"You have no idea about programming"

General Discussion
77

Let me tell you why you are wrong and what you don’t seem to understand:
The team is split in groups. One group is working on one hero, another group is working on another hero. If you are working on only 1 hero, that means that only 1 group is working on heroes, and if they want to release a hero every 1,5 months, that’s the amount of time they will have. But if you have 2 groups working on hero development, that means that each group will have 3 months, although the gap between hero releases will be 1,5 months.

Either you, either I misunderstood him. I understood that the whole process described takes 3 weeks. So if we are being generous, the said process shouldn’t take more than 1-1,5 months. And since heroes are released with 2 skins, let’s say 2 months, since the alternative skin uses the same animations.

78

Are you going to continue to ignore the fact that the team is large enough to only release 4 heroes a year. Are you going to ignore the plethora of problems this game currently needs fixing? Are you going to ignore that dev time is split between making heroes and fixing said problems? Players are dropping like crazy, and yet your main concern is pushing out more heroes?

I understood very well. Especially when he mentioned in a different post in this thread that it take 3 weeks to model and animate one character with hard work, this is assuming EVERYTHING went according to plan. What he failed to mention was the time it takes for art to be created, art to be added, model rigged properly, testing, if something goes wrong, ect… He also didn’t mention the rest of the processes to completion with time. I based my guesstimate with what he said.

You took the times literally in the post (ignoring the times he didn’t state) and added them to 1.5 months. This is how you don’t fully understand the entire process.

79

Oh, sorry, I didn’t know you worked for blizzard and knew exactly how big their team is and what they are capable of. As well as the state of the game, along with the state of its player base.
But personally I don’t see that many problems with the game apart from the slow hero release rate.

“Making a model up to standard” sounds like a ready and working model to me.

80

This is why people keep telling you, “You have no idea about programming”. I feel the problem is a little deeper than just simple programming, but hey that’s just me.

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81

This is absolutely naive. You made kael’thas. good for you, now do Qhira. do Sonya’s spear. Do raynors machine gun.
Do Ragnaroos taking over a building.

Show me the proper flame strike versus the game KT flame strike.

Score Damage correctly. Reduce armor correctly, show me xp collection , show me damage scaling correctly or talent availability menues. or increase/reduce cooldowns correctly.

There is more to game development than getting a 3D modeling program to wave hello and do simple tricks.

As someone who has done development for almost 30 years your standards are FAR TOO LOW. The list of things left off is staggering.

FFS this is such naive :poop:

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82

Hi all,

There’s a lot going on in this thread and I simply can’t touch on every train of thought, but I wanted to pop in and say a few quick words. I’ve been a technical designer for Blizzard for almost eight years now, six of those on the Heroes team. I’ve had a hand in implementing probably half of the Heroes in the game and have been the primary designer for about 10 reworks now.

The biggest time “expenditure” or “bottleneck” in the design process is not the implementation, but the iteration. Assuming I had an entire design ready on paper (four basic abilities, two heroics, 21+ talents, etc) and was only focused on making the hero playable ASAP, I could probably bang out a hero using existing assets in a week or two. That’s just to have a controllable character with placeholder visuals that can interact with their world and be mostly bug free. The problem is, we don’t just cobble together our initial thoughts and call it a day! We try an idea out, tweak it a bunch of different ways, scrap it, try some new ideas, tweak those, scrap them again, try something new and so on and so on.

This iteration process can take weeks or months, depending on the situation. Often we have to throw out multiple days worth of data work because an idea didn’t pan out like we thought it would or we found an alternative idea that was better. This is not a failure of a designer’s capabilities or aptitudes, just the nature of the beast. Even after this iteration process is done, there’s still tons of work needed to make sure all our new systems are bug-free and mesh well with every other existing system (there are hundreds at this point!). There’s also optimization, data cleanup, and refactoring involved, all of which take expertise and time.

And that’s just touching on the design process! There’s still artists, animators, sound engineers and a whole host of people whose work requires a designer’s time to implement/modify.

To draw a rough metaphor, looking at a final design is like looking at an iceberg on the open ocean; you’re only seeing 5% of the total structure.

Hopefully this sheds a bit of light on a largely invisible process :slight_smile:

Cheers,
David

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83

its more than that… people honestly want a proper release date. the miscommunication between your team and the those who talked a lot about deathwing is whats angering everyone.

some said next patch. some says a week from now and now everyone saying deathwing will be added in December.

we know hes going to be added into the game but the question people want to know is when? the whole balance patch thing doesn’t paint a clear enough picture for everyone I mean when is something like that going to be announced?

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84

Ohhh Blue responded now eat some pie humble pie

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85

Ha, yup my post was right. The iteration and process is majority of the work.

The thing is people only comment what they can see and what they can’t see behind the scenes.

Regards:
Fellow UX/UI/Graphics Designer

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86

I watched the whole thing, and they never said “next patch” at any point.

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87

That and we pretty much asked the people who went to Blizzcon, here at the forums and Reddit, who pretty much stated couple of weeks likely to the end of Scarlet Heist. They never communicated to the people at Blizzcon that the PTR and official release would be anytime soon… The problem with the topic and similar ones is that they were all expecting a PTR after Blizzcon much like the older release schedule but that just evidently is not the case, people just needed to temper their expectations that even the Blizzcon announcement means that there will now be a delay with the hero release.

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88

Thanks about the reply now i know my reforged map will never become as good as heroes of the storm is. I wish there was a way we could see a blizzard moba map on reforged, but this is less likely. Everyone is busy. I guess to bring hots from a scratch requires a billions of USD. Ugh I hate being average person with no talent and brain power…

89

Reforged is glorfied re skin for WCIII… feels like wciii just looks different.

But im pretty sure this HoTs was built on SCII engine right?

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90

hey just asking out of curiosity since you’re studying game design. since every hero can be affected by stealth (brightwing n medivh 20 as well as tyrande ult), would that mean that every hero has at least 2 versions of their models (stealthed and unstealthed one) or does stealth like…reduce their transparency? thanks if you answered. genuinely curious

91

Dude, you just don’t get it they can do it better than you with 0 experience.

It’s like as someone learning a lot of those on top of level design is still working on the same level for the past 4 months, no no no, that should take exactly a week in our book!

Git gud bro /s

92

Thanks for the answer, but could you possibly enlighten us if the team is just unable to release more than 4 heroes per year in its current state, or has it been just decided to be this way?

93

Hy sir,
Could you tell me how many people working in the hots team?

94

Wanna bet gems its both?

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95

How I wish most of the semi-earnest complaining ever taking place on this forum wasn’t so petulant. Who here is angry? ‘Angering everyone’? Sincerity carries the most weight, so if you’d like to get your point across, try changing every instance of “people” and “everyone” into “I”. It may be less comfortable than sinking into an imaginary crowd behind you, but then it’s also true.

There is a saying: “Anticipation is half the fun.” Enjoy it. And some advice which couldn’t possibly be well-received: breathe.

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96

Just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to post this.

Blizz has been generally pretty poor with community interaction, particularly on their own forums, and while I understand we might not always be pleasant, you won’t change hearts and minds by not interacting.

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