1. #1
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    Conflict within the development team?

    During the developer Q&A with Ion Hazzikostas, lead encounter designer (raid and dungeon encounters), a few weeks ago, it became pretty clear he admitted to the many faults of WoD in terms of outdoor content and whatnot. He didn't even consider 6.1 a major patch.
    When it came to raiding however, Ion seemed doubtless about there being no flaws with it. Although admittedly raiding is one of the few positive aspects of WoD, it is by no means flawless (think 4 difficulty burn-out, big difficulty gap between HC-Mythic etc.)

    Then we enter Cory Stockton, lead content designer, who is responsible for garrisons. Unlike Ion he is adamant that 6.1 was a major patch, shipyards are a refreshing addition and garrisons overall worked out fine.

    Is this an indication of possible conflict surrounding the dev team for WoW? The no-flying issue made it pretty clear that the current team lacks a combined view that lays out a path for the direction of the game.
    Ion being the encounter designer seems to have little problems with criticising the world content, whereas Cory (obviously) will defend it to his dying breath (?)

    Even if this were not the case, how bad can your PR be when one lead designer completely contradicts the opinion/words of another.

    Your thoughts on this?

  2. #2
    I am Murloc! Conscious's Avatar
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    I believe that Watcher's interview was done to help hold onto subscribers for the Q2 report -- a sort of damage control. Act humble, be opened ended, etc. Probably explains why he looked / felt / came off as uncomfortable and irritated.

    Mumper's interview however was a corporate shilling at it's finest. What you see there is the laugh in your face, who cares attitude. They got whatever they wanted out of Watcher's interview, and they know Q3 is going to be an absolute disaster, but they don't care as the expansion is largely over. He could've come out and told us all to go fuck ourselves, but he knows the preorders and subscriber spike is coming in November for the next expansion so he could care less.

  3. #3
    The Unstoppable Force Jessicka's Avatar
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    That such arguments led to such incredible delays with a final decision on flying says it all. The number of u-turns on obviously bad decisions too don't help either. *Someone* is making these bad calls, and a chunk of the team realise this, but aren't able to change anything until it all goes wrong on live and they can say "I told you so". The divisions are obvious.

  4. #4
    Seems to me the atmosphere changed greatly after several on the team left in 2013. That could either be a cause of the division or a result of the division. It's pretty clear there is conflict. It's almost as if there are too many cooks in the kitchen.

  5. #5
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    Yeah, Rob Pardo came back for WoD and left the company some months into its development. Same for Ghostcrawler.

    I would agree with you on the dev Q&A being a damage control Conscious, but even post-patch Ion had the 'decency' to 'apologise' for the 6.2 content because it was 'too late' for feedback.

  6. #6
    Spam Assassin! MoanaLisa's Avatar
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    It's a very large team. People are going to have different opinions.

    The expansion is not going well. People will have different ideas about why that is.

    Their PR is abysmal. The rest of what I wrote is perfectly normal. What's not normal is the lack of a clearly defined leader.

    Hazzikostas is pretty clearly, given the evidence of his interviews, one of the smartest guys there. I'm not sure that I can say the same for Stockton. The latest interview was unimpressive.
    Last edited by MoanaLisa; 2015-07-03 at 04:31 PM.
    "...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."

  7. #7
    I think its more a case of having some leads that dont deserve to be in the position. -And i dont mean fanboy rage terms but i mean they have often gone "i dont know how to solve X" over the last few years. Any other studio would take that person off lead development. But Blizzard suffers from "good old boys" syndrome where people that joined a company early stay in lead positions even after they have run dry in the creativity department. Imagine working with someone to craft something and you ask them "how do solve this problem?" and they go "fuck i dunno, cut it?" for every other problem? that must be an extremely frustrating place to work.

  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by Conscious View Post
    I believe that Watcher's interview was done to help hold onto subscribers for the Q2 report -- a sort of damage control. Act humble, be opened ended, etc. Probably explains why he looked / felt / came off as uncomfortable and irritated.

    Mumper's interview however was a corporate shilling at it's finest. What you see there is the laugh in your face, who cares attitude. They got whatever they wanted out of Watcher's interview, and they know Q3 is going to be an absolute disaster, but they don't care as the expansion is largely over. He could've come out and told us all to go fuck ourselves, but he knows the preorders and subscriber spike is coming in November for the next expansion so he could care less.
    I agree, all but the spike. I think they have burnt a lot of good will and good faith this expac cycle, and I feel the end result ma be telling. There won't be another proud announcement of '10 million subs!" again.. imo
    "These so called speed humps are a joke. If anything, they slow you down. "

  9. #9
    I don't see any contradiction. As Cory was a big part of garrison development, of course he's going to be a little defensive about it, but for the most part he definitely seemed to realise it fell well short of expectations. But you're not going to shit all over your own work in interviews. I think Ion is a little more blunt and honest about his feelings, but he was not harsh on garrisons either, he simply said they fell a bit short of expectations and didn't achieve what they'd hoped, but that the core idea was good,

    As for the raids, I think they've been some of the best in WoW so far, so I think Ion is right in being proud of those. Not perfect, certainly, but then nothing is.

    I do think Ion's interview was better though, as I think he dealt with some of the more hard hitting questions a little more honestly, whereas Cory perhaps was a little more reserved, while certainly acknowledging there were failures.

    I don't think it's reflective of some 'conflict within the development team' either way. At least in the case of flying, they were pretty up front about the fact they were going to see how things played out before making a decision.

  10. #10
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    Quote Originally Posted by MoanaLisa View Post
    It's a very large team. People are going to have different opinions.
    Ofcourse, but for some reason the only thing that the dev team can clearly display is the fact that they have different opinions.

    You'd expect any developer to give the customer/player the decency of believing that their combined view is one and the same, that the game they're creating is in good hands that are intertwined, so to speak.

  11. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by MoanaLisa View Post
    It's a very large team. People are going to have different opinions.
    Yes, and it's healthy to have different opinions because you get to see almost every side of an issue. But you do that internally, you don't air those differences publicly. And that's what Blizzard has done, it's completely removed my trust in them. I won't trust anything they say about the next expansion at Blizzcon, it's clear that it's mostly just pie-in-the-sky ideas that they don't know how they'll pull off.

  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by Beste Kerel View Post
    Yeah, Rob Pardo came back for WoD and left the company some months into its development.
    That was a bit weird. Before WoD was even announced he said that he's going to work on the next expansion, a couple of months later he introduces his new game Hearthstone, where he was Executive Producer till he left.

  13. #13
    I am Murloc! Kevyne-Shandris's Avatar
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    It's the office politics any company has. Each section will protect it's own interests (and jobs). Blizzard is no different with it.

    But personally I rather they split the teams into 4 groups for the 4 main aspects of interests players have now in the game...

    1. Raiding.
    2. PvP.
    3. Dungeoneering/Questing/Role-playing (core Pve content)
    4. Mini/Multi-gaming.

    With each team allowed to get at least 1 item out per patch.

    That can satisfy the non-extremists as their needs can be met (something to look forward to that means something to them).
    From the #1 Cata review on Amazon.com: "Blizzard's greatest misstep was blaming players instead of admitting their mistakes.
    They've convinced half of the population that the other half are unskilled whiners, causing a permanent rift in the community."


  14. #14
    Spam Assassin! MoanaLisa's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Beste Kerel View Post
    Ofcourse, but for some reason the only thing that the dev team can clearly display is the fact that they have different opinions.

    You'd expect any developer to give the customer/player the decency of believing that their combined view is one and the same, that the game they're creating is in good hands that are intertwined, so to speak.
    Couple of things:

    1. When GC left it was really clear that whatever space he left open for developer communication to players was going to need to be filled. They struggled with this for months and months. Hilariously in some cases. There was no evidence at all that there was a combined view at all. The view I got was that the lead developers had all been put into separate silos, told to go forth and do a good job and that somehow all of this would add up to more than the sum of its parts. Well, no. It hasn't. Unsurprisingly it's led to an expansion with little in the way of flow between its separate components.

    2. At this very late date it's clear that those silos still exist and that lead developers don't seem to be paying any attention to one another's interviews.

    What needs to happen is to bring in or appoint (better to bring someone in from outside) someone to be a general director for developer communications. This is supposed to be one of the jobs of the CM team but there doesn't seem to be much happening on that front. CM's apparently bring them stuff and the developers either remain silent, occasionally use their private twitter feeds to comment (which I don't believe they are supposed to do), channel brief answers back through @warcraftdevs (which they are suposed to do but many things do not lend themselves to short answers), or let it all spill out when they're sent out to do an interview.

    Whatever the case it's clear that on larger, more meta issues with the game they're still at the point where they either need one person to talk or have someone prep these guys with whatever the current answers are.

    Really, any sense they had made any progress at all in unifying their various points of reference into a single whole was damaged greatly by some of Stockton's answers. They're basically in much the same place they were pre-expansion on this.
    "...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."

  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by MoanaLisa View Post
    Hazzikostas is pretty clearly, given the evidence of his interviews, one of the smartest guys there. I'm not sure that I can say the same for Stockton. The latest interview was unimpressive.
    Honestly, to me it is like the interview 2 weeks ago was specifically targeted and worded to allay concerns and try to quell fears prior to the end of the quarter, and Ion learned enough from that interview to conduct himself more openly in future interviews.

    Cory, however, seems to have been on vacation for the last month and just got back, read some cliff notes of dev direction from a month or 2 ago and dove into an interview. He totally undermined all the good work Ion had tried to do, even though I wasn't totally inspired by his latest interview either.
    "These so called speed humps are a joke. If anything, they slow you down. "

  16. #16
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    Well, think about this:

    It's not Watchers work which mainly get criticized by watcher. It's mainly Stocktons work. He is the guy that works on the world content.

    While i would like to ask the question how the development budget is allocated.

    Something like 80% raids, 20% anything else? No idea.

    Still i think watcher consumes the largest budget, and Stockton has less resources available than ever before.

    It's up to the game directors to fix that problem. And its up to Watcher not to demand to put most of the expac effort into his raids.
    Last edited by mmoc903ad35b4b; 2015-07-03 at 05:07 PM.

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Kevyne-Shandris View Post
    It's the office politics any company has. Each section will protect it's own interests (and jobs). Blizzard is no different with it.

    But personally I rather they split the teams into 4 groups for the 4 main aspects of interests players have now in the game...

    1. Raiding.
    2. PvP.
    3. Dungeoneering/Questing/Role-playing (core Pve content)
    4. Mini/Multi-gaming.

    With each team allowed to get at least 1 item out per patch.

    That can satisfy the non-extremists as their needs can be met (something to look forward to that means something to them).
    I think that'll be kinda hard to do considering they already have small teams working on different types of content.
    The dungeon team for example (consisting of about a dozen artists) gets involved whenever they need to build dungeon/raid environments, cities, large 3d models and buildings (Garrisons). So they'll often work on 3 of those areas you mentioned.
    How exactly do you want to split this team and not risk having them not being able to work in a proper environment.

    Same applies to quest designers, level designers, encounter designers, etc. Currently whenever some new feature or content gets produced they look what kind of teams have to get involved, I'd fear with your approach each team would be limited as to what and how much they're able to produce.

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