Can some one help me understand a development question?

[dixincide]

TL;DR: Could someone help explain what the wow dev team is being kept busy with lately?
What happens behind the scenes of video game development?
I know they are doing more than twiddling their thumbs in their office chairs but I really have no idea how the video game development process works.


Q&A answered a lot of questions but hasn't addressed what the WoW Dev team has been working on in the past. I'd like to know what has been keeping them busy

A lot of the features added in 6.1 were already complete on release and the options brought in 6.1 Twitter and the selfie cam, the developer had this to say.

• "It was a feature that a few programmers worked on. It was only a convenience added for players that already use Twitter."
• "The S.E.L.F.I.E. camera was a side project for one designer and programmer who worked on it for a few weekends."

I could be misinterpreting but it seems like those didn't take much of their resources up at all. The designer went on to say that,

• "The team had just launched the expansion and was going on holiday vacations"

I don't know any company that closes down shop after a product launches for vacations. Especially with the new increased size of the dev team. I was hoping they'd give a little more detail on this then simply being out of the office.

[hakujinbakasama]

Here's my honest ignorant opinion...

Have you ever worked somewhere? Do you know what it's like to have that boss that comes by and says "hey from now on we are going to do this" and you then proceed to put in a bunch of effort and work in that direction. Then the next week that same boss comes by and says "No no no, we're going to do this now!" That's Blizzard.

[melodramocracy]

The majority are working on stuff thats about 6 - 12 months away from PTR testing.

I don't know any company that closes down shop after a product launches for vacations. Especially with the new increased size of the dev team. I was hoping they'd give a little more detail on this then simply being out of the office.

I've worked at places where the entire place shut down 2 weeks per year, and that's when you took your vacation. Reason being that having people out at various times can cause issues with lines of production.

[rda]

[B]TL;DR: Could someone help explain what the wow dev team is being kept busy with lately?

No one knows.

I guess they straight became less capable than before - through bad management, through apathy and attrition, through the outflow of brainpower and the internal "hip" factor to other projects like HotS / Overwatch (if you are a dev, you don't want to work on WoW, which is declining, has a bad rep, and is hard to influence because it's just so big, no, you want to work on something like HotS, which might become the next big thing - because if it does, you are golden), etc.

If you read through the Q&A, you'll note that they do hear the players and they do try to do something to fix the issues, but their fixes are always very small, the easiest things they could do. If it's even slightly difficult, "no, we don't have resources". It's fine to pick the easiest thing you could do, but when almost everything you are doing is such easiest, cheapest things, when you continue to roll your eyes at something like new instances and plan to implement scaling in existing instances instead, well, this is a telltale sign that you simply lack the capability.

[ablib]

TL;DR: Could someone help explain what the wow dev team is being kept busy with lately?
What happens behind the scenes of video game development?
I know they are doing more than twiddling their thumbs in their office chairs but I really have no idea how the video game development process works.



I don't know any company that closes down shop after a product launches for vacations. Especially with the new increased size of the dev team. I was hoping they'd give a little more detail on this then simply being out of the office.

My company. The week before Christmas, and the two weeks after, good luck getting anything done. Nobody is at work. Everyone's gone by the 19th-ish of December, and doesn't come back until the 7th-ish of Jan. That's just how it is with real jobs, and not some place like Wal-Mart or McDonalds.

This is what I think happened, which I believe to be true, mainly in part because I'm never wrong:
Halfway through the WoD development cycle, big names at Activision Blizzard asks what we're doing about the WoW sub problem. Someone at Blizzard says subs are highest when people come back for an expansion. Someone high up the chain says, then why can't we do that every year, like we do with Call of Duty? Someone at Blizzard says, we'd like to, but manpower is a problem. Someone high up the chain asks, if there is any hope with the money sink that is known as Titan? Someone at Blizzard says no, we should pull the plug.

Plug on Titan is pulled. Those Devs move over to WoW to start on the annual expansion project. This takes time away from WoD development time, and content. WoD is now hosed (as is to be expected). Select people at Blizzard don't like this new direction of the game/company, know it's going to tank and don't want to be a part of it, so they decide to bail (Street, Pardo, Sams, etc).

[Schizoide]

I don't know any company that closes down shop after a product launches for vacations. Especially with the new increased size of the dev team. I was hoping they'd give a little more detail on this then simply being out of the office.

Every game developer does this post-launch. You work on a game for several years, crunching the last 6+ months, then when it launches you fly somewhere warm.

[Duncanîdaho]

Blizzard for being the giant they are, have the most inefficient design process. They have always used a trial and error sort of method where where entire chunks of development time(like months, hundreds of man hours) just gets tossed out the window to go into a new direction. It is thought of last minute, only because they had developed what they had as far as they did and got to see its flaws, but they know it will be a huge success if they get it in. That's why blizzard games are notorious for having huge development cycles (remember WC3 getting pushed back so much) but are always so polished and successful.

The problem is this process wastes a lot of resources an more importantly, time. This sucks for patching because those HAVE to be done within a certain time frame. They can't just push back a patch release date endlessly to polish it more and add features they though of last minute or go in a new direction. As for the WoD bump, I think it's because they are just so far stretched right now. They have WoW/D3/Sc2 patches, the next SC2 expansion, the next WoW expansion, next Diablo 3 expansion, Hearthstone, Heroes, Overwatch all having development done at the exact same time. Combine that with said process I mentioned above and you can understand why they are beginning to slow down enough that you can see it in WoW. They are for sure having some internal manpower issues.

[MrExcelion]

I think they've been working on 7.0 so we'll only have a 4-5 month beta this time. They could have certainly put more resources into 6.1 but that's just my guess

[Tharkkun]

Sales disappears after the end of quarter. Development goes awol a couple weeks after product release. They stick around to be sure any game breaking issues haven't popped up and then relax for a week or two.

That doesn't mean development shuts down. There's many people whose effort occurred before the crunch like artists for example who may continue working but the core team isn't putting in 80 hour weeks until the next patch nears.

[Cerus]

The next expansion for one. They've always started work on the next one with the previous launches.

[dixincide]

Some of these responses make it a little more clear, I'd think that post launch of any product a company would keep a team behind to read consumer reviews and assist with any major oversights that could arise from going public. I only know the medical industry though and it's a pretty bizzar beast compared to others. So maybe shutting down shop for a 4 months is normal in the gaming world.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

One of the biggest "background projects" the Team has is working on the next expansion, which begins life usually even before the current one has shipped.

[Schizoide]

It wasn't 4 months, and they kept a crew around for maintenance and emergency hotfixes.