The Irony of Jay Wilson Working on WoW

[High Marshal Sigismund]

Jay Wilson has been relentlessly bashed for turning D3 into WoW and bringing WoW features into Diablo 3, and now the irony is that he's working on WoW. The fact is however, that WoW is, for the most part, a superbly well-designed game. The game systems are logical, sensible, effective at achieving the design goals, and the design goals are usually nicely aligned with fun. Therefore, there's nothing wrong with copying WoW. The alternative of copying D2's terrible game design would be far worse. WoW's game design is awesome, and presumably WoW players realize this fact, while D3 players prefer convoluted and unintuitive gimmicks and have a blind and seething hatred of anything associated with WoW. So perhaps, people will realize this now that he's credited in WoD.

Jay Wilson did almost everything right in D3. But he got 1 critical thing wrong: the RMAH. He ruined and destroyed D3 by turning the game into a pointless, pay-to-win, share market simulator, where you literally can buy the best gear. That's equivalent to being able to legitimately buy heroic raid loot with real money. So the haters are also right that Jay Wilson utterly wrecked D3 to the point that it was literally a stinking piece of utter shit not worth anyone's time or money. A further irony is that many WoW players support this and support buying gold with real money (see here, here and high support for the Guardian Cub).

So Jay Wilson's involvement in WoW is a funny thing. Take a moment to reexamine what you think of WoW and D3.

This post is fantastic. If only for the fact that it offers a clear window into the mind of an obsessed WoW fanboy.

[Raiju]

Most people don't understand that designing games isn't an exact science or matter of implementing the right systems. Games are like poetry based on popularity, art and culture and more often than not wether a game becomes popular has more to do with luck, publicity techniques, social dynamics than with the actual content and design of the game itself.

Some games can be designed utterly perfect and still not become popular in the market. Sometimes it's hit and miss, and although D3 wasn't necessarily badly designed it just didn't hit the mark when it was released.

Is that why so many people independently called it awful within hours of play, but now enjoy the new expansion? Because of some form of luck...?

[Haven]

Wait, what? D3 is excellent (sans the story) in almost every respect, especially since they got rid of auction house. Flexible skill system with variations (runes) that WoW is yet to reach with its clunky clusterfuck of specs, talents and glyphs. D3 design is much more simple yet amazingly more flexible.

[Didacticus Syntacticus]

You obviously didn't play D3 on release. The game was an absolute shambolic mess. The RMAH was a problem, but it definitely was not the biggest problem.

Yeah, the fact that they released a game that had the rubber-banding problems that D3 did was just shocking.

Presumably it was only ever tested on Blizzard's own .1msec ping LAN.

[Baine]

Are you fuckin kidding? Diablo 3 was a disaster of a game that couldn't have been designed any worse.

Well, it was not a disaster to me.

[MoanaLisa]

After thinking about this for a while I'm going to close the thread. It's no longer really about World of Warcraft and even has less to do with Warlords of Draenor. Due to the thread title it doesn't really belong in the D3 forum either. If there's anything constructive to be said about D3's launch after this long let's do it in the appropriate forum.