Programming is a tough job, especially when it comes to the systems that your customers would never see. There is constant pressure to write, write, and write some more, and when you’re dealing with managers that haven’t written a line of code in their life, there is quite often a major disconnect between technically minded folks and business minded folks. This leads to a deterioration in overall code quality and execution, and when you’re dealing with tight deadlines on big projects, it’s almost always the testing phase that is affected and shortened the most, despite it being the most important phase in my opinion.
The issues that we’re seeing with the game right now, at least the technical issues, seem to point to a decrease in the testing time. I can’t imagine anyone testing these quests would not have spotted these issues and let them go live, I would lean more towards them being tested minimally or not at all.
In addition to all of this, there are probably numerous systems being implemented that have more to do with Business Intelligence that someone who has no idea how to code, but has a high up position at the company, wants to have included as well. Given the amount of people that the company seems to lay off, I can only imagine the nightmare scenario their programmers are dealing with at the moment. If you’re a developer reading this, you have my sympathy, I can’t imagine what you guys are dealing with right now.
Didn’t they lay off a large part of the QA department back during BfA?
I have had the impression all along that between the complete reorganization of leveling that Chromie time represents and the new systems we see in Shadowlands, our ideas guys put together a plan that was way more ambitious than they realized, without any input from the people who were going to have to do that work.
So, idk if you are kinda deaf to the situation, but the programing is not the issue, the development is not the issue. as always, blizzards quality control is actually pretty damn good, and to be honest, the best in the gaming industry right now which is not saying much.
The issue that everyone is upset about is the design choices. The design choices are horrible the developers are developing those crappy designs very well.
If a sculptor is commissioned to carve a giant marble life like turd, im sure he will do a wonderful job at making it, it does not change the fact, its a gigantic sculpted pile of crap.
Tbh I’d argue that the games engine is being stretched thin, and due to these limitations they are having to make constant corrections simply because problems are showing their face far more often due to coding not agreeing with itself, in constant conflict.
THere’s clearly more going on than that. The length of time it took to get 9.1 out is telling. None of those things you mentioned applied to 9.1, yet it took forever and we didn’t get that much in return, not for the time it took.
Sure, “COVID” and all that, and maybe just that got in the way, but something happened and dragged everything down.
Although there appears to be significant issues involving adequate resources, the real issue is the current design of the game, which, frankly, has become far too focused on certain aspects of gameplay at the significant expense of others. One gets the feeling that even content not specifically created for the raider, mythic, and PvP players have been, well, created for them, and in the process diminishing the enjoyment of that content by others.
The biggest issue is that the writing team is try to tell their story, and not telling the warcraft story, but they dont realize the story they are trying to tell sucks.
I don’t think I’m deaf to it at all. I’m not a fan of the design choices, but if you ignore that for a second, there have been at least two big quests, Somebody Feed Kevin, and now The Nathrezim quest in the covenant story line, that are just outright broken. This screams lack of testing to me from my professional experience, I can’t imagine world where someone finds a bug like that and lets it go live. It’s usually the major features that you test like crazy when you’re in a crunch, so the fact that this even happened is mind boggling to me.
I have expressed my frustration with this lack of programming quality many times, but I’m trying to understand what’s going on.
As a side note, when it comes to the design choices as of late, it probably has very little to do with what the developers really want. I have a very strong feeling there are a few MBA’s that are guiding the development of this game right now, that has very little to do with Ion’s vision.
They were tested, they do work, they work fine, the issue is, because how they were designed, they are miserable to do with a bunch of people around, its no different then when we had questing in classic, and mob tagging was a thing. First come first serve, it worked 100%, it was a shoddy design, but it was not broken.
You are confusing implementation with design.
It was implemented 100% correctly as it was designed, its design was just crap.
I agree with you in that they suck, im trying to explain your upset at the wrong thing. Its not the developers, its who ever put this design forward.
I think nobody is mad at the actual devs.
They just call everyone working for Blizzard dev.
I mean even articles that went online just called Holisky a dev when the twitter thing went down.
If that’s not what they’re doing they clearly don’t know how decision making in big corporations usually works and how priorities are being set.
I wasn’t getting into that in that brief post. But my opinion on that is that after years of waves of layoffs to optimize short-term profits (which they admitted publicly), the big name guys started leaving in surprising numbers. But all along other workers were leaving too. Bad employee morale when a big company may lay anybody off at any time, plus the fact that it’s not a company that pays its employees well, means that the most productive employees at all levels have moved on. Work essentially came to a standstill.
Blizzard has the industry reputation of having a bureaucratic structure that is glacially slow to respond to the need for change. Right now they are hiring a lot of people. Hiring is probably harder because of the situation they’ve put themselves in. It will take many months to get them all up to maximum productivity. So I don’t see them catching up to a 2 year 3 patch content release schedule.
Meanwhile, Activision is taking a closer look at how much freedom Blizzard devs should have. I wonder why…
