MS has not bought ATVI yet, much less taken any role in running ATVI, or the subsidiaries under it.
They need a lot of approvals first and the deal won’t go through until at least 2023.
You are right, you said current expansion - I should not have said past. I should have clarified I meant past work. The Dragonflight expansion that has been worked on for 2-3 years and was announced before she was promoted.
Everything you have been complaining about pre-dates her being in the EP role over the WoW franchise. She became EP TODAY. You don’t like DF based on years of work before she was promoted.
There it goes. You just showed that you have zero experience in a global organization buyout.
I can assure you directly, as an IT consultant for global organization buyouts, that is not the case.
MS has boots on the ground, making high level decisions and approvals on any big changes within Blizzard. The hiring of executive management, is CERTAINLY going to be a Microsoft approval item.
The “deal” has been “agreed to”. That requires months if not years of work in some cases. But this isn’t a highly regulated industry like say, the medical device industry, in which I have extensive experience. No. They already have IT system accounts and email addresses within the Blizzard IT Environment, that is 100% at this stage.
Blizzard has suredly halted ALL purchasing, upgrade projects, any sort of financial investment, outside of keeping things running. If a critical server goes out, they will replace it, but if we face login queues at launch of DF?? They won’t be buying any new servers…
UNLESS, MICROSOFT AGREES TO INVEST THE MONEY REQUIRED. That is part of the agreement. They agreed to buy the assets of that day, then, back when. So if Microsoft wants more assets in what they are buying themselves, they would have to either agree to give Blizzard more money in the buyout to offset that cost, or just pay for it outright themselves out of pocket. That’s how things work during a buyout.
The executives are in the same room, at Blizzard-Activision, having meetings, all day, every day. They aren’t just sending a weekly email report. That was before the agreement. Now that they have agreed, they are already in the process of staging the actual Domain Integration between Microsoft and ActiBlizz… Setting up management vlans and hiring third party consultant companies to come and analyze IT systems for upgrade/implementation into the approved, secured, Microsoft XBOX Infrastructure.
This only needs one approval which is anti-monopolization law protections in place.
She was on the video, for the reveal. She helped make the expansion. Are you for real?
Did you get on the community council by being a cheerleader for Blizzard, or for the community? I’m confused.
I can tell why you’re believing Dragonflight has no content…because you’ve only typed out 2 things out of over 10.
New zones, new professions, a new race/class which will be expanded upon later.
New class/race combos.
I’m sure new battlegrounds will be added during the duration of the expansion. As well as a couple more side islands/locations. Like Timeless Isle and/or Zerith Mortis.
Like…you’re reading way too much into it.
You need to allow the game time to present us with everything.
You seriously can’t expect the devs to release the entire expansion: all patch notes for classes/races, all additional content that will come with larger patches, all raids, raid bosses, dungeons, dungeon bosses, all rares and all treasures and everything else before the game goes into Alpha mode?
It seems most people here don’t understand what maintenance mode means.
Until the game literally stops getting any new content of any kind, then you can claim that it’s in maintenance mode, but as long as it gets even something or something smaller then it’s not in maintenance mode because they still took the time to develop anything at all. Also even if the Dracthyr and Evokers are limited to each other, how is a new race and class with new animations, considered maintenance mode? What because they can’t use any mortal race as their humanoid form, or the Evoker is limited to just them? Have you guys heard of fantasy games before?
I’m confused about Blizzard’s hierarchy anyway. Where does she rank? Is she higher than Ion? Lower? Totally different area? I don’t get how they organize.
What it means to people who have watched mmorpg’s near and dear to their heart, come and go, have their own definition of what it means.
Even if those mmorpg’s “still exist today”. Even if so called “new content” is being added to the game in some fashion. Doesn’t justify the game being exempted from being considered a “maintenance mode” game.
Star Wars Galaxies was in maintenance mode after the CU and the NGE all but killed it.
The game was online for several years after that and even put out two new expansions.
But everyone was leaving. The game was dead. The only people left were actual employee’s, people who had career’s revolved around SWG content, and die hard SWG fans that didn’t care about the state of the game or anything, they just didn’t want the game to die.
Everquest has been in maintenance mode ever since SOE sold the rights to the Everquest Franchise to Daybreak games. It’s the same there. Employees. Boosters, Gold Farmers. Fansite creators and other content creators. And die hards. With the occasional nostalgia seeker. (but that only happens one time, after they see the state of the game, the common thought is that Daybreak puts out about 2% of the content of an actual SOE expansion. That is why “Classic” EQ servers “were” so popular. Until everyone realized that Daybreak games had ruined the itemization databases with all encompassing changes, and nothing to revert to. They literally broke the magic that made even the old game worthwhile, and it was lost forever.
Just because they are adding “stuff” to the game still, doesn’t mean that recycled cardboard content is equal to the quality content we have grown accustomed to. We noticed. It’s nowhere near as good. Race/Class was about as classic for expansions as new zones, level cap increase and new dungeons/raids/gear. But apparently that’s getting put into maintenance mode. We get one race that can only be one class. The new class. And only the new race can be that class too.
So historically we could be a variety of races with a new class, or a vareity of classes with a new race. But now they have limited both.
But you don’t think that is out of the norm? You don’t think it’s a sign of budget cuts?
What is it a sign of then? Blizzard just hates extra work? Is that better or worse?
If I remember correctly she was shown on the video as being in charge of WoW Classic. That is an entirely separate team and has zero to do with development of retail WoW.
Wow still seems to be a good chunk of the playerbase. Other mmos failed at this. The change in design might be result of realizing that pushing it further with crappy systems wasn’t keeping people playing. So I don’t think it’s there yet.
Maintenance mode isn’t something you can have an opinion on, it has a definition already.
To me the only problems I see are related to the court case scandals and the fact that they work under a greedy psychopath who also has an even more psychotic board to back him up. I see the team struggling to do anything at all because working under those people obviously hurts morale, as does every other week when people post articles about the scandals and don’t ever let up. You can see the quality diminish on all of their games, not just WoW, around 2018 when the investigations began.
I do not think WoW is in maintenance mode and I don’t think Dragonflights reveal was any more “lacking” than previous expansions. I also don’t think them promoting someone into the EP role changes anything.
Correction: the portion of the video she was on was the reveal for both Dragonflight and Wrath Classic. That said, I’m not sure what world you live on where working one project excludes someone from discussing other projects.