Ion Hazzikostas: Why do you like or dislike him as a game designer?

[xanzul]

It was an extension of the Garrison, they couldn't really change it way through. Besides, the Shipyard was the least of WoD's problems.

"But WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH I need the shipyard to fly"

Honest to god this guy cares about flying above everything else in this game no matter how much of a fucking idiot it makes him look like and he will whine about anything that is in between him and flying even if it was a full expansion ago.

- - - Updated - - -

They placed their bet on players re-running content and spending a lot of time in the game by going for legendaries. If they changed this, there would be no reason to do emissary quests, there would no reason to run raids on multiple difficulties, there would be no reason to spend time on alts doing these either and much more. The entire expansion is based around a RNG system that awards you one legendary at a time.

They realized they had to do something when they increased the drop chance for legendaries and especially for the first two per character. That is as much as they could've done at this point. If they keep the same system in the next expansion, then a post like yours would be the best way to describe their actions and the logic behind them.

I'm sorry were we not rerunning content prior to Legion? Look I get that legion has issues I really do but lets stop pretending they are somehow new.

[SirCowdog]

Or worse that the "bean counters" make the decisions which couldn't be any further from the truth. This just simply isn't how any business rooted in any form of creative art functions at least not at the level the simpletons here claim it is.

"Bean Counters" probably don't make the actual decisions. But if you think the business aspects of a company as large as Acti-Blizz don't influence the design process, then you might want to step back and take a hard objective look.

[xanzul]

The key difference from GC is that Ion acts like a professional, generally, and knows that WoW is his job, and an important job, but that it's not his actual baby. Whereas GC often edged toward the emo side of things, and took stuff pretty personally. He was certainly no better at "taking community input", but where Ion, as a professional, simply acknowledges it and moves on (or dismisses it), GC would get upset over it - only mildly upset, but upset nonetheless - and strangely I think that made some people like him better, even ones who disagreed with him. They felt they'd connected emotionally, not been ignored.

Pretty weird but there you are.

GC didn't mince words that doesn't make him emo that makes him honest. The people who were the target of his comments most certainly were emo though.

[SirCowdog]

This expansions version of the Shipyard is the NLC.

What cracks me up is how the Blue post addressing the complaints about the Cruicible basically boiled down to: You guys are wrong and we don't see any problem with it. And this was on the tails of the recent similar kind of response in regards to Flying and Argus.

LOL! Blizzard listens, guys, really! They just don't give a shit what you think. Aren't you grateful?

[xanzul]

This is exactly right, hiring Ion; a lawyer that has no education in software, but played the game..., is about the same as electing a president that has no experience in politics whatsoever and expecting the job to be done competently. Ion truly fits "the peter principle" which is "thou shalt rise to thy level of incompetence". At least Metzen understood that he was never going to be as good of a software developer as the ones that spent years learning it in college so he worked mostly on lore and voice acting.

It wasn't until the past decade that game development was even a serious area of study in colleges. But i don't expect kiddos still in high school to understand that.

[SirCowdog]

He admits to mistakes constantly but none of you haters acknowledge it because it blows your lazy simple minded narrative out of the water.

He can admit all he wants. But until his, and Blizzard's actual ACTIONS change, it means nothing. Actions speak louder than words. Ever hear that before?

[xanzul]

Yes. It was probably developed alongside the Garrison.

So when you receive such a negative backlash to the Garrison.... What should you do? Maybe make some ADJUSTMENTS to the Shipyard. Since its all still in development.

Yet they release it with the EXACT same mission board style but actually WORSE. Because your followers can die, permanently.

That's called doubling down.

When you release the NLC with ZERO changes throughout the whole 7.3 PTR cycle after receiving overwhelmingly negative feedback. When you've received hate for the amount of RNG throughout the whole expansion.

So what do you do? Double down on RNG and add the NLC unchanged.

Are you fucking for real? You haters spent all of wod calling it a contraction instead of an expansion because of all the "cut content" and now you are actually bitching that the shipyard wasn't scrapped or changed entirely? Are you fucking serious right now?

[SirCowdog]

As opposed to what? Youve already personally attacked multiple posters in this thread.

I attack his design choices and the mantra he was hired to enforce. Not him as a person. He's a lawyer, he acts like one. How is that attacking him?

Get off your high horse. I'm sorry if calling a tree a tree is offensive to you.

It's only slanderous if it's not true. Yup.

[xanzul]

Everything in Legion is 100% designed from a Business standpoint.

"Time Played Metric".

The Devs that came before have built this loyal fanbase from the ground up. People love this game and this franchise and the design choices in Legion are literally the current Dev team just taking a dump on that legacy.

It's all just designed to keep you playing because you feel you NEED to grind.

It's not actually ENJOYABLE content anymore.

- - - Updated - - -



All control has been removed from the player and put in the Casinos hands.


7.3.2 PTR just added Legendary Tokens. I think this is so you can farm currency on your main, buy one and mail it to an alt.

The problem? All the token does is identify a RANDOM LEGENDARY FROM THE POOL.

Hahahahaha...... Oh my fucking god.

The time played metric exists because all of Blizzard's other titles use various other business/payment models and as such lack a common financial metric. Is it the best metric? Probably not but it gives a rough idea of how various Blizzard titles are performing against each other and make no mistake about it the time played metric is solely about Blizzard games and only Blizzard games. I have yet to see any info come from shareholders meetings that indicates Blizzard is trying to use this metric to measure its games with other games.

[Eurhetemec]

Yes, exactly! This is especially apparent when I compare WoW's system of loot to Diablo 3, which has many of the same types of systems as WoW. The dev teams are many of the same people, and I see that D3 has many more tools to work the RNG system to the benefit of the player. Perhaps there's another explanation, but the only thing I can come up with to explain the difference is that D3 doesn't use a monthly sub business model. There's no need to artificially extend the amount of time needed to progress like there is in WoW.

WoW is dozens of times more complex than Diablo 3, on pretty much every level. I love D3 don't get me wrong, but it's like a minigame compared to WoW. There are different pressures too, that's true, but I think mostly what we're seeing is evolution, slow evolution. But in the right direction.

If the Next Expansion comes, and Legendaries work the exact same way as they do now, well, then I will admit I was wrong on that.

Ah...that's too bad. I played mostly in the first year of GW2, before all the elitist nonsense got fired up, I guess. Oh well, gamers are gamers, apparently.

It took a long while to go wrong. The first year was pretty magical. You only saw the beginnings of elitism there, and it was just some groups for some dungeons. Not "the entire instanced endgame" as it is now.

Hmm...are they directly selling power upgrades now? When I last played it was only cosmetic stuff. I mean, you could buy gems to trade for things like inventory or bank space, things like that. But no actual power or performance. Did that change?

You've always been able to trade Gems for Gold. When Exotics were the top item, and you really only needed Zerker and maybe whatever your class wore for PvP, well no-one was going to even think about that. In the HoT era, though gems buy a lot more gold, and you need a lot more gold than ever, to get Ascended gear (or even Exotic gear of the new types). You do also need stuff you have to earn in-game as well to make Ascended, but it's trivial with the new Living Story zones. Cash is the big sticking point.

When you played I think QoL items were limited to what bank space, character slots, and extra bag slots. There's a ton more now - infinite-use gathering tools (some of them with bonus effects which earn you more money), stuff you can buy which goes in your house, letting you mine stuff every day, stuff which teleports you to a location with all the vendors etc. you could ever want, as well as boosters for everything - XP, Crafting, etc. etc.

They have added almost no weapon/armour skins to game since you last played except those you get through the cash shop and the lootboxes. The lootboxes don't have weapons/armour, to be clear, they mostly have stuff from the cash shop, and weapon skins you can only get through the lootboxes - I dunno if they even did this in year 1 - but they do have some crafting stuff iirc, and more importantly, you can sell some of the things you don't want from them and undoubtedly buy a bunch of stuff with the cash you make.

Another cynical move was massively nerfing the amount of Karma you could get, which they did to prevent people getting Exotic armour as easily, particularly.

Again, the main difference I see between GW2 and WoW is the same as Diablo 3: One is a monthly sub and one is not. There's a direct conflict of interest in WoW when it comes to anything that artificially slows a player down, such as time-locks, layered RNG, etc. And there's no way anyone is going to convince me that Blizzard doesn't fiddle with the drop rates in order to control required subscription time to accomplish things. It's no different than Casino's setting the win ratios on their games.

Operate at a large enough scale and random factors become predictable.

I'm not sure what you mean re: drop rates though? Of Legendaries? Because that's the only thing that I can see that makes sense in that context. What else are you referring to? I mean, I ditched my Legion sub for months and came back, and I'm not feeling like I'm gated out of stuff.

[Galathir]

He is arrogant selfish fucking asshole.

I'm with this guy. Every time I see his smug grin I wanna beat his face in.
WoW is going the way he wants it to and often he's straight up dismissing honest community concerns with a bad pun.

[SirCowdog]

This is the epitome of trolling. You know damn well the shipyard was in development long before any real issues with garrisons came about. But fuck honest discussion and integrity if it means getting flying back right?

Uh...what? Where did flying come into this?

Anyway, we're not talking about some massive overhaul here. The Shipyard didn't have to be designed from scratch. It used all of the same underlying systems as the mission table from the Garrison. Even if the Shipyard had been in development for a long time, that's no excuse. Blizzard has a history of axing entire games that are DEEP into their development process. Nuking a single feature that was a carbon copy of an already existing feature that they knew players already disliked wouldn't be some earth-shattering damage to their design process.

EDIT: Oh..I get it now. The shipyard was part of the requirement to unlock WoD flying. To be completely honest, I didn't remember that at all. Nor was it part of any of my arguments or reasoning on this topic. I criticize the Shipyard because someone else brought it up, and it's a good example of the double-down behavior on bad ideas that Blizzard seems to have a history of.

Way to make a massive assumption about me, Xanzul.

[Aqua]

If you've ever seen him in person, he cares. He cares alot. Even when I disagree with him, even when he is standoffish or stubborn about something. He cares. I cannot dislike him for that.

[Eurhetemec]

GC didn't mince words that doesn't make him emo that makes him honest. The people who were the target of his comments most certainly were emo though.

I felt he absolutely did mince words. He was often quite cautious in what he said and always polite. That's mincing words. He also often expressed upset at how mean people were, or how negatively things had been received. I mean, he wasn't Tseric, but... he wasn't a million miles away...

[Eurhetemec]

Uh...what? Where did flying come into this?

You brought it up literally a few posts back when discussing responses re: flying and Argus.

- - - Updated - - -

He will actually try and argue it would. Without offering any sort of argument other than throwing out buzzwords like stability and playability.

He will ignore the point:

Doubling Down. Even when the feedback is overwhelmingly negative.

Man complains about buzzwords, then uses the phrase "double down" repeatedly. That's pretty impressive hypocrisy.

- - - Updated - - -

I'm with this guy. Every time I see his smug grin I wanna beat his face in.
WoW is going the way he wants it to and often he's straight up dismissing honest community concerns with a bad pun.

Should WoW not be going the way it's lead developer wants it to lol? Wtf?! Rofl.

[Eurhetemec]

Once again. Zero actual argument. Just pathetic attacks.

Right back 'atcha! You're guilty of every single thing you complain about in others.

[Dsc]

People need a scapegoat.
He is that scapegoat for now.
When he's gone, there will be another.

First Post nailed it. He's done some great stuff, when Blizzard had a very different formula for wow.

His predecessors ( not ghosttroller POS ) but the oldschool Everquest Guys, who now hold senior positions at Acti-Blizz and changed the game with the times, were at one time the best. ( unless you pvped) but now are responsible for the clusterfuck WoW has become.

There is alot of good, and bad,. I don't hold Ion responsible for any of it.

[SirCowdog]

I'm not sure what you mean re: drop rates though? Of Legendaries? Because that's the only thing that I can see that makes sense in that context. What else are you referring to? I mean, I ditched my Legion sub for months and came back, and I'm not feeling like I'm gated out of stuff.

Sorry, I had to cut a lot out because the posts were getting too large, and I'm letting my argument with Xanzul get out of control. You made a lot of good points about GW2, and I think it's a good contrast to WoW.

When I talk about drop rates, I mean most anything that the layered RNG effects: from Legendaries, to Titanforge chance, to the Cruicible. I'm sure that it's all recorded and reported, with an actual equation on how much average time it takes each individual player to get any particular drop. Blizzard controls all those drop rates(again, meaning TF chance, BiS legendaries, and perfect rolled relics, etc, etc), and likely sets them exactly the same way a casino sets win ratios. The main difference being that casino rates are monitored and controlled by regulating laws and governing bodies, whereas I doubt drop rates in videogames are.

Anyway, that's pretty much treading into the realm of pure speculation and theory, which I'm pretty sure is against the rules of the forums. And we're not even talking about Hazzicostas anymore. XD

[MoanaLisa]

Except they doubled down with the Shipyard, so where does that leave your theory? Are you telling me they couldn't change that despite having almost the entire expansion worth of negative feedback on it? Come on now. It's a perfect illustration of EXACTLY what Gwiez said.

The artwork, music and the basics for the shipyard were done long before garrisons started to sour with players.

Holy shit SirCowdog: I can imagine the fucking uproar if they had scrapped the shipyard. We get people tearing out their hair because some unnamed island that was barely mentioned disappears from a preliminary map.

Anyway, besides the point. Expansions are planned well in advance and major features are baked into the design months before expansions even launch. You don't have to like the shipyard or the garrisons but they were planned out, coded and artwork done for them well before Warlords ever saw the light of day.

[SirCowdog]

If you've ever seen him in person, he cares. He cares alot. Even when I disagree with him, even when he is standoffish or stubborn about something. He cares. I cannot dislike him for that.

I will say, that if I ever got the chance to just sit down and have an off-the-records discussion with the leaders of the WoW dev team, I'd REALLY like to see if they could convince me that they honestly believed they were taking the game in the right direction. I mean the kind of no-bullshit, honest, come to god discussion without any beating around the bush or evasion.

That would be a hell of a thing.