Source: Wowhead, and the Game Informer interview itself. Verified against multiple sources; datamines and reports are labelled as such, not stated as fact.
The Admission
Hazzikostas called WoW’s PvP underserved, then explained the math that keeps it that way.
A game director just explained why his MMO’s PvP gets the staffing it gets, and the answer was its player count. Ion Hazzikostas told Game Informer that World of Warcraft resources each activity in rough proportion to how many people play it, and that PvP has been shrinking against raids and dungeons for years. He said it plainly, without a press-release wrapper. Two months before he said it, the designer who ran that PvP for 11 years started work on Riot’s MMO.
The trap he described is circular. The audience shrinks, staffing follows the audience, the mode gets harder to walk into, and that shrinks the audience again. He called it a chicken-and-egg problem. From the outside it looks more like a ratchet, because it only turns one way.
PvP is just an integral part of WoW’s history, and I recognize that for a lot of players today who focus on PvP, it can feel at times underserved by us.
— Ion Hazzikostas, WoW game director, Game Informer interview
His fix for this cycle is an on-ramp. Patch 12.1 Curse of Ula’tek adds a Players vs. Bots Arena, somewhere to learn the maps and the PvP-specific abilities without a lobby of strangers rating you in real time. He was direct about why that is needed: modern WoW PvP, in his words, feels like jumping into a shark tank, because the baseline knowledge to have a decent time even at middling ratings is intimidating.
The same sit-down carried a report card and a bug. Hazzikostas graded the team’s housing work an A and the addon overhaul a B or B-minus, and he confirmed that WoW’s built-in damage meters still do not correctly attribute Augmentation Evoker damage, which pushes players out to Warcraft Logs to see what an Aug Evoker actually contributed. A fix is planned for an upcoming update.
The full interview, with the PvP answer in his own words:
The Record
What was said, when it was said, and the hire that turns a WoW interview into a Riot story.
Two dates carry this story. Hazzikostas described the staffing math on July 24, 2026. Brian Holinka, WoW’s lead PvP and combat designer for about 11 years, started at Riot Games on June 1, 2026 as Principal Game Designer on the Riot MMO.
- Game Informer published the interview to its YouTube channel on July 24, 2026, titled 'WoW Game Director Discusses Curse of Ula'tek Update (Exclusive Interview)'
- Hazzikostas said PvP is an integral part of WoW's history and that it can feel at times underserved by Blizzard
- He described a chicken-and-egg situation in which the PvP community has shrunk over time compared to raids and dungeons
- Blizzard focuses its team and resources proportionally to the number of people who participate in each activity
- He said PvP is often not approachable, and that the focus for this cycle is to grow the PvP scene and create more of an on-ramp
- Patch 12.1 Curse of Ula'tek adds a new Players vs. Bots Arena, per Blizzard's official WoWCast content list
- He graded the team's housing work an A and the addon overhaul a B or B-
- WoW's built-in damage meters do not correctly attribute Augmentation Evoker damage; a fix is planned for an upcoming update
- Patch 12.1 also carries a large refactor of the buffs and debuffs API, and adds map coordinates to the base UI
- Brian Holinka, WoW's lead PvP and combat designer for about eleven years, started at Riot Games on June 1, 2026 as Principal Game Designer on the Riot MMO
- On June 2, 2026 Holinka posted that he had watched an internal playtest and it looked like a blast; the post was deleted within hours and preserved by community trackers and press
- Riot has never revealed any PvP design for its MMO, which was reset in March 2024 and has shown no gameplay
The only signal from inside the project lasted hours. On June 2, 2026 Holinka posted that he had watched an internal playtest and it looked like a blast. The post came down the same day, and community trackers and press had already preserved it. That is the entire public record of Riot MMO PvP: one deleted sentence of enthusiasm.
What This Means for the Riot MMO
Riot hired the designer who lived inside WoW’s PvP decline. The open question is which lesson came with him.
Holinka spent 11 years inside the mode Hazzikostas just called underserved and unapproachable. That cuts two ways, and we cannot tell you which one applies, because Riot has said nothing about MMO PvP. He either arrives knowing exactly which decisions strangle a PvP population, or he arrives fluent in the habits that produced one. We have written a version of this sentence before, when one of the biggest free MMOs turned its PvP into a seasonal, matchmade 12v12 and Riot turned out to have hired the Blizzard veteran who built exactly that.
The staffing rule is the part Riot should stare at. Allocating resources in proportion to current participation is a sane way to run a mature game and a reliable way to kill a mode inside one. Blizzard has been swapping world-building for metrics for a while now, and we have watched someone put a number on it more than once. A launch MMO sets that ratio exactly once, before anybody has played the thing and before there is a participation figure to point at.
| PvP question | What WoW’s director said | What Riot has said about its MMO |
|---|---|---|
| Who gets staffed | Team and resources go to activities roughly in proportion to how many people play each one | Not revealed |
| The on-ramp | A new Players vs. Bots Arena in Patch 12.1 | Not revealed |
| Credit for support play | Built-in meters do not correctly attribute Augmentation Evoker damage; a fix is planned | Not revealed |
| Setting | Azeroth | Runeterra. Everything else about scope is unrevealed. |
Riot is the opposite kind of studio, which is what makes this hire load-bearing. League, Valorant, Teamfight Tactics and 2XKO are PvP-first products. An MMO from that company lands in front of an audience that treats player-versus-player as the main course rather than the room down the hall, and Riot’s whole competitive stack is on-ramps: co-op versus AI, normal queues, ranked tiers, Clash. The “not approachable” failure Hazzikostas named is the exact problem Riot’s other games spend most of their design budget on.
None of which tells us what Riot is building. The MMO was reset in March 2024, it has shown no gameplay, and it still has not shown a single class while newer action MMOs walk reporters through parry timings frame by frame. PvP design: not revealed.
What Riot does have is the chance to ask the audience question before anyone has habits to defend. A quarter-million WoW Classic players told Blizzard what they actually wanted and it came back as more raids and no flying. Hazzikostas is trying to rebuild a PvP funnel two decades in. Riot gets to draw the funnel first.
Your Take
Should Riot's MMO launch with fully built-out PvP rather than adding it later?
Read Next
Earlier RuneGrove coverage of the same shift, from the combat log to the metrics.
Reported from Wowhead and the Game Informer interview. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.
