Blizzard’s former president says ‘WoW has to reset’ over disastrous patch, and I really wouldn’t go that far

Former president of Blizzard Mike Ybarra has entered the phase of being a videogame executive that involves, among a lot of things, some very unfiltered posting on social media. Like arguing with other CEOs over New Years, or telling people they need to “man up” over AI use.

Anyway, World of Warcraft: Midnight had a really rough patch, recently, and given his understandable investment as the former captain of the ship, Ybarra has taken to his X account (thanks, GamesRadar+) to comment on the state of the game once more:

“Unfortunate. WoW has to reset and the commitment has to be clear and firm or it will continue to decline.”

As someone who has been keeping track of WoW, I am going to take a moment to quibble, here—”reset” is a big word, and not necessarily even what’s in order. The baseline offerings of Midnight are good. Player Housing was a great success, the new Prey system has a lot of promise, its raids and dungeons are all solid and interesting, its zones are jaw-droppingly gorgeous. There’s a lot to like!

There’s also the point of order that WoW has actually shaken things up considerably already, completely overhauling the game’s class design to better suit a world without UI mods (addons).

The issue is that the train’s moving so fast the wheels are threatening to come off of the dang thing. I actually wrote about it this weekend—while I wouldn’t call the game perfect, the problem isn’t with the MMO itself, it’s with Blizzard outpacing its own quality control. Either the developer needs to slow down, or it needs to get a better handle on proactive bug fixes.

But “reset” implies a bigger scrapping and starting over—and trust me, compared to WoW’s lowest low-points? We don’t have it nearly as bad as we did back then. Need I remind anybody that this is an MMO that used to have 400+ day patch droughts.

Now, to Ybarra’s credit, he did oversee the start of that turnaround. World of Warcraft: Dragonflight released in 2022, and Ybarra left Blizzard in 2024. Dragonflight itself was a genuinely solid start to a revitalisation of the game, one that saw Blizzard start to stick to roadmaps at an even tempo, focus on evergreen content, and hit the reset button on its story.

But he was also present for Shadowlands, one of the game’s most disastrous expansions, and he also oversaw the $68.4 billion acquisition of Blizzard that resulted in 1,900 employees laid off across Activision-Blizzard.

While I wouldn’t put much stock in the argument that follows—it’s a slapfight on X—Ybarra does respond to some criticism over his tenure and where it led Blizzard: “You’d have to blow the team completely up to course correct. We did what we could under the circumstances, but clearly did not succeed.”

Anyway, I’m not convinced that Blizzard needs a complete overhaul. There’s a lot of work to do and good will to scrape back, but one bad patch doesn’t make a dying MMO—I mean, unless you’re Star Wars: Galaxies. Bugs can be fixed, and Midnight’s not going to sink the ship just because of one sketchy update.

Is the studio at risk if it doesn’t turn things around in the next few major patches? Sure. But we’re seeing signs of ill health, not a game on life support, and WoW’s a stubborn old beast. If it can make it through Shadowlands without exploding, I’m pretty sure a buggy patch ain’t gonna do it.