Blizzard's evergeen online RPG World of Warcraft, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this coming year, retains an ambitious update schedule. The WOW team ships an important paid expansion, the same as a new game release, every couple of years, and substantial content updates every 2 to 3 months. So when I had the opportunity to interview John Hight, the executive producer and second in command for World of Warcraft at Blizzard, over video link a week ago, it turned out the first topic I raised.

"Generally our policy within the team itself is we should be a no-crunch team," Hight laughed and said. "We're not there 100% yet, but we're really dramatically greater WOW Classic Gold than we were even 5yrs ago, certainly ten years ago. I think that not many parts of the group end up corresponding any a higher level overtime."

Hight admitted that owning a mature game like WOW have their own advantages: after many years of constant development, he explained, "we've got a great sense of that which you need at a staffing standpoint". But still, cultural change might be slow. "There's still some pockets... Largely it is people that are self-motivated, they wish to put in exactly that extra little effort with a hard time letting go. As we're finishing up a significant patch or even an Vanilla WOW Gold expansion, I'm literally wandering the halls and saying, 'Go home! It'll nevertheless be there tomorrow.' I know that sometimes you need a lot of WOW Classic Gold in the game. If you are bored about farming gold, you can buy WOW Classic Gold online, and ZZWOW is always your best choice.

"There's enough studies who have shown that men and women are just not really that effective once they've crossed eight, 10 hours of labor. At that point it's diminishing returns, therefore we don't really need to adhere to that. I think we're pretty successful, but you can always improve. I'd find it irresistible if we might have perfect work-life balance. That's a goal."