Activision Blizzard Earnings Call, World Quest Assistant, Tweets, FinalBossTV #138

[chaud]

Necromancer Q&A - Live Updates

Hearthstone Breaks the All-Time Daily Active Players Metric with Journey to Un'Goro

Activision Blizzard Earnings Call
The quarterly Activision Blizzard earnings call was today:

• Activision Blizzard had 431 million Monthly Active Users in the quarter.
• Blizzard's revenues from in-game content grew more than 25% year-over-year, driven by revenues from World of Warcraft in-game content and continued strength of Overwatch customization items.
• Blizzard had record first-quarter time spent, up a double-digit percentage year-over-year.
• With a regular content and feature update cadence, World of Warcraft time spent grew year-over-year in the first quarter.
• Legion's overall performance is slightly ahead of the prior expansion.
• Hearthstone set a new all-time Daily Active Users record last month with the release of a new expansion, Journey to Un'Goro.
• Blizzard had the biggest Q1 online player community in its history with MAUsA of 41 million, up 58% year-over-year.
• Hearthstone MAUsA grew year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter, despite no content releases in the first quarter, and recently surpassed the 70 million registered player milestone life-to-date.
• In late January, Overwatch had its fourth seasonal event, Year of the Rooster, to celebrate the lunar new year. The event drove engagement records for the game.
• Blizzard launched a fifth seasonal event in April, Uprising, including a player-versus-environment game mode which drew record time spent.
• Overwatch continues to be Blizzard's fastest growing new franchise, reaching over 30 million players globally less than a year after launch.
• Overwatch is now the 8th billion-dollar franchise in Activision Blizzard's portfolio.

Addon - World Quest Assistant
World Quest Assistant is an addon that allows you to quickly find or create a group for world quests.

Blue Tweets

Dungeons and Raids
Im trying to mog run though HFC on my DH and cant get past Gorefiend to last bosses. Any way 2? Help plz
Help is on the way! In Patch 7.2.5, if there is only one target, Gorefiend will no longer cast Shadow of Death. Enj… (WarcraftDevs)

Classes
If you're going to resourcify BrM Mastery stacks, you'll need to modify it to stop stuff like this happening:
"Worst Case" meaning 'if you never dodge except at 100% dodge'? Why model/consider something so unrealistic? (Celestalon)
I just did some in-game testing. Out of 172 dodges (against 3 targets), 20 times EB reached over 100% before a dodge occurred. That's 11.6%.
Yes, but that's a far *far* cry from "Mastery between 28% and 42% is functionally useless". That's just false. (Celestalon)
Those are merely breakpoints where the value per point drops somewhat. The value per point between those is not 0%. (Celestalon)

Ghostcrawler Tweets
Ghostcrawler still occasionally talks about WoW. Remember that he no longer works for or speaks for Blizzard.

When developers/designers give answers that are less than satisfying like “the technology isn’t there yet”, was that usually the actual answer and the explanation for it would be technical jargon that would be too boring/advanced for most people to read/understand or was it a euphemism for something else like “too expensive for too little return” or “trade secrets, can’t tell you”?

In my experience, it’s usually legit. My general philosophy is that game players are pretty intelligent and they have the power of crowd sourcing any problem, so they’ll usually figure out when you’re not being completely honest.

So I will be honest that sometimes we are truthful but a little vague just because we don’t want a lot of folks with a little bit of subject matter knowledge but missing a whole lot of context chiming in about how we’re wrong. Those are kind of tedious conversations to have, and they don’t often seem to really end up with either party feeling better for having had the discussion.

This sounds harsher than I intend, but the kind of thing you see a lot is “I took a couple of classes of computer science, so I can tell you for a fact that the problem is that the developers didn’t use Java and I could fix this problem in my sleep.” You get the idea.

I see this a lot with statistics too. “Oh, but you probably forgot to exclude the level 1-30 players” or “You’re treating it as a normal distribution, but it should be binomial, or whatever.” It’s unlikely our business intelligence folks would overlook something really obvious, but if you try and engage in those conversations, it spirals out of control really quickly. It feels like you often get to the point where the only logical conclusion is “Okay, let me send you over all the data so you understand the nuance, and then I’ll walk you through how we came up with the analysis we did.” They are just long conversations and don’t often change the results. Maybe it’s a kind of victory if you get those few interested players to understand your logic, but you’re probably better off focusing your efforts on something with a better return for players overall.

So we fall back a lot on “This is our conclusion from looking at the data,” which isn’t very satisfying for some players, but I haven’t yet come up with a more fruitful way to have the conversation. (Source)

FinalBossTV #138 - Guardian Druids
This week focuses on Guardian Druids!

[Evilmoo]

Legion's overall performance is slightly ahead of the prior expansion.

= Failure.

[Segus1992]

= Failure.

Was pretty shocked to read that, and can't help but agree.

[Mendzia]

= Failure.

I wanted to type same thing.
'Slightly' better than WoD = still very bad imho.

Lanuched Heroes of the Storm 2.0, bringing players back to the game

This also does not sounds well...

...and nothing about Diablo. How surprising...

[Deleted]

Legion's overall performance is slightly ahead of the prior expansion.

Shocked. A LOT of work went into Legion. This could spell the end for WoW. I wonder if the next expansion will finally be the last 'proper' one.

[Blur4stuff]

Legion is better than WoD, but eventually people move on. WoW isn't a game I consider noob friendly. You could almost consider the design hostile to anyone that's only played popular games created in the past several years.

[taliey]

It's a wrap boys, WoW is dying! /s

[Deleted]

Shocked. A LOT of work went into Legion. This could spell the end for WoW. I wonder if the next expansion will finally be the last 'proper' one.

A lot of work went into Garrison shit too, and see how that turned out. This is actually quite good news, considering that for past ~8 years WOW subs have been in steady decline.

[Evilmoo]

Shocked. A LOT of work went into Legion. This could spell the end for WoW. I wonder if the next expansion will finally be the last 'proper' one.

Well, when devs and lead game designers do not listen to community this is bound to happen, a very sad yet necessary end to Ian's job.

[Coffeexbean]

its kind of inevitable that the game is getting that low.. there is no advertising or trying to pull people into the game. wow is not mainstream

[vilememory]

And here come the people that will scream that the only way to get WoW back to its glory days is rolling everything back to Vanilla.

[effs]

Well 7.2 isn't very enticing, so not really all that surprising. Plus m+ spamming isn't what you'd call fun.

[Coffeexbean]

And here come the people that will scream that the only way to get WoW back to its glory days is rolling everything back to Vanilla.

eh as someone who praises classic wow legion is pretty good the only thing I see lack is the social community and ditching some tools of efficiency but overall its doing a good job.

[Guyon]

Well, when devs and lead game designers do not listen to community this is bound to happen, a very sad yet necessary end to Ian's job.

Sad?
He's been the worse thing happening to WoW ever. Since thee minute he took the job the game went super sh*t.
Once Blizzard realize they have to fire him, maybe the game will be back to be decent again.

[Redroniksre]

Well, when devs and lead game designers do not listen to community this is bound to happen, a very sad yet necessary end to Ian's job.

A bit dramatic. If they listened to the community this game would be a hodgepodge of bad ideas. Have you seen the forums? They would make the worst game.

[DDM]

WoW isn't a game I consider noob friendly.

Haha, if not that, what then? You can't play your class ... doesn't matter. Go into dumbass lottery or let the others do the world quests for you by joining a group and get epics/legys shoved up your ***.

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

And here come the people that will scream that the only way to get WoW back to its glory days is rolling everything back to Vanilla.

There's no getting wow back to its glory days. Metzen retired, it's only downhill from here.

[Lightbull]

Anyone say this coming, but the fact that it's better than WoD means that the game isn't dying anymore, and it's getting better. it wasn't dying in the first place but you get what I mean

Also, this is in terms of earnings. WoD had hardly any content and a massive content drought after 6.2, so Blizzard would have spent less money. I'd argue Legion is doing miles better than WoD because a lot of work has gone into Legion in the last few months, meaning they spent more, and is still earning more than WoD.

[Evilmoo]

A bit dramatic. If they listened to the community this game would be a hodgepodge of bad ideas. Have you seen the forums? They would make the worst game.

I dont mean literally copy from the forum posts, that would be even more retarded than Ian's design, however starting listening to PTR feedback would be a great baseline and we would not have for example affixes that are obviously not QA tested, bugs into major encounters that are only acceptable on ptr or pre-alpha, decisions that destroy QoL and give nothing back or uninteresting timegating quests aka 7 fillers of the broken shore.

[Dismembered]

There's no getting wow back to its glory days. Metzen retired, it's only downhill from here.

Metzen wasn't the only "good" guy which left.