Correct me if I’m wrong but that was a merger and not an acquisition?
Seeing as blizzard has its own CEO and board, its pretty certain they are voluntarily following activisions plan. Activision isn’t entirely to blame on this, blizzard is to blame in many cases.
Blizzard doesn’t have its own CEO anymore. If you paid attention to BlizzCon, and know your history, Mike Morheime used to have the title of CEO years ago… that title no longer exists within Blizzard. It’s some other title now, I forget.
Which is why I formed that as a question, I wasn’t 100% sure. Since that is the case you are spot on that this is activison. It’s really sad in a lot of ways what has happened to the industry as a whole.
To be fair, it did start off as a merger, and Blizzard was still doing really well at the time. I think Activision did a hostile takeover relatively recently.
No problem. And yeah, it sucks. Blizzard has one or two duds and Activision loses its mind and does a hostile takeover…
Then again, if you watched the 20th Anniversary Retrospective Blizzard put on YouTube a long time ago, that’s basically kind of the deal they’ve had with all their owners going all the way back to the Davison and Associates days.
Considering the CEO title is MISSING from Blizzard’s hierarchy as of late last year? It’s not unreasonable to assume that.
Hostile takeovers do not an “evil corporation” make, either. I’ve no doubt the devs are still trying to make fun games for us; they’d have to be fantastic actors to have that much false energy and enthusiasm on the BlizzCon stage. Their ideas are really out of touch as of late, though.
Blizz has to make a product that doesn’t fail at launch… And the server population after launch for the next 2 weeks, month 6 months etc will change dramatically. I painfully read all 387 posts but didnt hear a good alternative solution to server congestion at launch or how to prevent dead communities. Anyone got something positive that doesn’t involve sharding?
Thanks for the link to the Legion patch notes on disabling sharding in RP realms!
It proves my point (in my thread, Sharding puts Vanilla gameplay second (anti-sharding anthology)) that sharding puts Vanilla community-based gameplay second - behind server performance which they are “very happy with” - while many people are unhappy because they can’t even see their friends!
What a HUGE disconnect between Blizzard’s view and players’ experience of sharding.
You would have thought that when Blizzard started looking at using sharding, someone, somehwere at Blizzard would have asked:
“Hey, isn’t it a bad thing for gameplay in a MMO to NOT be able to see your own friends in the world?”
Blizzard
Over the last couple of years, we’ve begun using some new technology we’ve occasionally referred to as “sharding” in non-instanced zones, which separates players in high-traffic areas out into separate “shards” of a particular zone. The benefit to our server performance has been massive - it was a huge part of why Legion’s launch went so smoothly - and so, as a whole, we’ve been very happy with the system.
Player comment:
Bananamanson 2017/08/08 (Patch 7.2.5)ReportQuoteReply
I do not like sharding from a game point of view. I have friends on the same realm, same guild and can never see them in game. We can run right past each other, not seeing each other as we are in different shards. Too bad they do not seem to be able to put friends in the same shard, unless they group?
Not sure why it still needs to be used after Legion’s launch?
And, this…is what I am afraid is going to happen in Classic WoW - one of the most community-oriented games ever made will be divided up into tiny shards just like modern WoW.
Modern WoW is an asocial game with virtually no need for guilds or community anymore.
Now they are headed down the same path with Classic WoW by the use of sharding - it’s very depressing.