Blizzard pays good money to keep those glassdoor reviews squeaky clean from having ANY Software Developer/Engineer reviews, negative or otherwise.
Talk about an iron clad nda. Can’t even soeak the truth because the truth hurts the company.
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Yes - our idea of what content consists of differs, I understand the patch release dates. My idea of content is the raids m+ and pvp seasons. Not the questing/zone releases and trickled in weekly story quest lines (3-4 quests). The seasonal releases were 5-6 months and final tier was about a year. Which is consistent with what i consider “content”.
We just have to agree to disagree on this one. Patch does not = content to me.
Esports peeps I doubt had an impact on the patch. This seems to be covid and a California work ethic
Yeah, but how often do repurposed employees make the news?
Considering the severance these folks got, they did pretty good, and they have a solid resume bump from working for acti-blizz. My company recently moved some folks from a group and had to lay others off. The folks who got moved mostly quit in the first 2 months because it really wasn’t what they wanted to be doing, but they stayed because it was a job. The severance they could have had would have been a much better option.
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Yup, that’s the part that most people don’t see or choose to ignore purposefully. A lot of folks who get “repurposed” didn’t want to be - and the part of the job they wanted to do or enjoyed doing being in their rear view mirror causes them to move on soon after anyway.
This happened to my wife recently. Her company had a mega merger and her whole department shifted. Including who was in charge, the visions and goals, and everything impacted between. She moved on a few months later. With about 75% of the team she worked with leaving shortly after her.
Repurposing people into roles they didn’t want and away from the role they desired generally loses said folks anyway. I’d take the massive severance and finding something more fitting somewhere else myself.
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The game has had three major content patches for each expansion as far back as I can remember clearly: x.1, x.2, x.3. If the game truly moved at the pace you suggest, we’d be on 9.3 by August and then stuck there for the next 15 months until the next expansion.
My $0.02 is: “no thanks”. I can’t complete a mythic plus season (or raid tier or PVP season) that fast anyway.
200 people from several downsized depts now constitute a “mass firing”?
You have no idea what a mass lay off is? Go back and read about the subprime crash in 2008, then come back to me and we can discuss mass layoffs.
putz.
The “firing half your employees” comment makes this rant legit… and made me chuckle a bit.
This is why I don’t play retail anymore. The game caters way too much of the game to players like you that want to play seasonal action rpg lobby games. It has been slowly destroying the vision the original game was founded on and a lot of players that want to play a WoW MMO are regulated to Classic now.
I think it was a gamble to try to morph WoW in this direction that the game has taken since Legion in order to try to appeal more to a modern gamer. I think it has been one giant fail personally. Just from my observations, the game is bleeding away it’s MMO fanbase to Classic, ESO and FF14, because those games are filling that role of an actual MMO.
Retail WoW is basically a MMO in name only these days and that was the point of the post, to point out the lack of resources that WoW is clearly suffering from. The developers obviously can’t sustain a content cycle that a real MMO would dictate these days. They’ve resorted to systems like M+, scaling raids and time gates of a very small amount content in order to keep players engaged. It has worked some what, but I think the novelty of grinding the same dungeons and limited world content has wore off.
Again, it sounds like you really don’t want to play a MMORPG, you want a online lobby co-op game that revolves around a very narrow set of content or play style.
MMOs were always about creating a virtual world for players to inhabit. Forcing everyone into these group based gear treadmills of a very limited set of content goes completely against what MMOs started out as.
Now my ideas might be outdated, but I still think the MMO market is still pretty big and it is currently being under served.
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Blizzard needs more punch and pie
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This.
It’s sad, but you can sort of tell who on the team still feels that excitement and passion, and whose just sort of doing it for a paycheck at this point.
People’s social medias are available to see. You can see how certain people act during interviews. You can even look up a lot of armories of people at the very top of the ladder. People in charge are raidlogging, and it explains a lot about the state of the game in regards to anything that can’t be pushed as an esport right now. (And even then, with the raid loot fiasco and state of rated PvP right now…)
People keep looking at the most recent round of layoffs and go “it’s just esports” without realizing we’ve gone through several waves since WoD, and when did things start getting really bad? During WoD.
We haven’t had any truly new innovative features outside M+ - and some would argue the redo of the player model rigs, but… that also fell short, and on out of touch ears from again, players that raidlog.
There’s been some shuffling of employees and a lot of promotions lately, and I’m praying that helps, but I fully expect longer patch cycles going forwards.
And normally that wouldn’t be a bad thing… but we don’t have evergreen content like player housing/proper old scaling like other games have (…we have pet battles), meaning that the moment the current content is done, you run out of stuff to do that’s engaging.
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They just watch a bellular clip on youtube and repeat the information.
No, but I think the QA cuts from 2018 are definitely being felt now.
A programmer is only as good as their QA and a game designer is only as good as their play testers.
You cut those “Non essentials” and things can fall apart pretty fast. Especially in larger organizations.
And I suspect they’re purposefully staffing down through attrition thinking classic will allow them to ping pong the players between the two games so they can slow down production. And that’s a very dangerous game with the loss of institutional memory and the most competent people that can get better jobs elsewhere leaving first.
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