Frank Pierce
J. Allen Brack
Blizzard Entertainment
The Universe Behind World of Warcraft

WoW launched on foundation of 10 years of Warcraft franchise. Warcraft 1 in 1994, sequel in 1995. Then Starcraft and Brood War. Team then split to Warcraft 3 (“Team 1”) – origin of the yellow exclamation point for quest! Frozen Throne had more of an RPG style experience. Other team (“Team 2”) started working on squad based RPG in sci-fi universe (“Nomad”). Struggled to find their stride, had lots of people playing UO and EQ. Team 2, “if we were starting a new project today, is Nomad the project we’d make?”. But the answer was ultimately no. The game would be an MMO and the Warcraft franchise worked well for that. That’s how World of Warcraft was born.

This data is not what WoW looked like in the past, or even how it looks in the future but is a snapshot of how it looks today.

EP > Game Director, Production Director > Art Dir, Tech Dir, Lead Sys Design, Lead Content Design, Lead World Design, Senior Producer Content, Senior Producer Systems, Senior Producer Operations. Form structure around the people, not people around a structure. Look at the skills of the people that you have. This is a different structure than for our other games. Note the dual reporting to the Game and Production Directors.

Keep teams around 5-8 people but routinely break that. 128 years of game industry experience in the leadership group.

Programming: Tech Dir > Lead Engine Prog, Lead Gameplay Prog, Lead Tools Prog, Lead Server Prog, Lead UI Prog, then programmers under each of those. Population: 32. Tools team has an important function, WoW will last so long that the tools that are being created are of commercial quality. Dev tools, but also CS tools. Better tools = more efficiency. Like any other deliverable, they go through an internal QA process like the games. Thousands of internal customers using these. Server team: server software infrastructure. Recently adding pooling of instance servers, let them not be dedicated to a single realm but a pool of realms. UI team is cross disciplinary, C++, LUA, artists and layout designers. Whole team maintains 5.5 million lines of code.

Artists: Art Dir > Lead Char / Tech Artist > Lead Environment > Lead Dungeon > Lead Prop > Lead Animator. Prop team relatively new, make all the torches, cheeses, etc. Animators and concept artists reporting to Lead Anim. Dedicated technical art team creates tools, cleanups, creation of collision meshes, last bit of art bug fixing. 51 artists. 1.5 million individual assets.

Production: Auxiliary management team to assist disciplinary team leads with task tracking & task management. Cross dept projects. Senior Producer Systems > Producer Tools, Producer Programmers. Senior Producer Content > tech writer, Producer Artists, Producer Designers. Senior Producer Ops > Associate Producer Live Operations.

1 producer per 10 developers. Creative teams do not report to producers, they report to creative people. Important aspect of management is succession planning. 4th person in the art director role, so have to identify and prepare future leaders. 10 people, tracked 33,000 tasks.

Design: Lead Systems Designer > Class Designer, Profession Designer, Itemization Designer. Lead Content Designer > Lead Exterior Level, Lead World Events. Lead World Designer > Quest Designers, Lead Encounter Designer. Population: 37. Exterior designers are combo design + art, use Wowedit to place props, buildings, heighmap adjustment. Zones all created by hand, nothing procedural. 70,000 spells. 40,000 NPCs.

But there are other critical departments that may not be as obvious / familiar.

Cinematics: Pre-rendered sequences, teasers. Cine owns these from beginning to end, starting with concept and storyboard all the way to final render. Very detail oriented. Also do Machinima sequences (as used for some of the patches, in-game storytelling sequences). Partners for a big component of storytelling. Also do creative direction of 12 ft statues and weapon replicas, action figures. Population: 123, so a huge group in and of itself.

Sound: Sound effects, music, voice casting and recording. Not on the WoW team proper but still very important. Lich King used a tool to programmatically change the sound of existing race voices (for the DK). Audio director composed a lot of the music in WoW. 27 hours of music in WoW, increases with every patch. Sometimes almost half the patch size is audio.

Platform Services: Director of Global Platform Services > Platform Tech, Mac Dev, QA, Localization, Technical QA. Shared resource dept. Mac versions going back to 1991. Compat testing as well as implementation of testing tech itself. Pop: 245 people.

QA: Lots of big patches make this bigger but their team doesn’t necessarily go up. 2600 quests in original Wow, +2700 BC, +2350 in LK. 7650 total. More content beyond quests of course, plus those patches. Automated testing experimented with but hasn’t worked as well as they wanted. Large raiding game (25+ players that requires some skill) which can be hard to test. Promote some of the top QA people into the development team. Bugs tracked: 179,184. Most of those are fixed.

Localization: 10 languages, no partial localizations. All done in-house. English, UK English, 8 foreign language versions. Played by more people in foreign languages than in English. Didn’t always have this internally but have made that transition to all in-house. Decision that can’t be taken lightly to add a new language because all are full locs. Not just translation of the product itself but is an ongoing commitment for customer support for as long as game is operating. Dedicated localization producer within that group in platform services. 358,680 strings, over 3.2 million words.

Platform Tech: Shared tech, build servers, streaming, patches. Create the actual gold masters. Patch 3.1, delivered 4.7 Petabytes of data to the players (ongoing!). Patching is a big part of the game.

Patch: 10 languages. Incremental from last patch, universal from last expansion. Trial download, trial streaming, stand alone patches. QA has to test all of those before release. Have to test those against all the previous patches! 126 individual patches to test for one release.

BONS: Blizzard Online Network Services. Data centers in Washington, CA, TX, MA, France, Germany, Sweden, Seoul, China, Taiwan. 13,250 total server blades. 75,000 cores. 112.5 TB of RAM. Global network ops center in Irvine, monitors everything. Monitoring weather everywhere too – 5 years ago today a tornado hit the beta hosting center! “Everything fine!” but you could see rainwater pouring in on the cameras… had to send reps there to buyout hair dryers from Walmart to get up and running again.

International Offices: monitor game releases, government approval. Regional marketing and PR. France, Ireland, SKorea, Taiwan, China. Taiwan and China deal with local partner. CS personnel. 1,724 people in intl offices.

CS: 2,056 game masters. 340 in billing. 67 in quality control. 121 in technical support. New CS head guy, so this is probably changing soon. Largest component in terms of Blizzard employees.

Online Technologies: VP Online Tech > Battle.net, Web team, Corporate Apps. 149 people. Battle.net does the social systems, login / auth, billing and account systems. Working on a new version with b.net friends, deep integration with all Blizz products. Receive notifications in chat regardless of which game being played in the Blizz network. 12 million active battle.net accounts. Decided at launch to segregate WoW and b.net communities but both grew large, wanted to unify into one Blizzard community.

Web team does several sites: WoW.com, Blizzard.com, battle.net, wowarmory.com and also the mobile tech = Mobile authenticator, Mobile armory. 900,000 content files on Wow.com.

Corporate Apps: Task and bugtracking tool. Fraud and compromise detection, next gen CS tools, internal wiki, internal data mining. Tools, but shared tools, not game specific stuff. Anti-virus / anti-spyware support. Data reports & mining track everything the WoW team needs to know, what content is successful and what isn’t. Achievement system has been a success: 4.4 BILLION achievements earned.

Public Relations: Community team, events team, E-sports team. VP Global PR > Community, Internal Comms, Events, eSports, PR. Press Articles featuring WoW: 10,000+.

Community Mgmt: Liaison between team and players. News alerts. New player realms, Forum announcements and moderation (blue posts). Local community teams around the world. Can use the ban stick, shocking. 24-hr forum monitoring. Pop = 66 people.

E-sports: Professional gaming. Partner with outside organizations also host Blizzard tournaments. Tournaments around the world. WoW team has special servers for pro gamers. American team won for the first time at Blizzcon, usually the Koreans always win. 1,640 events with Blizz games.

Events: Blizzcon, handle conferences like AGDC. Blizzcon is the big one. Jay Mohr, Ozzy Osbourne. Requires support of the entire org for Blizzcon. Employees have to pay for tickets to get in, but still operated at a substantial loss (huge marketing opportunity). DirectTV, Online Streaming. 100,000+ participants.

Marketing: Box creation, web campaigns, TV commercials, promos with partner companies (Mtn Dew), in-game promotions.10 million views of WoW commercials.

Recruiting: Internal referrals still a bit source of recruiting. Staffing is hard! Constant. 221 openings worldwide.

Licensing: Games, action figures, apparel, plushies! Comic books, manga, strategy guides. WoW magazine. They get a lot of pitches. Make sure to pair the right product with the right Blizz brand and a good cultural fit. 400+ licensed products.

Creative Development: Lore hub, 2 fulltime historians. Shared art resource, art archive for all Blizzard games. Chronicles of the history, not the creators of it. Liaison to the novels. Patch artwork, book covers, other misc shared art. 100,000+ assets in the art archive.

Development Teams: More besides World of Warcraft! Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Mystery Game. Leverage these resources and talent from other teams. Lent team from Starcraft 2 to make WoW launch work, lent resources to ship Wrath of Lich King. Teams get too close to the project to evaluate it, create strike teams of folks from among the projects. D3 people running strike team for WoW expansion. Unannounced MMOs = 1.

And more!! Human resources, finance, facilities, legal, IT.

20,000 computer systems, 1.3 petabytes, more than 4600 people. Operating an online game requires more than just game development!