After the 8.2 announces yesterday, granted we all still have to actually see how it is in live, strongly makes me feel this expansion will go down as the worst if not one of the worst. I hope I’m wrong and I still plan to try 8.2 to hope it is different.
1 Like
BfA really is that bad. The new system is major/minor glyph system that gives us new talents. Then we have the talent grid. We also have passive “talents” in the spellbook. We’ll still be keeping the annoying talent system from the Azerite trait system.
It is messy from a UI perspective having all these talents spread through so many different windows. If only there was a single window that could contain these. They could make it a hierarchical tree to make sure that certain qualifications are met before getting others. They could even call it a talent tree.
To quote someone in my guild in Discord:
So we lose water walking in Water Strider, but we can buy it back, but if we choose the parachute, it consumes the water walking which we would have to buy back.
I had to read that a dozen times to make sense of it. Then I read stuff I missed out on by being in the real world for a few days, and caught up on WoW news. Now that I’ve caught up that nonsense that hurt my head trying to make sense of, now makes sense. I am terrified it makes sense.
8 Likes
It has issues that anyone could have seen coming but the narrative, art, and music has been great so at least it has spirit.
I’ve decided to revise my original sentiment after the most recent 8.2 preview.
BFA was indeed that bad. And now it’s getting even worse!
10/10 bliz as usual /s
Where are the details on the 8.2 discussion?
Because in typical Blizzard fashion it’s a great big idea dashed by very low realities with the team. A team of 300 people aren’t going to build WoW + Sea of Thieves.
I do think the team is probably too small at 300 developers given the size of WoW and the historical revenue it has pulled.
More developers does not necessarily equate to better/faster development. 300 seems like way too many. Given the game’s longevity, they probably can benefit from having less developers, not more. When you have too many developers they end up tweaking systems that didn’t need tweaking and implementing features that no one ever wanted. The issues with the game aren’t due to too little development. They’re due to too much development focused in the wrong places. There’s a reason so many players are hyped for Vanilla. Often, simpler is better.
1 Like
That responsibility falls to the director to deal with.
Many studios out there, AAA in particular run with higher developer counts than Blizzard does for WoW. Ubisoft for example brings on hundreds of developers for their AAA projects.
More only is less when directors do not put their feet down on bad ideas and the director has to know when they’re seeing a bad idea unfold. Everyone is capable of pushing a bad idea so there should be no fear or embarrassment in identifying it. It’s just reality. We’re all headless in our goals and it takes someone with a unifying vision to bring it all under the same banner.
Basically when large teams become chaos that’s a failure on the part of the director to control it.
How are you defining “developer?” If you’re including artists and writers as “developers,” then I can see why you need 300 people. If you’re just talking about software developers, you really don’t need that many. Look at Stardew Valley. It’s very well done, and it only has one developer (and he even handles the art and writing himself). Asking a single director to control 300 people is absolutely insane. No one is going to be able to track 300 ideas at one time.
You might have one team of software developers per zone, and each team would have a lead. Furthermore, each team would be 4-5 people tops. Honestly, with a game this old you really need one or two. So, with six zones, you’re looking at 30 people on the high end and a dozen on the low end.
They don’t develop dungeons anymore, so you only need one raid team. The raid team might have one developer per boss. So if you have about 16 bosses per raid, you’ll need 16 people there. With sixteen people, that team will need two or three leads. We’re now up to 46 people.
Then you’ll need class designers. That’s about 9 more developers with two leads. So now we’re at a little over 50, and even then I think it’s too many.
I don’t see how you would justify 300 people. The Mythical Man Month was written in 1975, but it’s just as true today.
1 Like
You asked a question and then answered it in the same post. The director is there to control the vision of the product. That’s the director’s job.
Team leads communicate the team message to the team manager who oversees multiple teams. The team(s) manager then communicates with the director. This is how all large development teams operate and I say that as a veteran of corporate IT staffing.
At all of these junction points the message is tested for quality and adherence to the vision. So by the time it reaches the director it has a good amount of refinement to it.
What this ultimately means is a lot of good ideas don’t make the cut. That all comes down to the vision behind the product and the director. This is fine in a team of hundreds of developers and yes, development is more than coding. I include artists and writers, musicians and voice actors. The whole team.
You have to control the vision as director. That means getting a refined view not of 600 employees but dozens filtered through the refining of the team leads and the managers. Lots of ideas don’t see the light of day.
What WoW needs for example are more resources dedicated to world content. More assets, more dynamic events, more reason to go into the world. You could hire a couple hundred people just to develop assets and employ them into the open world and WoW would benefit from them. Some randomness to the events wouldn’t be bad either. Think Timeless Isle.
its all opinionated but in my opinion. its pretty bad.
1 Like
All the haters in the forum say it, is so it must be true.
I played from Vanilla through Pandaria and took a break until last month. Idk if it is BfA or so many of the other upgrades and updates since but I am VERY happy with the state of the game and the community.
3 Likes
perspective. More than once I have found myself wondering what 300 people are actually doing. So many things seem to be never quite finished or they are re using assets from 3 -4 expansions ago or when asked about features and additions to the game the reply is “the team would love to but doesn’t have time”
I would love for Ion to do a blog explaining just what 300 staff are doing
It’s not 300 artists or 300 writers or 300 coders.
It’s 300 people of various dev roles doing all of those things and more.
What you probably aren’t seeing is that every expansion has an enormous amount of writing, art, music, gameplay, design, etc that must be carried out in a timely matter and to be frank 300 people isn’t enough. We see the numerical constraint in BFA. It’s crystal clear. Nobody sees every single asset the team develops because nobody does everything. At least not right away. The stuff is there though. Acti-Blizz was also well aware hence how they justified letting people go to increase the number of devs on their IPs.
Like I said earlier I have worked on some really large client projects with hundreds of developers. One single company employing over 500 people in various development roles. Some strictly networking, some programming, some design, some doing full stack, some architects. Loads of people and very large corporations. All of them working towards a vision the director and the stakeholders have for the product.
“Don’t have the time” means that. In plain English when you get the sausage timer from start to finish lofty ideas die on the vine. Of course whenever teams get so large it’s really easy for them to be mismanaged and easy for directors to lose direction but good managers and good directors can handle 600 people.
2 Likes
It is still bad. PTR for 8.2 better be good.
Most folks don’t understand this. Having a vision and implementing the vision are two different things.
No, not really. It’s bad mostly because how good Legion was, and the current iteration is a let down. Not to mention the progression system (the Azerite gear) is very underwhelming compared to the traditional Class Sets we are accustomed to.
However, if you were to objectively compare, BFA isn’t the worst or even one of the worst expansion. People who compare it to WoD really aren’t seeing things logically.
1 Like
WoD had better class design and gold making was easier. That is objectively and subjectively true. BFA is on a path to be worse than WoD and last longer as a failed expansion.
3 Likes
BFA is great. Major problem is diluted class design following Legion.
2 Likes