Activision-Blizzard fired a big part of their QA staff. “Non essential” or something like that. Guess they’re only essential if you want to deliver a high quality product right away and not have your customers identify your bugs for you.
6 Likes
I’m talking about players. People who go on the PTR or Beta are supposed to be helping the game, but it never accounts for much, it seems.
So, they want free labor and to put that burden on paying customers than to pay QA testers… Well, of course no wonder testing has gone down hill.
1 Like
Well no, this is how its always worked.
I don’t know a single thing about the internal QA process, or how much staff is allocated, but either way its failures are remarkable.
No point in hearsay without knowing more behind the scenes.
All I know, is the PTR is an embarrassment.
Logging on, you see less than a hand full of people actually online, and many of them are running around doing things that offer no benefit on the PTR - likely meaning they are just playing the game for free instead of actually testing things directly.
They need to find a solution to this.
1 Like
I feel they reduced investment in the title, which may be expected assuming subs much lower than they were in Wrath. They’ve laid off a lot of quality people.
4 Likes
Do we even know what the subs numbers are? So many people speculate, but without knowing… it’s hard to say that. Also, you have to consider the timing of Wrath and other expansions, many other big MMORPG’s to take player interests… including some of Blizzard’s own! I’ve lost a handful of friends from WoW to Hearthstone.
I do agree, they’ve laid off quality people. They’ve also, thankfully, let go of some not-so-quality people. In terms of internal QA process, I can’t imagine it being much better after taking a huge hit to their team.
1 Like
It’s all speculation and extrapolation, but if they reduced investment and maintained population I think that’d be a worse scenario. There are diminished engagement numbers but I do not know how that correlates to sub numbers.
Is there a way to compare yearly reports from Realm Pop websites, I wonder?
1 Like
I think any numbers I’ve seen are soft, just estimators without knowing relative error in the approximation making them mostly meaningless. We can look at how they trend but I suspect their relative error margin has also increased. Really, only Blizzard knows and they’re not telling.
I wouldn’t argue that it’s the players trying to aim to be disapointed in the game but that rather when try to. And go with things like “Hey, this titanforging stuff, it seems kinda clunky, why should getting some of the best gear in the game basically be a lottery dice roll for titanforging + socket?” and the next solution is gear that will kill you in lfg, it’s hard to see that as a positive.
When people see the Kultirans and Mechagnomes vs say the Zandalari Trolls all unique motifs and themes and the Vulpera, they get excited, and then everyone was all like. “Oh blizz please anything for Ogres/Saberon/Vrykul / Sethilak”
The response is that they took one of the least popular races with not a lovedom but a Disgust-Dom and forced it on instead after Kul Tirans. Alright so maybe the rigging wouldn’t work, but then again neither do legs, arms, gloves, pants, or boots.
The players feel frusterated too, no matter what we try to do, it doesn’t feel like positive or negative feedback is listened to or acknowledged. So we go to talk to our fellow players and agree the grass used to be greener it seemed and maybe times were simpler back then, but we remember when a game was a game we looked forward too, and didn’t feel like we were seen as dollar cows to timegate to milk subs out of like a old dairy cow on a machine sucked dry to the last drop on half the feed.
Everyones playing the game for the people and hopes of the new content to chase after. But it just seems like this general feeling that Game developers are laughing in spite of one at the other, neglecting core components of the came like pvp and pve on blue side. PVPers can’t gear up, Mythic raids are suffering population / competition issues. when solutions or ideas are proposed from cross faction raiding to incentives or trying to find positive ideas, it doesn’t seem like things like account bound essences, offspec friendier methods, or cross faction raiding get acknowledged. And the things that are popular often just get a ‘nope’.
While the developer responses to players listing and HIgh elf threads rivaling Vulpera were. “If you want to play a high elf, the horde is waiting for you, just quit if you don’t like it.” doesn’t exactly earn a lot of good will with a community that is trying to enjoy the grind.
But it’s kinda self evident that from grinds people never minded, or did out because it’d be fun, like frostsabers that there are things people enjoy. And character too, like who didn’t like Zappyboy and Saurfang and cheer when Bolvar appeared, only to watch both of them be blown up and wasted 2 seconds later(???) What about the other half of the story. Where’s the Alliance gets a giant Gorilla and llama questline where we literally run around during our war campaign just seeing a bombing to go enlarge gorillas? Whats our story, what do we do? Why is a gorilla the most fleshed out part of BFA of all things?
By all means i’m not like saying i wouldn’t want to hear more about the insights, but it just gets sour when it always feels like the solution to a complaint seems to be from Blizz Activision Dev team is to grant the wish like a spiteful monkey paw that only grants wishes with a middle finger when corrupted gear and mechagnomes come out to make a race that has little to no public appeal while another get the wildly popular Vulpera… to the one edgelord race of undead that hate furries… Great??? What exactly are we working with here, what’s the goal of all this, why does it hardly ever feel like feedback is listened to positively and not like having the walls shut and grenades shot back at us?
10 Likes
Its better than ever. It’s just that the person who writing the checks has other plans.
When was this?
All I remember hearing about was some layoffs. Layoffs happen all the time in the business world and they are far from the same thing as being fired.
The game is a massive monstrosity these days. It has pet battles, achievements, rated battlegrounds, arena, lfr, multiple raid difficulties, multiple dungeon difficulties, brawlers guild, a mythic dungeon invitational, garisons, pvp mlg awards, lots of old content that bugs out from time to time, and more.
In the past it was more refined with fewer systems to deal with and it I suppose was easier to manage. These days this game probably has too much content and too many systems. So with that said it probably is just getting tougher and tougher over the years because there is too much for the devs to manage.
I think what they may have to do is simple but also would perhaps be a bit nutty. Make World of Warcraft II and continue adding expansions to WoW I, but put more focus on 2. I can’t believe I even suggested WoW II but frankly at this point they either remove stuff from WoW or they start with a whole new game. That is if they really needed to go back to a refined game with fewer systems in place and way more polish.
1 Like
Do you guys think the legendary cloak could be better or worse than the legendary rings?
I think it’s getting more homogeneous, so that everything feels kind of the same. One rep grind is just like another. It makes things feel less creative and more cookie cutter-ish. Go further back in the game and every adventure felt more unique.
7 Likes
The game is at cash cow stage. You invest enough to keep the cash flowing.
I don’t know what the development team size is like, but I imagine it’s a fair bit less than the glory days. You can’t do as much with a smaller team.
8 Likes
Whatever term you want to use. The important fact is that Activision-Blizzard no longer has many of the employees whose job it was to ensure quality. This was during that layoff months ago, think it was 800 people? Some of those people were on the quality side of the house. I’m sure you remember because it was all over the gaming news outlets.
2 Likes
I pretty much stopped reading after this. It is completely delusional to think that people who are working their butts off trying to please customers, fandom, AND investors are “laughing at players”. That is not how the real world operates.
1 Like
There’s a huge difference between being laid off and being fired. It’s not just swapping terms out. You’re trying to compare a horse to a giraffe on the basis that they both have eyes.
I feel like you never frequented the forums during WOTLK. Just like now people were trashing the game and calling for Ghostcrawler’s job. Please take off your rose tinted goggles.
2 Likes