Thanks to all of our readers and supporters for making 2018 great on Wowhead even through all of Azeroth's ups and downs!
Our dev team has done a fabulous job of keeping the site current to best-serve player interests, and I'm especially proud of the Wowhead Twitch Extension Overlay and Quest Completion Tracker. Expect to see more tracking tools in that style in 2019! Classic Wowhead is another project many of us on the team feel passionately about, and we can't wait to develop in further in 2019. (Plus, we're all excited there are no Classic PTR updates.) We've also adjusted to the breakneck PTR pace introduced in Legion--I'm proud of how we've balanced PTR updates with new features, site improvements, and managing un-fun things like technical debt. It was great getting to tour Blizzard with the whole team earlier this year, especially getting an impromptu picture by the Orc statue with Mike Morhaime.
Here's a fun datamining story: During our annual staff meet-up, an important Battle for Azeroth build hit, one with new Allied Race druid forms. We headed to a small meeting room to datamine in person, yelling updates across the room as we progressively overheated with a bunch of high-powered laptops processing the build. It was a great bonding experience and we learned that the voice communication was extremely helpful, shaving off minutes of the build process! So now for every PTR build we hop on a group call. Hearing the wisecracks and reactions to data updates is priceless (Stiven always says the funniest things when he discovers a new model) and something I look forward to every week now. (We then had a repeat at BlizzCon, when we
datamined a build in a car.)
I've really enjoyed working with the content team this year, expanding our team so all of us have time to focus on our passion projects, bringing unique and detailed content to Wowhead. In my case, I really enjoy writing about literary and visual references in the Battle for Azeroth story. Some of the articles I had fun with include
Warbringers: Azshara Cinematic Analysis - N'Zoth, Ny'alotha, Circle of Stars, Old God Whispers,
Analysis of the Jaina Visions Cinematic Including Warcraft III References, and
Sylvanas' Motivation and Parallels to Arthas in the BFA Pre-Patch. I was also extremely honored to be sent an advance copy of the Battle for Azeroth Collector's Edition, collaborating with Nobbel on a
series of lore articles on the novellas "A Good War" and "Elegy." These sorts of articles wouldn't be possible with a smaller team if I constantly had to stop to post hotfixes or update guides.
A special welcome to Nery, who joined the news team in the spring after writing Nostalgia articles in 2017, Dderserei for managing our new PvP guide section, and Archimtiros, whom we threw in the deep end live-blogging at BlizzCon 2018. I also want to thank Ketsuki for her efforts in constantly innovating the site, through setting up new partnerships like INTO THE AM or our BFA stream event!
A special thanks goes to all the sites that use
Wowhead tooltips, whether you cover sims or cute pets. We offer the tooltips as a free service across multiple languages, and try to add as many features as possible from community requests. It was also very cool seeing Wowhead tooltips used as part of the Blizzard Twitch Extensions for MDI and Arena (even if it took us by surprise the first time, temporarily melting the site as we worked to handle the load).
I also want to give a shout-out to all of our contributors and collaborators, both new and old. I know I recapped many collaborators in the earlier part of this blog, but I just wanted to state it again. When I first started at Wowhead, we didn't even have a homepage, let alone creators reaching out to collaborate with us. Thank you for choosing Wowhead as your home for sharing information.
Happy new year from Perc, Pepe, and Brightpaw, who is currently
destroying Sas' home, being babysat by Sas!
