How do indie devs have better and faster QA than Blizzard?

General Discussion
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I’m not trying to be toxic, but something just doesn’t add up, here…

One of the indie games I play just started a new season which added some new cards to the game. When a particularly oppressive strategy was discovered with one of the new cards, they released a hotfix nerfing the strategy…one day later and they release on Xbox at the same time.

The HotS team used to do this regularly as well: fast, scalpel changes to attempt to bring a hero in line and continue balancing if one change didn’t have the desired result.

So what exactly is stopping the OW team from doing the same? Why were we left to deal with blatantly overpowered heroes like Zarya, Sombra, and Sojourn for over a month when indie devs and even Blizzard’s other teams have shown us they have no problem hotfixing a day or so later…?

Nothing will actually kill this game faster than players being burned out on playing against the same OP heroes for over a month. :frowning:

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Competent and experienced devs already left. Just interns and new hires trying to keep the game afloat probably.

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Extreme incompetence. Sojourn especially should have been disabled and emergency patched in the first week.

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Because it would means they would have to divert resources from the cash shop and everyone knows the only fun thing about OW2 is watching Blizzard milk the playerbase and still have that same playerbase shill for them.

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I was going to ask, do you want the “click bait answer” or the actual possible answer? But someone already did it so here is the second:
Most likely because the bigger the company is, the more people “in the middle” exist to make the process longer, tedious and harder than it should be.

If the indie Devs are directly the ones designing, taking feedback and doing and implementing the changes (including QA) that goes superfast. In companies like Riot, EA and Blizzard? OOF … thats months of meetings, mails, approvals and managers in the middle (sometimes for no reason).

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Because they have not so many stages of “management”. They can act faster and more agile. There are just a few people that need to communicate. At blizz? It needs a few weeks even for a meeting, I assume.

The bigger the company, the slower the changes. They decently need to improve as a live service game.

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This was already explained. In simple terms, there was/is a bug with their ability to live fox issues so they have to do a full patch which takes longer. This was discussed when explaining why the midseason patch was so delayed.

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OW is not a priority for them. The 2 month seasons highlights that. They are just releasing the stuff that have been in development for the past years.

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But why could the HotS team do it? They’d make weekly balance changes (and their QA was overall better).

We’ve seen a Blizzard team balance this way, but the OW team just doesn’t for some reason.

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Because HotS is “dead” so to speak. They dont really care about anything in this game. Its not a major title that has all eyes on it.

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I have asked myself the same question.

So in all service development (gonna talk about my job in my games, I feel like this is a mistake lol), there are 3 stages:

  1. Feature Dev
  2. Debugging
  3. Deployment

For games, the first one is actually the hardest because games development is an extremely demanding formula of “human creativity * computing power = development time”. Human creativity is extreme and so is computing power, it’s basically infinity, you can dev a game for decades.

Debugging is mostly a question of experience and repeating the same mistakes until you catch them faster and faster. It’s really about your team and your devs’ experience. For all service development, automated tests are ran at every new build, but for many good and bad reasons, most game studios still do not automatically test their builds. This means either time lost testing bugs, or time not lost, and bugs in the wild.

Deployment is taking whatever new build you have confirmed to be bug-free (or as bug free as you can) and deploying it across your entire network. This depends a lot on the quality and tooling the network has. A very mature and well designed network will allow mostly hassle free updates within a short timeframe. OW2 runs on the same network as OW, so that puts us at circa 2015 technology with 6-7 years of maturity. Should be more than enough. Of course you can just design it poorly and over the years, the network grows rancid with bloat and quick fixes. I have no way to know, but considering OW1’s general stability, I’d say it should be solid.

So considering that part 3 is probably not the problem, there are three options I’m seeing:

1/ Blizz devs take forever to do the slightest number change for a nerf/buff of a character.

That would be highly doubtful unless they are crumbling under paperwork(in certain companies you spend more time discussing tickets than finishing them), or they have a ridiculously small team, we’re talking less than 4 people on these nerf/buffs and they all have other jobs to do.

2/ They keep finding little bugs left and right that delay fixes for an inordinate amount of time.

Which is not likely in a large company full of competent devs, but may be very likely in a company that has been shedding its core talent and maybe a lot of experienced non-famous devs along with it. In other words maybe we overestimate the real manpower size and/or talent currently at Blizzard.

3/ Their management is not putting the necessary amount of pressure or consider the problem secondary, and it’s the management’s fault.

Now whether it’s that the teams are actually tiny, whether it’s a procedure problem, fear of the service crashing, poor bug fixing, I don’t have a clue. But I do agree that even with all the complexity there is in OW with the amount of characters and balancing, this is slow, very very slow.

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This. The game was released in an unfinished state, or “early access”. The code that allowed them to hotfix things was even more buggy than the rest of the game, and proved to be unusable. It’s getting patched in season 2. Theoretically.

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Long before then, though, back in the early days of OW1, the HotS team was faster and smarter about balancing than the OW team.

It was kind of comical: the HotS team would be like “We made this small change to Thrall and we’ll see how his usage and winrates change” and the OW team was all “After four months of complaints, we’ve burned Roadhog to the ground.”

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I’m always on the lookout for a fun indie game, especially a turn-based one. Which game is it, OP?

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Minion Masters: Not turn based, but a Clash Royale-like game. No P2W, thankfully.

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