Was Ghostcrawler fired/forced out?

[Statix]

Now he can for sure be blamed for the death of WoW by creating the game that kills it!

World of Warcraft will be long dead by the time Ghostcrawler releases his new game. I kinda feel sorry for the guy/gal that will replace him at Blizzard.

Also, he said he was a Holy Priest. Does that mean that, for six years, no one has ever managed to find out what class he plays? Doesn't he raid and speak on vent? Don't people recognize his voice?

[GoldNSilence]

Well as much as I'd like to believe he was fired, he probably quit to go work on Wildstar or something or hell even just retire.

[Aquamonkey]

World of Warcraft will be long dead by the time Ghostcrawler releases his new game. I kinda feel sorry for the guy/gal that will replace him at Blizzard.

Also, he said he was a Holy Priest. Does that mean that, for six years, no one has ever managed to find out what class he plays? Doesn't he raid and speak on vent? Don't people recognize his voice?

He said that he raids and that they know who he is. He just doesn't let that affect his job.

Took a look at your twitter for the first time ever. I do not envy you. People are rough. Curious, do you raid on a raid team?
Yes. I'm on a heroic 25 team. I have been raiding just about since I dinged 60. (Source)
Do your guildies know who you are? How do you respond to their criticism?
Many know. I let them bitch away. It's not fair not to be able to just because I joined them. (Source)
What class do you play? Or would answering that open up a can of worms don't want to deal with? Whats been your favorite raid?
It would be a can of worms, but in reality, like many players I play many classes. Ulduar was probably my favorite raid. (Source)
I would bet he plays a lock.Fire mages nerfed 60% afflic/destro buffed.
Do you guys realize I would actually get fired if I just kept buffing my characters all the time? (Source)

[Amerissis]

Do you think that perhaps GC was fired or forced to 'resign'?

Where is the option 'we have no f*cking clue and will never know'?

[Heldamon]

From what I understand he find another job that pays more....no?

[Deleted]

It's very easy to find out if he left on its own. You just have to wait.

Well, if you are in a lead position, in charge of a bunch of people, upstairs eventually bullies you into a long contract.
Executive Contracts are filled with weird constructs like non competes, NDA's, secret NDA's (your not allowed to talk about the contracts content) strange "delivery formulas" and of course this contract runs for a certain time, depending on the value of your work. Companies need to plan their ressources,
and people are resources.
I think, if he wanted to quit, he had to give at least 6 months notice. This may be even longer, but 6 month is fair for both parties.
You see that all over the industry, people announce to leave and then take at least 3 months to get their things in order.
And you see people that leave at the end of the week. Those got fired.

Basically the company that employes you has a saying in how and when you leave, and if you're that good, they want to keep you for a while.

Now in between is a HUGE grey area, because you can just replace that contract with another.
And i assume this is what happend to ghost crawler. He got a good offer, talked to upstairs and they aggreed to cut his contract short.

The reason could be that his style of balancing and systems design goes totally against the current industry trend and Moba's with their different mechanics paradign eating at blizzards cake.

[jbombard]

Not true. The radical changes started at the very end of TBC when they introduced T6 level gear for heroic badges and scrapped attunements to BT/MH. In WotLK they went even further by allowing 10 man easymodes to raids, resetting gear every patch and putting in LFD that trivialized 5 man group play.

The radical change was to go from a system that was linear and where you took the same path but at different pace depending on your play time and skill level, to a system where everyone is pushed to do the same content at the same time. It killed the diversity from the game and made it dull and unexciting for many since nothing you do on your character matters anymore since the next patch always resets everything.

While those are significant changes, I was talking about core gameplay I was talking more about learning from the past and improving things like quest flow and pacing, adding new quest mechanics, how they tell a story(phasing) etc..., as opposed to adding entirely new modes of play like scenarios. It is hard to include raiding as core gameplay in the vanilla and bc era because such a tiny percent of the population participated in those activities. Even running dungeons wasn't very mainstream until Wrath.

[LeperHerring]

There is absolutely zero chance he was forced out. Clearly there are significant voters on the poll who haven't worked in any tech company.

He is very different from your average tech worker. He was a public face of a major product of a publicly traded company. He's going to get treated very, very differently than you would in a tech job. People in such positions don't get fired because it's bad PR. They get told they won't have a future in the company and then get paid a nice bonus to keep their mouth shut and go "focus on their family" or an "exciting new opportunity".

[Amerissis]

Now in between is a HUGE grey area, because you can just replace that contract with another.
And i assume this is what happend to ghost crawler. He got a good offer, talked to upstairs and they aggreed to cut his contract short.

Or he already quit 6 months ago and Blizzard decided not to tell us until it was his last day...

[jbombard]

He is very different from your average tech worker. He was a public face of a major product of a publicly traded company. He's going to get treated very, very differently than you would in a tech job. People in such positions don't get fired because it's bad PR. They get told they won't have a future in the company and then get paid a nice bonus to keep their mouth shut and go "focus on their family" or an "exciting new opportunity".

You have to consider that unlike many large public facing corporations, they have a very different culture resembling an extended family. If you aren't going to fire someone like FTL Jay Wilson(I mean seriously if you won't fire someone over that childish nonsense that hurt their corporate image...), it is hard to imagine them firing GC.

[Mosotti]

Not a chance. There are probably multiple factors, one of them might be that he got tired of that crap. That's not an easy position to stay in for years and years, and trying to please millions of customer, many of which are completely insane and will freak out and fuck you in the ass if you change one digit somewhere. Wherever he goes, he won't have to deal with the amount of rabid douchebags he had to deal in WoW.

[Extremity]

Has anybody considered that he just moved over to Titan and is still with Blizzard, but when he eventually starts working with the community on that will want a fresh start with a fresh, new handle/avatar? Completely leaving Blizzard after this long seems strange. I doubt they couldn't match another company in terms of compensation in order to keep him. I honestly think he's been moved to another project; moving to Titan WOULD be an "opportunity he couldn't pass up" and it just makes much more sense, to be honest. I really think that's what happened. Calling it.

Edit: If this were the case he obviously would not be able to say he was leaving WoW to work on another Blizzard project, as we'd all guess that it was Titan and the person in his position there would immediately be assumed to be him. He would have to say he was leaving Blizzard in order for his new avatar to pass as actually being new in the Titan community when it comes to that.

[Deleted]

You have to consider that unlike many large public facing corporations, they have a very different culture resembling an extended family. If you aren't going to fire someone like FTL Jay Wilson(I mean seriously if you won't fire someone over that childish nonsense that hurt their corporate image...), it is hard to imagine them firing GC.

Pretty much this.

Also Gred announced he got a different offer and a person like him, who worked on blizzard and successfully designed WoW will get every job he wants, so I'm pretty sure he just got an extremly good offer.

One word to sub numbers:

It is a fact that subs declined after mid/end WOTLK (which was when GC took over) however sub numbers are complex and the game got older and older so it is simply not possible to blaim one person.
In theory it is even possible that he was the reason subs didn't go down even more which is pretty natural considering how old WoW is now.

My personal opinion here is: I'm glad that he is gone, not because he did a bad job but because sometimes a fresh wind is needed and I think WoW needs that fresh wind more than ever now.

[Inci]

Pretty sure he left on his own.

[LeperHerring]

Has anybody considered that he just moved over to Titan and is still with Blizzard, but when he eventually starts working with the community on that will want a fresh start with a fresh, new handle/avatar?

No, Titan was de-staffed and pushed back indefinitely, there's currently no (significant) team working on it. Also, as a public company they can't lie about something like this since it can theoretically have an impact on the share price.

[Deleted]

i can't even begin to address this ignorance

He joined in 2008, i.e WOTLK

WoW was growing much faster pre wotlk, GC joined and sub still went up but slower, it eventually reach its peak and then started to decline in 2009/10

So in summary:

WoW was growing very fast

GC Joined

WoW started growing more slowly

Decline a year and a bit after he joined

Raipidly decrease since.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

You realize that it was under GC that WoW hit its all time high in terms of subs, right?

Wrong, Greg Street joined when WotLK was "complete", Greg was responsible for cata and onwards, his work will still be in WoD.
He didn't do a "bad" job but it took him 5 years to get class balance in order and then you look at PvE atm and it's broken warlocks just tearing numbers apart...

[Deleted]

well the sub numbers have been getting incredibly low under his reign

Yes he was the one guy that decided all the changes and reasons people stopped. Dude no offence here and i might take my first warning here but can you just fuck off?

[redwitchy]

I don't think he was forced out at all, but I do have an idea who will take his job :P




Red Shirt Guy!!

[Deleted]

He didn't get fired, nor was he about to get fired. WoW has become a lot better since he joined.

Stating that he dropped the subs is a pretty dumb accusation by some of you.

Devs make decisions as a group, and not as a person. So that basically means that say person a's graphical design wasn't good enough, person b's game design wasn't solid enough, person c's idea's weren't executed well enough... while people should say well the graphical designers really sucked, or the game designers sucked, as a whole, and not as an individual.

Otherwise you can literally keep going like this, because everyone quits for a different reason - therefor resulting in a lot of people at blizzard being blamed for sub drops. People like to blame GC because he's the only blizzard member that has been so vocal in the past, so it's easy to jump on the bandwagon.