This is pretty significant, a third party acting in good faith and investing thousands of paid hours into providing feedback to make a Blizzard game better for free to play players ultimately felt they were completely ignored in favor of monetization.
An omen of what to expect of Blizzard in the near future, in all aspects Hearthstone and otherwise? You decide.
I thoroughly enjoyed the campaign but as a casual I’ve mostly lost my taste in the game now- the paywall is kinda/kinda not a factor, I don’t feel like I NEED to spend money on the game to continue enjoying it(speaking as a dedicated casual who would never seek to play at top levels no matter how f2p-friendly it might have been)
But for anyone who really wants to dedicate themselves to playing the game competitively? Yeah, massively unhealthy paywall there!
Dunno, I’ll continue logging in and doing bounties when I’m bored, that’s fun, but I won’t be spending much time OR money on the game in its current state
Website that helps you min max some of Blizzard’s games, most notably the Diablo franchise, but they are now expanding to other games. Pretty useful if you are into that sort of thing and need to know optimal builds or itemization.
If you read the linked article, they claim to have pretty much volunteered thousands of hours collecting important balancing data as well reporting a lot of bugs.
Basically they were a game balancer/QA department for Blizzard for this particular game, probably because they wanted the game to succeed with the free to play demographic which would give them a significant boost in their revenue.
I mean they basically describe all the work they did, a lot of it was collecting data for which they ultimately had no use, but they fed it directly to Blizzard so that Blizzard could use it to rebalance and fix bugs.
If true, I count that as work which they stood to gain very little from, other than to help DI succeed, at least with the free to play crowd. Their intentions may have not been completely alturistict, but they were acting in good faith.
Bottom line, if what they say is true, which I have no reason to doubt, they acted in good faith investing paid work (obviously comes with opportunity cost) to make DI better. Ultimately they probably had a vested interest in seeing it succeed, but never the less, they paid it forward and were, it seems, taken advantage of by Blizzard.
But, they are not Blizzard devs, as you implied above. They are devs oif og BiS site, which is awesome, as is their stand in removing the D:I title from their list of games they report on.
Not paid by Blizzard though. Paid by their supporters etc.
Yes, its a great move, but you suggest they were being paid by Blizzard directly for their work, which is simply false.
Walking away based on that, as it did read that way to me personally. YMMV!
I think everyone with half a brain knew just how heavy D:I pushed the P2W aspect after a few days. Nice to see a 3rd party site that provides tier lists for said game walk away from it.
As usual, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
From about 10:30 to about 17:30. Seven minutes.
No, Maxroll wasn’t paid for balancing dungeon rewards. No one was paid for balancing dungeon rewards. The entire point of every alpha test ever is to get hardcore simps like Raxx’s team to do dev work for zero cost to The Corporation.
That said, I love Raxx’s passion for gaming and I am glad he’s distancing himself and his brand from Diablo.
I mean I think all these third parties have strategies to monetize the work they put into collecting and analyzing data. Their strategies differ (HSReplay uses subscriptions I believe?, VS throws ridiculous amount of ads into your face)
In this sense none of their work can be really viewed as labours of love/passion. That said, it doesn’t mean they can’t be passionate about what they do.
I think where the maxroll story really differentiates itself from the examples you gave, is that maxroll is literally paying it forward, they are working towards an uncertain fate on a product that is not yet finalized and may or may not be accepted by the broader free to play community as acceptable and/or enjoyable. They are putting in the blood equity into a product they themselves have no autonomy over, with the hopes that Blizzard can address the failures/bugs/issues that they had found, so that they may have a delayed payoff in the end, in the form of a large interested free-to-play user-base using their website.
The moral of that story seems to be (at least for me), for all the effort maxroll put in, they have no control over what Blizzard does with their data. Blizzard could use it for what is perceived as the greater good of the free-to-play community and address the issues, or instead could use the data to further cement the pay-to-win aspect in an act of unmatched greed and self-serving interest. Based on what maxroll narrated, it seems Blizzard appears to have not only ignored most of the issues maxroll brought to Blizzard’s attention, but may have actually done the latter of the two options stated in the previous sentence.
I think the way in which the person attributed maxroll as
was clearly not meant to imply they were Blizzard employees, or were in Game Development for them in any official capacity. All the statement is saying is that a task or a job is being done for Blizzard by maxroll, instead of Blizzard themselves. Also, the emphasis of the statement is punctuated by the “for free” part.
He’s just saying Blizz should be doing the job, as well as paying some people to do it, that maxroll seems to be doing for them, and they are doing it for free. They don’t deserve to benefit from the endeavors of what amounts to unpaid interns consisting of fanboys of Blizzard.
Either way, his statement is both true and inaccurate, they were not in fact Blizzard employees doing game development for them. However they are doing the work and not getting paid for the fruits of their labor and Blizzard still benefits from this as if they were paying them to be game development. Its a distinction without much of a difference, which is where a lot of people will use sarcasm to make this drawn out point shorter, perhaps inaccurate, but still true to their point.
I know sarcasm isn’t an easily recognizable font on this forum but it isn’t that hard to discern it.
