How many times do I have to teach the forums this lesson.
Over the past couple years, Blizzard fired all the people who actually know how to make the game. Then Blizzard pushed the release date up by like four months, surprising us and the developers left over. Then they fired more people just last week.
They release the expansion early and we are currently in Beta 2.5 while they do 6 hour maintenance at least twice a week until, I would wager, in November. Which was, most likely, the actual expected release date…But violent corpo rat mergers tend to leave a gaping chasm instead of bridging one.
I would wager they pushed the date up to increase their stock value to make the microsoft merger even better.
Fatten the pig before you give it for dowry.
Blizzard is, as far as anybody external can see, working on slightly-less-than a skeleton crew. Barely getting by especially since they fired almost all the customer service staff, so what else do they deem as unimportant? They already told us they dont’ care about customers by getting rid of customer service…so how important do you think we are to them in the grand scheme.
At this point, I am playing almost entirely because of the sunken cost fallacy. The game, as a whole? Decent. I used to suggest this game to people, but I stopped even really telling anybody I play because I am not very proud of what this game has become.
This used to be my home away from home with friends and new people at every turn.
Now its just a hollowed out shell designed to meet metric criterion.
All criterion except the most important one: Fun. Every time people find some silly thing that makes things more fun, blizzard will patch it instantly.
But when your entire guild bank just randomly goes missing, along with all the materials you gathered over the past 20 years…only to have Blizzard tell you “sucks to suck at life” and didn’t really do anything to return items to players and have all but dismissed it as a problem.
I am here to watch the ship sink. It might get fixed, but the chances are non-zero. I love Metzen, but he hurt his back in the first place by carrying this useless corpo on his shoulders. All the developers who used to work there and loved the story and gameplay and communicated with us…no longer work there. They moved on to other studios because Activision Blizzard King Microsoft Etc, Inc. is only concerned with money.
Which is ironic because the only reason anybody played was because it was fun. Take out all the fun, you lose all the money.
I leave it at this. I said I am here to watch the ship sink, but I do my best to still try and communicate with the crew and see if we can do something about that hole caused by the iceberg.
