Former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra has reacted to World of Warcraft’s recent string of issues, saying the long-running MMO needs a “reset.” He also commented that the “reset” he advocated for when running Blizzard included a whole new game called World of Warcraft 2.
Posting on social media, Ybarra said the recent WoW bugs are “unfortunate,” going on to say, “WoW has to reset and the commitment has to be clear and firm or it will continue to decline.”
Asked to list specific things Ybarra advocated for while he was running Blizzard to help improve WoW, he said there were multiple priorities he was going after. He said WoW should be a game about war, and it should make players feel and experience things like conflict, struggle, risk, reward, and achievement. “This is what WoW is all about,” he said.
Ybarra went on to say he wanted WoW to have an expansion that would hammer home to players that “there is always a Lich King” and take the story “much further.” He said there was “so much more” story to be told.
Additionally, Ybarra said he advocated for Blizzard’s developers spending more time working on raids and new game ideas designed first and foremost for “core” players vs. the game’s “casual audience.”
He also said he pushed for “WoW 2 instead of the same WoW 1 expansions over and over re-skinned.”
“For 10 or so years, [they] just don’t have the team for that anymore. It’s changed so much,” Ybarra said, referencing how core WoW developers like Jeff Kaplan and others left the team a long time ago.
In another post, Ybarra said although he wanted to see these changes, and the addition of WoW 2, he didn’t actually pitch the ideas because “the president of Blizzard doesn’t pitch game ideas.”
“He/She has little influence on the games themselves other than input at various stages and random ideation usually directly with the game director (who owns the creative vision for the game),” he said. “At Blizzard, at least historically, the game director decides what they want to do with the game. The president is just one channel of input they can completely ignore if they choose.”
Ybarra said WoW’s game director, Ion Hazzikostas, did not ignore Ybarra’s suggestions, but he “balanced a lot of things and ultimately decided where he wanted to take the game.”
“Who knows, my ideas could have been a terrible direction. Probably would have been!” he said.
Ybarra worked at Microsoft for nearly 20 years before becoming Blizzard’s president in 2021. He left in 2024 and Johanna Faries is now the president of Blizzard. As for Ybarra, he is currently the CEO of fantasy sports company Prize Picks.