Last Chance To Back The WoW Diary by John Staats
wowhead.comJohn Staats published The WoW Diary, a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of vanilla World of Warcraft back in 2018. A campaign on BackerKit is currently in progress, for a second printing of the beloved WoW Diary. We're excited to highlight excerpts written by John Staats during the campaign. If you find this article interesting, consider backing The WoW Diary. The campaign will be ending on Feb 24, 2023 at 9:00am PST —
The WoW Diary on BackerKitBelow is an excerpt from The WoW Diary on the pitfalls of success, written by John Staats --
The Pitfalls of SuccessOne of the most surprising takeaways from my book, The World of Warcraft Diary, was its melancholy ending. Readers and fans wanted to know how WoW’s launch affected the team’s morale. Were the new employees similar to the original devs? What were the growing pains of shipping a mega-hit like World of Warcraft? Did development become harder or easier after Vanilla WoW? Does money solve everything?
Success WastelandEarly in the dev cycle, surprises and discoveries from new technologies and features buoyed the team’s spirit—controversies about how things might pan out kept our imaginations fresh. By the end of the project, WoW was a known quantity. By the time we were playing it on live servers, we had had too much of it. The dev team’s low morale came from a general burnout from fixing bugs, iteration, and long hours. Instead of coming up with new ideas, we were putting out fires. Some devs wanted to work on a new game—or do anything different. We were sick of eating dinner with one another. No one had anything new to talk about since no one had a life outside of work. The dev team knew our post-launch fate would involve more of the same—fixing bugs,
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