Blizzard team has undergone "restructuring"

[rda]

All you need to do is look at the history of how this works. Game Director Chilton barely got a nod from this or any other forum during the years he was game director. Why? Because he never posted on forums, never tweeted and generally never said anything at all outside of a Blizzcon or magazine interview. It was always whoever was talking to players the most that got the abuse. Always. You know it. I know it. Everyone else knows it. Stop being dishonest.

That's not how logic works. You are trying to prove that X (hate) is equivalent to Y (exposure) and your proof is that not Y results in not X. That does not compute. Besides, your not Y resulting in not X is not true - Jay Wilson tweeted nearly nothing and he is hated universally. Because what? Because what he ended up being tied with was Diablo 3 *PVP*. And because that PVP never arrived (and the joke that took place instead never worked).

I state again - you get hate not when you talk, but when you talk about things that DON'T WORK. Yes, that might be unfair, but it's a different kind of unfair - it's at most a wrong guy being blamed for a REAL failure.

[Sithalos]

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

Because everyone is an armchair dev, and thinks they know how the game should be run.

[Deleted]

I state again - you get hate not when you talk, but when you talk about things that DON'T WORK. Yes, that might be unfair, but it's a different kind of unfair - it's at most a wrong guy being blamed for a REAL failure.

But nothing works in WoW. Everything is broken. I mean today we have a guy complaining that he has too many order hall resources and that makes him disappointed. :-)

[Deleted]

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

I don't know what companies you worked for but I have to disagree.

[eagsasdf]

That's not how logic works. You are trying to prove that X (hate) is equivalent to Y (exposure) and your proof is that not Y results in not X. That does not compute. Besides, your not Y resulting in not X is not true - Jay Wilson tweeted nearly nothing and he is hated universally. Because what? Because what he ended up being tied with was Diablo 3 *PVP*. And because that PVP never arrived (and the joke that took place instead never worked).

I state again - you get hate not when you talk, but when you talk about things that DON'T WORK. Yes, that might be unfair, but it's a different kind of unfair - it's at most a wrong guy being blamed for a REAL failure.

You have really poor memory if that's your understanding of the Jay Wilson hate.

The guy commented on Facebook saying "fuck that loser" in a reply to a post set by David Brevik (original Diablo dev). You also forget the RMAH and just how bad Diablo 3 was in general WHILE having Jay as a very vocal defender of his work. He was too involved in telling the community to shut up. This idea of him being silent is bizarre from what I remember.

Now, for a counter argument, which does add evidence to an argument logically (not Y, not X is very useful in any debate to show that the negative is also true), Ive played WOW since vanilla and had no idea who Chilton is nor his game alias.

I can tell you a lot of people hate Ghostcrawler though, who was very open to discussion and typically does so in a very respectful way and takes players opinions seriously.

[Mad_Murdock]

You have really poor memory if that's your understanding of the Jay Wilson hate.

The guy commented on Facebook saying "fuck that loser" in a reply to a post set by David Brevik (original Diablo dev). You also forget the RMAH and just how bad Diablo 3 was in general WHILE having Jay as a very vocal defender of his work. He was too involved in telling the community to shut up. This idea of him being silent is bizarre from what I remember.

I thought it was a different comment that got him on the hate list. And didn't Rob Pardo, who was in charge of Diablo 3 at the time, say the blame fell on him and that Jay Wilson brought a lot of good things to Diablo 3? I think people just didn't like Diablo 3 and since Jay was the main figure head, he got all the blame.

Imagine if you will, that Blizzard's big wigs told Jay that they wanted Diablo 3 to be like this and that. Jay may have even disagreed with that direction, but that's what the bosses wanted. Now pretend that Jay did a fantastic job of giving the Blizzard bosses EXACTLY what they asked for and more. The funny\sad thing is, Jay may have done exactly the job they asked for, but because the players didn't like it, he gets blamed for ruining the game!

It would be very interesting to get to be a fly on a wall sometimes.

[Pickynerd]

I don't know what companies you worked for but I have to disagree.

Many companies, many large and small, if you think otherwise you're either fooling yourself, or clueless.

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Oh. Yeah. *shrug* Guess we'll just abandon holding a company we throw money at to any standards because nothing ever gets done anyway.

Vote with your wallet, not their fault you pay for something you don't like.

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Cause the people complaining have never worked in a corporate setting.

Makes me think they have never worked.

[Gadzooks]

Different things.

Imagine you go see a movie which costs $10 for a ticket. When you open your wallet or purse you realize you’ve lost a $10 bill. Would you still buy a ticket? You probably would, right?

Now, imagine you go to see the movie and pay $10 for a ticket, but right before you hand it over to get inside you realize you’ve lost it. Would you go back and buy another ticket? Maybe, but it would hurt a lot more. The situation is the exact same. You lose $10 and then must pay $10 to see the movie, but the second scenario feels different. It seems as if the money was assigned to a specific purpose and then lost, and loss sucks.

It's called sunk cost fallacy. It prevents you from realizing the best choice is to do whatever promises the better experience in the future, not which negates the feeling of loss in the past. It's not "investment"

But anyhow - this is going off the rails, so I'll just stop it there before the original point (CM team "restructuring") gets derailed.

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Right - and they fail the expectations because our brains are wired to fall into sunk cost fallacies. They should know better.
But then again, so should we.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_c...k_cost_fallacy

You're nitpicking and lecturing, and about what, I'm not sure. An argument about "sunk costs" is something more appropriate for an investing forum, I'm not sure why you fell it's relevant here, unless it's to feed your ego.

[Mafic]

It doesn't take six months to restructure duties and responsibilities.

If that is the case = bad company is bad.

[Eapoe]

It doesn't take six months to restructure duties and responsibilities.

If that is the case = bad company is bad.

It takes time to move person A to position B while finding person C to replace and train for person A's job while still training person A to handle all the responsibilities of position B. At my current workplace, one person moving from 1 side of the room to another side takes roughly 1-3 months of training, and that entire time that side of the room they moved from is left short and filled by overtime. A new hire takes 6 months to a year to completely train someone to work 1 primary side of a room.
Also keep in mind that in a corporation it takes time to familiarize yourself with a new team as well as learning what has been done previously to a new person stepping in as well as learning what upcoming changes are in store and actually having to understand said changes and deciding if you are opposed or on board with them before backing an upcoming or existing idea.
It might not take 6 months to move someone from janitor to fry cook at a fast food joint, but we're not talking about that, the topic is about people being moved around, hired, and/or fired from a company that is having to adjust to a product that's been around for a long time.

[Deleted]

You're nitpicking and lecturing, and about what, I'm not sure. An argument about "sunk costs" is something more appropriate for an investing forum, I'm not sure why you fell it's relevant here, unless it's to feed your ego.

As I said in the beginning, I don't like the usage of the word. It makes people behave like Blizzard owes them something through an offer/promise that was never there in the first place. It wasn't that hard to understand, was 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.

No one expects them to be perfect, they just want Blizzard to be as good as they used to be. Not releasing an expansion with minimal content that gates the fuck out of everything and slaps on terrible grinds to repeat the little content that there is.

For some reason Blizzard can't achieve what they used to anymore.

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I'll never understand why everything has to be such a grand conspiracy these days. Maybe, and most likely, restructuring did actually happen.

Because people lost their trust in Blizzard over the last couple of years. They release minimal content, lie and talk down to their players and tons of big names have left the company or switched away from WoW to other projects ever since Ghostcrawler left years ago. Not even Blizzard wants to have anything to do with WoW anymore. The game is in milking mode.

[rda]

You have really poor memory if that's your understanding of the Jay Wilson hate.

The guy commented on Facebook saying "fuck that loser" in a reply to a post set by David Brevik (original Diablo dev). You also forget the RMAH and just how bad Diablo 3 was in general WHILE having Jay as a very vocal defender of his work. He was too involved in telling the community to shut up. This idea of him being silent is bizarre from what I remember.

You are making my point for me. Which is: you get hate not because you talk but because you get associated with things that don't work.

Why Jay Wilson's "fuck that loser" appearing in a tiny comment to a post made by a D3 dev who was a bit taken aback by David Brevik's words about D3 (you missed that detail, right? it was a small comment written *to support* someone else) discussed at all? Why?? Right, because D3 was not a runaway success to say the least. If D3 was good, people would have +500'd the comment.

You talk about RMAH, and yes that was a big issue. Because what? Because Jay Wilson just talked? No, because RMAH did not work, people did not like it. They'd have cursed at anyone who'd dare defend it. Because they didn't like the feature.

Further, I don't know anyone who berates Jay Wilson for RMAH now. And why is that? Can you guess? Because they fixed it and Jay Wilson apologized and said that it was a mistake. Maybe someone somewhere still holds a grudge, but I guarantee you if that was the only thing associated with Jay Wilson, he wouldn't be hated, because, again, this was *fixed*.

I am sorry, but my point is getting confirmed at every turn. No, you don't get hate just because you get exposure. You get hate when you get exposure AND - that's key - AND if the product or features you are associated with are trash. The "playerbase" is not all that irrational. It is kind of blind, yes, but it yells when there are big issues.

And here's a very simple final illustration - perhaps not so much for you, because you just talked about Jay Wilson, but for others in the thread.

Who do you figure is hated on the WoW team right now? I will tell you who. It's Holinka and Celestalon. Ion's image is not too good either, but he is not hated. CMs like Lore aren't hated, they are treated like shills - deservedly, because that's what they are - but they aren't really hated, people understand that they aren't making any decisions.

Now tell me, do players have reasons to hate Holinka and Celestalon? If you put 2 and 2 together and see that Holinka represents "PVP" and Celestalon represents "class balance", and then you cross-check that with top issues reported for Legion, you can see that the hate is, indeed, rational. It is blind in that maybe it's not Holinka but someone else in the PVP department who is making the stupid decisions or maybe that's the entire PVP department not having a voice, but that's about it. The hate towards whoever represents PVP and class balance has an entirely logical reason - these things don't work in Legion. Blizzard failed at them big time, they did a terrible job.

So, stop with this nonsense that angry tweets should be ignored because they are always there and appear simply because someone gets a public twitter account. This is closing your eyes and going "lalalala I am in fantasyland". A few angry tweets are always there, yes. A big, lasting, near-universal hate is not always there. You get it when you work on things that failed hard. It is a very robust signal.

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By the way, I will say this, too.

If Holinka or Celestalon decide to switch companies right now, them getting a lot of hate from the players in WoW will absolutely be an issue. Because this myopic position about people complaining about devs not mattering is not actually held by anyone who has to do business. Everybody understands that small amounts of hate mean nothing, everybody gets that, but when you get metric tons of hate for years like Holinka and Celestalon do, that's not without grounds. "WTF was going on there? Why did you get so much hate regarding your job?" will absolutely be asked on the interview. (And there are no good outs, mind you.)

The options for these two heroes going forward are: either move to another project within the company and get silent for years hoping that time will cure things (that's what most likely will happen), or fix the hell they became associated with.

[Pickynerd]

No one expects them to be perfect, they just want Blizzard to be as good as they used to be. Not releasing an expansion with minimal content that gates the fuck out of everything and slaps on terrible grinds to repeat the little content that there is.

For some reason Blizzard can't achieve what they used to anymore.

As long as I have played, this is as good as it gets and as far as grind goes... Are you new to World of Warcraft? These grinds are minimal.

[Gadzooks]

As I said in the beginning, I don't like the usage of the word. It makes people behave like Blizzard owes them something through an offer/promise that was never there in the first place. It wasn't that hard to understand, was it?

Great. I don't give 10,000 flying rat's asses if you don't like the word or not, and I'm not going to respond to your pedantic ranting about it anymore.

And, I will use the word as I see fit - without INVESTING in your ego.

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No one expects them to be perfect, they just want Blizzard to be as good as they used to be. Not releasing an expansion with minimal content that gates the fuck out of everything and slaps on terrible grinds to repeat the little content that there is.

For some reason Blizzard can't achieve what they used to anymore.

There's some truth to that. Wrath was made with 54 developers. Legion has well over 300. Could be, they're bogging down from sheer inertia. But that's typical of corporations, they get bloated and slow, with lots of middle management slowing things down, they're not agile and quick, they become plodding and slow. GC has touched on that, mentioning 'Too many gatekeepers" in the development process.

Could be, they over-reacted, and tried to do too much, too soon, to make up for the train wreck that was WOD. I definitely feel the class revamp was too big a job for them to do in the time they had, and their playing catch up now is the best sign of it - and the amount of work ran smack into their slowness and whatever issues they have with content pipelines.

Solution? Hard to say. Changing institutional behavior is challenging - IBM faced it, and survived, but they were severely challenged in their core markets back in the day with the new, agile startups like Microsoft and Apple. It would take some serious leadership skills to do it, and I have my doubts about Ion being the guy to do that kind of thing. He's not a maverick, he's a company guy. (Nothing wrong with that, it's just how he is.)

I've been involved in this kind of thing, on a smaller scale, I worked with a boss who fundamentally changed how her department did things, and sped up the time on everything, and went from traditional warehousing/stockpiling to on demand/instant changes to market changes. It took us 5-6 years, and convincing everyone involved was like pulling teeth at many junctures along the way. Once the cost savings kicked in, everyone fell in line.

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Now tell me, do players have reasons to hate Holinka and Celestalon? If you put 2 and 2 together and see that Holinka represents "PVP" and Celestalon represents "class balance", and then you cross-check that with top issues reported for Legion, you can see that the hate is, indeed, rational. It is blind in that maybe it's not Holinka but someone else in the PVP department who is making the stupid decisions or maybe that's the entire PVP department not having a voice, but that's about it. The hate towards whoever represents PVP and class balance has an entirely logical reason - these things don't work in Legion. Blizzard failed at them big time, they did a terrible job.

Holinka is THE PVP guy. All the changes pass his desk. When the new changes for PVP in wow were announced in Germany the other devs congratulated him specifically on Blizzard for them. It's his baby. My opinion of him is based entirely on his responses to the community, and how he talks in interviews and Q&A's: he's a dick. I've been saying it since WOD, and while it's gratifying that others are seeing it, it's not gratifying that he's gutting the PvP game in WoW with his ham handed decisions and poorly designed systems.

Celestalon, same thing. He made his own reputation dealing with the general public. I think there's a reason they pulled back on letting devs talk freely to the general public - and these two are a big part of it.

The other devs, I have better opinions of. I always get a used car salesmen vibe off Afrasiabi, but he's a solid, damned good developer who made some of my favorite parts of the game. He delivers. Ion, he's a nice guy, bit of a wonk, tends to overthink things, and has a bad gauge for the players, and sticks his foot in his mouth at times, but I don't think poorly of him. Again, solid dev. The raid dev, Wendy, solid. I'd love to see her do some Q&A's, she's been there forever, I'd love to hear her talk about design and the ideas and concepts they work with.

I seem to recall GC said he hired both Holinka and Celestalon. Ironic, if true. I get why some people hate him, he designed parts of the game that a lot of players (irrationally) hate.

But, nature of the beast. Blizzard is unique to have kept so many for so long, I've worked on teams that won awards, and a year later fell apart because key people left, because their success led to offers. Maybe what they need is a LOT of fresh blood on the teams, especially in leadership. If you can get any of the current ones to leave.

[Deleted]

Great. I don't give 10,000 flying rat's asses if you don't like the word or not, and I'm not going to respond to your pedantic ranting about it anymore.

And, I will use the word as I see fit - without INVESTING in your ego.

Ok bro. Don't get mad.

[epLe]

Blizzard kinda took an unique approach to how gaming companies communicated with their gamers.
No other companies changed their game in a similar extent based on feedback.
Nor did they ever really answer on many questions except for techicalities and bug-reporting.

By communicating openly on their internal processes, game philosophies and just all kinds of chit-chat.
This communication gave them much better feedback than other gaming companies ever got before.

This feedback must be a huge tool in later development and continueing their success.
It's really what enabled WoW to feel somewhat like a world in constant change.

But as any tool it can be used for bad purposes aswell, the loud majority doesnt always know whats best.
Many changes have been unpopular and based on poor feedback.
This is best seen over expansions, how the philosophy has changed from a mmo-RPG to mission-shuffle, d3 grinds and raidlogging.