World of Warcraft was meant to have viable levelling gear from professions way back in 2004, but the designers on raids and dungeons 'cheated a little bit'

The design politics of studios in the early 2000s will always fascinate me—not the unsavory stuff, I am glad that is well and truly binned—but rather, the little elbows and feet put on other designers in studios where there wasn't a clear, clean pipeline or a mandate. Such was the case with Blizzard where, as revealed by principal Kris Zierhut in a recent Polygon interview , there was a little cheeky in-fighting over the power of crafted gear.