An Interview With the Notorious: Wowhead.com

Posted by Alex on 1 March 2010 @ 11:32 AM

If you play WoW then you'll have a collection of trustworthy sites that you visit for information on new content, items and advice. If your head is screwed on right, one of those sites will be the famous Wowhead.com; the biggest and best WoW related database and news site available today; run by a series of professional staff members, the site has become the handbook for anyone trying to find their way in the World of Warcraft. (P.S. The title of this article is a pun, not everyone will get it).

Today, we were lucky enough to get a hold of Casey "Malgayne" Monroe who heads the content and community over at Wowhead. He sat down with us and was able to give some detailed insight into the beloved site we can't get enough of.

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Firstly, could you start by telling us a little about Wowhead, where it began, how it has come to be where it is today?

Well, most of the details are on our About Us page. But the short answer is that Guillaume (Skosiris) and Joshua (Mystadio) started the site as an experiment when they were in college—back then it was just a talent calculator. For a while they were on IGN as a hosted fansite, before they debuted the database portion of the site and moved onto their own servers. They were running this way for a while before they decided to join the ZAM Network, and that's when I joined the team. Since then we've added a ton of really talented people—Miyari, Noxychu, PoeticDragon, Alayton, fewyn, Corgan (briefly) and TheOnyx—not to mention all of our volunteers. :)

What is the meaning of the name, “Wowhead”?

Well as I said I wasn't here when it was chosen. It's a pun on the term "Warhead", though—it's a joke about the rocket. That's why Sko gets very worked up when people spell it "WoWHead".

How many people are behind the running of the site and what type of roles are needed?

Right now we have a paid staff of nine —Skosiris, who's in charge of the whole site overall, and TheOnyx and myself directly underneath him. TheOnyx is in charge of anything on the site that's generated by a computer, and manages all the software developers (of which there are three), and I'm responsible for everything else. I manage a team of three (two content managers and an artist), as well as all the volunteers. We typically have 10 or 15 active volunteers at any given time.

This also doesn't include the administrative staff that we share with the other ZAM sites, like the advertising team, accounting, and all that.

Describe the workings of Wowhead, is it fun to be a part of or is it a grind?

Any job can be a grind on a bad day. There are certainly times when I find myself working 12 hour days, and I know I'm not the only one. When Blizzard releases new content and we're all up late making sure the site is up to date with all the new data, we all work a lot of overtime. But it's a wonderful, wonderful job. It's the kind of thing I didn't ever even imagine I could get paid for, you know? We're all incredibly lucky.

What plans does the site have for the future?

That would be telling, wouldn't it? :) The Completion Tracker feature we just released was a really big deal for us, and we're very excited about that. We have a bunch of enhancements and features planned to support that in the coming weeks, but we do have some smaller bug-fixes and enhancements we want to get in place before we go in that direction. We're trying to keep our plans for the future loose, because you never know when Blizzard is going to throw you a curveball.

How does Wowhead manage to stay on top of all the patches and new bits and pieces added to the game?

All those 12 hour days I was telling you about? :D We typically stay up late on patch nights making sure our PTR website is up to date. Fortunately most of the big stuff hits the PTR first, so by the time it's on live servers all we have to do is merge the data from the PTR site down to live.

Does the team have any plans to expand and become a market leader in the front-page news department as well as their database endeavour?

We actually have a lot of news coverage currently, both on our news blog and in the news coverage on ZAM.com, our sister site. We're trying to carve out a niche for ourselves in between the other players in the space, but it's hard. MMO-Champion and WoW.com and all the others are great sites, and I don't want us just to be another news site, you know? I want to make sure we bring something unique to the table.

What is the working environment like at Wowhead?

We actually all work remotely. Our "working environment" is an IRC channel. We communicate through our project management software (we use Trac) and through chat. We have meetings once or twice a week on Vent to make sure we're all caught up, but that's it. When I'm working, I'm working from a chair in my living room. ZAM does have an office in Santa Monica, which I sometimes work from, but not regularly—and the rest of us are all scattered about several countries. I'm in California, TheOnyx is in Florida, Skosiris and Mystadio are in Quebec, etc.

As we all know, the site was purchased for a sizeable amount of money a little while ago, could you shed some light on the subject?

There isn't much to tell about this, honestly—or there wouldn't be if WoW players weren't a community that's built on forum drama. :) Wowhead was getting big enough that they didn't have the administrative resources to support themselves—at the time they had only three people, two programmers and a combination server-admin / one-man advertising team. Every time you add a new feature onto the site you need to dedicate some amount of resources to support it, and as they expanded the site, they needed more people—both to develop and maintain the site, and to support it from an administrative level. Skosiris and Mystadio were finding themselves spending too much time doing administrative and support work and not enough really doing what they loved. And if you're going to sell the site, ZAM was the obvious choice—they knew exactly what went into maintaining and supporting a site like Wowhead.

I assume that you're looking for a comment about the connection between ZAM and IGE, but that's an old story by now. IGE used to be owned by a company called Affinity Media, the same company that owned ZAM, and Affinity sold the company off to someone else. I wasn't privy to the reasons behind that decision, but it's not hard to figure out—IGE wasn't making money, and ZAM was. I've always believed firmly that you can only become a successful business by respecting and supporting your customers, and it's good to see that Affinity came to the same conclusion.

Is there a relationship between Blizzard and yourselves, or are the resources we find on the site purely the result of data-mining?

We're an official fansite, on their list at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/community/fansites.html. But if you're asking whether they provide us with any of the data that you see in our database, they don't—we collect all of that ourselves, using no tools that aren't available to everyone.

Are there any new features coming out any time soon that we should all keep our eye out for?

Well our Wowhead Pride contest is running right now, our very first international contest. I strongly recommend you guys enter, there are a ton of prizes available and the pool of entries is still fairly small, so your odds of winning are good! We have a few more awesome contests coming up next month too!

Is it safe to assume that most of the team at Wowhead are players themselves?

Of course! I don't get to play as much as I'd like to, of course—Wowhead keeps me pretty busy! But I have a death knight on Silver Hand and a paladin on Velen, where I'm in a guild with Noxychu's priest and PoeticDragon's druid. Skosiris has a hunter and TheOnyx has a warrior (I think) on Draenor. Miyari and Fewyn both have druids on Illidan—Miyari was actually in Blood Legion for a good long while before she burned herself out. Out of all of us, I think Mystadio is the only one who doesn't play regularly anymore.

Wowhead has become incredibly successful and has always been known as an efficient and professional entity, is this powered by the tangible rewards, or does it stem from something greater?

I don't think it's possible to enjoy the kind of success Wowhead enjoys without loving what you do. This site is our baby, all of us—especially Skosiris. He spends nights and weekends doing work on the site, not because he's getting paid but because he wants to. I'm proud of the fact that I'm able to make a paycheck doing this, but it isn't and never has been about the paycheck, and I think that's true for the whole team.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Only that I really appreciate being asked, and if anyone who's reading this ever has any questions, feedback, or comments about the site, you can always reach us directly by emailing feedback@wowhead.com. That email address goes directly to me. :)

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We'd like to give a big thankyou to Casey for taking the time to have this interview with us, and encourage you all to go and show your thanks to the wonderful team over at Wowhead.