Great dev interaction

PVP Arenas
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Everything is fine and working as intended. Whole community very pleased with current state of arena.

Blues, continue to ignore this section and collect pay check. You’re killing the game!

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10 billion dollar corporations have no guilt.

You can literally substitute nouns with the birth of the lich king on wikipedia;

When Activision-Blizzard awakened, it removed its own heart, believing that anything that lowered profits made the company weak.

Afterwards it journeyed to [World of Warcraft] where he raised the ancient minion Ion Hazzikostas, alias “Watcher” then watched his massive undead army of developers prepare to find more profits.

While he was pruning, his developers trained in [Warlords of Draenor] After he awoke he and ordered the march on [all future expansions] because of the potential profits buried there. He wanted to raise them and claim those profits for the [Soulless Parent Company].

etc…

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Yooo this was a good post just wanted to throw a shout out of appreciation for this solid work.

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I think pvp is pretty decent right now. It’s been worse.

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Eh, not really the blues fault that the devs don’t communicate. They’re reliant on the devs just as much as we are for information, which is why there’s very few posts here by them, and why generally when they do post, it aims at a humorous topic.

With exception to people like Ion of course.

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Imo it either comes down to whoever is taking lead as director of communications failing to establish lead & sell the devs, president/VPs, CEO, CFO, etc. that the current model isn’t how companies with successful communication lines & adoring fanbases act. That, or it’s a corporate culture issue where people at Activision have essentially politely told whoever is managing PR/communications to go F themselves after hearing an intelligent dialogue and making it clear that a strategy of ignoring virtually any hardball tossed their way will be employed in such a scripted manner it lacks any real human deliberation whatsoever.

In said scenario, company higher-ups would acknowledge some loss but ultimately chalk it up to an acceptable one with the rationale that with resources being moved around, they aren’t losing out on a priority consumer base.

What I can say without a doubt is I’m 100% noticing lower employees at Blizzard (CMs, devs w/ smaller responsibilities, blues, etc.) seem to absolutely keep a passion for gaming while unmistakably losing a passion for Blizzard games. Just reading the twitter feeds of devs, I really don’t get the same sense I did back in Vanilla-WOTLK that people were stoked that they were on the COOLEST project in the world and just poured their soul into it. Get much more a sense that this is a 9-5 for a lot of people and that’s not a critique on them, that’s a corporate culture issue, both in terms of leadership, compensation, vision, etc.

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Of course you do, mr rogue.

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I don’t think that’s exactly true. The Blizzard employees I’ve seen seem to enjoy working for Blizzard (at least before they lost the last OG Blizzard lead person)… Maybe towards WoW itself things could be tainted, as it feels like the soul of the game has been sold off to the highest bidder (which is exactly what happened when Activision made their purchase leading into Cata). I don’t know though, all such references are just going to be hearsay, and not really a legitimate way to criticize the situation.

I think the issue is more likely to be that they’re being stifled with their game design from Activision. They’re likely having certain aspects pushed from higher up, and then are forced to try integrating them in a reasonable way. Then they have to defend actions that they’ve had to take from the community, choices that are likely not in their control.

That personally seems like the biggest likelihood, as it would explain the lack of communication as a whole. It’s easy not to have to defend garbage choices that you don’t agree with, when you just decide not talk at all. It also would explain why Holinka and Ion both double talk a lot when discussing changes in public, as some changes you literally cannot defend logically.

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So if there’s no information for the blues to communicate from the devs to the players, they should eliminate that position since it’s redundant.

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From what I’ve heard, the blues essentially are translators/filters for the devs… Likely for the devs to avoid player toxicity… but that also likely creates the bubble where the devs feel like they’re in their own world compared to players, which likely is why the game feels so alienated. They also choose what topics get sent to those devs, so topics that are important to us, aren’t necessarily important to the blues per say.

Dunno, it’s possible the devs read the forums and just don’t respond, but it’d be hard to tell.

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My main spec is outlaw though :frowning:

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Who are you talking to? As you said, there are no Blues here

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I’m talking to the blues who are paid to communicate with us and the devs, but just browse over these forums.

Can anyone tell me the number of blue posts the arena forums has gotten since legion launch/BFA launch?

I mean, I get it, they are muzzled by the developers who are muzzled by the money people. But seriously I would be ashamed to work for this company right now.

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You can find all the blue posts here: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/groups/blizzard-tracker/activity/posts?category_id=21

Including the best answer ever(from Ythisens):
Q:Can you give us the formula for how scaling is handled please?
A: 2+2 is 4, minus 1 is 3.

So, basically, no decent communication since Sept 24th 2018. Community engagement at its finest.

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At this point blues are basically acting as a PR team for the company. Think of it the same way that you’d imagine a traditional press corps in the White House. Sure the president might answer some questions directly but usually the press secretary is going to filter information through lens and decide both (a) what information to put out and (b) how to filter it to make it look the best/least controversial. This game isn’t a passion project where blues are excited devs letting you in on the watercooler talk they’re dishing out during the week anymore :frowning: