Feeling 800 Stings, I guess:

Community General Discussion
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Remember those 800 people from quality assurance, IT, and other sections that they fired?

Yeeeeeah… Looks at patch.

Since people asked for sources:

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-02-13-activision-blizzard-staff-cuts-largely-hurt-support-teams-it-qa-and-publishing

https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/16/18226581/activision-blizzard-layoffs-executive-pay-unions
^ Quality control is also included in there.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Blizzard-Entertainment-RVW3509198.html

For those who couldn’t access the Glass Door review:

See All Reviews (842)
January 8, 2014
Helpful (10)
Blizzard Entertainment Logo
“Do not work in Quality Assurance”
Current Employee - Anonymous Employee
Doesn’t Recommend
Negative Outlook
Approves of CEO
I have been working at Blizzard Entertainment full-time for more than 5 years

Pros

  1. Ability to move to other departments outside of Quality Assurance.
  2. You will not be fired at the end of a project.
  3. The culture of Blizzard Entertainment is fantastic.
  4. All other departments outside of Quality Assurance and Customer Service are fantastic places to work.

Cons

  1. Management does not have technical knowledge.
  2. Political battles between managers catch employees in the crossfire.
  3. Career progression is attained arbitrarily based on the personal feelings of each manager.
  4. Career progression is not well defined due to this.
  5. Work ethic counts for little in the face of perception even if the perceptions are proven to be false.
  6. Overtime can last for a year…Show More

For people misinterpreting what QA is, someone who does it as a living posted the quote below:

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Yep, worst patch since selfies. At least selfies worked though.

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This became a dumpster-fire overnight.

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Never go full quality assurance deficient.

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They didn’t fire anyone, being laid off and being fired are two very different things.

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Tomato Tomahto, the people who would have otherwise done the work still aren’t there to do it.

And their development office is in the heart of insanity, California. Finding talent willing to move out there with that cost of living and to deal with that traffic? Good luck refilling those roles.

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Don’t code, don’t paint, what doooo ya do?.. Bean counters singing that while firing probably.

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Do they work at Blizzard anymore? Was it their choice? No on both counts?

Then maybe stow the pedantry.

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It seems like a pretty smooth launch to me tbh. Balancing issues yes and a couple of bugs but nothing game breaking. A quick 10 min maintenance and double dailies yesterday hardly game breaking.

You are looking for things to complain about.

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I thought the big layoffs we heard about happened in the “e-sports” areas of employment in Blizzard. I don’t remember hearing that Quality Assurance had a bunch of layoffs, but maybe I just missed it.

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Really they fired those people from the WoW quality assurance team? Do you have a source for that.

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People are getting set days and weeks behind.

Auction House sales and listings are just disappearing - someone lost hundreds of thousands of gold.

Overwhelming lag and DCs are auto-failing people in visions. Abilities are auto-failing people in visions. Certain team things are auto-failing people in visions. People aren’t getting their guaranteed loot from visions.

Vulpera and Orcs are living together - it’s raining foxes and cyborg gnomes. Utter chaos.

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Source: The state of BFA.

(Sorry, as I said in my post just a bit above, I actually don’t know if Q&A people were laid off, but I couldn’t resist the set-up).

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When you can;t do dailies because mobs break at 50%, quest mobs dont spawn or quest items don’t appear all in 1 zone, you dont really have to make any sort of effort to find things to complain about…

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Most reports also suggest that none of the lay offs affected any of the game development departments, which would include Q&A.

So let’s stow the spread of misinformation and then perhaps there will be less pedantry.

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https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-02-13-activision-blizzard-staff-cuts-largely-hurt-support-teams-it-qa-and-publishing

https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/16/18226581/activision-blizzard-layoffs-executive-pay-unions

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Blizzard-Entertainment-RVW3509198.html

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QA is it’s own department, it’s not part of development staff.

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Just cancelled my Shadowlands pre-order. This patch has shown me that their lowest point… can go lower. Sigh. Blizzard has lost all credibility with me.

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Enjoy 8.3, that is what we have until the end of year, BFA will go down as the worst expansion ever, from here until Shadowlands come out people will get so annoyed and no quality assurance to help.

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WoW players are so entitled that they think Quality Assurance is about themselves lol.

QA doesn’t exist to please customers, what a ridiculous notion.

QA is a blanket term to describe financial advisors whose purpose is to ensure that Blizzard’s money is being used for the most development with the least amount of wasted money.

Meaning, useless positions like the 800 listed above, were cut based on other QA who advised Blizzard to cut ties with the ones who were unproductive for the company.

Think of Quality Assurance as the IRS of corporations, used as a tool to police their own companies.

If nobody were in these positions, then dev studios would run amok with company money and risk having nothing to show for it.

If too many exist in these positions, you’ll have QA who are working and other QA who sit around twiddling their thumbs.

1 Like