Aggrend expects Forever's changes to slow after launch, and says he no longer works on classes

About ten hours before Forever's launch on 4 November, the creator Savix published a 59-minute interview with Josh Greenfield, the developer players know as Aggrend. Greenfield introduces himself as "a senior game designer on the WoW Classic/WoW Forever team". Most of the hour is about his life and career. A few minutes deal with what happens to Forever after launch, and that part is an expectation, not a patch schedule.

Slower, not finished

"I think we're gonna slow down a little bit once we launch," Greenfield says at 37:37. A minute and a half later he explains the beta's pace. Changes have been "hot and fast", he says, because the team wants the game in "as good of a place as we can for launch, so we're not making that scale of changes after launch."

Then he adds the limit: "even after launch", he says, "if we gotta make a change for the good of the game, we'll do it." He gives no dates and no list of what might change.

Why this feels new

Greenfield says a large group of Classic players "aren't really used to the magnitude of changes that are happening". Classic, in his words, "was kind of a museum piece", and the team was "very hesitant to make changes" because changes can have "cascading effects". Forever is different: "we are not starting from no changes, and this is gonna be an actively developed thing." Getting players used to that, he says, is "an adjustment".

What he says happens to feedback

Savix put it to him that every gamer thinks they know how to fix their favorite game. Greenfield's answer is that a suggestion can be good "in a vacuum", but "it's not really a player's job to think of the game holistically". The designers' job, he says, is to look at "the problem space that they're describing, not the solution they're suggesting".

He calls that "especially kind of tricky" for Forever, because some of it is "a friction that maybe we want to keep". He doesn't say which friction. He also says "I love it when players give suggestions", and that every now and then one is "actually a pretty good idea".

Not the person to message about classes

At 37:41 he stops mid-answer to say: "I don't work on classes anymore." It's aimed at people who send him angry messages on Twitter, and he denies having any "paladin or whatever druid agenda". He jokes that the people who do work on classes "do not listen to me". He says he mostly works on "content and narrative".

At 51:18, when Savix worries about the game being passed to the wrong person if he leaves, Greenfield goes further: "I'm not the person who runs the Classic team. I am one person on the team." It "literally does take a village", he says.

What this doesn't settle

Greenfield said "a little bit" and gave no measure of it. He doesn't say who decides class changes, which friction, if any, stays, or what would count as a change "for the good of the game". This is a developer talking on a creator's channel, not a Blizzard announcement, and it contains no new patch details.