If they said that, you know what the community would say. It’s wishy washy. They’re lying. It’s a smoke screen.
See, nothing Blizzard says matter. Nothing. Nobody trusts what they say. Blizzards good will is very low in the community. Blizzard gets no value from saying, well, anything.
All that matters is what they do. All that matters is what they deliver. It’s a very “ask forgiveness instead of permission” kind of affair.
Do you think their statements on sharding are any better than if they said nothing at all?
The Community wouldn’t say anything, because there’s no poster on this forum called The Community.
It’s like this fellow who insists that Blizzard’s fanbase is clearly utterly unreasonable, because The Fanbase wanted pandarens, and then they got them and The Fanbase started complaining about such a ridiculous race being added to the game. Which is true…as long as The Fanbase equals a carefully selected fraction of the actual vocal players at any given time. What is less true, is the implication that any individual fan can be assumed to have abruptly reversed position and thus been a hypocrite. But if Blizzard’s representatives were honest and transparent, they would get a reputation for being honest and transparent, and it would matter, just as it matters that they’ve instead worked hard on building up a reputation for being deceptive and withholding information.
Their statements on sharding are marginally worse than nothing precisely because their statements on sharding are full of weasel-words: There’s a strong sense that it’s not wanted (passive voice everywhere!), one of our strongest tools, etc. But there options were not “say nothing” and “talk much, but say nothing.” They could have said, “We’re going to use sharding” or “We’re not going to use sharding” or “We’re working on a build without sharding but we may put sharding in if we conclude it’s that or constant server crashes.” “Talk much, but say nothing” was the option they chose, not anything they were forced to.
If blizzard has credibility issues, they have themselves to blame. Ignoring those issues does not make them go away. They need to earn back the trust by being open and honest and sticking to the decisions made.
FWIW, Yth, the biggest outstanding question for the team is how they intend to approach progressive itemization (or the lack thereof) or item gating (or the lack thereof). There are arguments that can be made for several different approaches, and “authentic experience” doesn’t really shine much light on this one. Would love to hear the team’s thinking and rationale at this time.
blizzard are deciding whether or not to make it a legit classic, or continue on their plans for easy mode classic to keep the subs. The hits blizz have been taking are certainly confusing them haha. get stuff blizzard