World of Warcraft game director: 'Trust is everything, transparency is the only way'

World of Warcraft's game director outlines the most important things for any live service game--maintaining trust and transparency.

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At the recent Nordic Game 2025 conference in Sweden, World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas gave a stage presentation about the lessons that he's learned through 20 years of the MMORPG.

Hazzikostas' presentation strongly emphasized that game developers and publishers must maintain a healthy relationship with their communities, and trust will often determine whether or not a game lives or dies. The insight rings true and can be attributed to the long-running success of specific games as well as the total U-turn reinventions of big games like Final Fantasy XIV and even Fallout 76.

Below we have a transcription of what Blizzard's Hazzikostas said at the event regarding player trust:

"What this is about is maintaining players trust and confidence in the process.

"That is, when you can't always be right in every situation, the most important thing for any live game, for any ongoing game. Trust is the fundamental currency of the entire ecosystem. When we ask players to spend time in our world, we're asking them to spend the most valuable thing they have, their time, with us.

"If you look at the discourse around whether or not a game is a 'dead game' online--which is everywhere these days--, at the root of that is players' anxiety that maybe their time is being spent in a place that, in the long run, will be unwise. That they're going to regret.

"Certainly if it feels like the development team is out of touch and isn't going to look after players' interest, isn't going to respect their time, again, why would they spend their time there?

"So maintaining trust in everything we do is absolutely essential. We know we're not always going to get it right--sometimes we're missing a piece of data, sometimes we're just going to make the wrong guess as to what players will do in response to something that we put out there.

"Sometimes, given the diversity of our community, it's literally impossible to please both sides. If there are two groups that want literally directly opposing things, we're going to have to disappoint one of them more often than not.

"What we can do is act very quickly when we realize that we have gone astray so that when something is off, players' reaction is ideally 'hey this isn't it, but I'm sure Blizzard will fix this,' as opposed to 'wow these developers are out of touch, do they even play their own game?'

"It's not to say we can't continue to improve in this space but that is our aim in how we communicate and how we come up with the decisions we make.

"Transparency here can be really scary. Admitting that you were wrong, admitting that you missed something to a community when there's people looking to pick that apart, is challenging. It's daunting.

"But in the long run, I think it's the only way to maintain trust...and you need to maintain trust for there to be a long run."