"A game like World of Warcraft is too big and has too many moving parts and committees making decisions for the writers to be able to plan out and execute a perfectly paced, well told and well received story. One of the often repeated bits of gossip in the World of Warcraft lore community is that the writers were originally planning a full villain arc for Sylvanas that would end with us killing her as a raid boss. Essentially, they were going with the Sylvanas becomes Arthas route, but that when they had already had her burned down Teldrassil, that was when they were told by executives that they weren't allowed to kill her. She's too popular. They had to find a way to save her. I don't know if that's true and I'm a huge Sylvanas fan who at no point wanted to be the one to fight or kill her, but either way, the thought of executives throwing a cold bucket of water into the middle of any creative work and making their writers hastily rewrite things because of numbers on a chart somewhere horrifies me. Surely, few things could be more inherently toxic to creativity. But at the same time, of course that's how it works. World of Warcraft is a business, after all. Of course, numbers on a chart are going to end up being treated as more important anything else, including, and in fact especially, something as insignificant as telling a good story. There's also the issue that is the executive tendency to view writers as contract workers who can be easily swapped in and out, hide one minute and toss the side in layoffs in the next. Even senior writers have been quite famously playing a game of musical chairs. Steve Denusa was given the impossible task of fixing the problems left for him by Alex Afrasiabi, and Chris Metzen is now leading story that was partly created by Denusa. Christy Golden was hired as a story consultant and then, unceremoniously tossed aside in pretty much the very next set of layoffs. With so many changes to the writing team, something like a clear vision and direction is probably just a bit of an unfair thing to expect. A lot of the time, writers who are doing their absolute best are nevertheless being blamed for decisions that were completely outside of their control."