Ghostcrawler leaving WoW

[hrugner]

This is the part where WoW is fixed and everything is fine and dandy, right? Wrong.

I like the alternative personally. While extremely unlikely, the game suddenly bouncing back after his departure would be really entertaining.

[ZeroEdgeir]

Dear god... some people.

NOTHING is going to be like the glory days of WoW, cause the market is saturated. The numbers will never climb back over 10mil+ and hold for an expansion at that.

Very little will seem "new and exciting" after 9 YEARS of the same game. Anything that isn't spot-on PERFECT to everyone's needs is "failed content by XXXX XXXXX, they need to be fired". Anything that is what the playerbase asks for ("We want TBC-like heroics!" ring a bell? Yeah, that appeased a SMALL percent of the playerbase in Cataclysm, and pissed off the majority), is usually rehashed, retooled, nostalgia-influenced features, not NEW stuff.

It is going to be a different landscape without Mr Street involved, and he's been part of World of Warcraft, in some capacity, since it started.

[corebit]

Classes were horrible in vanilla and most of the burning crusade. Completely broken and useless specs still existed. Now classes are very close to each other, less than 5% in some cases, which is better than any game I've played. Look at boomkin, feral, enhancement, beastmastery, shadow, etc. They were all the laughing stock of the game.

Your statement will fall on deaf ears, as most of the WoW players right now have no idea what the class balance was during Vanilla and TBC. Of course they will think GC is the worst dev imaginable, as they have experienced no other lead developer.

[arcaneshot]

Most people I know hate Ghostcrawler for no apparent reason.

In fact one guy in my guild thought he was Chris Metzen. That's how silly it was.

[championknight]

Wish him all the best in the future, the person taking over is going to have his work cut out for him...

[BrerBear]

So what you're saying is that graph really needs to be updated to show the WoW West and WoW East split from 2010 onwards?

No, I think what he's saying is that WoW reached its peak in subscriptions a few years after GhostCrawler took over the game systems.
Congrats, GC!

[Deleted]

abandon your mages. we're no longer protected.

He plays a priest....

[kail]

Most people I know hate Ghostcrawler for no apparent reason.

In fact one guy in my guild thought he was Chris Metzen. That's how silly it was.

There was another guy I was talking too years back that confused him with Bashiok...

It's natural to join the hate train w/o knowing shit about it. It's the reason why I feel for political leaders sometimes.

[BrerBear]

He is being blamed for everything cause he was LEAD designer...

Lol. No, he wasn't.
Like most of the critics, you can't even get a basic fact right.

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3 million lost subs (in 1 year nonetheless) = $540~ million lost per year. Heads just have to roll over a loss like that. I know those numbers aren't accurate because they count subs that aren't actually subs and some people don't pay monthly, but it is a good idea.

Because if a 10 year old game doesn't keep adding subscriptions from now to the end of eternity... heads must roll!
I wonder how many film studio executives have been fired now that The Avengers is no longer #1 at the box office?

[Zandalarian Paladin]

I actually liked the guy. Watched his tweets almost daily - he might have done mistakes, but I never saw someone so focused on their work and the community.

[Worgoblin]

WoW has grown stale and needs some fresh ideas. So nothing against GC, but I think this is a good thing.

[BrerBear]

Its only when the financial situation as blizzard gets reported will any sense come out.
If as many suspect the subs will fall further in Q4 what options will blizzard have.
personally I think its going to be first of many. Feedback on the next patch wasn't exactly frenzied

Blizzard isn't dumb enough to bet the company's long-term future on WoW. Why are so many forum posters of this mind? Are you naive enough to think that this game is supposed to last for a hundred years or something, and that the company's management or investors believe this? If so, we'd see a lot more negative stock market reaction when WoW sub drops are announced.

Hearthstone, D3 expansion, Heroes of the Storm. These are the short-term options Blizzard will have.

[jbombard]

No, I think what he's saying is that WoW reached its peak in subscriptions a few years after GhostCrawler took over the game systems.
Congrats, GC!

I don't think GC had much to do with it one way or another,but just to let you know that isn't a great argument. If you figure nothing GC would work on would have an immediate impact and you look at the year following his entry into the company, we got Wrath and while we did reach peak subscriptions in Wrath, it was a period in WoW where we saw very little real growth. As a reference WoW grew at the rate of 6 million per year for the first year and continued growing at the rate of 2 million per year prior to Wrath, subs in Wrath only grew by 250,000 over 2 years.

[Deleted]

Your statement will fall on deaf ears, as most of the WoW players right now have no idea what the class balance was during Vanilla and TBC. Of course they will think GC is the worst dev imaginable, as they have experienced no other lead developer.

Yes the class homogenization system is so much better. Tanks: Active mitigation with different spell names, Healers: aoe heal/single target heal/single target hot but with different spell names, DPS Melee: Rouge/Feral/WW Monk CP with energy while keeping debuff/buffs up etc etc you get the point. So much fun right? Soon enough we can split it up to ranged dps/melee dps/healers and tanks and just pick whatever classes that sims out the highest performance for each role because fuck class uniqueness right?

As for the guy you quoted, all the specs he mentioned where viable in both pve and pvp during TBC. The fact that he even mentions beastmastery hunters in the laughing stock category makes me wonder if he ever played TBC.

[BrerBear]

I thought he was "Lead systems developer"?

I.e. supervises people who work on new stuff.

In games, "systems" is essentially the math side.

Yes: class balance, stats and formulas, gameplay mechanics.
No: quests, story, art, sound, music, raids, encounters, game programming/engineering, etc.

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I don't think GC had much to do with it one way or another,but just to let you know that isn't a great argument. If you figure nothing GC would work on would have an immediate impact and you look at the year following his entry into the company, we got Wrath and while we did reach peak subscriptions in Wrath, it was a period in WoW where we saw very little real growth. As a reference WoW grew at the rate of 6 million per year for the first year and continued growing at the rate of 2 million per year prior to Wrath, subs in Wrath only grew by 250,000 over 2 years.

It was a simple retort to someone trying to prove a non-statement with a subscription graph.
But you are correct. And to further the point with your data, that means WoW sub growth had already fallen by 2/3 by the time he joined on.

Not that any of those points has any direct relation to GC. One can interpret the data for or against him based on personal biases.

[Algearond]

I wish him the best, going to be interesting what direction the game takes going forward.

[makketota]

GC had no vision to grow the game.

His idea was to simplify and cut away. In theory that sounds good but reality is WoW is known for adding features and making them simpler. GC made things way too simple and bare bones.

Less is more.

[Mormolyce]

Real ID has been a total failure ever since its release, that's why it got mostly replaced by BattleTag now. It's only a matter of time until Real ID gets removed completely, since it's redundant anyway now that we have BattleTag.

I wouldn't say failure, people used it kind of begrudgingly, but yes I hope they just merge my Real ID friends into my battletag friends at some point.

[iamthedevil]

I really want to know what job he chose over Blizzard.

[vendizritz]

Woot no more hate on pallys now gc is out of here