Your completely wrong. Everyone forgets how much of a liar ghostcrawler was and his blatant favoritism for some classes over others. He lied while on stage at blizzcon about nerfing paladins. Just because the criticisms comes for the so called vocal minority does not mean those criticisms are unfounded or wrong.
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I heard some grumblings of resentment towards Ghostcrawler but he mostly stayed in the background it seemed. I don’t really associate his tenure with the WoW franchise. He occasionally did blog posts (communication is a good thing) but most of what he had to say was very distant and didn’t give any kind of clear picture as to the direction of the game. Trying to glean anything out of his blog posts were like trying to read tea leaves (possibly on purpose).
The only thing I will say of Ghostcrawler, is that I am glad Watcher is at the helm instead of him. You can argue all you want to with that, but I’ll take Watcher any day over him.
With Watcher I feel like I can at least engage in open debate and stand a chance of it being considered, outargued or be met with facts that refute my point. But in all cases I can expect that since he’s an educated man, the points will be weighed calmly and logically.
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I disagree. You never get a real answer, just lawyer speak and fluff. He’s no more educated than Ghostcrawler was. The Q & As are horrible.
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Curious as to your personal experiences in this regard. From my perspective Watcher is just another cog in the corporate machine like most recent public heads. You will get really no quarter from that type at most they will patronize or pretend to take your advice to keep things moving along. Trying to impress your own ideas or read any sort of intention from them is like reading palms. In a way those in power to make the choices prefer someone who is that type. Someone who wont rock the boat or put anything of value on the line for an idea they believe in.
I think that is part of why Morhaime (was forced out, likely) and others left. People like him are willing to rock the boat in the name of personal convictions. They are also usually reviled in corporate arenas for that same reason. But it has been proven many times to me that people like that are more likely to start/save a company than someone who focuses on the ‘bottom-line’ through bureaucracy.
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Watcher was a player before he was a dev. He was “one of us” before he was ever a “cog in the corporate machine.” Which is every position at every company, btw. With his background in law school you can at least be assured the man is educated enough to think logically and choose what he believes is the best answer.
Oh. And about Morhaime. He co-founded this company. He’s been here for a while. He’s getting old and more likely than not just wanted to move on with his life and have a less stressful job.
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Law school is a strange jump to heading a major game development company. Personally I have no experience with Watcher either focused or in general. He is still an enigma to me.
Not just Morhaime but I don’t think any of the old-guard of WoW’s heyday are still in any kind of important decision making role. That could be good or that could be bad, depending.
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This is his story, if you have an hour to go do something and listen in the background. Or watch I guess, if people still watch videos.
Tbh, they’re all old and the topic wears on you after a while. There has to be a new generation of devs eventually when a game goes on this long.
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Stop hiding the numbers. Post them and we’ll see what’s really up. My friends list is a ghost town. Guilds are dead/dying. Tuesday night and I struggled to find a group for the world bosses. Still haven’t done Lion’s Roar on one of my two 120s cause I couldn’t find a full group the two nights I’ve logged in this week. I’m sure there are busier servers, but I won’t line your pockets to transfer to one.
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Problem is either having vision consistent with what made the game popular in the beginning, or charting their own course with their own consistent vision. So far those at the helm have succeeded at both and neither. The game feels like a muddled mess at this point with trying to appeal to all and succeeding in appealing to very few.
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I mean like I said Watcher has been here since the beginning. He is a Scarab Lord and everything. He knows what made Vanilla successful and has been working on the game since Wrath, which is still credited as the “greatest expansion ever” by pretty much anyone who played it.
In general the market for MMOs is much different than it was in 2004, so I’m glad they’re letting the Vanilla lovers have their fun in the old-school RPG era that made this game successful, but I’d much rather stay here. I noticed my personal enjoyment of the game shoot right up once Ion took over Chilton’s job.
Well, aside from the horrific content droughts in Draenor. But that’s other internal issues, not game design.
If sub/sales numbers are any indication this game is still in slow decline. I can say ‘I have been there from the beginning’ too, but if I was offered the chance to steer such a behemoth I would recoil at the offer.
To be perfectly blunt, we don’t know the sub numbers and haven’t been told for years. After the Draenor debacle managed to lose more than half the playerbase they kept it hush hush and pulled out all of the stops with Legion to get people back. In my experience, it worked. And we’re all still here.
We’re just in the post-launch bubble crash when people who resub to see the new expansion fade into the background until the next patch/expansion when they do it all over again.
There is also the problem of a decline in community cohesion. If you asked most people who played MMORPGs back in the EQ/UO days they would say it was not the content that kept them coming back but the sense of community that they may have developed. There is really no sense of forming bonds anymore for whatever reason. Guilds fall apart at a faster rate now more than ever.
I won’t deny community bonds aren’t what they were. I think that’s the primary reason people look back so fondly at Vanilla. I want them to reduce the amount of servers and focus on restricting some of the CRZ whenever it’s not absolutely required to keep a zone populated.
Server merge has always been the death knell of an MMORPG. You can’t avoid the stink even if it goes over well. CRZ is basically Blizz trying to server merge while at the same time not signalling definitively that the game is in decline.
Fair enough. No matter how you do it though it’s always gonna make people uneasy. I just feel like it will need to be done at some point. At the very least merge more dead servers together.
When Ghostcrawler was working at Blizzard it was undoubtedly true that more people appreciated the devs than were highly critical.
Yes, even during Cataclysm.
When Ghostcrawler worked on this game the mistakes they made were the kind where they swung for the fun fences and hit a fly ball instead. Yeah, you might groan, but you KNEW the dev team was trying hard to do something awesome.
Now it is not the same situation. At all. I don’t know why but WoW now is markedly different than WoW prior to WoD. Street’s comments apply to his experience and his time, not this time and these devs.
Game forums always are home to the most passionate players of whatever game is being discussed. Maybe you love features or hate them, but if you are here yakking about WoW then you are passionate about this game. There just is no other reason to be here. There are much better places to have a conversation, troll people, debate, or be funny all over the internet. If you are here: You care.
So calling other people who care deeply about the game dismissive names just because you don’t share their POV on the current changes to the game? That’s petty. Because the day nobody is left here caring enough to be mad about some design they don’t like will be the day the game really is dead.
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When dealing with a behemoth like WoW, any action will make someone unhappy. In hindsight I think they should have chosen a different course than CRZ due to how extremely buggy and immersion breaking phasing can be. It goes back to the whole ‘experience’ thing. You don’t feel part of a world when things randomly pop in and out of existence and you form no lasting bonds to people from other servers.
In this, we are in complete agreement. They should’ve just done server merges from the beginning, imo.
(To clarify, like Borean Tundra-Shadowsong, or other low-pop server examples. Not literally crossing two servers together in a technical space - that’s down the line when we really have to do it to have enough of a playerbase left. I’m sure we still have quite a few years ahead of us for that though.)