 What's up guys? I'm here at PAX West. We'll stay safe and we're actually sitting here getting ready for story time with Ian Hasekosis. So this is the opening ceremony and thought why not record it. Maybe post it on YouTube. So hope you guys enjoy. We're coming out to join us this morning. We're coming out to hear me tell my story. This is crazy surreal experience. I'm excited, humbled by the invitation. So for those of you who haven't watched one of these talks before, did a bunch of research, but watched the last like 10 years or so online to help prepare, this is the theme of story time. It's a developer talking about their own personal journey, their story in the game industry, and that's what I'm going to be doing. Maybe some lessons learned along the way. If you're hoping to learn about the next wild patch, sorry, this is not going to be that kind of talk. So it's been a crazy month. August 2018, we stand here at the end of it. Two and a half weeks ago, we just released this game, a game called Battle for Azeroth. It's been amazing to see millions of people around the world jump in and just dig into exploring this label of the entire World of Warcraft team over the last two plus years. But when Pax reached out to me with the invitation to come and give this talk, it was the one hand, the worst conceivable time ever since the kind of energy game that took me to release. On the other hand, actually, really fitting for me, because I've been reflecting on my own journey and how the events looked like me to this point. Because, actually, ten years ago, on this very day, I was starting to lose an entertainment. My first week at Blizzard, my first week on the World of Warcraft team, had just come to the East Coast. I was living in temp housing at the suitcase, got on the night before. I woke up crazy early in the morning. I made some nervous and still being at East Coast time. I called the yellow cab, taking me to Blizzard offices. This was way before Lift and Uber were a thing, and I didn't have a car yet since I just moved out here. And I was standing there, like 7-7-30, looking up at these gates. I was pretty much the only one there, because this is a game development studio in the 7th of the morning. But it was exciting, anxious, a little scared, but above all, just eager to begin this next step in my journey. Part of why it was so impactful, though, was not just the background I was in here at the campus of this company that had been engaged. I had drawn my entire life and idolized it. But because of, in some other ways, they're all likely it was. Because actually 5 years prior, 15 years ago today, I was actually sitting in a classroom just like this in my U.S. school of law, beginning my third year as a law student taking a criminal procedure class. And I had been following what felt like a pretty steady path throughout my entire life. As long as I remember, I wanted to be a lawyer, but maybe when I was like 5, I wanted to be an astronaut, but that was a phase. But for most individual purposes, you know, this is a goal that I had pursued, and there was a fair amount of certainty and comfort there. And I had a job lined up for after I graduated. Life was good. I think my interest in the law, and I forgot to say it goes back quite a ways. I think when I was like 11 or 12, doing some summer reading, actually writing this book, John Grisham's The Firm, and it wasn't the money laundering for the mom, but that was actually the first part of the book. Reading about a young lawyer who's graduating from law school, going looking for law firms, spoilers, he picked the wrong one. The details of the minor issue, the day-to-day work, the sorts of problems, the real legal talk that flushed out the background of the story, actually fascinated me. I wanted to learn more. It sounded really cool, sounded really interesting to me. So I talked to some family friends, sought out whatever resources I could, and everything I'd learned about the law appealed to me. Now, if they're on my mind, I'm always like, solving puzzles, I'm like, you know, problems. And that's how I viewed the law and it's for legal practices, basically, taking a puzzle that consists of a set of facts, a set of laws, some extra resources like maybe interpretations of those laws, other documents that have been written. And solving a puzzle that is, what is the best argument you can make given these fixed things in support of this position? And it wasn't just not making the argument, that was the first half of it. You might have this perfect idea in your head, that's what you thought. But you also needed to be able to express it, to convince others through word, written, spoken of the validity of your argument. And in the course of making an argument, you might often realize that it wasn't quite as perfect as you imagined it. And you could do all of this in service of protecting rights, in service of society as a whole. What was someone's thought to like? And so I was sold. I was hooked. A lot of the choices I made could not point on. Classes I took, I was to curriculars I pursued, they were all in service of this idea. In fact, I was like 11, 12, I wouldn't be a lawyer when I grew up. And so, when I got to college, two years down the line, I took classes that were tailored to achieve that goal. And four years later, when I made it to NRU and was starting law school there, it felt like that was my realized this dream I had ten years ago. It felt pretty amazing. And there's something to be said about it. And it was, you know, I felt like I had this great life that I had planned for. And yet, as we just saw, not that many years later, I found myself standing in front of the gates of Blizzard on a cool morning in Irvine. So what happened? And there's another side to my life that maybe makes it not quite as breakthrough. Let's take a look at that. Going way, way back, 1983, you know, this was a big year in the life of the young Ian, as opposed to this, I was getting ready to start my first year of preschool. Also, I had just been introduced to a world that would captivate me throughout the rest of my life. My mother-in-law was an elementary school teacher. She taught first grade. She was actually transitioning to being a computer teacher as computers began to get more and more in place in schools around the country. And so they did some of those readings, and she was reading about the value of educational software and computers to develop and get minds. We brought home this text insurance, you had $99,000 more out of it. And had, you know, some, you know, there was some educational software in place, number names, spelling names, other things along those lines. But as we've seen it, there's a device that can have names on it. It will have names on it, it doesn't matter whether it's a calculator or whatever it is. And so out of all of those, the one that sticks out in my mind the most, and I don't expect any of you to play this or remember it, but this game was called Tunnels of Doom. And this came down to 1982. It was actually crazy ahead of its time in a lot of ways. It was basically a roguelike. It was a 10 layer, procedurally generated dungeon. You make a party to venture to the start, and your goal was to make it to the lowest level of the dungeon when you progressive your king who was trapped there. And you, you know, explore, defeat monsters, rally generated levels each time, buy weapons and shops along the way, and if you lost, game over and try again. When I first started playing this, I believed it was bit too young, couldn't make heads and tails like this, but a lot of time exploring the top level, getting nowhere, but I was still captivated. And over the course of the next couple of years, I made greater strides and eventually managed to get to the depths of the dungeon. And it was a great triumph at the time. But it really opened my eyes to this whole world of fantasy and imagination and, you know, looking beyond simple graphics and lines and pixels and dreams of adventure and progression and rewards. And a lot of things that I would continue to seek out and gain across the rest of my life. Just kind of a quick tour through some of those. So a few years later, slightly better graphics. For context, I was an intended kid, I was an active kid. My mother was a little educator, we had educational discounts on Apple computers at later times. So that's what we had around the house. We never actually had a standard PC computer until many, many, many years later when I was in law school and I actually needed a laptop for exampating software. So in the meantime, the games that I played were the ones that were available in that universe. Of course it's a big part of what attracted me to Blizzard games in the first place, because all of the games from the 90s ended up on the back, which is unusual at the time. One thing though that stands out, a lot better graphics, in the upper right here, we see a bunch of text. So in the 90s, we started to see the origins of the very first online multiplayer games. Back then, these were bulletin board door games that you'd call into a computer to maintain by just a random hobbyist and play for these games. Often taking turns, there's only one person in a time would pass. This was something that my friends and I were super into, we were junior high school, early high school. And these games opened my eyes to the possibility that gaming wasn't just about sitting next to somebody on a couch and sharing that experience with them, but that it could bring people together from much greater distances. So it's pretty neat to keep all through these online games. And later, yeah, then, slightly nicer graphics. Pretty cool game called YAMBO there in the upper right. That was a pretty big fixture in the 1990s and 80s. But at the lower right, again, another text based online game. A lot of all teams are dungeon. And these were really the progenitors of the MMO RPG in a lot of ways. I think there was MMO RPGs that they weren't massive, but there were hundreds of people, maybe, participating in these worlds. There were persistent environments with drama and buffs and nerfs and balance. And a lot of the things that came to define the MMO genre there after. I actually had quite a bit of time playing a couple of them. And actually, at some point when I was taking some college programing classes, a few online friends and I tried to start a realm of respect. A few months puzzling through the idea of coming up with your own classes and spells and building your own world. It was a problem. And so, the sum of all this is that from the earliest age, when I was four onwards, I had immersed myself in a wide variety of games, often with progression elements, often with online components. And then I was training myself in a way that wasn't even conscious of the time, but because of the stuff I mentioned earlier, it was how I like to approach things as possible as a problem, to be entangled in another world. I was just naturally thinking about what worked, what didn't, what I did, what frustrated me. I got to see how buffs or nerfs played out in some of these online environments and learned lessons from that. I was doing what was actually, in a sense, building a skill set. It was a slight digression. You often hear game developers, game designers talk about someone, whether it's praising a colony or evaluating an interview candidate, they'll talk about someone's design instincts, someone who has good instincts, or someone who has questionable instincts. And instinct is a funny word because it makes it sound like you sprang fully formal from the womb destined to make games, like it's, you know, a big bird in its nest. But that's not what instinct means in this case. Instinct is more a reflection of something that we as humans are just naturally adapting, which is consolidating vast amounts of information and experience into planning patterns, and then using that to guide our intuition, to guide one, and to think of an incident. Consider chess, for example. A novice chess player that will get a board and evaluate every possible move one at a time, thinking through it, if I do this, and she does that, and I can do this, oh, we never mind that's bad, we'll think of that in a different direction. A master who has spent thousands of hours and looked at hundreds of thousands of positions might just have an intuitive sense of what he had in mind, because it had a matter of a second or two. This is a strong position, this is a weak position. Or I might even see a winning move. And that's effectively the pattern of our mission, that is the consolidation of vast amounts of experience, and that's something that directs designers, directs people on a creative area, where you can't possibly evaluate every possible, every possibility, you have to have something to guide them, take one another. Anyway, that's effectively what I've been doing, that's effectively how I've been training myself in the course of just living my life and having fun. And there's a couple of books I recommend if you're interested in learning more about the formation, those thought processes, or the factors that lead people to success in the course of the course. Watch, watch more, because many, many topics worth of information contain these books, but they're both great reads. Now, I just want to take a second to make it clear, as I was assembling these slides, it occurred to me, I didn't want to paint them a sleeping picture. My life wasn't just, okay, I played a bunch of video games for 20 years, and that was what prepared me to be a game developer, to be a game designer online. And I think there's a lot more to it than that, there's a lot more to it than that. So, I ran an example, so if you've looked at my name, and I've come to a huge surprise that I have some great characters, my father was supporting Greece, and I was probably not. The bedtime stories that he would read me were actually Greek books, those were my fairy tales, it was Perseus and Medusa, Thezias and the Minotaur, Heracles and his labors, trying to get home to the gods. Those were the stories that captivated me and transported me. And as soon as they, you know, could read better, those were some of the first books that I sought out and asked my parents for so I could learn more. And later on, you know, wherever I could, I wanted to delve more deeply into those worlds and other mythologies. That interest actually led me, when I was in high school, to take Latin instead of German or French or Spanish or something more conventional, because I wanted to be closer to the stories that had helped just shape my imagination when I was young. I also caught a ton of baseball cards, I was super into baseball. I was a tenor, I probably could have gained the starting roster of every major league baseball team, a lot of number crunching, and again, just a totally separate classroom of interest that I was exploring. Speaking of numbers, I always liked math, I liked puzzles, I liked math puzzles, I was actually captain of my high school math team just to give you the level of merit we're talking about here. It's pretty high. And even in high school, and even in high school here, I was a mix of following trends into this, but wanting to challenge myself, wanting to take more risks, wanting to learn a bit about what could lead me to be up on stage and be the vulnerable in front of a crowd of people who do not quite this size of a crowd, but it was something. And the point is, there's a lot more to me than just the games that I play, there's a lot more to anyone that comes into the game industry than just the games that they play. The games are a subset of it, but they're not a whole. I think with any art form, and that's what games are, there's mastery and knowledge or craft, but there's also the perspective that you bring to it. And one of the cool things about the game industry is that really, only very recently, when there are formal programs that you can take to prepare your for game development, almost everybody has some different stories just to keep up with like 10, 15 years. They start out with some different client-like images that led them there. And so, whether it's someone who has a past-age or history that informs the world-building or someone who has an outdoorsman, is hiking and camping, and those pictures, those images, seared on your mind, or makes them, or that makes them entirely art. I think everyone brings something, some new perspective, and that's what actually expands in the game, as well as just enabling it. Anyway, slightly richer. Let's go back to our story. I was in Florida graduate school. I moved down to Washington, D.C. for my very first real job as an adult. I was working as a clerk for a federal and public judge in D.C. And this was an amazing job. It was everything I had hoped the law would be, everything I wanted to be. I was working with kind, smart, talented people, helping to research, evaluate, look into positions and their briefs, and help my judge reach conclusions of law. And these were very important things that we have seen just in our headlines once they were decided. And so I was doing interesting, fascinating work and I was making a difference in the world. Life was so good. Things were good. Now, after I got set up and about three months after that, this is the game that came out. And as I go huge loads of time on my life, it's like Warcraft 2.0 and Biola with friends in high school and was sustained in this world. Well, to be honest, I hadn't actually paid a ton of attention to the details of Warcraft. I had just graduated from law school, taken the bar exam, relocated my whole life. I was moving. And so while I knew about Warcraft, I hadn't cleared the data. I didn't really know all the details. But I had some free time. So I was looking for teens. I was looking for a new game to play. And so for a while, I was just going to, yeah, my best friend was to just hop on my server and go from there. I decided to reach out to a friend of mine and Owen, who had played some of my games in the past, just to ask me, are you going to play Warcraft? If so, in any renovation of the server, I should play. And he said, yeah, yes, I'm playing. I'm playing with these big internet form deals. You should come join us. We're going forward. So I said, sure, why not? I was in the shape of 14 years of my life. I was just really on the start of all of them. And it was Thanksgiving break. And I had been away through recess, playing out for the court. So I actually had a fair bit of free time. And I really jumped in and started exploring and immersing myself in this world. And going to relatively blind, actually made it even more magical. I think more so than if I had played the data about what I've been reading about in the first months. Because every adventure, and it was the best game I've ever played. There's no question about it. And really became a fixture for me going forward. Now I was just one person, this giant deal with hundreds of people. Yeah, just internet forms deal, not like a tight-knit group of friends, just anybody who wanted to join me, anybody who wanted to play together, who was right in this community. But as some time passed, early 2005, when I was max level, and the group started making their first explorations into the game's first big race, it was a place called Baltimore, a 40-player dungeon. And so they were looking for more bodies because they weren't that many people max level at the time. And so I volunteered and packed along. Now back then, the game's user interface was very, very simple. And even when this was a 40-player group, the UI by default only actually let you see the other four players in your five-player party. And I had the misfortune of being placed in a group that didn't have a healer. Which meant that no one could actually see that I was injured, let alone target the healer. Which meant that I set up like 90% of the rate dead. Super fun. And seeing this thing, that hopefully a few thousand people in the world had seen at this point, and we failed repeatedly and got nowhere. But it was awesome. World Warcraft 2005, I think. We went back recently to the group. Maybe a little bit more ambitious time than Warcraft. But Spanish, we're still... Things are so rough. We needed it further in, as those of you who play it and remember Warcraft 4, do these mods called Ancient Warhounds, that would respond very frequently. And as we slowly were slogging our way through the place, very commonly one of them would respond right on top of our group, kill us and say, alright, back to the entrance. Very slow going. For whatever reason, I happen to have one of these on my desk, about this exact thing, with something that looked a whole lot like that. I had a really good explanation. I think I basically used this a little like the digit flicker thing, with more digit spinners and huge stuff that existed. But I happened to notice that there was a pattern to what the Warhounds were doing, but they would respond every 15 to 18 minutes or so. And so I started timing, and I actually used the physical stopwatch when we killed the one. I would start the timer. And after I started calling it, I spoke up four of the first times on our voice comms, and said, hey, this is what it's safe to move up. We should wait, respond soon. And before I knew it, after about 23 minutes of this, I was basically the fact of leading the way. Because I was telling the group why it was safe to move, and when. And it turns out, a lot of the time, in order to lead effectively, you just need to step up and do it. There's part work that is desired as soon as you can perform a diamond function. Equalism. And that is the link from being the anonymous member of the Raid Group dying and treated the group with no healing to the group's raider over the course of a week or two. And so as we eventually further through the core, we eventually, over the course of weeks to come, a couple of feet to drag us, if we did it next year, we would raise whole flags, raiding hills, we could take pride in the fact, especially back then, there were only a few thousand people who had seen what we had done. It felt amazing. Well, continuing further, two Raid zones later, there was this so-called entourage and this is where my devil hit one of our first real brick walls. We were struggling with this encounter, called the Twin Elms. And I was pretty sure that based on what I had seen, that we had found a serious bubble of the encounter. It was very specific, technical bubble that required, you were doing the strength that we were trying to do, we'd run into something that was closing of interest at that. Now, at the time, there were a lot of encounters, because the culture in the wild community was one of near absolute secrecy around raiding. This is something that had been inherited from the game EverQuest previously, where Raid also was a single one in a public space and if you killed it, another deal on the server couldn't. And so the knowledge of how to overcome encounters was something to be zealously guarded. And even though little warcraft encounters, that set of cutting lines, those set of moves forward. And so I could just go close to the forums, hey, this is what we're seeing, this is how we're doing the encounter, and this is the bubble we're writing into. So it was kind of a loss. I don't remember, in speaking of EverQuest, that one of the lead developers on the little warcraft actually in the well-known EverQuest later in the past. And so I actually went to an old EverQuest build form, made an encounter, and sent him a private message saying, hi, sorry, why are you here? I think I have a bug. And I explained, and sent him some message and thought, I'll make sure to write it. A couple of days later, he got back to me, and came to report the bug. Appreciate it. He said, in the future if you want to reach out to me, you don't have to go to the forum. Here's my email address. And so I can send you feedback, reporting bugs, here and there where I could. The name he went by was Worns, was Tickle, or as we know him today, Papa Jeff. So it's true. Definitely one of the lead games I know in warcraft became an incredible resource. I did my best to not take advantage of this, you know, lifeline as direct connection and not what I had concerns when I had bug roaches to share. I would send him an email about that. And we continued to know what a great course would be like for the expansion. And it became a relatively solid grade build. We were at some point, one of the top, you know, 10 or 20 in North America. Brandy Crusade, elevated the game to new heights. I took a brief break some more along the line, and really the life I was living at this point was very much like border by day, great leader by night. Two separate worlds, kind of plaza and work, no one would have gasped her down and let her just go home and have this all for you. And yeah, so, our build site, back then, I had a build website, you would post strange shots on it, you would keep people off the data and your latest kills but in this case, a lot of people from other top build started coming to our forums to congregate, to discuss, to share information, to learn. And it was a place where there were a lot of smart people with varying backgrounds. Some of them were graduate students studying math, just a couple programmers, others were actually developers in the industry. All shared a common bed for the way all of our caps work. And I think it's a stretch that claims this is where theory cap has been started but I think it's definitely a part of that story. And so, it was awesome seeing our humble build website become a nexus of discussion and analysis as people try to, for the first time definitively answer, well when you're playing this class is it better to use this rotation or my rotation, not just what feels better but what thinks better as to the level of depth and analysis that was possible in some of these games. As well as expanding the community of awesome folks that I am a contact with, a game contact with. It was somebody who was a member of the forums back then who was actually starting to reply to Law School. Who knew I was a lawyer who reached out to message me to ask for advice of kind to Law Schools who's now actually completely separately is a small world and the internet makes it a smaller world and it's amazing. The first list kind of been held in 2005 but I wasn't nearly, didn't know enough about the game back then to consider going but by this point it was something I knew I had to go to. And this was my first time meeting any of my ill mates face to face who also made the trip out or were living in California. It was also a chance for me and also to grab lunch with him and a couple of other folks like Alex Proxiani, the young creative director or Scott Barser, who was an encounter designer that I'd been sending feedback to as well and reaching out to it kind of correspondingly as a player to develop. And to this day I have people who usually reach out and send messages whether it's on Twitter or Facebook as we've had because I remember how much it meant to me as a player to feel like I had this connection with the developer of the game that really was this massive central part of my life and anything I could do to help share a bit of that feeling, to help pay a bit of that back I want to do. So, hold on, this isn't going to be the other half of my life. So, after my one year clerks have ended unfortunately it's only a one year gig and they're letting me but it's time for everything and then I probably won't be here. I went on to work at a law firm doing large scale commercial litigation had a pretty significant amount of student debt to pay off from the law school and so going to a firm like this was the best way to do it. And I was still working alongside a lot of smart people doing a lot of fascinating work but also an increasing amount that wasn't quite as integral as the cult discovery where, you know, we need to settle a little bit of dispute. You asked for the other side but the other side is not a civil party or there's the government and vice versa, you ask me, can you give me all of the documents in your possession that relate to acts and they do and maybe 30, 40 years ago it was like here's two boxes of stuff. Nowadays it's here are 3.7 gigabytes of text files from our entire exchange server and yes, who gets to go through and process a lot of those things, lawyers. And so there was less of a puzzle solving, a problem solving that I loved and a bit more like fishing through boxes to find the right puzzle pieces to even begin solving. And so I was starting to look for something a bit different supplying to other legal jobs at the time and reaching them and passing in 2004 to see, just to kind of complain obviously, like for jobs kind of sucks like setting up letters, resumes, the general stress of it and around this time he actually confided with me on a secret he had actually just gotten a job at Blizzard. He had been a programmer previously and kind of changed gears largely inspired by his, you know his passion for World War II and he was having a blast like he loved it, he had opened the whole door of my mind. I got into the very first time thinking wait, is that something I could do? And it quickly decided now of course not that stupid I'm a lawyer, I spent the last ten years of my life preparing for this, training for this, going to school what do I know about game design anyway that's it now. But a few long months passed and I found a couple other jobs other legal jobs nothing that was super exciting to me though and that itch still remained so I reached back up to everyone and I said hey, does Blizzard have any design openings? Is there anything like my there any possibility there? And graciously he agreed to act as a referral if I wanted to to apply and I wrote what I could say is probably one of the most ill-advised cover letters in which I said literally I don't know that I want this job and it was true it was true in my mind I was still a lawyer but man I'm so curious to learn more here and I was really worried that my friend would be sticking his neck out acting as a reference for me and that I might just get cold feet back at the whole process partway through but I applied and then that's what happened but it was set in a design test so lengthy series of questions ranging from design to satisfaction to how to modify this encounter to be suitable for different grades a bunch of stuff that I never really thought about before in those terms but it was awesome I spent the whole weekend just writing thousands of words and responding to questions and even if I didn't go any further in the process it was worth it just for that long it was actually genuinely a super fun experience but they actually invited me out for an interview and so I flew out to California found myself on the Blizzard campus getting ready for a day of face-to-face discussions with this development team that I had watched from afar and idolized and again I liked it in the test it was the most amazing experience as a cloth alien that lived in a double life previously actually sitting down in a professional setting with the trapping to the job interview and debating class design for 30 minutes it was awesome had an amazing time it was like a whirlwind fantastical journey and I got back out playing flew back to DC and went back to what I was saying thought nothing for a while I'm on the path and was reached back out to Italy and said we want to offer you a good job and suddenly this wall became super real because it actually had it totally been up until that point in all honesty it was still like a lawyer, this is a life that I'm living but I've had this amazing little side journey and this was just fantastic but then I had a real question am I going to walk away from my career or walk away from financial security from what's on the country to be under all of these things I reached out to friends and family for advice at parents initially thought I lost my mind it was my casualty like the way you want to go is what but the more I lie about it the more I realize I had to because if I didn't I realized this was the most I might find I was incredibly fortunate to have had it from across my life and if I didn't I also regret I was going to wake up one day whether it was a month later or it was a year later whether it was five months later or it comes to that and I had that moment of regret what would it have been like what if I could change this opportunity and I didn't want to feel that way so I took some safety precautions I talked to a... I gave myself one year I talked to a recruiter to make sure I was completely damaging my future career prospects so I took a year off for a long time but I said I'm going to do this I'm going to take a chance just as Blizzard took a gigantic chance on me and I'll prove and develop it if I'm being good at it if they like me and so that brings us back to our story again as I was standing in front of these gates on that warrior in August 2008 excited and looking ahead to this next chapter of my life that I walked in and I was arriving and very eventful time in a company a couple of months before graph religion came out the second expansion for Warcraft this was a super, super busy town the last stretch the last sprint to the finish line before expansion can be the end of my first week Jeff Campbell actually called bubble designing things together and said hey we have three and a half weeks to make the game the players deserve to finish it do everything in our power to make this memorable and this was our charge this was the last sprint to the finish and there was a lot of love to be done like you just got here don't feel any pressure or obligation you know this doesn't apply to you this is more just everyone has a lot more when they're playing they need to finish up they don't feel any obligation to them to stay away from the answer I look at it like you've been saying like at the time I was living in a tent house and I had a suitcase I was like I don't normally watch bad TV in a town where I knew no one or was I going to stay at the office and make world a freaking Warcraft and at the time also so we were a little bit less efficient in some way as we work than we are these days back then the entire zone of ice now the top end of Warcraft the Cochrane Expansion and so on was basically 70% empty there were zero creatures in it it did not look like the place where they were supposed to be where they were found because that's more the nature of the live products and the extent that I get literally was very well known to keep quality making people wait 12 months or something new that's not doing anything for the players but I had to be an amazing experience my initial work literally the things I did were my first days of the company I'd come back after the weekend and go to player fan sites and see that work on the front page of those fan sites because a new data bill didn't push out and had the data on it and that was surreal to me to I just put something in it and other people are playing it literally overnight it was crazy so around the time out I fell into a new role as a dungeon and raid encounter that was my first job formally unwrapped originally and I love it I knew pretty quickly but I wasn't going to be here for this trial period I was exiled this was a place I was very happy they did so there were some early challenges I think one of the biggest works was actually becoming adjusted becoming used to the creative process all through my life previously I had worked and lived in a domain of certainty that's not what I'm in condition to do for a young age whether it's elementary school teacher asking what seven times I'm and I would raise my hand and I knew that it was 63 and I had no more hope and praise for getting that answer or years later in high school US history teacher asking what's the XYZ affair what was its impact on late 18th century US trans relations if I didn't really I was going to stay quiet but if I knew it I'd be that obnoxious kid raising his hand saying ooh me because I had an answer to share but if I didn't know I was right I wouldn't have been into a creative environment it's a type of argument it's my native words if we're sitting around the group discussing boss mechanics like there's a skeletal cross track what should that dragging do what is right what is wrong what is smart what's a good idea what's a bad idea how could I have the confidence to open my mouth and say I had these ice blocks and break them out is that smart how should I know how should anyone know and so there's something terrifying actually about vocalizing these thoughts and exposing the judgment of others without any knowledge about it and it's something I think you almost never let go of the title I've heard people very senior folks at Blizzard this is a terrible idea but and there's that little bit of deflection there's that little bit of the same thing I don't know if this is good either but bear with me and even to this day I sometimes catch myself looking around the room looking for micro reactions on people's faces to know whether they're there whether they're busy whatever and what follows from that it's something to censure that's how the creative process works it's something that I need to take that test but it's also something that now in my role as a leader I think for anyone out there who is facilitating trying to organize a creative group or creative process I think the most important thing you can do is make sure that it feels like a safe place to share those ideas that there's never a sense of judgment that it's going to make somebody withdraw and refrain from their opinion next time because without that the final result, the whole ends of being the border I think that was in terms of a huge takeaway for me over the course of that initial onboarding and shifting my thinking from legal framework to a creative design framework Moving on a couple of years later catapulting a structure as this was coming out I actually made a shift from working on encounter design and I was also trying to juggle it to where I could but my primary job was coming up with capabilities chewing, balancing improving the overall feel of several of our character classes and I would try this in a way where I was wanting to go in every patch or so as a great way to kind of shift gears I could create a block in one area I would focus my attention on the other and so I would like to combat that but I would go up from this process you know on paper where it feels like objective math where it feels like something grounded in those areas of certainty I was talking about earlier but it's not on us so here's Matt again from Early in Capitalism now in our game we have a death knight class that has two different specializations both kill damage one is a pulley, one is frost and by this point several years after it's a chair and you break the down knowledge they collected combat logs activated them and processed them you can see on the stock market index they used to look every night's rates even you knew who was doing how well and players definitely let us know so in this world it was a sense frost was lagging a bit behind and holding in most situations and frost at night justified we reached out to us I said why you hate us Blizzard I just want to play the specials that I enjoy but everyone knows we're terrible and so we looked at the numbers and we know our own integral data simulations and we realized hey we know it frost is a few percent behind a pulley let's make some finely calibrated adjustments to frost to break them up so they're very useful to our pulley and so that's what we do and then a week passed we pushed our changes to frost 5 and this is what happened the numbers were simpler or more complicated than just about a fraction of numbers there were people behind these characters human psychology wouldn't pass anything what happened was fear grabbed our number crunchers looked at our changes and said frost is now a fraction of a percent better than a pulley under optimal circumstances which then was translated to frost as the new best of the players which then meant that all of the very best players for whom maybe that number the biggest thing to be was their source of joy in the game the base version of frost from unholy frost if you look at this chart you're thinking of the pulley in fact it's not long later unholy players like why did you nerf us why did you get a pulley I'm sorry now let's talk about this agency so look later this year blizzcon has been large because it was actually my first blizzcon where I had a role on stage I was asked for the first time to be part of a Q&A panel with the other class and systems designers and on this point I'd actually lied to my guild mates back then it was sort of considered of the most importance that no one should know that you were a developer or a blizzcon or a warground that had changed but even in blizzcon 2018-2009 I had I forget what that happened I just kind of still did it like a player would because at some level this reflected the fact that I was still living a double life in a sense yes I was going to work and I was making balls simple to work out and I was just in classes doing those sorts of things but I had fully embraced what my life was and when my first blizzcon came out Blizzard posted a local sign event in the Orange County area I figured it was a comprehensive collective decision to get them signed by the developer team I didn't go to that I stayed home and played the game because I was still a wild player more than I was a wild developer I think that myself was discerning to be there and sign the box I had just worked on the game for a few weeks that wasn't really worth a hundred this blizzcon changed and I had to break the news to my new mates and I had to go for it again hey by the way you might see me on stage tomorrow sorry the last messages of the old life I still longed to I had my mind moving on another couple of years list of Panaria our fourth expansion now at the start of this Scott Mercer who had been leading counter-design on the Warcraft for many years one of the folks I had met had launched with a blizzcon way back five years earlier decided he wanted to after that kind of service on the Warcraft team move on to a different project with a blizzcon leaving the leading counter-design and I didn't know that I was ready for it but typically almost like that makes you play cult sort of person's like came to jobs promotion you should apply for it I applied for it and in the course of the interview process then the producer then our production director John Hyde asked me a question on the lunch Ian why do people stop making things why do you want to be a leader why do you want to be a manager instead and I did not think that answer to that question because I hadn't really fully thought of it in those terms until that point it's a question I still ask people introduced today when I want to move through being individual contributors to being leaders because it's very different doing acts versus leading people and mentoring them and guiding them as they do acts whatever that may be and there's a traffic block in college where your best artist or your best engineer or best whatever gets promoted into a position where they no longer are actually making art or no longer are actually writing code and maybe they're not as good a manager maybe they're not as good a leader but they were conditioned to think like this is the next step they should take in life and they end up less happy and the teams up hold as up or soft because they've lost a great source of contribution and John Mott mentioned that I was a colleague of that traffic I actually took a lot of time to reflect on them and it occurred to me that this is actually what I wanted to give you I there were a lot of parallels a lot of lessons I learned from actually raiding I've never been the best player in my raiding group I wasn't the single most still raider but I was good at identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the group and assigning them to roles that suited those strengths and weaknesses and facilitating and soothing and accomplices and helping people work through the challenges to come with traffic to operate and get something done on a large scale and that's what I threw myself into at work from that point forward I think when I first moved into the role I actually had a meeting with my team within nine years just days earlier and one of the first things I said to them was please I don't want you to forget this I'm not something magically a better designer or a more smarter or have better ideas than I did yesterday just because I haven't reviewed my title right now don't think of me that way just think of me as a resource who can help you who can if you have problems that I can help you with I can help you solve what you know and I think this began a transition and a shift into thinking more as a leader more as a manager and less as a doer less as an implementer and yes so this was one of the first giant crazy things we set out to tackle from thunder I think one of the big goals for sort of the course in a secondary expansion was to do more to do it faster to keep our level of quality with the same team side we've had in capitalism and over the course of this expansion we've made literally twice as many great losses we've had in capitalism in my opinion without sacrificing quality I think that has set a standard so eventually the World War I've just tried to carry forward since then in terms of how ambitious we are how large our rates are what we've tried to accomplish with them and moving into more of a different I had another opportunity opened up and I shifted from being a leading counter designer to a leading game designer and I think this kind of reckless I would go back down and do subsystems work and do some creative accounting work and it was to me a best of a world but I was interested in all signs of game and this might be actually you know explore all of that simultaneously but as I moved into this for a while I started to notice something that the way that I related to people the way the other people related to me was changing as my responsibility shifted as my title changed over the years and the process that I'd follow into the game wasn't actually playing out the way that was done you know when I was a new designer I'd go look after you if I had an idea I had a suggestion something to follow should do whether it was smaller but I might start out by bouncing it off my tears focusing on desks right here to see what they come out if I had these suggestions if I still liked it and seemed excited I would let my lead know and say hey I had this idea of what if we and if they liked it then socialize it further with the other members of the team leadership and eventually I'd make it into the game if it did it was almost certainly improved along the way by being challenged by having a lot of questions by having suggestions things to augment it introduced by every other person who shared in the creative process and a lot of the time ideas that I woke up thinking were brilliant I quickly realized were terrible after running by just a few people but here by 2014 as a lead game designer I was actually having a much easier time getting my ideas into the game because there were way fewer people who could tell me no and I did more and this is certainly better than there were five years ago maybe they were a bit more refined maybe they were a bit more polished by lessons learned but I was no longer willing through the same process forgive the cheesy metaphor but I think this is a crucible a crucible is something in Blacksmithing that helps filter out impurities to create a better stronger whole as your final product and I think I've been putting my ideas into this process almost automatically by necessity because if I did it well then there was no way there would get into the game because there were gatekeepers between me and Matt as I gained more responsibility on my team I had to force this process to play out I had to actively go seek out not just peers but people on the team who worked for me as many different voices as I could find to run my ideas past to challenge so that this crucible could make them better for the sake of the game as a whole and I think it's something that if you just how do you just continue to go about my business unconsciously being like yeah and if they say yeah it's not something we can they take the game a little bit more soft for it so then I was getting closer to the present day after going to have probably fewer fewer lessons fewer insights at this point to have as much time to really reflect and totally process what I've learned more in my life but I do know one thing as soon as you came out my boss Tom Sheldon would be the game director of World of Warcraft from 2008 onwards we've been on World of Warcraft from 2003 onwards we've been a big game designer as well online previously like one of the real go-foggers in the animal genre he was also one to move on to the project and those are 10 years, 15 years of games quite good and that left me looking to move into those very, very big shoots to fill and as I moved into that role I was excited I mean I was awestruck I was humbled by the responsibility but also was terrifying I think this was an extension of something that I have felt throughout my career and that I still carry with me to this day right down there to be in shorthand for the boss syndrome and the idea that other people can be used like they are not looking to you and theoretically you're supposed to be a beacon of judgment and responsibility and guidance but especially when you first go this is certainly what you're doing and I look forward to meeting your forum press tomorrow and finally I miss you as know what you're always doing but whether it was me first coming into creative brain through my meetings and feeling it's really uncomfortable or unsure of their environmental leadership or unsure of how to better responsibilities guiding our team of 300 brain developers are expected to be waiting for it's something that I think is natural so I think first off if this is something you feel in any area of your life know that you're not alone know that I think it's a healthy natural part of this process moving into a new role of course you're not an expert in the role like I was comparing myself to somebody who had done it for almost a decade and I'm comparing myself to my first day in the job to his eighth year in the job for me I try to keep this in mind helps keeping I think humble and grounded that crucial idea that I talked about a couple of times earlier you know if I wake up one day and I think oh no yeah I'm the greatest man director I was born to do this maybe I'm not running all of my ideas past as many people as I possibly can and ultimately trust in the process that got you into a place where you are whether it's the leaders who promoted you directly whether it's a test that you passed some screening you made through others placed their faith in you have your judgment in your ability to excel and clearly if you're comparing yourself with what you think that is so great it might not be something so that brings us back to August 2018 as I stand here I am super excited to join all of you in the exploring past this weekend if you've seen me out about the convention anywhere please participate to come up and say hi always happy to chat and after can't wait to get back to Irvine and to continue building the next chapter of this journey for myself for my team familiar to characters around the world thank you welcome to facts 2018