Just curious – how did COVID-19 push them back a year?
Don’t get me wrong I don’t expect the game to be launching in a completely balanced state, that and brig 1.0 was created because the vast casual audience of the game didn’t like the sudden shift to fast pace dive strats.
Then that vast casual audience started leaking just a few months after that do to the goats balance changes.
but ya it’s going to be roller coaster of wack for a bit.
their was a good few week transition were almost no organized work could be done to having the giant organizational hurdle of moving a few hundred Acti-blizz employees to a home environment.
Then from their development is slowed to having to transfer large uncompressed models, animations, code, test builds. From peoples personal internet lines to a central server and back, while also trying to keep everyone up to date structure wise.
Even then a single piece of art can go through several managers , designers, programmers, ect. just to get approved and implemented.
I missed this, can you point me to it?
That is incorrect, I am sorry. No, Brig came in because back in 2017 people were sick to death of Dive, and when Blizz proposed nerfing Dive characters the high level community balked and instead wanted an anti-dive character. In response, they got two, Moira first (soft anti-Dive) and then next immediately Brig (hard anti-dive). The casuals were not up in arms about Dive, that is nonsense. Jeff K. clearly laid this out in one of his videos, the famous “Be careful what you wish for” also is in direct reference to this.
Also, the casuals did not leave, the more hardcore players on certain popular dive kits notably Genji and Tracer, were the first to depart.
I won’t be playing…but only because the same toxic OW community will be playing it, but really it has not been completed yet, so you might want to wait until it has been released and finished.
Thanks to Baja and Prett!
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I would not sure how to link in this forum.
There is a thread in this forum about it. In the thread Baja posted a bunch of the questions and answers. Good stuff, worth the read. Addressed several of the concerns posted here and their answers made sense.
Sadly I wasn’t awake during that time. I still have some questions I would wish to get answered for supports 
And the vast majority of the player bass are casual players. This is true for just about every game. like casual to core ratio is like 70%/30%. ya core players were getting frustrated of dive to, but brig 1.0 was made for those 70# of players in mind. As an easy to use counter to that comp.
Very big thanks. Reddit is a mess to try to follow along.
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Yeah true! Maybe someday we will see a Forum Q&A! I crossing my fingers.
Of course it is, but the Great Loss came from players who despised Brig 1.0 (for good reason). Many of the exiters were high level players who then had people follow them on streams. I was there and on almost every day since. No question what happened, or how that all came about. The people complaining about Dive were not the casuals, they were the Diamond+ hardcore players and the pros at the time.
This is an interesting thought but suspect none of it applies. Here is why:
- Large organizations like Blizz already had people working from home at least 1 - 2 days a week.
- Most dev staff are tech people so they were not using dialup modems or low end internet connections.
- Work flows etc all still basically work the same.
- WFH is an extension of working in the office.
Now I’m sure during the transition and into at least 6 mons, there were some tweaks, adjustments, that had to be done but it did not throw off their dev time by 1 year… that would be an excuse
How do I know this? I run a very large IT shop.
My organization has over 90K employees.
The only thing we had to do was bump up our VPN appliances for more licenses and more hardware - something that we accomplished in weeks, not months or years. Other than that, we had all of the infrastructure needed to support our customers and our employees and didn’t miss a beat.
Well run and large IT shops were already doing some or all of what was necessary to support employees remotely. If they were behind and caught off guard, that was a self-inflicted issue.
Um mentioned that to M8
I would recommend reading the whole post
It took I think most organizations on the order of two - three months to adjust; a tech-heavy company like Blizz probably already had 90% of the tools in place already. I refuse to believe Covid had a deep, deep impact on development.
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Most of the people that worked from home were those in the more Advertisement focused part of their business. As in people that spend most of their time brainstorming ways to sell and promote the game.
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Not so much the animators, modelers, and programmers that need the beefy 1000+ dollar equipment to do their work. While at the same time have near immediate access to their work on the company servers. -
Yes most of the staff would have access to high speed internet, the issue is such speeds a lot of the staff (especially testers) would have to download several gigs of patch info.
They do now have tools to send a simple workshop code for tweaks to stats and stuff. But like making a functional beta version of orsia (who was using zaryas model at the time) would require still require them to patch in an out builds between every different test.
Which is lot slower to do when your not literally wired to the machine that can provide you with that.
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Work flow is not the same at all, as your playing phone tag with managers/directors/and developers half the time. And in turn everything just takes longer to accomplish, especially tech support.
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Like when I can’t walk over and do a quick run through the potential issues with someones device, I would have to go step by step with the user slowly directing them through each Menu, device, checking build status.
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like ya the chain of command is the same, but it’s so much slower in comparison. -
Well read 1-3 replies. Everything is slow, you can’t immediately share Ideas, meetings can only have one effective speaker over video chat with out breaking into smaller groups, it is functional but not ideal.
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Their is a lot waiting and organizational issues that the company didn’t have time to work out till it already had to implemented. Which means even more work and Q&A testing for Ideal setups, meetings timings, simply getting files to each other and everyone being on the same page.
TLDR it’s a lot slower and then in the office even when they get everything flowing properly.
read above post
FWIW I have worked in IT since 1993, and incidentally work in the very tools that collaborators use frequently. I know the game inside and out and how companies adjusted. I am in the business 
Are you in the game development business or just the IT business?
Because game development is much more like chaotic then traditional It development, a lot more can go wrong when you have to throw in content that isn’t a jpeg and a pop message indicating that you can’t insert special characters into the Phone section of the sign up form!
not discredit your or PadorisBox’s work. I’m doing the same thing myself. It’s just a headache when most of your development team are not exactly IT professionals. And more so artist pulled from a more CGI/film/Multi-media oriented back ground.
I mean… calling it a “mess” is a bit harsh, but lets be real…
Of course it’s going to be unbalanced in that there will be numerous adjustments and balance changes made within the first few months.
Because no matter how much testing blizzard does, it is simply impossible to account for every eventuality, every playstyle, every gripe that the general public will encounter once the game is released into the wild.
So yes, Blizzard will do their best, but there will need to be balance changes made… cut them some slack… I’m sure they’re struggling with staff (not to mention the lawsuit) and none of that stuff makes work any easier.
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Agreed.
That is an excuse I see a lot of companies use though. Why? Easy to use, hard to disprove and you can literally stretch it to find almost every situation.