Blizzards weakness - Being stubborn

General Discussion
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Before we get into it I would like to say that I don’t hate anyone that is a developer at blizzard or anyone that works for blizzard to any degree. This comes from a place of love as someone who has played blizzard games since the original Warcraft.

Some of you may or may not play World of Warcraft, but in the WoW community it is a known fact and ongoing battle of well respected and loved content creators trying to get blizzard developers to understand what we as a community want in that game. The most recent interview with lead head developer Ion Hazzikostas and the most respected person in the WoW community Preach highlighted a lot of this.

Incase anyone wants to watch it, it is quite interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEcXvDDtarc

What the community learned is that blizzard is so stubborn on getting people to play the game the way they want, and not the way the players want and will play their game. My favorite part of this interview is they have actual discourse back and forth between each other in a civil manner. Unlike overwatch, the developers of WoW are being very transparent and interactive with the community which is a big change of pace. Though they are still stubborn.

In Overwatch we get this stubborn, cold shoulder treatment on a larger scale. The forums is a good example. There is a massive schism in the community cause of nerfs and buffs, and we get no thought process on why it takes so long to change or admit they are wrong in doing some of them. Overwatch doesn’t seem to acknowledge what the community wants or needs nor are they active with the community in general.

There are many examples of this, going back to closed beta when some of the current known pros expressed that unlimited heroes, lack of structure in how teams are built (too much freedom), and high burst damage would be an issue. Instead of willing to admit a design flaw, we got Ana who set the status quo. Then we got Moira/Brig to combat dive, and brigitte didn’t even stop dive, which became double sniper, which ended when a contenders team finally made goats due to their lack of good snipers. Then DPS started getting crazy buffs and we are all now on this roller coaster.

From there, things spiraled out of control. Much of this could of been avoided with acknowledging mistakes they made. Being stubborn and prideful is why we are here today in my opinion. Said traits seem to permeate through out all of blizzard in general.

I would like to end this with that I love Overwatch, and its developers. I love the art, the characters, the world, and how some of them are realized into playable entities us players can control and use. I hope this comes across as being respectful in my critique of blizzard cause I took a lot of care to be so.

TLDR: Read the post. :slight_smile:

6 Likes
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I just wish they weren’t so inconsistently stubborn. They keep making massive game changing decisions to characters like Mercy and Symmetra but then insisting despite the years of pushback from the community that those changes were good.

Either stick with your vision and never change anything or acknowledge when your changes were bad and revert them, but this whole sometimes yes, sometimes no hogwash is impossible to enjoy.

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another blizzard weakness
‘’ always listening to non fans and 4% of the playerbase ( the pros and streamer/content creator ) instead of their 96% playerbase ‘’

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I can understand (and even respect) a lot of their reasoning, but I still get frustrated with it. I feel like there’s a stigma with Blizzard against solutions that aren’t perfect. Obviously that isn’t completely true because Jeff often talks about how there is no “silver bullet” for certain problems and yet they still work on them, but it still feels like there’s so much emphasis on finding the best solution regardless of how long it takes rather than just doing something in a timely manner.

A good example are clans. Some might remember how we were told we weren’t likely to get clans or guilds anytime soon because they want them to be 100% battlenet wide and synchronized fully… but how many people actually care about that? Yeah, that’s the perfect world, but it’s one I’d say not many people care about and it’s one we wouldn’t get anytime soon (from the time it was said, of course, who knows maybe we’re close to getting them now).

I’m not trying to talk down to them and how they handle the game. I feel like this is something they’re improving on and even if I’m playing the game less right now I’m more hopeful for it going forward than I was in say, 2018.

Sorry if that’s a little off topic but I feel like it plays into them being stubborn about certain things. :laughing:

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Yeah. I am hoping my post doesn’t come across like this (I don’t think it did, and I don’t think yours does.)

I don’t think it is offtopic and I can see the correlation between it and blizzard being stubborn.

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Heh I dont understand why they ruined Diablo 3 with taking away the possibility to trade with other players. This game had to die because of it… xD

I wonder if there will be trading in Diablo 4 or if they will release already dead game because of their stubbirness. xD

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What i hate most is they make changes. Changes break game. Blizz changes everything else instead of just reverting the changes that broke the game in the first place. Changes and more changes that never solve the initial problem

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Let me stop you right there, ain’t nobody got time to go dumpster diving.

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Don’t take what I said out of context please, thank you. :slight_smile:

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I’m going to stop you right there. I agree with you. I too have so many good memories of Blizzard games and the way Blizzard used to present itself to the community. But those days are long gone and they are not ever coming back.

From their big releases (e.g. new games) to their smaller decisions (e.g. balance patches), almost everything they’ve done in the last 2-3 years has been garbage. Just poorly thought out, terrible, garbage. And they have taken no responsibility for any of it.

The Blizzard you loved is dead. Long live Acti-Blizzard.

EDIT: also, keep in mind that as much as a certain OW designer presents as a funny, everyman guy (and I like him in that sense), almost every thing he has said about improving OW in the last two years has not ever panned out into something that overall improved the game. On close analysis I think anyone would be hard-pressed to find anything that he has done that is good idea.

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I didn’t. God help us all if the devs come here for design ideas more than they already do.