ve been our problem to solve. So I think our approach is either: There’s functionality in the cooldown manager to let you track a proc or track a cooldown or something, or, if it’s so complex that it really does require these multi-variable calculations, we should be redesigning that effect so that it is something that a human can actually keep track of and use efficiently.

Icy Veins: When it comes to healers, a lot of them are very worried at the moment that not being able to read the combat log information anymore will mean that they will no longer be able to plan out their cooldown usage. Starting with a big spreadsheet, then importing it into a note in the game, then through a Weakaura tells you “Is minute 2:17, use your big cooldown right now!” Will that also be blocked through these changes, or how do you envision this is going to be affecting raiders and players in general?

Ion Hazzikostas: So, that’s something we need to keep talking through. Thinking about it, there’s certainly pure text notes that many raiders use to keep track of cooldown usage, who is cooldowning the first intermission the third ability.. All that is certainly possible. Addons should also know how long have you been in this encounter for; that basic piece of information, of how many seconds have elapsed since the fight started, isn’t really anything that we could, I think, reasonably protect. Now, they won’t be able to actively track the cooldown state of everyone else, but if you need to keep a personal reminder for yourself that you want to use whatever ability at 2 minutes and 30 seconds into the fight, that should still be possible. I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that would break it. But ultimately, part of rolling these changes out, and having an encounter that, as players will see, the Belo’ren encounter, the first raid boss in the march on quel danas raid, testable on alpha the first week, is to start getting this feedback on how the holistic experience of all of these UI elements along with the new addon rules work in that setting. We’re gonna begin raid testing for tuning purposes later on in beta, like we always do, right. It’s very unusual to have a raidboss available this early, but we’re making the raidboss available not really for feedback on the tuning or the encounter mechanics, but just to give people an environment to see the full experience and give us feedback on what feels like it’s missing.

Icy Veins: When it comes to raid management tools, obviously, when we’re talking about being able to track when the next Combat Rez is coming up, we’re assuming a lot of the information will naturally be available through the cooldown manager. But are there any improvements in the works or planned when it comes to, say, for example, saving the layout of the World Markers throughout multiple raid nights (at the moment they still disappear after 4 hours), or even just offering an increased number of world or target markers for players?

Crash Reed: here is no plan right now to do anything like that at the moment, specifically; however, you bring up a topic that’s very interesting because we want to make sure, as we’re talking about with these new addons, we want to increase the ability for players to communicate. So we are looking at things that would increase that. I think maybe that’s a great improvement you brought up, and we’re also looking at the ping system; can we make those kinds of things more robust? All of the different types of raid management tools, because communication becomes more important in this new world that we’re living in, and being able to rapidly communicate. There’s nothing to announce right now, but we’re definitely looking at those avenues.

Ion Hazzikostas: I can say that the suggestion of being able to save raid marker layouts is something that has come up a couple of times; it’s something that the team is considering. I think our focus right now was on all these other changes for midnight. I think there’s also a sense that a lot of those raidmarker layouts, currently, are often used in conjunction with very specific weakauras that kind of define a meaning for each symbol. And so I think we want to see how that plays out in the new world and evaluate whether that’s still important functionality to add.

Icy Veins: Augmentation Evokers… A lot of them have always been lamenting the lack of being able to track their own performance within the game, since the log hooks kind of only work through third-party tools at the moment. Will there be an improvement, or will Augmentation Evokers be able to track their performance through the damage meters by Blizzard?

Ion Hazzikostas: We don’t currently have functionality planned in the initial rollout of our damage meters that is going to be special for augmentation beyond what external log sites can do. It is something that we would like to look into more. I think, as the community has found, it can also be a challenging thing to perfectly track and attribute the damage. So we want to make sure that, certainly, if we are providing an official version of any of this, that it’s accurate, and we have an obligation to do that if we’re gonna do it at all. I think our primary focus, though, has been initially on replicating the existing functionality that players are used to from addons, and then this is just the beginning. This is the foundation that we’re laying, and if there’s ways in which we can go above and beyond what players are used to, we’d love to do that. Like, one thing that we are excited about when it comes to our damage meters is the fact that they’ll be server-side authoritative, so you don’t have to worry about sync issues or players in different phases or anything like that; it should just be the one true source of the damage being done in the instance.

Icy Veins: You mentioned it a few times, but what would be the go-to avenues to provide thoughts and feedback, both for players and their gameplay experience, as well as addon developers specifically, to talk about their thoughts and issues that they run into?

Ion Hazzikostas: I think all the usual channels, but Crash can speak to the Add-on side certainly.

Crash Reed: Yeah, I would say I am an avid, avid forum reader. If there are posts that are specifically about the UI, about the addons, about UX, anything, I am in those forums. So I think that is a very, very good way to do that. I also consume lots and lots of creator videos, I read Icy Veins, I read lots of things. So I think just keeping that going, those are my favorite avenues, the forums will be number one though, for players. For players trying to respond, the forums are the best way to get to me and my team.

Ion: And then for addon authors, for addon developers in particular, our engineering team maintains a Discord specifically for them to answer technical questions and to have open lines of communication. I think that’s where some of the technical details about how this “Black Box” system will work were first shared yesterday, and we’re making sure to invite thousands of addon authors to this first alpha wave, which is usually unprecedented; we actually usually have addons fully disabled early in alpha. So we want to make sure there’s specific channels for our [Add-on] developers to let us know how the technical implementation is working, what unexpected roadblocks they are running into, and what we can do to best support this very important part of the community, that does in turn support the rest of the community.

Icy Veins: From a player’s perspective, it often feels like almost all item-slots are locked in with little to no options in gearing, from must-have trinkets, to tier-set items, to cantrip items, as well as two embellished items. Even with the Great Vault, with all its slots, it often turns into a disappointment as a result. Where will items in Midnight land on this spectrum?

Ion Hazzikostas: It’s a great question, a great observation. I think it’s something that our systems team and our rewards team spend a lot of time thinking about as well. We’re always trying to come up with creative items, things that are a bit outside of the box, things that vary the usual approach, but at the same time we also understand that the community has a strong desire to distill things down to a Best-in-Slot list, and that those lists will get published, and that for many players it doesn’t really matter how many items there are, how many options there are. They just see ‘this is the best’ and then everything else is bad, and that is the blend through which they view things. That’s a challenge in so many games, and it is one that we grapple with as well, because we want the ability to have an exciting item be an exciting reward, as opposed to this just being the only thing that matters, and now every other thing you might get as a drop or from your Vault feels frustrating by comparison. I don’t have an easy answer for this one, honestly. I think it’s something that we want to make sure is in the current world. We want to be mindful of different playstyles and making sure that there are different sources of competitive options for people who only focus on one piece of content, so they don’t feel like they are totally locked out of the things that they are looking for. But beyond that, min-maxers are going to min-max, and I think for the majority of players, though, they’re not necessarily as focused on that in that world. I think for a ton of players, they’re getting an upgrade, they’re excited about that upgrade, and that’s enough for them. But we understand that at a competitive level, people are going to be drawn to “just the best”. It’s a problem we’ve yet to solve, frankly.

Icy Veins: Did you guys ever consider a lightweight commendation system for Mythic+ that decays over time and unlocks harmless perks like transmog-glow for a limited time for players to incentivize positive behavior to combat toxicity?

Crash Reed: Nothing to talk about right now in terms of a commendation system, but it is absolutely something on our radar that we are looking at, something to consider and look at. Nothing that we would be talking about now, nothing to show or comment on, but that is a consideration that we have been looking at.

Ion Hazzikostas: I think in general there is a lot of focus on preventing or punishing toxicity, but I think it’s equally important, if not more important, to encourage and reward positive behavior if you really want to shape a community.

Icy Veins: Let’s sneak one last question in! When it comes to cross-faction issues, there is still some outstanding problems when it comes to loot-trading, which is only possible within dungeons, so the moment you leave the raid, you suddenly have to get back to a dungeon to trade an item, or even just inviting people to a guild that are from the opposing faction. Will those issues be solved going into Midnight, or will there continue to be some problems?

Ion Hazzikostas: You’ll also be able to trade in shared neighborhoods now! I think the focus on expanding cross-faction has been focused on Housing and Neighborhoods in Midnight. If I were going to look into a crystal ball, I’d predict that several years from now down the line most of these barriers will be gone, but we’re not yet at a point where the outdoor world is by default cross-faction. There’s a lot of old technical assumptions built into how the outdoor world works, and there’s a lot of things to unpack. I understand some of the inconveniences, but we’re hopeful that, at least, despite them, it’s worth it being able to play with each other in a limited capacity, which is why we rolled it out that way, instead of waiting until we could do the entire package at once.

Thank you very much, Ion and Crash, for the interview. It was a pleasure talking to you, and we hope you and the entire team at Blizzard Entertainment will have a great Alpha launch!