Did Activision ruin Blizzard?

[Cosmoz]

Yes and yes.

[shimerra]

Small minds need an easy scapegoat to save the critical thinking. No.

[Deleted]

No, Activision Blizzard acts as a holding company, they didn't touch the game, at best, they could have deprived Blizzard from its funding, which I doubt. They share investors that might prefer a certain direction over the others, there's one thing in particular that investors tend to dislike in the game industry, and it's innovating games, but exploiting strong game trademarks over and over was what Blizzard was doing even before the merge anyway
Vivendi was far more shadier than Activision Blizzard is actually. Blizzard is the only responsible for how WoW turned out.

[oraz4000]

You only have to look at the Black Ops 3 supply drop system to see how scum Activision practices have become.

[Super Kami Dende]

yeah i doubt that not alot of people knew about it back then cos im 33 i only ever played zelda type rpg's and text based rpg's

I'm 27 and have played DnD since I was a kid. Seeing the progression system in Videogames was actually enjoyable.

[Deleted]

No. Ruining something means destroying something. Is WoW or Blizzard in ruins? No, it isn't, therefore nobody ruined them. A purely subjective view can be that WoW is now in worse state, but blaming Activision is just scapegoating. Unless we see the internal processes in Activision-Blizzard and Blizzard, we can blame tooth fairy with same credibility...

[Sencha]

Yes.

/10c

[Roadblock]

Did Activision ruin Blizzard for gamers and game creators?

Yes.

This needs to be re-posted every year or so, because people have a short memory.

More valuable for the links and references than anything else, you can form your own opinion easily.
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A short history of Activision Blizzard or how B.Net 2.0 came to be.
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But they sure made the day for shareholders and some golden boys.

[McNeil]

I don't think Activision influences the games decisions, its still Blizzard thats fully working on their games. I just don't think Blizzard is not as good as they used to be, so the quality of their games dropped.

[Jewsco]

What? Wonder and Hostess still exist. I can still find Wonder Bread in stores, as well as Hostess snack products.

Ask the 10k employees they had nation wide if thier jobs still exsist. Those brands still exsist as they sold off the company in parts. Did you not notice for nearly a year those products were gone? And not everything is back either.

[Deleted]

I remember end of wrath my ingame community was talking about it in trade, my faith in blizzard lessened that day and somehow I expected cata to be a bit worse than WOTLK,

[socialmaker]

Not ruined but made it worse.

[Deleted]

If anyone has "ruined WoW", it's Blizzard.

Also Activision and Blizzard are both equal business units in ATVI.
The current day Activision doesn't have anything to say about Blizzard's design decisions.
And Blizzard doesn't have anything to say about how Activision should develop Skylanders or their other IPs.
They're equal business units (along with King.com and the new eSport Gamers League)

I think you meant to say ATVI - i.e the actual mothership.
They can of course steer Blizzard anywhere they want, but I doubt they are closely involved in the nitty-gritty of the design. They do business. Not game design.

[Deficineiron]

Thats a clever way to get around 10 characters O.o

Activision ruining Blizzard reminds me of the days EA ruined Westwood

don't forget bullfrog either.

but on topic, mmo-c (and wow forums) are the only place on the planet I have ever seen people claim a publicly traded company acquires a major division comprising almost half their total revenue yet doesn't exert any influence over them. Of course Kotick's mgmt team and philosophy impacted blizzard. Just look at the hard turn on tuning in 3.0.2 versus everythhing prior, including 2.4.

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When did this aquisition even happen? I started playing the game at the end of Wotlk so Im unsure if I can answer the question.

merger closed june/july 2008, after 2.4.x but before 3.0.x prepatch.

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Wasn't is more a merge than an acquisition ?

it was a reverse merger, technically, with vivendi ending up getting issues more than half the total outstanding shares, but kotick and team ended up over the overall company.

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People who think Activision had no influence on how are things run in Blizzard are delusional.

only on MMO-C. Go try this theory on a financial board and watch a description of the LEGAL problems kotick would have if the claims about his lack of any involvement with blizzard were true.

I am not unsympathetic to this willful fantasy, though, because the alternative is realizing that a game which likely has taken up a great deal of your free time in life has been acquired and is being changed by a team that cares absolutely nothing for mmo's or the playerbase.

[Darkeon]

I wouldn't say that "Activision ruined Blizzard", because they do benefit each-other with this deal.

However, Publishers are known to "whip" down developers and come up with all these rough schedules and objectives focused on profits.

So, while I don't think anything was ruined, I feel there was certainly a shift between the mentality of "For gamers, by gamers. And fun!" to a more serious, corporate style management.

[Deficineiron]

Then why didn't that happen with Vivendi? Blizzard wasn't a standalone company since 94 and has been owned by a big corporation since 98.

one thing to be a small piece in a conglomerate, another to be half the revenue of a publicly traded video game company.

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The lawsuit was frivolous and it even mentions in one of the articles you linked "The state’s highest court overturned that ruling Oct. 10, clearing the way for the buyout." If I recall correctly it related to Vivendi's plans, as they could not find a buyer, to load ATVI with debt and payout its existing and borrowed cash as a huge dividend, obviously, as the majority share holder Vivendi would benefit most from this.

Without Kotick's actions ATVI, and as a result WOW, would be in a very bad place.

He and a group he led bought a part of vivendis stake at a discount not available to the public. That is a problem, even though he got away with it.

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You must be incredibly biased then, because this sort of downward spiral has been, according to a few people in this thread, going on since Warcraft II back in 1995.

to anyone who had been playing a while in 2008 -

compare tuning, game-wide, between 2.4 and 3.0.x

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Due to the lead time between creating content and releasing it it is unlikely that any changes requested by Activision would have been sudden. Wrath which was the first expansion for Blizzard under Activision continued with 2.4 theme of offering raid gear through dungeon currencies and apart from easier heroics (although Oculus and Halls of Lightning were certainly not as easy as some make out Wrath HCs to be) I don't recall any major changes in design philosophy. I would imagine that Activision were involved to some degree with the cash store but it is worth noting that value added services were in game before the merger.

Based on the fact Activision have not, at least obviously, interfered with the running of Blizzard despite quarter after quarter of unanswered customer and revenue losses leads me to believe that Blizzard have been allowed to operate as an independent business.

actually pann, the most likely explanation, given that LK was all designed in essence by that time, was just what it looks like happened. A mass nerf in mob-damage across wotlk content, from outdoors to instances to heroic instances to raids. Even chilton has specifically said naxx wasn't tuned as hard as they wanted.

[Exerionx]

Define "ruined"? As in "bankrupt"? No.

But if you think "artistically" ruined then you can answer that yourself, because that is.....an opinion.

I feel the same.

It's hard to make an honest opinion though, because let's be honest, we're never going to actually know what Activision influences (despite what Blizzard tells us...)

That's my thoughts anyways.

[Deficineiron]

The merge happened in July 2008 and Wrath was released November 2008. I think the Wrath project was too far down the line for Activision to have much influence on it... therefore u need to judge Activision for everything after Wrath to have any true reflection on how acti-blizzard performed.

With this in mind its safe to say that Activision hasnt had any positive effects on Wow, the only beneficiaries in the deal are the shareholders.

suppose, just suppose, blizzard suddenly had to get player participation in all content levels up across the board, with wotlk almost done or basicaly done. How could they quickly accomplish that?

remove threat, nerf all mob damage, nerf any and all gating/attunement mechanics for heroics and raids.

heroics were being steamrolled on release. raids (except harder sarth variants) were being easily pugged.

[Echo of Soul]

Well someone bloody well did, it's easiest to blame Activision since they already behaved like this way before Blizzard did.

[Deleted]

Correlation != causation. Activision is not responsible for the mechanics of World of Warcraft, no matter how much you might think it to be true.

And you know that how?