Not frustrating at all. In a perfect world, I'd have detailed answers on everything but its a big game and a big team, making that effectively impossible. I try to mention my focus upfront because I don't want to waste the interviewer's time and I can give much better answers about things I'm directly working on.

Happy to answer these questions here:

• Who are you, and what did you work on before you joined Blizzard (since he joined in February)

While I'm new to Blizzard, I'm a "hardened industry veteran". I've been making games for close to 20 years with almost all of them being multiplayer online games. I've kind of lost count, but I've worked on something like 25 titles in that time and they've run the gamut of genres from flight sims to turn-based strategy games to shooters. Where I've spent the majority of my time as a designer, though, is on MMOs. The games people are most likely to recognize me for are EverQuest, where I was the Lead Designer for several years, and the Kingdoms of Amalur MMO, which unfortunately died in the fires of 38 Studios (if you're not familiar with it and want to a fascinating story, google it), where I was the Design Director.

I've always had a love for systems design and did the design for many of the core systems on previous games. I've also always loved Blizzard, love Heroes, and jumped at the opportunity to join the team and help out with their gameplay systems.

• What does a "systems designer" do? What is the process like for designing a new system?

It varies a bit by game, but in general, system design is looking at the fundamental gameplay systems of a project. It tends to be the counterpart of content design, which utilizes the systems to build out the world of the game. Since joining Heroes, I've been primarily looking at systems that exist outside of the actual matches, such as the ranked system and the new MVP system.

For the process, I generally start by identifying a need and define some goals which address that need. The goals provide something to judge the design against as well as constraints, which help keep a design from going off the rails.

From there, I'll draft a high level proposal, iterate on it with others on the team, and then pitch that to leadership. This makes sure everyone agrees on the goals and the direction before I spend too much time on details.

Once everyone is on the same page, I'll dive into the detailed design. This is where I get into the nitty gritty, calling out all of the requirements for the system and defining any details required for implementation. I basically try to think through everything that needs to go into the new system and document it with enough detail that I could be hit by a bus and the folks doing implementation could shrug and finish out the project without major issues. I always try to keep the designs based on requirements rather than crossing over into dictating implementation details. There's a lot of very talented people who are going to be doing the actual implementation and they know better than I do how best to implement it.

From there, a UX designer gets involved to help figure out how best to visualize everything for the player. There's generally a bunch of issues uncovered during this stage and a lot of back and forth with the core design. Once that's all sorted out and we're happy with the flow, actual implementation can start and the people who do the hard work get involved: artists, programmers, sound designers, QA, etc.

Throughout this whole process, I'm there helping shepherd things: answering questions that come up, helping resolve issues that are uncovered, etc.

• How many people do you work with on the systems team? How collaborative is it?

Extremely collaborative to the point where it's a little hard to draw a boundary on where the 'systems team' ends. It takes a lot of people working together to put together features like the ranked play update and MVP. I'm the lead systems designer and take point on the actual game design for systems and overseeing their implementation, but there's probably 30-ish other people involved that do all the hard work of bringing these things to life.

• How challenging was it to transform your design on paper to a working finished product for the MVP system?

It's always a challenge bringing an idea from paper to a realized product, but this team is amazing, passionate, and talented which helps a lot.

For MVP, we also had a big benefit in that we have tons of data from live games that we were able to leverage for the core formulas so we had a good understanding of whether that was going to work very early on. Overall, implementation went pretty smoothly and I'm very excited with the results. The big question is how it will be received by the players. No system is perfect and you never really know how things will work out until its in the hands of the players.

BTW, thanks to the CORE guys for having me on the show. That was a lot of fun. Hopefully we can do it again soon. :)