Blizz Interview and the "Blizz doesn't care"

This is one of the most accurate things said.

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IMO, when 99% of people agree with person A, it might be reasonable to consider ignoring person B. For example, AoE looting in Wrath classic.

Additionally, not everything has to be black or white. Sometimes it can be black and white. Why not give people the option. For example, let AoE looting be a check mark next to auto loot so the 6 people who don’t want it can turn it off.

With the buffs to legacy content yeah.

It shows they don’t care.

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Fact is the developers do care Blast.

Keep in mind that video game developers get paid less than most other tech industries, and they’re often forced to work long hours to get products ready for ship. Blizzard is known for underpaying/lowballing, so they pay even less than other video game developers like Riot Games or Ubisoft.

The fact that they care is literally the only thing keeping them working for Blizzard. If they didn’t care about the games and the community and only cared about the money/workload, they’d be elsewhere now.

If they really cared they shouldn’t be letting Blizzard shove us around as they have.

So they don’t care, since they’re already dead inside.

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I find this bordering on the line of emotional manipulation. Different people have different motivations to do work. I find that if you want your employees to ‘care’ more, then treat them well first (e.g. higher salaries, better benefits), and their desire to pay more attention to customer issues improves. It’s human nature to not really care much about others when your own needs/wants aren’t being met.

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Doesn’t change a thing I was right about the body mass, isn’t it? These are absolute simple requests to do, yet for some strange reason it looks so far-fetched for the community, so outlandish, so hilarious.

Truth as a matter of fact is, all these things can be done with one person within a week, who goes across all races and adds two more body types. It isn’t rocket science. And that’s basically with many similar little requests.

Actually, they would be still at the wow developer’s team. As long they can work on a game instead being a waitress, this life certainly suits them better.

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Just because someone can do something in 3DS Max or Blender, doesn’t mean it can be done using Blizzard’s tools, in Blizzard’s engine.

That’s what people in that Reddit thread are missing. They have access to the tools that allow them to create and manipulate models, and you can do anything in those programs, including making insanely detailed characters that look like they belong in an animated movie and not in a video game.

But getting sliders to work inside Blizzard’s engine is a completely different animal, and no one outside Blizzard can actually know for sure if that’s possible, because they don’t have access to their engine or the tools that allow them to create things in said engine.

That’s why I cringe whenever I see someone create a WoW zone in the Unreal Engine and then I see comments like: “Why can’t Blizzard do something like this?!”. The answer is right in front of their face, smacking them with a smelly fish and said answer is: ‘Unreal Engine is not the engine Blizzard uses, so creating something that Unreal Engine can make in the Blizzard engine is not possible.’

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Does this tool work in a Repurposed Heavily Modified WC3 RTS Engine that doesn’t add strain on the system with the ability to provide the information to other players without causing more data strain on the servers with the ability to saved said information in the database that is currently used to store character data without causing any unforseen bugs, errors or just straight up breaking the game?

There was a time ago that GW2 would constantly go on and on about adding dye channels to backpacks. People took assets and proved it could be done and that it was easy and the that Devs were just being lazy. What they did not account for was the 100s of systems that interact with the model or the model data. That this model Data is also used for NPCs and was designed so early in developement there was so “hacky” methods used to get some NPC to work with them. Changing the backpacks wasn’t the hard part, it was getting everything else around it to play nice and that some Devs had spoken that it would of taken 1000s of Man hours to change all the backpacks in the game (Some 5 or 6 years ago) to the new data format as they’d of had to of made them from scratch not accounting for bugs or other issues with the hacky methods used many years prior to get something working.

I could be wrong with this, but I doubt Evoker actually has 4 body types and its just extra bits of model bolted on to make it appear “thicker” and one of the reasons that the Dragon form transmog is non-exsistant and can only be used by very carefully curated pieces that is set in the Barder shop.

If there’s one thing almost every gaming community I’m a part of does, it really under estimate how much work goes into making these things. Changing things is easy if it was designed that way it can be very difficult to almost impossible (sans rebuilding the entire system) to change certain things in a system that people just don’t realize.

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I think you’re reading far too much into what is more or less someone getting paid to do work. Work is work- that they’re working on a video game doesn’t change work being work. These people don’t wake up in the morning going “hmm, let’s see how we can do something to players today”.

Rigging has never and will never be that simple. It’s nice that people can take a model viewer or sketch art out for body types, but it’s never just a simple as “well add models hurr durr”. There are so many underlying systems that any added piece has to be woven into and work with as seamlessly as possible.

WoW’s engine works in particular ways, like a lot of games’ engines. Bolting extra crap on is how you break things.

That reddit post is almost completely irrelevant to the conversation of implementing body scaling in retail WOW. Is it possible to scale a model non-linearly so it it has different proportions, sure, which is exactly what they did in the post. Blizzard doesn’t just need to do that, there is SO MUCH more work to it that you don’t seem to grasp. This data has to be saved somewhere in the character data, it has to be included in every single rendering pass, it has to be persisted, it has to have a customization UI, it has to be transmitted to the client for every relevant character that might appear on your screen, they need the migration logic to backfill existing characters with this new data. Also, notice how that post uses either static models or very minor resting animations? It can easily screw up animations, so maybe they need to redo some animations. Not only do they have to produce those, they need the logic to switch which animation is used on the fly. Honestly, I could probably come up with more (how much customization data do you add before it becomes a memory issue for servers?), but I feel like I have made the point.

Development is hard, and what seems easy in isolation becomes more and more complicated when done in a complex system. Some of the above may be trivial, and some may be overly complicated depending on how everything in implemented. Likely there are dozens of issues I can’t even comprehend because I have no internal knowledge of the system.

I was in a few debates today about FOMO stuff, and it is astounding how many mounts and armor/weapons mogs are locked away. I understand rare titles from raiding. Those guys earned those for downing those bosses but locking mounts and cool-looking unique mogs away? I found the list of stuff removed. It is incredible and sad, but a bunch of people who no longer play has them just sitting there, and it does nothing for everyone else who should still be able to obtain them.

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I currently don’t have the time to reply to all the incoming discussions but could you please share this list with everyone?

I think the only thing I disagree with is thin Kul Tirans.

We already have that: they’re called “humans.”

The Kul Tirans have their own backstory and lore and whatever else you want to call it that they’re just a stocky group of people. And without waving some nonsensical woke-banner around, if you make “thin” Kul Tirans, it sorta feels like you’re saying there’s something wrong with the bigguns.

Kul Tirans are big. If you don’t like that, don’t play them. Is that bad?

It really feels like you’re rolling a Tauren and then asking them to look more like Orcs. Like… what is the point of this argument? Just roll an Orc.

Similarly, just roll a human.

On the OVERALL argument of body-mass sliders, I totally agree. See: City of Heroes. Where I’m sure developers will say “if you give players body-mass sliders, everyone just chooses to be the biggest, strongest possible, there’s no variation.”

CoH proved that wrong. People LIKE TO BE DIFFERENT. Give players sliders and, TRUST ME, you will see people picking EVERYTHING along the range of whatever sliders you give.

But until that option comes, Kul Tirans are fine.

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The irony of this post is that it is based on an interview with Ion, and it is Ion who said, back several expansions, that they don’t design the game for the users but for themselves.

Maybe he has changed his mind - I don’t know - but it is equally likely that he wasn’t telling the truth in one of the two opposing interviews. In his position, he is stuck between Bobby’s clear disdain for the players, his own ego (Elitist Jerks) and the likelihood that many of the devs actually do care about the players (which is how Blizz gets away with abusing them regarding wages and working conditions.) Therefore, one can understand what he says being driven by something other than the truth, but please don’t insist that we take something as true because Ion said it.

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The retired mounts https://www.warcraftmounts.com/retired.php nephew sent me the other list will have to check IMs for links, but it is enormous for armor weapons mogs.

They do care. They just don’t care about the right things sometimes.

Garrison - We wanted player housing. They thought we wanted some base of operation integral to the story they were telling.

Order halls - We wanted guild halls. They thought we wanted some base of operation integral to the story they were telling.

Covenants - We wanted meaningful choices. They thought we wanted some base of operation integral to the story they were telling.

Hopefully this makes sense. They care more about what they think is important than what we think is important. The success of Classic was egg on face. Let’s hope now they are paying attention.

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Garrisons were too big in scope for a single expansion imho.

Order Halls were legitimately good. It was fun to sometimes run into familiar names.

Covenants were good once 9.1.5 removed most of the busy work.

Making video games is hard, yet alone making it fun.

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This is your opinion but it’s worth noting much smaller teams have made hideouts much faster than Blizzard took making garrisons.

When you consider the quests, the dialogue, the templates, the professions, the way the whole thing was tied to the world it was obvious they spent way too much time thinking about it and planning it.

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if you cared devs, you would support Linux and stop with this Windows monopoly. I don’t want to hear that you care, because you clearly don’t.