Stefano Cozzi, former Community Manager and Team Coordinator at Blizzard Entertainment, recently discussed the company's past internal management. He stated that when several of Blizzard's core titles were in active operation, there was a strict hierarchy between departments, making it difficult for the European support team to directly relay player feedback to headquarters developers.
In an interview on the Fette di Pixel podcast, Cozzi stated that during the active operation periods of StarCraft II, World of Warcraft, Diablo III, and Hearthstone, lead game designers held high status within the company. Community and PR staff had to endure player dissatisfaction and attacks, striving to prevent these voices from directly impacting the development team.
According to him, support staff in the European office were not allowed to contact project developers at the Irvine headquarters directly. Management believed that communication between regular employees and developers would take up the latter's time, so they prevented such interactions.
Cozzi claimed that if the European team wanted to submit important player feedback to management figures like Mike Morhaime or Rob Pardo, the information had to go through more than ten layers of approval. Reports could be filtered at each stage, making it difficult for grassroots employees to convey community opinions as they were.
After leaving Blizzard and joining Riot Games to work on League of Legends, Cozzi experienced a different departmental culture. He stated that support staff at Riot Games could dine with lead designers and discuss balance adjustments directly; similar interactions would have been considered a violation of internal hierarchical norms at Blizzard at the time.
He believes that long-term isolation of developers from player feedback caused some core designers to gradually become detached from reality, affecting subsequent decisions. Cozzi also mentioned that Blizzard later canceled lifetime World of Warcraft subscriptions granted to some former employees based on their years of service, and gradually removed former employees' names from game credits and character names.