I was watching Tod’s townhall meeting where he speaks with pro players and discusses the game in length with them. An interesting discussion arose regarding the feedback pro players have provided to Blizzard regarding the game.
This was further touched upon by Grubby in one of his videos regarding Reforged as well as Back2Warcraft caster due.
To summarise, all pro players, and casters have sent pages and pages of feedback including bugs, ideas, requests for better observer panel etc. and apparently Blizzard just tossed all of that info and most probably never even read it.
Now, an important point is that if you watch the Remo interview with the project lead of Reforged from the blizzcon where they talk on a couch 1on1 , a lot of the features the casters asked for, as well as ladder etc, the developer said will be there from day one for sure.
That goes against the claim (from Blizzard) that the game will be patched to subsequently have these features included. At no point people were given heads up about the delay in releasing these features.
You can check the original interview here:
Now given this information I am puzzled on how Blizzard decided to release a barely working campaign essentially, thinking that was okay, while the feedback was there for them on what they need to fix.
I don’t want to harp on the situation but I am not optimistic at all going forward for the game. I am very saddened to say that as I have been playing the game competitively for over 13 years and it has given me so much positive emotions and I really want to see it in the best state possible.
They have proof that they did? It is more likely that all their feedback has been thrown on a back burner to eventually be addressed. Seeing how WC3 lacks custom campaign support at the moment it is very much a WIP.
All the people saying they should have delayed another year for a more complete product release seem to have been right I guess.
Back when SC2: LotV was either newly released or in beta, the dev team lied about reaching out to pros/streamers at a particular esports event. One of the pros themselves said publicly that he had not been contacted, directly contradicting what Bli$$ard reps had said.
Moreover, many beta testers, including myself, were very concerned about some aspects of the game. Bli$$ard ignored our concerns and released the game in that state anyway. Lo and behold, the greater community found the same things to be problematic. It took months to get those issues addressed when they could have been dealt with much earlier on.
Bli$$ard’s ego is getting in the way of them making good games (among other things like their obsession with money). They put “vision” ahead of quality. If you disagree with them even slightly, or offer the slightest bit of criticism, you’re deemed unimportant to them and are cast aside.
I’m not saying Bli$$ard or any developer should cater to every whim of their players, but at some point, the game has to be enjoyable outside of the 4 people working on the game at the company.
No, it doesn’t, because your timeline is all wrong. This interview was done in 2018, just after the Blizzcon announcement of the game. The claim from Blizzard that the game would be patched to include these features came in 2019.
In fact, all the information about the ladder, the campaign and all of that was outdated by the time Blizzcon 2019 rolled around. So using a 2018 interview to claim that ‘Blizzard is lying’ really isn’t going to work.
They have moderators with no morals that disguise as players and flag posts to make it look like the community did it. They also troll anyone with negative opinions of refurbished. They spread lies and say nothing has changed from Classic Wc3. If you check the blizz tracker it looks like they stopped replying to everyone on Feb 7th then made 1 reply yesterday on the 19th.
This game is a cash grab by a company with no integrity. I was told this was a cash grab by players in Classic Wc3 before refurbished Open Beta even started. They were probably bug testers or had some sort of connections to this horrible remake to know that. I kept hope and the moderators/paid shills would disguise as players and continue to lie to me in these forums and in-game general chat, constantly addressing my doubts with the same lines.
“it’s open beta, of course it’s bad, it’s not finished and will be great on launch”
“people don’t care about online custom games, they only care about single player campaign and versus”
“the player-base is dead because it’s open beta”
I was always skeptical but kept hope. And then it launched and it was still as bad as Open Beta. It seemed ok for the first few days as far as bringing in new players but now it’s dead again. The game is DOA because it’s a sad buggy mess and the development is too slow (slow in more ways than one). I’m simply waiting to see how bad the next patch is then I’m Refunding. If they refuse my Refund then I will charge back to my credit card by going through my credit card company.
Try a good RTS like AoE2 DE. It’s a Remaster done right that came out Nov 14th, 2019. It’s a fair price and gets aggressive patching and hot fixes when needed. It has a great community and it’s a balanced and fun RTS about real History. Command and Conquer Remastered is on the way too. I advise you to stop supporting activision/blizzard. They’re a company with 0 integrity that abuses their players/community. They’re ruining the gaming industry. Their only goal is to give you as little as possible for as cheap development as possible, once they have your money they’ll leave you in the dark.
They still have sad moderators/paid shills going around doing damage control. The one below this post is a great example of this. It’s their low paying job and they can’t get a better one with meaning. They have no morals and no respect for their players. activision/blizzard is a bad company and you should NEVER buy from them EVER again. They’re making the world a worse place
That indeed seems to be factual and you are right about the timeline - i found the 2019 one after the fact. However, a lot of the things they approved as getting into the game in the 2018 interview, they did not subsequently say will be not included in the product. If i say i will give you a course which includes 12 lessons and then say 8 will not be in the course, then give you only 2 lessons and say “i told you there were changes” you will be more than right to question my integrity. This seems to be the case here.
Also, your comment does not address the core point of my claim - that professional player testers submitted pages and pages of feedback which was not addressed in the release at all, and the game was put out in a super unfinished state.
Let’s look at the facts:
The color bug which makes your units change their color after an upgrade has been there since day one of beta and was addressed 50 times, including during interviews with developers. How the game was released with such an easily fixable bug is beyond me.
There are a number of super easily fixable bugs, which were just left out in the game pre-release. There is no way to convince me that blizzard did not notice that when you whisper someone there was no name, adding friends did not work, and when you open the game on an ultra wide monitor all the menus are terribly miss-aligned. This is something that you notice if you enter the game even once in your life…
The join game bug, the de-sync issue with multiplayer, all of those things are so easy to spot and were an issue all through beta. There is no way they weren’t noticed.
There is only one explanation for this and that is that all of the feedback was disregarded (I dont mean here, but from the people which they paid for feedback or gave them free product much earlier in order to see what the professionals feel about the game). Blizzard decided to forget about multiplayer, and essentially release only the campaign as a “game” and then take it from there. The campaign is not the game, the campaign is not even 20% of the game. Yes I see how a casual player like it seems you are can view the campaign as the game, but people play this game for multiplayer and to compete. There are some professional players that play this game for over 15 years and have never completed the single player campaign at all.
In conclusion, releasing a half baked campaign is not a “game release” it is a feature and cannot be charged as a whole game. There are a ton of things that must be fixed and it all starts from actually reading the feedback provided from the pro players you have asked to supply feedback.
The reason why it doesn’t address it is because there’s no way to prove what you’re claiming. You’re saying that Blizzard took the feedback from these folks and tossed it in a bin/ignored it. There’s no way to prove that. It’s essentially nothing more than a theory which you’re presenting as a fact. But I’ll focus on some points here, and to give you some background, I have knowledge of game development. I don’t work for Blizzard, but I have quite a few friends in the industry, including some who work in QA departments, so as far as these points are concerned? I’d like to think I know what I’m talking about.
Not all bugs are ‘easy to fix’. It might seem that way, looking at it from the outside. I mean, how hard can it be to stop units from changing colour after they’ve been upgraded right? The answer is surprisingly enough, very hard, because code is extremely chaotic. A simple ‘fix’ to one thing, may ultimately cause another thing to break and if that thing that broke is more serious than the colour swap, they won’t implement that fix until they’ve isolated the issue further and can fix it without breaking everything else.
Remember the rhyme 99 bottles of beer on the wall? There’s a programmer version of that:
99 little bugs in the code
99 little bugs…
Take one down, patch it around…
199 little bugs in the code.
Ask any programmer if that rhyme is accurate and they’ll tell you it is, 100%. And the worst part is that some of these breaks don’t appear until after the fix goes live, which is why you see games like Fallout 76 patch one exploit/bug only for another one to pop up in its place. Making it a coder’s version of whack-a-mole. In this case it’s even worse for the developers because they’ve already put the fix out, so now they have to scramble to isolate the new problem and fix that, without breaking something else.
Yes, this happened, and there’s also an explanation for that, as far as game development is concerned. Essentially what you’re describing here is what game developers call ‘triage’. Essentially if there’s not enough time to fix the bugs before a game launches, and they cannot delay the game further (delays need to get approved from multiple high-level staff, and it’s rare that they happen at all, even rarer for 2 to happen in a short time period) they will do their best to stabilise the build so that while the bugs are there, they won’t have a huge effect on everyone, and then they’ll launch the game and quickly work on patching the bugs post-launch.
This act of triaging happens across all companies in game development. It’s not a Blizzard thing. No game releases completely bug-free, but developers will prioritize critical bugs before release and ones that are not as critical? They’ll triage them and fix them as soon as possible once the game launches.
Your argument regarding the game development part is well developed and it has value in reading it. Thanks for that. I am versed in asset making and more of the artistic part of game creation and can confess with open heart that I am not familiar well with coding.
Can you share your thoughts on the following 2 points though:
How much bad planning must go into reaching a point close to launch with too many issues and too few fixes? And how can you best circumvent the situation so that the launch does not completely destroy the future of the game.
No matter how many patches are released now, the game will have a legacy online ( where everything is documented) of bad review scores and thousand of reddit/forum posts that it is a piece of garbage. What in your opinion can make the developer reclaim even a mediocre spot in the history of game making , and can it be done that the game is not left as a “worst player scored game ever” in the minds of people?
A last remark on the original post regarding the feedback - the reason for my claim is a particular video in which a number of pro players and casters discuss in length the fact that not a piece of their feedback was implemented in either of the products they have submitted it for - that includes both heroes of the storm, and original wc3 + reforged. So my claim is actually the claim of the people who gave the feedback, and I would think they know what they are talking about.
Thanks for not immediately responding with aggression or… ahem… arrogance… ahem… it’s actually nice to see a decent debate with measured responses. Looking at your two points, I think I can respond to them, but this honestly delves further into game development than I personally have knowledge of, but I will answer as best I can regardless.
This is a difficult question as ‘bad planning’ is something that stays behind closed doors and it’s impossible to know if a game did have bad planning or not until someone exposes the nuts and bolts of the development of the game. This has happened before. Anthem comes to mind specifically, with the articles released by Jason Schreier. I’m not entirely sure if Warcraft 3 Reforged is in that same boat, although opinions will vary on that one. Some people will say it is, while others will say it isn’t.
In my opinion, the only thing that will really ‘save’ the title is if Blizzard knuckles down and fixes the critical issues before delivering on the delayed features, like ladder implementation and clans. That will improve the view of the game among players and Blizzard gamers, but it will not significantly change the internet view of the game.
Games that release in a poor state rarely, if ever, manage to claw their way back out of that as far as ratings and scores are concerned, and you need only look at games like No Man Sky to see that in action. That game released with a ton of broken promises (which is actually worse than Reforged, because Blizzard at least told folks that they weren’t getting some of the stuff in 2019, whereas the developers of No Man Sky said nothing at all and just dumped the very broken and empty game on everyone at launch) and even though it has vastly improved to the point where it is now a fantastic game, the scores for that game are still 61 (critics) and 3.5 (users) on Metacritic.
Those scores will not change unless the critics and users revise their reviews, and that rarely happens. So Reforged will likely always have a low critic and user rating. It may climb a few points, but it will never reach the green scores of 7.0 or higher regardless of what Blizzard does.
reforged seems to be made by a team of … beginners?
i mean im no expert for UI design, but that main menu violates pretty much any basic rules of usability. they would just have to use it once and see and feel how clunky and counter-intuitive and cumbersome and devoid of features the main menu is. that abomination is a flat F in my book. a good main menu wouldnt cost more, it would just require more skilled/experienced developers.
the hiveworkshop exposed amateurish/bad methods of doing the scripts/events/ai for the campaign. those working on the campaign apparently didnt know much about the wc3 editor at all.
and they broke the RoC campaign with the TFT ruleset and didnt notice it.
the reforged graphics miss alot of requirements for professional play - how can blizzard miss that? release without proper matchmaking?
add everything else on top of that and it kinda seems like the ppl working on reforged (not the 2018 demo, but the 2019 beta version) have no frickin clue what they are doing.
maybe the senior developers were pulled from the project half way through and some junior devs + someone who has no clue about wc3 to lead them are doing reforged since 2019?
I feel the same. So many beginner level mistakes. Just wonder how could it even possible be. Even race change animation lags when change race before animation was finished (and if you fast change races it just blows up like a head of that intern that did it). Just why? Why such the disrespect and lack of love to the game (
I think it’s more likely that Blizzard’s upper management forced them to release the game early, before they could act upon the feedback and fix the issues. Most professional game developers are at least smart enough to fix bugs when the community points them out.
They were given a strict deadline for January 28, when they clearly needed more time.
Again, as I explained, it’s not as simple as folks are making it out to be, and you can ask any game developer this and they’ll confirm it. When you’re fixing a bug, you’ve got to make sure that you can isolate it completely. If fixing one bug creates three bugs elsewhere that are more serious than the bug they’re trying to fix, they’re not going to fix the first bug, not until they can absolutely lock it down and make sure that they can fix the bug without breaking something else.
Think of it like this…
You’re a store owner trying to direct a bull in a china shop. You can direct the bull away from one pile of china, but if doing that sends the bull into three other piles of china, you’re not going to do that. Instead you’ll find a way to make sure that when you move the bull, it doesn’t knock down any other pieces of china.
Well then, it sounds like the developers needed more time. It was clearly a mistake to release the game so soon after it was announced.
Blizzard’s policy used to be “The game will be released when it’s ready, and not a moment before”. Their games used to be polished and well-put-together. This doesn’t feel like a Blizzard game; this feels like it was created by an amateur studio that only has a vague notion of how to make a functional game.
You could argue that, and I am sure many developers would like more time, but a sad reality of game development is that everything follows a very strict timetable, and when simple delays can cost tens of thousands of dollars, it’s incredibly hard to justify any delay, especially for things which can be triaged and fixed post-launch.
As for Blizzard’s policy. Sorry to say but the whole ‘when it’s ready’ thing? It’s a myth. It always has been a myth. It’s a nice catch phrase to give the consumer confidence, but it has no real substance behind it. Because games are released on a timetable, when it’s go time for a game to launch? It gets launched, whether it’s 100% ready or not, which is why almost every game that Blizzard has ever put out, from Warcraft Orcs and Humans to Reforged, has had bugs in it which have impacted players in one way or another.
The reason why you didn’t really hear about the bugs back in the day is because the forums weren’t as prevalent and sites like Metacritic, YouTube and Twitter didn’t exist to act as megaphones for company failures.
Honestly, as someone who’s been playing Blizzard games for almost 20 years, I have to disagree. The original Starcraft, Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 did not crash once, ever, in all the time I played them. Even recent titles like Starcraft 2, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch had a high level of polish on release, with relatively few technical issues.
And with titles like Starcraft 2 or Overwatch, several years would often pass before Blizzard dared to announce an official release date. And the release date would often end up being delayed or changed: in fact, the Night Elf Archer unit in WC3 alludes to this with the voice line: “My release date’s been changed!”