There are 2 phrases of stoopz during the interview that really caught my eye:
- I play hpal, ww monk and warrior
- people please, lets not change the meta, it play out…
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stoopz obviously is going to play whats meta.
just like 90% of the players.
why shouldn’t they though? there’s 0 balance changes so whatever is op stays op!
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The answer is boring and depressing all at once. Blizzard has come under your standard American corporate management, where budgets are flatlined and teams are squeezed. Morale is likely low, and devs would need to work overtime unpaid to implement even small PvP changes.
It all paints a clear picture. There is a PvP team with very little agency to implement the needed changes. Chris describes hitting a wall even after working for Blizzard for 13 years, and that’s clearly what drove him to move on.
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Its hard to believe there is so much red tape, or whatever gets in the way, on someone being able to make at least pvp-only changes. Stuff that will have zero effect on the main game the majority of the playerbase plays.
Just number tweaks here and there would go a long ways on making the game more balanced and enjoyable, but they cant, or wont, or dont.
At like 34 minutes, he mentions that “you know, sometimes certain classes are just better when the matches last longer. Warlocks… uh hunters maybe”. A couple minutes later he mentions hunter again as an “endurance class”. In what universe has hunter, even when good, been a dampening class? Like this dude used to make decisions for our game. Christ.
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man i heard him say this too was like LOL wtf ! this is the guy who is doing pvp balance?!
Maybe Riot’s MMO will be the swift kick in the rear this company needs to get its sh@! together
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This video showed me it’s time to level up a ret pally since I play double dps 2 arena. Doesn’t look like it’ll be taken down a few pegs any time soon.
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The fact that everyone always references the good things about this to old expansions “its just like WoTLK” “feels like MoP” just proves the best times of expansion are long gone and the only reason people keep playing is time sunk fallacy and addiction. New players dont stick around because this game isnt AAA anymore, and never will be again.
Blizzard doesnt care about this game outside of the box cost at the start because they cant sell skins and thats all Activision cares about.
All the best talent has left Blizzard and whats left is essentially just developers doing fan fiction. There is no drive to make the game as good as possible, it just has to be on the budget and good “enough”.
All the events in this game is just old content “timewalking” and the same holidays over and over and over.
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It is clear that PVP is a mini game and there will never be changes that could impact PVE. For example any PVP changes will end with “while engaged in player vs player combat” or modification of honor talents.
Which means you will not see a change in Ret paladin off healing because that would change PVE. If your class is broken, expect it to stay that way.
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there was no such testing period btw. like, really. it “happened” but it was a joke.
I didn’t realize the interview was so long.
From the hour or so that I’ve listened to, WoW PvP is not in a good place.
- Need to convince multiple stakeholders to enact meaningful changes in PvP.
- Let things ride for a few seasons and see if the meta eventually changes on its own.
- There are no right answers. What is even the vision?
- Not many powerful advocates on the team for PvP anymore.
- PvP is the lower priority (or just low priority) because it has fewer players.
For us, this means we should reroll whatever is FOTM broken OP, because Blizzard won’t be rushing to fix/balance PvP in Shadowlands.
He wanted to make more things for PvP, but they kept decreasing his production budget until the only thing left was one new arena for this expansion.
This is so sad.
I didn’t watch the interview and probably won’t. The last little chats he did were 100% useless and were masked self promotion. I don’t like a lot of his work in the game. Some things were pretty good and some things like gpyro makes you wonder if he even plays pvp. He created Ashran and seething shore. He tries to take credit for all the honor talents which are just rehashed versions of removed spells. He was caught playing with cheaters in rbgs and getting boosted on his mw.
Does he ever claim he went into Ion’s office and asked for a day to do some pvp tweaking? Destro was busted for how long last expansion?
Also to mirror what Exalter said above…
They conveniently tuned pve trinkets at the end of each raid tier and purposely left the next tier’s trinkets untouched.
This guy wanted to make things. That’s obviously his passion. He even says so on his resume website. “One of my passions when on the WoW team was creating class spells.” https://kaleiki.com/
This guy never once did numbers tuning or claimed to take credit as such anywhere on his site. He only wants to showcase he’s a designer and lists things he created.
It’s great we had someone trying to create new things for pvp but at the end of the day, if it’s an unbalanced cluster then what good does it really do? We’ve rarely ever asked for new things and consistently asked for a balanced game.
Yeah Riot definitely know a thing or two about balancing, and they also focus on that aspect.
Not saying WoW is a bad game, just PvP is not their focus and PvPers in this game, like Stoopz, are expecting too much from Blizzard.
You don’t need experience when you have connections.