To the development team, The time is nigh

Community General Discussion
22

So just skimmed this thread… PONG world quest confirmed!

Cool look forward to it!

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23

That’s not the suggestion at all.

Even during WotLK there was churn and people left and others came. As you said games ebb and flow in popularity. But when you have people that have been here for 14 years, who didn’t have a problem being here for the first 10, telling you things are wrong. Perhaps somebody should listen.

Blizzard, for all of the grief I give them, doesn’t have morons working for them. We all have orders to follow and their orders given by their leadership have been really bad for a while now. It’s time that the people giving those orders changed their ways.

The news flash for everybody not interested in business, it’s impossible to innovate, cut costs, and grow your business. These things literally cannot occur at the same time. If Blizzard is interested in milking WoW and cutting costs, they should give up any hope of ever making this game good again.

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24

Great reason why it makes sense to dive into the indie market. Lots of great companies out there without much patience for corporate overhead. Just navigate vaporware and seemingly never-released early access games.

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25

Sorry, but blizzard have never EVER been inventive. Every single game they have ever created was just another persons idea, done better. Diablo was purchased from an outside studio looking for development money. Starcraft and Warcraft are both warhammer. WH didn’t like what Blizzard did so they scrapped it. Blizz decided to go forward and just rename the game.

WoW was created to contest EverQuest and do it better. They even hired and brought in the top raiders from EQ to make the game they always wanted EQ to be. Thus, WoW was born.

Heroes of the Storm = DotA / LoL

Hearthstone = Magic the Gathering.

Blizzard just takes a good idea, and makes it better and more polished.

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26

Dota/LoL concepts both came from WC3 Dota built from the ability to make custom games, something Blizz implemented

Correct me if I’m wrong but magic the gathering was physical cards, blizz was inventive with making the first successful online only card game.

27

I disagree. I believe you can dial the game back A TON in regards to promoting level of complexity, breadth and depth of content, player motivation, content difficulty, promoting community, robust gear/stat systems.

You would just need to retain some of the quality of life changes like group finder and personal loot (as an option, not mandatory).

And part of the issue is reaction time. If you try something for an xpac and it doesn’t work, you can it in the next one. You don’t let it ride for 2-3 more and just say “well that’s how it is now”. Each xpac and patch should be like an experiment, with a Control and Experiment group. When your new feature, your Experiment, does not perform well…you revert back to the Control. When it does perform well, you implement it permanently.

There are 2 core issues here:
#1 is that Blizzard has very very very few instances of reverting any sort of meaningful changes, so there is no data to support that the game may or not be better with or without certain features. We only know that subs and play time are declining and you can’t attribute it to anything because you can’t say, “Oh we tried that one thing and subs went down, but then we put it back in and things did/didn’t bounce back”.
#2 issue is transparency. Blizz, compared to other big developers gives very little insight into their overarching game dev philosophy for WOW. Even in the rare instances where they do revert changes. And you’ll notice also that they never just can something that sucks, they just tweak it. They don’t take ownership of mistakes, and they don’t just eat the cost of resources they dumped into something that sucks. They trickle just little bit of resources into it to make it suck slightly less, rather than just wiping the slate clean and reverting back to the Control, or investing in a new idea. And I actually believe they are actively hiding things because they know if they released a statement about what their true motivations or philosophy behind WOW is, the backlash would be monumental.

Personally my theory is that they already wrote WOW off as a well that is quickly running dry long ago, and are just trying to suck every dollar they can out of it before it goes belly up (and also investing few resources into it).

Compare this to another wildly popular PC game right now, Path of Exile. Where the dev team is very transparent and very responsive. Every single season they implement at least one new system. Every single season they very publicly say, “Here is a list of the things that we think worked, and the things that didn’t work. And here is why…” A TON of it typically has to do with player response, but some does have to do with the resources required to support it, or the game philosophy. But they are open and transparent about it. The things that work, they implement permanently. The things that don’t work, don’t try to polish a turd, they can it. The tweak time/resources go into the things that worked well to make them even better.

I mean seriously what kind of business model is it to take something that is a complete disaster, and then jimmy rig it into being passably acceptable. Which points back to my previous statement that Blizz is mostly interested in cutting costs/corners as much as possible, and just wants to do enough to keep the game limping along.

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28

I am not sure my sub runs out on the 21st and i am not sure I want to give Blizz money any longer. However, I am interested in Classic so I will see how it turns out before i jump head first into that pond.

29

There’s no good reason why Blizzard cannot do the same.

They had the magic once and the company knows how to get back there. Even if it means cutting ties with the more corporate side of the company. It should not be necessary though. Just get the corporate politics out of the product development. The CEO can do that.

That sweet spot of having the majority of the talent in the industry has past, sadly. I don’t think those people are ever going back but there’s always new talent and that new talent wants to be somewhere they can make a dent. They don’t want to be in an overly structured pillowcase of corporate affairs that will no doubt suffocate whatever value they put into the company.

30

DOTA was an all new genre created inside of the guts of a different game. Blizzard had nothing to do with the conceptualization or creation of that game or genre. They piggy backed off of someone else’s great idea.

The tools don’t make the game, the minds of the individuals creating it do.

As far as MTG and HS goes, there were other online-card-games at the time hearthstone was made. They just didn’t do a very good job with it. Blizzard are known for coming in and making existing categories BETTER. They have never invented a category.

Overwatch is technically their only true original. A MOBA style FPS game. It has been quite successfully received as well.

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They were gamers that cared about gaming, now we have developers that care about money. They would not release a game until it was ready, now we get half finished buggy as all get out" Beta For Azeroth," and "Don’t you guys have phones Diablo. "

32

Yeah - i was just thinking that there seems to be a kind of sweet spot for studios. It’s right before they decide to get super rich.

I’ve seen it happen. Studio produces a very well-received game but suffer from internal processes and challenges, they then bring in AAA producers, et al that starts to change the company’s culture.

Did this happen to Blizz? Maybe …

33

Possibly so but it’s rather clear this new direction isn’t working at all.

34

Not so sure about this one. I am not defending Blizzard, but, it just doesn’t really add up.

Teams of individuals create great games. Sometimes a great game was made because the team making it just had that magic. The team eventually disbands, that’s life, and the magic that made it so amazing is lost.

It’s not that the company itself is shredding itself, it’s that the team is no longer there.

It’s like the Dallas Cowboys, the franchise is still there, but the team of individuals that once made it great have all moved on.

35

No doubt it did.

Largess in finances allows you to hire more and more people. More and more departments. Once it incorporates an entirely new layer of managers exist that provide zero value to the product.

If that new layer knows to keep its nose out of product development things will usually be fine. Once they start suffocating product development it all goes downhill.

So Blizzard can fix this. Will they? We’ll see.

36

They can’t actually. The team of people who made the magic happen are all gone. Mike and his team of amazing leaders are all out. You cannot put a new head on the body and expect the same results.

37

Everything is built on something previous pretty much that’s how we get new things. That’s what games are in general, they take something previous and polish/add in some new stuff. Piggy backing (using prior concepts) off of something else is how technology advances in the first place. By your own argument nothing is really unique at all most of the time.

38

Which is true. And I never said being innovative on an existing idea was a bad thing. Blizzard does this extremely well and has been amazingly successful. The bulk of humanity’s best achievements were doing an existing thing in a better way.

But to say Blizzard was inventive is what I was combating. They are not. They are innovative. They don’t invent anything. The wheel blueprint already existed. They just added chains and pimped them out.

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39

The actual answer to the question of ‘Can Blizzard fix this’ is a resounding yes. The actual QUESTION that needs to be asked is will they.

I’d go into why they may not, but it’s a long ramble about ROI/SVA models. But irrespective of that, it’s tough to not want to make a game that generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year in gross revenue better if you can.

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40

I just have to say I like your example, it gave me a :smile:

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41

Except you can’t make that arguement. You don’t speak for everyone. I have literally played WoW since day 1 vanilla, and I think the game is better than ever. Is there a pretty bad content drought right now? Yeah, but that’s nothing new, its happened before, its unfortunately gonna happen again, people consume content in WoW faster than any amount of humans can create.

Just because you see a vocal minority upset with the game, doesn’t mean you get to also group in your own personal disinterest of the game and pass it off as legitimate problems with Blizzard, from the top down.

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