Blizzard team has undergone "restructuring"

[burzian]

I am a software dev myself, I knew / know people who were on the WoW team, plus I had the privilege of looking at their decisions and so-called processes over the years as a player.

Mountain of a molehill, oh, sure, absolutely. Why am I not surprised that you just ignored what I wrote as nothing. Do you PVP? Do you understand what their changes do? Did you see the size of the ladder lately? Yeah.

I understand the changes, and I understand why you're annoyed. What I don't understand is why you apply standards to WoW's development team that are in no way normal for software of much higher objective importance.

[rda]

I understand the changes, and I understand why you're annoyed. What I don't understand is why you apply standards to WoW's development team that are in no way normal for software of much higher objective importance.

Warning about breaking changes is normal. Not doing them when you can avoid them is also normal and is even better. They did neither.

[glowpipe]

Just face it, they spend all their time and energy on overwatch. Trying to get that shitty league shit going. Wow is old and its not going to make it in the long run. Its just a skeleton crew working on it now.

[A dot Ham]

they communicate plenty already don't know why people want to know every time a dev takes a shit.

I just like hearing the juicy gossip, like when they get shit on...

[Bepples]

Here we go! Final stages of the blithering "I hate everything!" person. When failing to produce any form of meaningful rebuttal, they just go "Oh you are white knighting them!". We are in the end-game now. Want to call me a troll also?
Once again, this all comes down to you ranting and raving about a staff member, over which you have no input, and the company is evidently happy with his performance. Your opinion is entirely irrelevant in how he does, Blizzard and the bigwigs are all that counts. I did not say I thought he was any good, I am just fully aware my thoughts on it are totally pointless, so I don't worry about it. So, please, carry on, I want to see more of your rambling about this "treacherous route"

Lol? I said in my post that you CAN succeed without tertiary education but it's far less likely because I know in any one of these discussions you always get people naming the few exceptions to the rule. Your response? Literally exactly that. I'm not going to bother typing a big refutation when I already refuted that point before you even posted, but it looks like that was a farce because here I am having to explain basic concepts to you. I guess I gave you way too much credit.

And shit like this is why people call you a white knight. I demonstrate Celestalon's OBJECTIVELY awful performance and you're response is "it doesn't matter because Blizzard says he's good and that's final". Blizzard's word = infallible truth. It doesn't get much more white-knightey than that.

Ah, another one who confuses "Not giving a shit about something totallly irrelevant and inconsequential" as "whiteknighting".

Got to love these forums, able to turn a total non-issue into a major drama.

You are way too invested in this thread at this point to still pretend that you don't give a shit.

[xanzul]

https://twitter.com/devolore/status/818592380022423553

First it was training the larger team, then it was then it was the holiday season, Blizzcon, delays, and now it's "team restructuring".

In a recent tweet, Lore mentions that the sloppy patch notes release was due to "team restructuring", and he anticipates that future patch notes will be "MUCH better".

Do you believe that this team restructuring will improve communication with the community? Or will things remain at the status quo? Personally I'm a bit sceptical.

You people bitch and whine and moan that Blizzard doesn't communicate with us and then as soon as they do all of you come down on them for doing exactly just that. Unbelievable. This community really is trash now. Nothing can save it at this point.

[darklogrus]

The communication from Blizzard over the years has spoiled people into thinking this is something players are owed. So now you have up-and-coming gamers expecting more and more, spoiled by the fact that Blizzard DOES make efforts to talk to us. False entitlement.

We pay to play a game and character that ultimately doesn't even belong to us. And somehow we feel entitled to an explanation of every little nuance of their inner-workings? Get over yourself.

Just pay your monthly sub, play the game, and if you're not getting your money's worth, stop. I've done it several times.

I think its the other way around. I think gamers have let Dev teams get away with a lot of stuff for awhile now. Its only now that your starting to see the turning point.

[Bepples]

Nope, just looking for the occasional notification on my list to see if someone has quoted me. Hardly being "invested". And the answer as to his performance is irrelevant as I said, you don't know exactly what goes on behind the scenes in the company, what may seem shoddy performance externally, is exactly what they have been briefed to do behind the scenes. Unlikely? Hell yes, but not beyond the realms of possibility. The point that he hasn't been removed from his position is evidence of this, despite all your protests and ranting to the contrary. Linking things like his patch notes and whatnot is hilariously farcical, because, like all people of your ilk, you decide *you* know better than the literally billions of hours of raw data they have behind the scenes, but like most, you rely on a handful of sims as somehow equivalent data.
The point about the tertiary education being irrelevant in this case, is like many companies of their ilk, Blizzard prefer to promote and recruit internally, thus, the whole demanding of a degree or higher is entirely irrelevant, and absolutely laughable. They do not care, so why should you?

You are literally just putting your external viewpoint onto a company that owes you neither an explanation, nor cares to do so. Blizzard are far more transparent than many companies in the same league, yet I am not surprised they keep the community "in the dark" so to speak, because of the relentless drivel, personal attacks and absolute outrage started over the most minor of things. This entire thread is proof of this, and the fact you are still rambling as if it is of some import, is even more hilarious.

You really have brightened my day with you random personal attacks, and no, I really couldn't give a crap, honestly. Replying 4-5 times over the course of a day is hardly "giving a shit". I think you really need to relax and let go of such whiny dramas, you will live longer my friend

Once again, your argument entirely rests on "might is right". I don't give a fuck whether or not Blizzard thinks Celestalon is doing a good job: there is overwhelming evidence of the contrary. So when people say developers like Celestalon are worthless and you come in saying "your opinion doesn't matter because Blizzard says so", you are adding jack shit to the discussion. Does the mountain of bad decisions and oversights go away because Blizzard says so? Do you even try to refute the claim other than saying "whatever, doesn't matter" (which isn't a refutation at all)? And trying to shift the blame somewhere else within Blizzard doesn't exactly help anything, it just means a lead designer like Hazzikostas is culpable instead. The fault is still with Blizzard, not the players.

Also, saying that Blizzard has some untapped fountain of knowledge through data that the players don't is laughable because they frequently make decisions in SPITE of said data. The example I talked about before also applies here: there was a wealth of data in the form of logs and sims that showed Elemental was underpowered. Blizzard declined that this was the case. The expansion goes live, and what the fuck do you know: Elemental is underpowered and needed an emergency pile of buffs to make it remotely playable at any level of content. So there are three alternatives here:

- Blizzard had good data and didn't listen to it
- Blizzard listened to the data but it was bad
- Blizzard has no data and made a bad assumption

Here's the thing: ALL THREE are Blizzard's fault. So, unlike you, I will NOT put faith in Blizzard's "billions of hours of raw data" because I have seen countless occasions where they walk right into an obvious failure out of pure arrogance when all signs pointed in the correct direction. I used to be that kind of person back in the WotLK and Cata days who would make that sort of argument but it is astonishing to me that there are people like you who have seen so many design and tuning catastrophes to the point where it's almost routine now yet they still have faith in them to do the right thing and believe their design is actually data-driven.

Since you don't seem convinced yet that your beloved corporate entity is staffed by incompetent monkeys, I leave you with yet another catastrophic fuck-up from the class design team with "billions of hours of raw data". In 6.0, Survival hunters were focused on sustained damage. One perk of the spec was that Serpent Sting applied a tick of the debuff on application (and it was applied by Arcane Shot and Multi-Shot). In 6.2, Blizzard in a fit of wisdom decided that this was in fact a bug, and removed it. You would think this would warrant a compensating buff... nope. They nerfed Explosive Shot by 15%. They insisted that a 7% buff to mastery would compensate both changes, but that's nonsense because that's a +7% to magic damage and Explosive Shot got nerfed by 15%, so it doesn't even cover ONE of those changes. Sims and in-game testing revealed the Serpent sting nerf to amount to about 20% on single target, and more for each target added in.

It was so bad that people insisted it was simply a result of pre-numberpass PTR, but nope. This went live. Survival was so unviable in mythic raiding that it didn't even break 100 parses in all of Mythic HFC. What made this even more of a kick in the balls was when they flat out deleted the spec in favour of a generic melee spec that no one wanted nor asked for.

"billions of hours of raw data"? What a fucking joke. I actually am confident that there are several people on this forum who DO know more about the game than the people designing it.

[Deleted]

Meh, people some how imagine companies are perfect, forget the fact that none of them are.

Business is chaos 24/7 it's amazing that anything gets done.

Yepp, pretty much. Blizzard has spoiled us rotten.

[Life-Binder]

I never understand why devs MUST (according to someone) have to do this much with the community, honestly.

they communicate plenty already don't know why people want to know every time a dev takes a shit.

Coming from Valve games it's a bit funny to me in general when people say Blizzard doesn't communicate. You have no idea.

this

Blizzard is already doing more on that front than 98% of devs and honestly I think they should cut down on it and use the resources/time for more actual development

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its funny how some of the more vocal complaining members of the WoW community wouldnt last a week with most other devs

they would beg to go back to "Blizzard communication"

[KrazyK923]

Its always something.

No content for so long between MoP and WoD? Oh it was because we were making the team bigger.
No content for so long between WoD and Legion? Oh we were just so focused on Legion instead!
Almost complete lack of dialogue between players in Legion, which has a TON of class problems? Oh well, we just restructured the team!

There's always some excuse.

Hopefully this team restructuring isn't them taking even MORE people off of the WoW team, because when they did that, we got World of Warcraft: Legion of Timesinks. I doubt it though, based on 7.1.5.

[Zeta333]

https://twitter.com/devolore/status/818592380022423553

First it was training the larger team, then it was then it was the holiday season, Blizzcon, delays, and now it's "team restructuring".

In a recent tweet, Lore mentions that the sloppy patch notes release was due to "team restructuring", and he anticipates that future patch notes will be "MUCH better".

Do you believe that this team restructuring will improve communication with the community? Or will things remain at the status quo? Personally I'm a bit sceptical.

Fail title name, the WoW team was restructured, not "blizzard team"

[ImpTaimer]

"Restructure" is code for "management securing their own jobs by sacrificing hordes of minions."

Bingo.

"Maybe if people gave feedback we'd do a better job."
*provides feedback*
"Constructive feedback please."
*provides constructive feedback*
"Our data isn't showing this. You're doing it wrong, but we won't tell you why."
*gives bigger sample size and live logs/recordings*
"Help! I need my safe place! Protect me Twitter!"
*sub hemorrhaging*
"We're restructuring our team."

[Deleted]

https://twitter.com/Celestalon/statu...03778441469952

boi is this real life???

"Chadd Nervig, Technical Game Designer on World of Warcraft. Balance! Tuning! Spreadsheets!"

I really hope this guy get never involved in any kind of gameplay decisions.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

I dont read that as dev team restructuring but as the CM team. Could just be me thought

I think it is more likely the dev team or both. Remember, Chilton got moved off of WoW and replaced by Hazzikostas. I suspect Ion has been doing damage control for all the shit Tom left behind. I base this speculation upon the nerfs to many legendaries, and the fact that they've only just now gotten around to removing GBoM despite knowing that much of the Ret community has hated it since the Legion Alpha introduced it.

Remember, Tom Chilton is the one posted this on the Legion Alpha forums in the paladin section when defending the talent Holy Wrath (the talent at the time was named Equality).

I think this talent touches on a handful of topics about class design philosophy. It's a great example of talent design that doesn't fit today's norm, but in a good way - and in a way that we need more of, not less. The topics I see in play here are philosophies about what role talents play, the mechanics of a talent that require a player to take damage, and possibly the location of the talent in the tree.

http://urbad.net/blue/us/20742624741...ild_21232_3Mar

Chilton defending the ridiculously awful talent that is now named Holy Wrath.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

My department at work was restructured a year ago and most people got a rise, 6 new hires, and a re-equip of most of our technical neededs. So all in all an amazing time. Not saying that happened or is happening here. We don't know. Either way.

[Bepples]

So much salt.

It is a game, you have absolutely no say in how it is run, beyond cancelling your sub (and giving reasons), which, seeing as you are so vehemently angry at how things are run, is most likely for the best. The data is there, and they choose what to do with it, your input is entirely ignored nor even cared about.
Take a break for your own sanity, seriously, this anger isn't helping lol.

How much self-loathing do you have to have as a customer to buckle down with this "hail corporate" attitude in defense of design decisions against YOUR OWN interests? I will never understand this.

You literally have no argument other than "might is right". Sad.

[ehxy]

Apparently I was overpowered because I did well in ursoc on my enhancement shaman. Nobody ever pointed out the warlock who outdps'd me on everything except one fight where if I didn't get focus gazed I would actually stay neck and neck with him until the shadowpriest s2m'd. Oh and shadow priest. They are even MORE crazier now and the windwalker buff went full retard.

[Metallourlante]

Blizzard is already doing more on that front than 98% of devs and honestly I think they should cut down on it and use the resources/time for more actual development

Yeah, exactly. I may not agree with them most of the time but Blizzard devs are for sure the most "social" - maybe too much "social" sometimes.

[xanzul]

Its always something.

No content for so long between MoP and WoD? Oh it was because we were making the team bigger.
No content for so long between WoD and Legion? Oh we were just so focused on Legion instead!
Almost complete lack of dialogue between players in Legion, which has a TON of class problems? Oh well, we just restructured the team!

There's always some excuse.

Hopefully this team restructuring isn't them taking even MORE people off of the WoW team, because when they did that, we got World of Warcraft: Legion of Timesinks. I doubt it though, based on 7.1.5.

It isn't an excuse when they answer a question players asked. Isn't that communication? They could have simply ignored that thread entirely and said nothing and as usual made the mistake of engaging this shitty community and got attacked for it. It is digusting. It really is.

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How much self-loathing do you have to have as a customer to buckle down with this "hail corporate" attitude in defense of design decisions against YOUR OWN interests? I will never understand this.

You literally have no argument other than "might is right". Sad.

So stop fucking giving them money and go the fuck away already. How in the hell is any customer going to change how Blizzard does business when they continually reward them for engaging in supposedly bad business practices? Come the fuck on.

If anyone is working against customers interest it is customers like YOU.