WoW Development is Being Run By The Finance Department

So I checked out the Ion Interview. And while he comes across as smug and non answering, I recognize the language and answering technique.

This is a person whom cant give the answers, because the answers are “Its not possible with the budget given to me.”

He doesnt really have development control. The finance department gives him and John the budget they have allocated. They then have to do what they can with that budget. And usually the budget gets smaller year over year to show increased profitability to the shareholders.

I have personal experience with running Food and Beverage Operations for Hotels. Restaurant Outlets ect. I can relate to a restaurant having old silverware and plates. They look beat up, chipped and the venue/department has barely enough to function. So we request to buy new silverware and plates for the restaurant. Enough to have backup and replace all the old, beat up items. Then the comptroller and finance department and I look at the budget. They have allocated “x” amount of dollars for china, glass and silverware spend for the year. And that number only 2/3 what I would need to replace everything. They will not allocate more money. So I have to decide if I replace the silverware this year and the plates next. Or the other way. It doesnt solve the problem. It doesnt make the staff or the customers happy. But it meets the financial numbers and projections.

That, in my opinion, is how WoW is being run now. There is an ever decreasing budget and the team has to make due with it. I dont think Ion or John really want to adhere to the decisions as much as they are. But they just dont have the budget to allocate resources into changing or fixing them.

Look at legion raid scaling. It is a pain of an issue. Their solution is that, we will gear up and by the end of the expac we should be able to clear them for tmog like other expansions raids. They want to fix it. But its not in the budget, so they cant.

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it’s being run by the poop department

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Nothing more frustrating to hear about “record breaking revenue” only to be followed up with immediate layoffs.

One of the biggest area that has been hit hard is the communication with the community. I can’t even remember the last time we had a Q&A with devs or all blue’s responding the forum posts. Feels like we’re constantly kept in the dark.

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It makes me sad to think that WoW may be in the ‘run it into the ground’ stage of its lifespan, but if so, there will be a breaking point for every player.
We won’t all stick on the sinking ship until the bitter end

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Sadly thats how it is. They cant really communicate, because there is nothing to communicate aside from what they do.

“We recognize there is an issue and we are working on it.”
“At this time we dont have any immediate plans to address that, but will take another look at it in the future.”
“We feel that right now things are in a good spot, but we are planning on improvements in the future.”
“We understand that some are feeling frustration with this particular aspect and we are planning to address it at a future date.”

All standard responses for “They arent giving us the money and resources to do this now. So we have to wait till next years budget to factor in the cost of addressing this.”

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I miss the old days of Blizzard when they would take forever to release a product because they wanted to make sure it was perfect prior to release (or fixable with one or two patches). You’d have to wait, but it would always be worth it…

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Thats when they werent shy about putting some money into it, to get it done. To bring on more staff. Now they dont have that control. The Activision finance department dictates what they can or cant do.

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It’s being run into the ground.

The absolute levels of gross negligence can only be explained by virtue of intent. They are intentionally making the game bad, there is just no other way that every one on the team is this incompetent. Even the art is slacking (3d models/armor/weapons look the worst they’ve ever been.) Everything is a recolor of an already existing item, the new items are ugly.

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The “sinking ship” that has been in various stages of said sinking for, what, ten years now?? You people are like doomsday preachers who predict the end of the world on a certain date and are completely unphased when it doesn’t happen, just pretending you never made the prediction and moving on to the next inaccurate prognostication.

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Longer than that. Letting Blood Elves be Paladins was the death of WoW, remember?

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Given what I read with him stating that China had to show the world how to do M+ properly, I’d say their finance department is ran by the CCP.

Yeah, they’re “intentionally running into the ground” a perpetual license to print money. Good call.

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They have to adhere to a budget. They cant devote the time to design a lot of new assets. Recoloring them is cheaper. Thats what they can do with the budget allocated to designing of assets.

The team is most certainty not incompetent or negligent. And I would wager the bulk of the team wants to make the best game possible. Even Ion and John. But they have to make due with the timetable and budget given to them.

That is what makes sense to me. The game is too profitable to intentionally kill. But the people who actually make the decisions for WoW, dont care about the actual game. They care about the profitability of it. The numbers on the financial statements and spreadsheets. If they decide that too much money is spent on developing in game assets, they will shrink that budget, in line with what they can project the return will be.

Simple. Nothing nefarious. This is how businesses operate the larger they get. Investment vs Profit. Decreasing the money spent on production as much as possible, while maintaining its profitability.

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I don’t think its as bad as people claim. This is not the first expansion that many people were unhappy with.

They know that unhappy players = less $$$ so I’m betting things will get better.

I can’t quit though, I have the Clutch of Ji Kun, I had to go through Throne of Thunder like 25 times to get that. If I quit its like it was all for nothing.

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Are people still complaining about reused assets in this game?? Have you been living under a rock for the last 15 years??

In fairness, that was less of a “WoW is dead, RIP, time to move on” post and more of a “IF WoW is in ‘just abuse it til the money runs’ out mode, people will start bailing” post.

Which is reasonable. If it ever comes to light that WoW has officially entered some kind of skeleton crew / maintenance mode (no, we’re not there yet), it will absolutely be the point where people start finding their stopping points.

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WoW is also 15 years old. A game this old is very expensive to maintain. The more they add, the more complicated it becomes. I am sure the maintenance portion of the budget keeps increasing. Its pretty much a fixed cost. They have to spend “Y” each year, just to keep the servers going and the game running.

In this scenario, with decreasing the total budget year to year, the maintenance portion of the budget gets a little bigger year over year. So as the cost to keep WoW going increases, the % of the budget for game development decreases.

Also why they are pushing the E-Sports so much. Trying to increase the revenue stream of WoW. Increase its profitability. It has nothing to do with making the game better. Just increasing the revenue it can make.

Yeah, I’m done with ActiBlizz. WoW is the only Blizzard game I still play and I don’t play anything from Activison. When I’m finally done with WoW I’m done with Blizzard. Sad to see the company come to this. I used to play every game they made. Now, I’ll never play another one. Not until they stop pulling crap like firing people during record profits, paying their people peanuts and giving Bobby hundreds of millions for it. Yeah, every game company is in it for the profits but not all of them are as slimy as ActiBlizz has become.

The thing about a publicly traded company is that good is never good enough, making millions or billions of dollars year over year is good, but the current quarterly report always has to look better than the last. When the company can’t grow its business (player base) any longer the cost cutting comes into play. It’s a small thing here or there at first, but before long it’s not filling vacant positions, then its layoffs, price hikes, customer service going down the drain, and predatory forms of monitization. Soon the the product starts to suffer which in turn leads to less customers, which basically starts a domino effect of decline. This game feels like it is being run by a third rate gaming company like Gamigo or Daybreak at this point, and it’s sad.

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That IS development control. There is no company in the WORLD where the head of software simply spends whatever he wants, without limit. That’s just a fantasy in YOUR head.

Another fantasy is that adding devs makes things happen faster. Utter, pure fantasy.

I have personal experience as a software engineer and/or software manager in large and small companies for 20+ years. Believe it or not, human beings (devs) are NOT similar to glasses and silverware.

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