Do you think Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street will lose his position ?

[Jerakal]

The guy is kind of schmuck TBH. He's made me want to unsub more than once just because of his goddamn flippant attitude.

[Deleted]

Seriously you should never wish any man ever to loose his job regardless how much you hate them.

I wished GW Bush had lost his job during his tenure.

Should be privileged that the game is still going otherwise you would be on a different mmo forum wishing some other lead dev be sacked....

And what would you like for people to wish when they don't like the way the game is being developed? That the lead developer.. should be given a reward? Win the lottery?

In short, Ghostcrawler is cancer. Wait, cancer is too nice a word. I don't think the word censor on the forums would allow using the words that come to my mind when I think about him.

[Celista]

I wished GW Bush had lost his job during his tenure.

Then we would have had Cheney as president, and things would have been exactly the same. :P

In short, Ghostcrawler is cancer. Wait, cancer is too nice a word. I don't think the word censor on the forums would allow using the words that come to my mind when I think about him.

I was going to say something along the lines of, he's not THAT bad...but then I remembered that I had a conversation with a friend of mine tonight who raids with someone who supposedly works under GC, and that he is pretty generally universally disliked. >.< I don't work at Blizzard though so who knows.

I really don't like GC for reasons I listed earlier in the thread, but yeah for karma reasons I can't really wish him to be fired. Although I do get super pissed off when I think about some of the stuff he's written over the years... >:{

[vesseblah]

In short, Ghostcrawler is cancer. Wait, cancer is too nice a word. I don't think the word censor on the forums would allow using the words that come to my mind when I think about him.

So a person is a cancer for nerfing your class?

Nice to see people haven't completely lost all sense of reality... only most of it.

[Thulvaso]

In short, Ghostcrawler is cancer.

You are taking this far to personal.

[Osmeric]

In short, Ghostcrawler is cancer. Wait, cancer is too nice a word.

You do realize you're being insane with those statements, right? Compare a man to a group of lethal diseases that kill eight million people a year, due to computer game design decisions you happen to disagree with.

[freighttrain]

Then we would have had Cheney as president, and things would have been exactly the same. :P


I was going to say something along the lines of, he's not THAT bad...but then I remembered that I had a conversation with a friend of mine tonight who raids with someone who supposedly works under GC, and that he is pretty generally universally disliked. >.< I don't work at Blizzard though so who knows.

I really don't like GC for reasons I listed earlier in the thread, but yeah for karma reasons I can't really wish him to be fired. Although I do get super pissed off when I think about some of the stuff he's written over the years... >:{

If the man was universally disliked he would not be there or at least in the position he is in now. I call BS on your friends story.

[Celista]

If the man was universally disliked he would not be there or at least in the position he is in now. I call BS on your friends story.

You can take it that way if you want, I'm certainly not about to back it up...it's obviously secondhand knowledge, and I'm not about to name the guy's character/guild/server just to prove a point on the internet :P I doubt it's BS though.

As mentioned Ghostcrawler is not the source of half of the things some people complain about with the game, so constantly finger pointing at him for things other than what he has direct control over is useless.

[Malgru]

PvP dudes need to get cracking though...there's so many things Blizzard can do with wow pvp that haven't even been tapped into yet, some sort of bounty system on pvp servers being just one of those things.

Holinka made 3 changes in the first week he was working for Blizz. It's been 2 months now and no changes since.

Something's gotta give.

[ReleaseDay]

Sub loss is due to content being released too slowly, mainly new expansions, aswell as Activisions greed with p2w store etc.

[xanzul]

How stupid we are thinking our opinion influences Blizz's personnel decisions.

I hope that is sarcasm. Players don't get a say in how Blizzard is run nor how the game is developed. Our only power as consumers is to buy or not buy. That's it. Nothing more nothing less. It is funny how players continually refer to GC as condescending and arrogant not realizing they are in actuality describing themselves.

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Yet the game was growing back then unlike now, so maybe, just maybe, players like to be challenged and stick around for a longer time if everything can't be completed in 2 weeks of afking in LFR.

Imo Ghostcrawler should step down, in the short time he has been at the head of WoW, sub numbers went back 6 years to the ending of Vanilla, and say what you want about the game being dated, if it was still enjoyable like it was pre ghostcrawler era, most of the ppl that left would probably be playing right now.

Games don't last forever. Wow could have been in TBC mode all this time and there would still be significant subscriber loss.

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Completely agree. He won't be because Blizzard has their heads up their asses. The Diablo 3 failure dude, Jay Wilson right?, got a semi promotion after turning out a shit game. Blizzard rewards mediocrity. He absolutely should be moved to something else and NOT be in charge of it. I don't believe he should get fired but he should not be working on this game anymore.

Mediocre games don't sell 12 million copies and don't even try claiming they were sold on Diablo's reputation alone. Well over half those sales occurred months after D3 was released. D3 has issues and they need to be resolved but for many players it was an enjoyable game and still is and it can only get better from here on out.

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Where did you get 30+ million? Seems exorbitant.
If I recall correctly, sometime during WotLK it was publicly announced that more players had played and left WoW than were currently playing WoW, which I gather was around 10-12 million.

Do you seriously actually believe the exact same 12 million players played this entire time? What you people need to comprehend is that Wow is the first mmo to ever hit market saturation. So yes the game was growing over the past 8 years but what kept the numbers up was the fact that more players were coming into the game than were quitting. The estimate of how many poeple have played Wow in total was announced at the shareholders meeting some last year and it is very accurate. This game has had a lot of subscriber churn and at this point anyone who was going to play Wow has already done so hence why the numbers are now falling.

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He should be fired. The state of PVP is actually disgusting right now.

Blizzard is never going to balance pvp around 1v1. Get over it already.

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Over the years I've been pretty critical of him. This said however I will say that aside from a few individual spats with him, I prefer to take a longer view of the game. The game is greater than any individual and while I dislike concepts like CRZ I can see why they were implemented. Most of the things he does and says are well reasoned, and he has the guts to tell off people who are being stupid to not be stupid. For this and his efforts at Class Balance which are almost ALWAYS taken out of context by mouthbreathers "Leveraging for nerfs / buffs" as Tseric would of said, I think he's doing well.


The real problem is that people rage that he isn't a servile whimpering yes-man that does what they want, rather than what the game needs and so like broken records, they make "FIRE GC!11!!" Threads, never realizing that in the end. They are expendable. People like Xanzul who behave as attack dogs do him a disservice, as they make him appear to be an authoritarian asshole, and having met him IRL at one point. He's far from that.


Maybe some will say WoW's decline is his doing, and maybe it is to a point. Yet the petulant dip-shits will quit regardless, and blame him. More and more will come in and the cycle will repeat. So it goes.

The end of the discussion though is the Game is almost a Decade old, and the community sucks. So kudos to him for staying sane.

I like how I'm being brought up as if I matter. What the fuck is wrong with you people? Disagreeing with other players doesn't make anyone an "attack dog" and if anyone is an attack dog it is the haters on this very forum who can't comprehend that different people have different opinions. It is funny how you people will fight to the death to defend negative opinions of the game and Blizzard yet if anyone has a contrary opinion all of a sudden it is ok to attack them. It is complete bullshit and hypocrisy of the highest order.

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Whoever will lose his position doesn't matter for as long as it will fix at least some of WoW problems.

Even though I heavily dislike GC, but CRZ has nothing to do with him. It was financial department, who pointed out easy savings on expenses (as CRZ allows to cut expenses on hardware by around 80% - that's quite significant cut). It was more than obvious that CRZ wouldn't benefit any player. In this case GC was just messenger and nothing depended from him.

There are rumors flying around that Xanzul is GC in disguise.

1. The cross realm zone hate brigade has already determined that no hardware was shut off when they discovered they could block certain ports to access zones on their home realm. Then there is the fact that one of the typical complaints is that players see rare spawns and pets while on flight paths and yet once they land they are shunted off to another realm which doesn't have those rare spawns further proving that no hardware was shut down.

2. Grow up. People don't need to be a Blizzard employee to like the game.

[Korgoth]

No he is buddy buddy enough and will just cry age to excuse his very poor decision making that has led to the massive drop off in subs.

[xanzul]

Two answers to that :

1) I see him as a complete failure on the gaming fun point of view, not the marketting crap. Even if WoW had 25 millions subscribers today instead of less than a third of that, it would still be a pile of steaming shit compared to what it was before GC.

2) In any case, the game doesn't look it's going great right now even when it comes to subscriptions, so even for that my case still stands.

I don't get this argument. People don't pay for "shit" games and they certainly don't keep playing them. It may be "shit" for you but it isn't for many others.

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The guy is kind of schmuck TBH. He's made me want to unsub more than once just because of his goddamn flippant attitude.

Last time I checked GC is human not an emotionless automaton. If you are so bothered by what he says you could simply stop reading his twitter.

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I wished GW Bush had lost his job during his tenure.


And what would you like for people to wish when they don't like the way the game is being developed? That the lead developer.. should be given a reward? Win the lottery?

In short, Ghostcrawler is cancer. Wait, cancer is too nice a word. I don't think the word censor on the forums would allow using the words that come to my mind when I think about him.

Not liking the direction of the game isn't justification to call for someone's job. Get over yourself. You aren't his boss and he isn't your bitch and NO ONE at Blizzard has any issue with telling certain belligerent customers to take a hike.

[ablib]

It was financial department, who pointed out easy savings on expenses (as CRZ allows to cut expenses on hardware by around 80% - that's quite significant cut).

As a techie person, I have to call BS when I see it. No hardware was shut off, reduced or removed to create CRZ. If anything, the infrastructure and man hour costs needed to create CRZ, was immense. Please don't spread mis-information.

[xanzul]

Holinka made 3 changes in the first week he was working for Blizz. It's been 2 months now and no changes since.

Something's gotta give.

Ok? You do realize there is a significant amount of internal testing that is done in house and not on the PTR right?

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Sub loss is due to content being released too slowly, mainly new expansions, aswell as Activisions greed with p2w store etc.

What? Too slowly? Are you fucking kidding me right now? 3-4 months between patches is too slow when it used to be 6-9? Seriously? As far as Activision goes, ATVI's company bylaws prevent Kotick or any executive outside of Blizzard Entertainment from overriding any of their managerial decisions. As stated time and again Morhaime checks in a few times a year to show the ATVI executives what they are up to but they are not given any sort of commands or direction. Also xp potions aren't pay to win and it is endlessly amusing no one has been able to tell me what exactly is being "won" with them.

[ablib]

Also xp potions aren't pay to win and it is endlessly amusing no one has been able to tell me what exactly is being "won" with them.

Time lost. In an MMO, time is a luxury.

[xanzul]

As a techie person, I have to call BS when I see it. No hardware was shut off, reduced or removed to create CRZ. If anything, the infrastructure and man hour costs needed to create CRZ, was immense. Please don't spread mis-information.

The cross realm zone hate brigade still won't concede defeat so all they have left is misinformation, fear mongering and hyperbole. It must really burn them up that the technology that they hate so much is being used to provide solutions to low pop realms. What is even more hilarious is that anyone who tried to explain to them it was laying the ground work for fixing low pop realms was harassed and called fanboys. Makes me wonder how many of their heads exploded when as predicted by us "fanboys" Blizzard announced virtual realms. Sadly once virtual realms go live the cross realm zone hate brigade will be back in full force to throw temper tantrums over how terrible virtual realms are despite the fact their #1 complaint was that CRZ didn't fix low pop realms. They are certainly no strangers to back peddling and lies.

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Time lost. In an MMO, time is a luxury.

Ok? I might actually buy this if we didn't have RAF. Where was your righteous indignation years ago when it was first introduced? How can an xp potion that only works 85-89 (89 is significant in that it implies it WILL NOT be in effect for the next expansion) and only a 100% boost when RAF is 300% and works 1-80 along with the ability to grant up to 40 levels per character to the person who recruited them? This xp potion is only marginally useful and at best will only save a few hours of leveling time.

[clone5240]

This isn't a thread to bash the guy, for better or worse I think he's done a great job. Its just that for the last two expansions the game has been bleeding subs by the millions. Now I know that WoW is aging and people are just not that interested in it anymore but in the world of business all that matters is how much profit you can make for the company. So way I see it, those last two expansions are like poor performance reviews for GC. He seems to be out of touch with the game as of late. The stuff he said about hunter utility I found to be kind of ridiculous and the inclusion of Flex Raiding seems like a cop out for lack of catch-up content. I don't think they would or should flat out fire the guy but I do think its time for someone else to take the lead. Let GC work below this person advising them. I would argue the same thing about Chris Metzen. Seems the guy can't be reasoned with and everything he says goes, lore-wise.


EDIT: I never wrote that he has the sole responsibility of the game therefore sub losses are all his fault. Apparently I wasn't clear enough, what I am trying to say is that he has a leadership position therefore if the game performs badly he is partly to blame. Of course he isn't in charge of everything but the truth is that companies always look at who's in charge whenever they are losing money. Of course this can be applied to Tom Chilton or anybody else in Blizzard. Also he isn't infallible he's adapted a lot of poorly developed ideas into the game over the years which have eventually been either completely removed or broken other aspects of the game.

Anyone knows that just looking at subscribers is a short sighted way to review someone. Its one thing to look at, but not all.

Look at gaming demographics. In the last few years, app gaming has exploded. Veteran WOW players are getting older and possibly quiting due to not having enough time. They might not get enough young people because they are more interested in app gaming on android or ipads.

[Mormolyce]

This isn't a thread to bash the guy, for better or worse I think he's done a great job. Its just that for the last two expansions the game has been bleeding subs by the millions. Now I know that WoW is aging and people are just not that interested in it anymore but in the world of business all that matters is how much profit you can make for the company.

They could fire GC and hire Merlin to cast a magic spell to make WoW not 8 years old anymore I guess.

I think you overestimate how much Blizzard is a stupid evil corporation vs. a studio with its head mostly screwed on straight.

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No he is buddy buddy enough and will just cry age to excuse his very poor decision making that has led to the massive drop off in subs.

The delusion is strong in this one.

P.S. GC isn't the King of Blizzard. He's just the only member of the Dev team whose name you know.

[Robert3620]

Two flops in a row, pretty sure he's gone. It doesn't matter if it's his fault or not, he's the guy at the top and someone is going to have pay.