I’m talking about those specifically at Blizzard who are responsible. As I explained, the comments I see all the time are “blame the devs”. They are only 1 part of Blizzard and are taking orders. I’m sure there are devs who see what they’re about to release and think “sigh…”
So whoever the dev’s manager reports to. Or even higher than him. Imagine being the manager and being told “Ok, for this fiscal, your budget is now cut in half and you have to fire a couple people but I still expect you to release a content patch by the end of…”
That manager does what he can and has to be the recipient of the backlash, not the one who made those calls to him.
To add onto it, I’m not saying nobody is to blame, just blame the right persons, not in a blanket sense.
If I go to walmart and I see a worker grab my buggy loaded with groceries and wheels it to the back which causes me to waste 45 minutes because I have to go get another buggy and start over. Then I go to checkout and only 2 registers are open and both have 45 minute wait lines. When I say walmart sucks, is that not a fair statement to say even though I just generalized every single walmart because of a single experience at a specific store?
I don’t care if the manager made cuts and only put two people out there to ring up customers. They are all under the umbrella of the walmart brand.
You’re rating the company itself because that’s the only option. There is no option to rate that individual employee. But that’s not what’s going on here. We’re on a forum where we can specifically say “Joe Blow” sucks.
And yes, they are all under the same umbrella but to paint everyone with the same brush isn’t fair.
It’s not fair but it’s the same concept. Saying Walmart sucks after a bad experience is the same as saying blizzard sucks because of a bad experience. No one is naming names at either company because we don’t know those names so we use their company name.
It’s putting blame where it belongs. My point is still that so many blame the devs specifically and knowing how business works, that’s not smart to do.
I’m still having some fun leveling and goofing off. My current project for when Lisa is at work is a twink build. Probably won’t ever actually PvP on it but the process of making it has been fun. Right now I have more STV arena trinkets than levels
If you’re curious the run from the dwarf start zone to the Gurubashi arena awarded enough experience to almost hit level 3 and required 23 corpse runs.
Whenever my wife gets bored of TBCc is when I’ll unsubscribe. I’ll probably come back to punch Arthas in the face once or twice more.
I was having fun in tbcc too. Leveling with Squeek and I is an experience everyone should have because we’ve fine tuned “just jump, you’ll live, I swear!” splat. And I was looking forward to a Kara speedrun with Jd on his “hold my beer” prot pally.
The thing that finally turned me off from WoW was seeing a dev team that could so quickly and so easily remove something that’s been integral to WoW since it’s conception, faction conflict. If they could remove that, anything is game. They’ve targeted the spit emote already. What’s next? Cannibalism? Jeffrey Dahmer is real. The blame falls on the devs for letting real world implications invade an RPG.
And I won’t even start on the boosts and the impact they’ve had on an old version of the game, but I do agree with Jd, the indications are there that there are more coming.
The current dev team lacks creativity and innovation. Those people are gone. The new people just come up with new iterations of the same tired sustainable (as they see it) formula.
Good recent example. Our sales director chewed out our production team saying “you build crap” and I said “yeah, because you take on large orders knowing our workforce is smaller right now and set unrealistic time frames”.
I very much doubt Activision has micromanagement to the level of dictating design. Certainly, in my conversions with various devs over the years, they maintained that the ideas and creative direction are largely in-house. There is probably a mandate from above to try and get players to stay online for as long as possible, and they’re given a budget to work with.
The development team then decides how to reach those goals - and they’ve fallen short for a few years now. Instead of making the game fun (which would get people to play), they’ve decided to time gate content, make unnecessary long grinds and have RNG set to silly levels. They’ve lost the heart. It no longer seems to be a design direction of “making a game we want to play”, at least to me.
Case in point: our one PvP developer said he had a budget to work with, but other developers came in and took it for other PvE things that all that was left was an arena for this expansion. That is not an Activision decision, that’s a development one on where money goes. Sure, Ac will set an overall budget, but I very much doubt they dictate where it goes.
I agree with both of your recent posts. There has been a real shift in the community (even from people who love/d the game). The goodwill is gone. There’s a lot of entertainment avenues out there competing for people’s attention and their time. Perhaps they have just become complacent over the years.
In most big businesses, the top management sets the ultimate goals “bring in/retain X amount of employees”, “release expansion before X date”. Then they set the budgets for each department and the department head has to decide where that money is allocated to try and meet the goals. Sometimes, they end up having to cut a bunch of corners to meet those goals whether it’s manpower or other resources. Some companies are forced to buy overseas when they prided themselves on buying locally.
In the end, that department isn’t always proud of what they release. Some would (under confidence) admit they’re ashamed of their outputs.
In regards to blizzard devs vs Activision, it is not wrong to say that Blizzard sucks. It just does. Blizzard, the company, the entity, sucks. The individual people who work there don’t all suck. There are plenty of good people who want to design or develop cool things but they are ultimately constrained by budgets and poor leadership.
How Blizzard went from being one of the most loved companies to now being a hated joke of the industry is amazing, but it’s not because of Jane Doe creating the terrain environments in a WoW zone.
It’s the atrocious leadership.
I’m wondering why the devs disabled the emote only in TBC and not also in retail.
I guess this shows the two games have separate dev teams. It’s kinda inconsistent that the TBC team determined the emote was toxic/bad so they removed it, but the retail team just shrugged and did nothing.
The weak aura is for tbc only. There’s only one store mount in tbc so it’s easy to isolate and shun by the player base like using a spit emote.
What’s silly to me is that the weak aura will just get changed to /fart or something. I guess they think a lot of players will just let it go and not change their weak aura.
