Who is building Riot's MMO: the WoW all-star team

November 2024: an engineering manager from Blizzard. January 2026: World of Warcraft's former lead producer. June 2026: World of Warcraft's former lead combat designer. Riot has not shown a frame of its MMO since 2020, and in that silence the only reliable information about the game is who it keeps hiring.

Read as a sequence, the Riot MMO hires are a production schedule. Engineering first, so there is something to build on. Production next, so the build has a plan. Combat last, because combat is what you build once the plan exists. This article goes through the people, what each one has done before, and what the order of their arrival says about where the Riot MMO is.

Reading a hire

On a normal project, staffing is background. Here it is foreground, for a reason Merrill himself gave: the team went dark on purpose in March 2024, "likely for several years". When a company decides to say nothing, its hires become its statements, and senior developers tend to announce their own moves on LinkedIn before any journalist notices.

That is how each of the names below reached the public. None came from Riot.

Marc Merrill

Co-founder of Riot Games, its chief product officer, and the only person who speaks about the MMO on the record. Every official statement since the reset is his: the reset itself in March 2024, "a great direction now" in November 2024, "probably the project I personally spend the most time on" at the DICE Summit in February 2025, the confirmation in April 2026 that Riot had looked at acquiring Intrepid Studios, and the "before 2030" window.

Merrill is described as supervising Condominas directly and being heavily involved in the new direction. That is unusual. A co-founder personally running point on one of a dozen projects is a sign of how much the company has riding on it.

Fabrice Condominas, Executive Producer

Appointed with the reset in March 2024. At Riot since 2021. Before that, a producer at EA and BioWare on Mass Effect 3, Mass Effect: Andromeda and Star Wars: Squadrons.

That CV is the first clue about the direction. Condominas has never shipped an MMO. He has shipped narrative RPGs where the player's choices carry across a story, and a multiplayer flight game built around a tight core loop. If Riot wanted a conventional MMORPG made faster, it would have hired an MMO producer. It hired an RPG one, then surrounded him with MMO specialists. That combination is the clearest signal available about what "different enough" might mean.

Brian Holinka, Principal Game Designer

Joined on 1 June 2026. Eleven years at Blizzard, about five of them as World of Warcraft's lead PvP designer and more than four as its lead combat designer, until 2023. After Blizzard, as Mein-MMO reported, he worked at Fantastic Pixel Castle, the studio Greg Street founded to make an MMO called Ghost; that studio closed on 17 November 2025 when NetEase withdrew its funding. Six months later Holinka was at Riot.

Two things follow. First, Riot is now building combat, because a principal designer with that background is not brought in to write documents. Second, the person shaping the MMO's fights spent a decade on a tab-target game, at the moment the pre-reset plan called for action combat. Whether that means the combat model changed with the reset, or that Riot wants WoW's discipline applied to a different model, is the question we take up in what the Holinka hire tells us about combat.

Raymond Bartos, Senior Game Producer

Joined on 15 January 2026. Known online as GoodGuyRay. Former lead producer on World of Warcraft. Bartos announced the move himself, and PC Gamer's headline at the time was that the MMO "shows signs of life", which was a fair summary of a year in which the project had otherwise produced only a departure.

A senior producer's job is schedule and scope. Hiring one from the largest MMO in the West, six months before the combat lead, is the order you would expect from a project that has moved from design to production.

Orlando Salvatore, Engineering Manager

Reported in November 2024, in the same week as Merrill's "great direction" comment. Formerly of Blizzard. The first of the three World of Warcraft hires, and the least visible, which is normal for engineering. An MMO's server and networking layer is where Riot's own experience is deepest, given League's infrastructure, so this hire is about adding genre-specific knowledge to a base the company already has.

The people who left

The project's founder, Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, announced the game in December 2020 and left Riot in March 2023, after nine years. He had been World of Warcraft's lead systems designer before Riot, which is why the announcement carried so much weight and why his departure was read as a bad sign. His own MMO, Ghost, then died with its studio in November 2025.

Vijay Thakkar, the technical director, held the project together between Street's departure and the reset, then left in December 2024, after eight years at Riot; his own post said it was his last month.

Mark "Scruffy" Yetter, League's gameplay design director for more than eight years, moved to the MMO as game director in 2021. Nothing has been said about his role since the reset. He may still hold it. We do not list him as current without a source, and no source exists either way.

That is three senior departures in two years, against three senior arrivals. The arrivals came after the reset and the departures mostly before or during it, which is the pattern you would expect if the reset was also a change of leadership. It is still a lot of turnover for the posts that matter most.

What the team implies

Put together, the team is a narrative RPG producer at the top, three World of Warcraft veterans underneath him covering engineering, production and combat, and a co-founder above all of them.

The obvious reading is that Riot wants World of Warcraft's competence without World of Warcraft's design, which is exactly the tension in Merrill's reset post: a "significant evolution of the genre", built by people who know the genre's rules well enough to break them deliberately.

The less obvious reading is about timing. You do not hire this sequence of people for a project that is still deciding what it is. You hire them for a project that has decided, and needs to be built. That is why our estimate of the release date starts counting from these hires, in why "before 2030", and not sooner.

What we do not know

The size of the team. Riot has never given a number, and the recruiting page still says there are no specific openings.

Who holds design authority. No game director or creative director has been named in public since the reset.

Who is directing art. For a game whose entire appeal is a world people already love the look of, the absence of a named art director is the gap we would most like filled.

Whether Holinka's arrival closed a vacancy or opened a new discipline. Riot listed "Game Design" among the disciplines it wanted MMO experience in from the start. A principal hire in 2026 might be the first senior designer since the reset, or the latest of several.

For everything the hires sit inside, the full dated record is in the Riot MMO timeline.