The new Blizzard ideology

[Longburn-frostmourne]

After hating on Blizzard for over 10 years, boycotting every and any product that had their tag even near it, I have to say right now I am eating humble pie.

There have been several moments in the past few weeks where I felt like I was being unfair on Blizzard, but then I remember Refail and things like the wall of NO. The problem is it just keeps coming, more and more signs that Blizzard has learnt from at least some of it’s past mistakes and are forging a new way forward, or is it a return to what made them popular ( when they were popular ) ?

Either way, Thank You Blizzard. The shift in Ideology is noticeable and while it remains, you have my sub until my last days on this rock.

Keep the good fight going people, and thank you to those who did. Here’s a copy of the recent post from Blizzard regarding the LFG addon. BTW this hit over 200 likes in the first 5 mins of it being posted.

@Bornakk

We’ve been closely following the community discussion around this add-on for WoW Classic, as well as analyzing it to make sure we understand how it works. After careful examination, we believe the nature of ClassicLFG is incompatible with our social design for Classic. Thus, in an upcoming patch (in the weeks following launch), we will be adding restrictions to the Classic add-on API that will significantly limit this add-on and others like it.

In line with what we shared at BlizzCon last year, we intend to be very careful about allowing add-on functionality that might undermine aspects of the social dynamics that are core to the Classic experience, even in cases like this where it’s clear that the addon author had no ill intent and was simply trying to provide a service to the Classic community. Ultimately, if a streamlined group-finding system was something we considered compatible with Classic, we would have kept the modern Premade Group Finder tool rather than choosing to remove it from the Classic client.

It’s difficult to articulate a clear-cut rule for exactly when an add-on crosses the line. However, when an add-on goes beyond presenting information or providing aesthetic customization, and attempts to create an interconnected social network that relies on other players also using that same add-on, we are likely to scrutinize it particularly closely.