My company does a significant amount of software development in a country that spent most of last year and this year under severe lockdown. We had about 48 hours’ notice before the lockdowns went into effect.
Nothing slipped and we ended up doing MORE business than the year before. Everyone worked from home, everything got done.
But you are playing a US based game, which makes a significant difference. The laws about the game adhere to the US laws, for example, you can’t get on WoW from a country with a lower consent age and look for sex from the people that fall within that age bracket.
It’s cute to see you like this. Look at the positions they are trying to fill. but please, go on… you clearly know what you are talking about.
This is all true. However, Blizzard choosing to build themselves a giant system-stack that would be nearly impossible to balance in the best of times is 100% on them. One can’t help comparing WoW to other MMOs with much smaller system stacks, all of which managed to get back to a relatively normal content schedule fairly quickly.
Knowing they were under a tight timeline (probably given to them from higher up) to release and maintain a game during a time of significant upheaval, why did they choose to continue on the path they are on today?
Normal companies would look at their reduced timeline and reduce the complexity of their work. Blizzard seems to have upped the complexity instead.
Do you feel like Blizzard owes their massive fan base, who is paying for their service, an explanation? I feel like I’d feel a little better if I got some sort of explanation like “I’m sorry, we accidentally made your eggs over easy, not sunny side up. They will be out in 6 more months”
I’m with you. This wait has killed so many guilds and communities. Guilds that people have spent so much time setting up their community. That’s actually what irks me.
I hear the arguments against borrowed power, but I don’t hear the solutions. You know Blizzard is having this conversation internally. Borrowed power creates balance issues but they cannot just let the specs become stale by not adding anything from xpac to xpac. But its also not sustainable to keep adding abilities that would create too many other issues over time.
Borrowed power feels like the lesser evil, at least to me. I read arguments about “just give us more content.” Do we really just want more dungeons and quests and storylines without new abilities?
The Crux of it,
It’s a little bit because of covid.
But the majority of the problem is poor management, veteran programmers and developers have left to different gaming companies because they pay hell of a lot more…
That’s really irrelevant to the fact that choosing to build a Tower of Babel made up of different systems is not a good idea when you know you’ve got reduced time/budget/team size etc.
Anyway, as with everything, moderation is key. We had borrowed power in the form of tier sets and trinkets for many years and most people enjoyed that. It’s the new “stacks on stacks, every patch until we delete it all” that people dislike.
It is also possible to occasionally add new abilities and remove/combine some old ones. There would be some work to do on Blizzard’s end to accomplish that, but they’d have a lot more time for core class design if they weren’t balancing a tower of system stacks.
Moderation is a good thought. Not sure about how much dev time is devoted to borrowed power systems v. content, etc…, but I see your point.
10.0 will probably be the biggest expac we’ve ever seen. You know, because 10 is a number.
its sad really all the other game studios are doing just fine. I don’t know what blizzard studios are having such a hard time with and there engine is super old … may be that it they need to use a better game engine so they can update things faster and more effectively. the same with there coding… its so outdated… they need to really get it together at this point I just feel sorry for all the dev and employees…
working from home is fine if you just doing normal computer work but if your job is to polish high end graphics you may not have the rig to do it at home
Blizzard has stated they’re playing catch-up, and they’ve spoken quite a bit about 9.2, mentioning Tier sets and whatnot. Heck, they’ve even said the Tier Sets are modeled and everything.
My personal theory is that they’re taking this extensive wait to not only work on 9.1, but 9.2 as well. Therefore, when 9.1 comes out we should only have to wait like 3 months for a new patch. The usual.
Rather than have a content release schedule that has a new patch coming out every 6 months, they want to get a more consistent schedule. To do that they have to take these 7 months to work on both patches so we don’t have as long a wait until 9.2.
I suspect that they may have been poaching devs from the Retail team to work on Burning Crusade Classic as well. They’ve been sidelining Retail for Classic for a while now.
It wouldn’t even surprise me if Activision has been poaching WoW devs for Call of Duty development.
Simple…
Blizzard doesn’t really care. They are a multi billion dollar publisher/game dev teamed up with Activision. They COULD put something out but really don’t care to. They are milking the Classic launch as “new content” and will only come out with 9.1 in time to subvert another game’s launch or sub numbers dip too low for their comfort. They simply aren’t in the business to feed us updated content. They are in the business of dragging out what they have as long as they can to make money.
Combination of COVID, Upper Management Leaving and layoffs around them. Gotta be
What are they saying it is?
I think it’s pretty obvious. Wasting time trying to balance the covenants, conduits, making conduit energy work is taking up too much development time. Something players have said since the beginning. Lack of content will always be due to these crap systems until they finally decide stop and listen to what players want.
That they’ll minimalize borrowed power, and go back to more basic content features, for instance if they keep their word in the pre-Shadowlands interviews, we’ll get tier class sets back in 9.2…assuming they’re HONEST about 9.2/10.0 which…to be honest myself…I doubt it…
you forget the devs now didnt make wow the 1s who made it are all at dream haven , the devs now they try but they didnt make wow