Ghostcrawler to Leave Blizzard

Greg Street, aka Ghostcrawler, Lead Systems Designer for World of Warcraft, has recently announced that he will be leaving Blizzard.

For those of you who are unclear on just what a Lead Systems Designer does, Ghostcrawler was basically in charge of how the game worked. Class mechanics, gearing, all of the ways that reputations and currencies interacted. It may be easier to define his role in the game by what it wasn't. He didn't design the bosses, and he didn't produce the art or write the lore. Pretty much everything else fell within his jurisdiction.

In addition to playing this incredibly demanding role (and also becoming a lightning rod for just about every disgruntled player,) Ghostcrawler had an unprecedented level of back-and-forth communication with the players. More than probably any designer, GC talked to the people. He responded to forum posts, he had an active twitter account full of quick answers, and he also wrote longer blog entries to really unveil the thinking and reasoning behind some of the design decisions that he and his team made.

The WoW community is not without its toxic elements, and sadly I think that a lot of legitimate criticism gets drowned out by doomsayers and the nostalgically deluded. While I won't say I agreed with absolutely everything that has happened under Ghostcrawler's leadership, the vast majority of his contribution to the game has been a positive one.

There was a time, for instance, when nearly one spec for every class was just unplayable, and the attitude Blizzard took was that you would simply have to deal with that and respec. GC took charge during the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, which was the first expansion where they took inter-spec balance seriously for a change. We've also seen every spec given enough attention to have its own identity, and to actually make some kind of logical sense (to give an example, there used to be no Arcane Blast. Arcane Mages would… spam Arcane Missiles? And that was it.)

We don't know for sure who will be replacing Ghostcrawler in this key role. But I think we will be extremely lucky if it is someone who is as innovative and as open with the community as that crazy old spectral crab.

Good luck, Doctor Street.