For a few days in solidarity with ABetterABK’s walkout. I hope everyone can show support in anyway they can, like commenting on this post that you’re with ABetterABK!
Power to the people, Bobby needs to go!
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Blizz is gonna ride this out and release another cute store mount/pet
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You should realize by now ActiBlizz is like the Machines from the Matrix.
“There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.”
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Not to be a defeatist, but it looks like the walkout is already a dead end.
Which leaves the question: what next? At this point, I honestly don’t think anything short of a full-scale strike threatening the next expansion will be enough to make them budge. I can understand how difficult of a choice that would be for the ground-level employees, but Blizzard leadership has clearly already decided that they can just eat the loss of one day or two of symbolic protesting and ignore the bad PR.
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This is the moment where we as consumers make this as big of a fuss as we can. Dethrone Bobby. Down with the Trade Prince.
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They’re getting very predictable.
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but the cute store mounts!
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Who’s “you”?
A supposed leak posted on the general forums. Grain of salt but worth a read. Most likely bogus given the alt right image board of garbage is the source.
WoW currently has around 960k active subscribers in the west. Since August the games numbers have been in freefall and never recovered.
The higher ups assumed there were a lot more “heavy users” or “lifers” locked in for the duration than there appears to be, though the scandals could have something to do with it.
This “final chapter of this book in the warcraft saga” was news to the team before the 9.2 video dropped. Its assumed its trying to riff on the media for FFXIV’s upcoming expansion but the sentiment around the office is its bad optics and seems insincere and delivers a narrative that we are imitating rather than interating
Danuser is insufferable. When he isn’t gaslighting anyone that questions his divine god given narrative about certain characters he has an unhealthy obsession with -take a guess which- he is not really talking with the rest of the team. We make assetts and raids and quests but don’t really know what for. You don’t know why the Arbiter broke? why he is trying to retcon Warcraft 3 into the jailors forces fighting the jailors forces? yeah guess what? NEITHER DO WE. WE STILL DON’T. We didn’t even know what Zereth Mortis was till 2 months ago. We are as in the dark as you are.
He is even blanking other writers. The reason the Sylvanas book is delayed is because he didn’t talk to Christie Golden for months after she pointed out he was trying to bruteforce a Sylvanas redemption that wasn’t earned like a petulant child and as “punishment” she was kept out the loop WHILE WRITING A NOVEL ABOUT SYLVANAS SET DURING 9.2!
Meanwhile as long as he makes raids Ion doesn’t care. He just sits there most of the day stress eating and barking commands but as long as it funnels players to his next raid thats about all the rest of the work is good for. He is generally oblivious to anything outside his bubble. Or doesn’t care.
The majority of the games flaws as a product stem from these two men who both only care about their own slice of the pie so to speak and the rest may as well not exist and mismanagement is team wide.
Cross faction grouping is on the table because they would rather do that than take the bad press hit and merge servers at the risk of losing transfer fees. Like that would be the worst news for the company this year.
The game is monumentally tilted to horde in terms of userbase now and its almost entirely due to racial but for some reason the balance team refuses to buff any alliance racials or nerf horde ones.
The Cyphers are a retention mechanic designed to keep players subscribed. It will take 12 weeks to unlock all base ciphers and the currency cap per week will then double this for the next stage of unlocks. Intended on paper to be a 6 month weekly content update.
Most of us understand the complaints about borrowed systems. We do not like them either but we aren’t in charge and the ones that do seem to think we are working on a mobile project and not the rpg most of us signed up to be a part of. We feel like we are trying to trick the player into some habit forming loop like some mobile gambling app and it feels dirty to say the least.I work on the live team and not 10.0 but I can tell you the Infinite Dragonflight are involved along with a shift in the way we release product. WoW is not going to release expansions after 10.0 but instead focus on “evergreen” seasonal content. The game we keep being told to compare our work to is not something like FFXIV as you might assume but Bungies Destiny.
From 10.0 onwards after the events of End of Eternity the entire game will be reworked including Chrome Time which has internally been seen as a bit of a failed experiment in its current state. Players will have an experience closer to Diablo 3’s adventure mode. You will create your character and have a series of “campaigns” to play through solo or with friends but also a seasonal track comparable to a battle pass using a system like renown. The idea being no matter what content you do be it some random quests in the Eastern Plaguelands or Island Expeditions in Kul Tiras you will always be advancing your seasonal track.
The first season will involve the infinite dragon flight as a lore friendly way to explain this and the reworks to chromie time. You will assist the time walkers who reveal themselves to have been Attendants created by the First Ones to mend fractures in the timeline but as with the Attendants of Korthia they are a separate and visually different group to the ones we know in Oribos.
Right now there is one baseline track that acts almost like post level cap experience and another that requires a currency but is not a paid track.
Time Fractures will allow characters to be shifted around and there is a visions style activity called “Paradox Moments” which are essentially a blend of visions, scenarios and the theming of the old Carvens of Time Dungeons
Speaking of the Carvens of Time themselves will be destroyed and instead of new areas the new zones will be existing zones at different points in time. Think the End Times version of Dragonblight from Cataclysm’s Dungeons.
Seasons are intended to last 3-4 months right now and alternate between WoW Classic seasons -which is the test bed for some of these ideas- and allow us to make time limited seasonal content that will use FOMO to keep the players coming back and allow us to make changes to existing zones albeit many being temporary so we don’t permanently change too many things forever as with the Shattering content that really messed up the timeline for questing players, ironically given 10.0 I suppose. While the seasons are wholesale taken from Destiny and to a lesser extent Diablo 3 of course this temporary world changing is being workshopped as something to appeal to “the fortnite generation” and started getting put forward around the time they did their big map redesign for the first time.
This is done to spread the workload, increase profitability beyond one major box sale every 2 fiscal years and to try and lure in a new younger audience as the current “Heavy User” audience of diehards are a lot older than the target demographics Activision as a whole wants to target.
Yes the fruit bowl stuff caused some internal fiction but its not the “us vs the essjaydubyas” you might think but rather there is a sentiment that a lot of the games current issues are being waved away by pushing the earlier team members under the bus rather than respect the work and the foundation they built.
FFXIV is not the boogeyman you might think but we had one large meeting with leadership specifically asking “What is it doing right?” and being befuddled when people point out things and going “but we already did that” while missing the many replies of “but we don’t anymore”.
Overall the scandals coming to light and the game in lower numbers than the peak of Vanilla have lead to a very depressing work environment. Remember hearing about Anthems team? People crying at desks or in empty rooms? People having to be put on sick leave for depression? Yeah take that and imagine how much worse it could be. Thats us right now. All the worse because we know there are things you want we can easily change but the few higher ups with the most control refuses to listen to anything questioning their “vision”.
Activision is sending in people we call “the gestapo” they claim is to “monitor for workplace violations” but really its just some third party hired to ensure we keep our heads down and not raise too many voices again lest we get labelled as a “troublemaker” and fired. Theres been a lot of firings and I can tell you if any of them were Cosby crew wannabe’s I haven’t heard about it.
These positions have been filled by members of Vicarious Visions and ex bungie rehires picked up by Activision. There is a sentiment that the “Activision insight” fake leaks might ironically be more on the nose than the fantasist who wrote them may have guessed. A blizzard in all but name.
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The Caverns of Time destruction and no future expansions tells me that, at least those portions, are unlikely. The rest of the stuff is probably believable but I doubt it’s wholly true/accurate. I don’t doubt it’s too far of the mark, though.
Skimmed, reads a whole lot more like someone who could get very lucky throwing darts at the broad side of a barn rather than the actual frustrated vent of a disgruntled employee.
But I sure would be concerned about which things it happens to mark accurately.
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I don’t buy the “leak” in the slightest. Reads a bit too much like a fanfic of how I imagined WoW was back when I still was blinded by self-righteous rage over the state of the game rather than just seeing it as an aged product, fighting as much to stay relevant as to retain folks.
I don’t doubt the leadership have their heads in the clouds. That much was demonstrated over the past two expansions. But blowing up the big expansions, moving to a Destiny/Diablo based season structure? Nah.
Nah. FFXIV is definitely on their radar the same way Amazon’s on the radar of my own place of employment. That means the hamfisted story beats are just the current crew’s attempts at capturing that Final Fantasy magic, but WarCraft’s lore has always been patchy and loose, especially the metaphysical aspects. In that regard, Shadowlands is perfectly onbrand since no major story revelation really syncs up with the lore that came before. The Old Ones came about as a brief encounter in one map of The Frozen Throne, after all. Illidan tried to destroy Azeroth and stop Arthas at the behest of Kil’jaden…until he didn’t. That sort of thing.
I honestly think 9.2 is Blizzard’s attempt at creating what, internally, it sees as what’s working for FFXIV and I don’t see that stopping any time soon.
While they absolutely are trying to encourage people to log in out of habit, it’s not a Mobile Game sort of habit. I’ve played enough mobile games to understand the difference. Even during the dark days of the Garrisonville Endgame content, the Mission Table was always designed to be “parallel content” done while you do something else, and that never changed through Battle for Azeroth.
So yeah, by and large just another “My dad totally works for Microsoft” kind of deals.
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You know… You. Uouuu. Yooo. Yu. Not They. Them. Yhose. Eu. Ewe. Yews! Yes, yews!
But seriously. Everyone.
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I find that leak to be quite feasible. It seems to suggest that WoW is aging, bloated and more or less unworkable at this point–which has been plain to everyone since BfA. It also poses what we already knew with regards to head developer egos.
I feel like if the leak weren’t super true, there would be more exaggeration. It felt like a fairly sober take confirming what we suspect and speculate often: out of touch devs, unworkable content, a complete lack of communication.
i want the leak to be real so i can laugh, really hard. please let it be real.
anyway thanks for letting me know, i’ll refrain from playing diablo 3 on this day.
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I think some Bellular video made a compelling case for them having been down to ~1.6M subs before the lawsuit stuff. I honestly wouldn’t be shocked if that ~900k number was accurate.
They REALLY screwed up BfA and SL, HOT DAMN.
I’ve thought dragons might be involved next, there were some hints with island expeditions. If they did a dragonflight expac and ripped off that fan-made Dragonsworn class or whatever, it would likely be better than most things they’d do.
That “leak” is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard and I’m astounded that any of you give it a shred of credence.
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Wow! It’s really amazing how every single one of these leaks is written by someone that is deeply involved with every department. I wonder how they find the time to post on anonymous imageboards with all of that on their plate.
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The thing is that even if it’s not true, the situation within Blizz right now makes enough of it plausible enough to be possibly true. That’s kind of the point of the “leaks.” There are parts that are just believable enough, and that just reflects how bad the company state is right now regardless of the specifics.
That said, this is the second time from very different places I’ve seen someone claiming that Blizz dev’s don’t see FFXIV as major competition, though the reasoning in this one is a bit different.
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The leak plays upon expectations and bits of reality the same way a con artist would. Whether it’s coming from a reliable source or not, some of it is probably true. I’m sure Danuser is a pain to work with, and there probably is dissonance between him and Golden. As far as no more expansions and just season pass type stuff? If they wanted to kill the game and put WoW behind them, that would be how to do it.
As far as the walkout goes, the “board” cares about money and stock going up. They stand with Bob today, but if crap like forging emails and harassment keep on cutting into the support of fans and their bottom line, they’ll change their tune. Who knows what that threshold is or what kind of conversations they have behind closed doors, but right now it certainly doesn’t seem like things are getting better.
I’m fine still being unsubbed and conveniently also supporting this walkout.
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