Celestalon Moves to Hearthstone Team

[Tabrotar]

You can't call it an opinion using your opinion as proof. Its a fact that this game was not created for a pvp experience. Just because something was popular doesn't mean it was designed from creation to do something. sorry but you are wrong,

So we can just ignore you because you also just have a opinion (one which is not shared by that much other people), which also seems to forget that with the starting of the class pruning the game went downhill for many many players and unhappy players don´t play the game.

So Sherlock if you´re so versed in game design what is better please tell: happy customers or happy developers (here´s a little hint it´s the ones who pay the salary of the other group)

[blehmeh]

Its a fact that this game was not created for a pvp experience.

Ok, prove it. With, you know, facts.

So far you haven't shown me you even understand the difference between fact and opinion.

[Deleted]

THANKS GOD !! I hope classes will be back to a good gameplay like it was at MoP, fucking hope so !

[Malico]

I never heard of him so I dont know about him! Unknown for me!

[Nurasu]

More a case they need a scapegoat to take their vitriol out on, and Celestation got chosen to be that scapegoat.. Like how Ghostcrawler became the scapegoat for the woes of the game way back when..

Will be interesting to see who replaces Celestation and how long it will take for the community to start blaming them for the woes of the game..

This is such absolute bullshit. He was a shitty developer with even shittier communication skills. Sigma is just fine, no need to call out people who aren't garbage. No need to defend people who are just because they work for Blizzard either.

[Riistov]

Keep up the brownnosing on failed WoW devs. Celestalon will never be missed on WoW.

Pretty were generally pretty bummed when Tom Chilton and Chris Metzen left. I always thought GC was solid as well (at least based on his interactions with the community).

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This is such absolute bullshit. He was a shitty developer with even shittier communication skills. Sigma is just fine, no need to call out people who aren't garbage. No need to defend people who are just because they work for Blizzard either.

Sigma has been pretty active on the forums in Legion. Always seems to explain changes and interact with the community. I'd be cool with that choice.

[Ishayu]

Ok, prove it. With, you know, facts.

So far you haven't shown me you even understand the difference between fact and opinion.

You can't call it an opinion using your opinion as proof. Its a fact that this game was not created for a pvp experience. Just because something was popular doesn't mean it was designed from creation to do something. sorry but you are wrong,

It's funny because you're both wrong.

WoW's classes weren't originally designed around either of what we today call PvP or PvE. WoW's classes were designed with inspiration drawn from Warcraft 3 units and heroes, and they were intended to immerse you in the life of that particular unit/hero in the context of the Warcraft universe. World of Warcraft was fundamentally about exploring the world of the Warcraft games from a new perspective. There was even more material for this than we know of, given that Warcraft 3 was originally supposed to be an RPG more than an RTS, but this was changed mid development.

It wasn't until around 2002 that the Everquest crowd came into the WoW dev team and, with their understanding of what Everquest had done right and what it had done wrong, created the PvE focused open world game that we know and love. However, before this, most of the classes had been settled, their core fantasy and toolkits decided, the races were decided, most of the capitals created (they were overhauled later though), and the decision of having 2 factions also came before this time. All of these things make WoW a strong PvP game.

Since Warcraft 3 was a competitive game, and the classes were designed with inspiration from it during a time before the open world PvE game was settled on, WoW's classes turned out to be rather fun to PvP with. Furthermore, since the overall game had little direction then, the overall class design reflected "what would a character of this type do in their every day grind in the world of warcraft". The game was also originally supposed to have all 4 continents at launch, but much, much fewer quests - somewhere in the hundreds - like 1-2 quests per zone, literally. The level cap was supposed to be 70 as well. Northrend never got far, but Outland was 1 zone for 60-70 players, and same applies to the Dragon Isles, which still aren't in the game today. The core of the game was to be faction conflict and player interaction in a huge open world.

However, when the EQ guys took over, they refocused the game to be more like Everquest and started developing raids. Onyxia's Lair was added a few days before the game shipped, and Molten Core was developed in one week last minute. Thus the game was made PvE focused, but developed on a strong PvP foundation. Blizzard decided to offer 2 realm types, recognising that some people wanted the open world PvP experience originally planned, whereas the Everquest crowd wouldn't like it. In 2005, Blizzard added the honor system, and then BG's, and the PvP part of the game started to shine.

The origin story of WoW is complex, but suffice to say was neither a PvE game nor a PvP game. It was an open world RPG game first with end-game PvE and PvP tacked on.

Source: I know 3 vanilla devs, and they've talked about this publicly many times anyway if you want to hear. Check for example the BlizzCon 2005 panels or the 2003 developer conferences.

[zemerax]

Good riddance, ever since the comments he made towards the shadow community i've been waiting for this day.

[Deleted]

finally.
the bioat , biggest idiot of all time, gets finally away from the game i love.
now we will all have peace and well tuned classes.
thanks blizzard!

[blehmeh]

It's funny because you're both wrong.

While I certainly appreciate the background, I'm not really sure what the point is of this post. I mean, games develop. Diablo was originally going to be turn based, but would I ever say that that's what the games INTENTION was therefore real time is bad? No, because again, games develop. Diablo became Diablo because of the development process and going through more then one persons hands. It's inevitable when you have so many people working on one single thing.

The game was released with two opposing factions, with both PvP servers and PvE servers. The released product is the intended product, its when the devs say "this is what we made" and put their final stamp on it. That's a pretty strong intention if you ask me. The case is made right away for validation of both PvE and PvP, and what I see far too often on the forums are PvE'ers trying to say that PvP needs to go away forever. You simply can't have half your subscribers doing a thing, and then completely dismiss it as a "mini game", when for those people it's the entire reason they play the game at all. It's flat out ignorance, not to mention it only hurts PvE at the same time. Push out half the subscribers, and now you have half the budget.

Look at all the WoW videos from Vanilla, they're all world PvP videos. It what garnered a lot of attention to the game in the first place. I'd argue this entire time Blizzard has failed to capitalize on this concept from the very beginning, and the move towards arena-only based PvP system is what has been eroding the strengths of the PvP game. I mean, I tried to watch the WoW arena finals at Blizzcon, I think there were like 12 people watching. No one cares about arena. But this is an entirely different argument all together.

My point is, almost nothing in life came from its very first original design, it comes from iteration and evolution. Then after that it falls on those designers to either take advantage of that, or miss out. PvP was extremely popular through to the end of MoP, then Blizz failed to capitalize on those players for WoD and on, so they left in mass.

[shoegazing]

While I certainly appreciate the background, I'm not really sure what the point is of this post. I mean, games develop. Diablo was originally going to be turn based, but would I ever say that that's what the games INTENTION was therefore real time is bad? No, because again, games develop. Diablo became Diablo because of the development process and going through more then one persons hands. It's inevitable when you have so many people working on one single thing.

The game was released with two opposing factions, with both PvP servers and PvE servers. The released product is the intended product, its when the devs say "this is what we made" and put their final stamp on it. That's a pretty strong intention if you ask me. The case is made right away for validation of both PvE and PvP, and what I see far too often on the forums are PvE'ers trying to say that PvP needs to go away forever. You simply can't have half your subscribers doing a thing, and then completely dismiss it as a "mini game", when for those people it's the entire reason they play the game at all. It's flat out ignorance, not to mention it only hurts PvE at the same time. Push out half the subscribers, and now you have half the budget.

Look at all the WoW videos from Vanilla, they're all world PvP videos. It what garnered a lot of attention to the game in the first place. I'd argue this entire time Blizzard has failed to capitalize on this concept from the very beginning, and the move towards arena-only based PvP system is what has been eroding the strengths of the PvP game. I mean, I tried to watch the WoW arena finals at Blizzcon, I think there were like 12 people watching. No one cares about arena. But this is an entirely different argument all together.

My point is, almost nothing in life came from its very first original design, it comes from iteration and evolution. Then after that it falls on those designers to either take advantage of that, or miss out. PvP was extremely popular through to the end of MoP, then Blizz failed to capitalize on those players for WoD and on, so they left in mass.

The reason arena is so unpopular currently is twofold: 1. the classes haven't been fun to play since MoP (ability pruning), and 2. the rewards suck.

The people who are really into PvP all quit because of 1, and the masses that just did their 10 games per week for gear stopped participating because of 2.

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Celebration time!

Let the unpruning begin

I hope so my friend!!

[blehmeh]

The reason arena is so unpopular currently is twofold: 1. the classes haven't been fun to play since MoP (ability pruning), and 2. the rewards suck.

The people who are really into PvP all quit because of 1, and the masses that just did their 10 games per week for gear stopped participating because of 2.

I personally believe they pruned the classes because it was their attempt to contain the arena game and make it more "esports friendly". I mean, with Legion we saw the rollouts of even more pruning and PvP talents and templates.

I also believe most people only did arena because of the rewards, and if the rewards weren't there they'd choose to play something else. (Though obviously I understand there are people who are hardcore arena junkies, the real question is just how many exactly?)

Btw, I agree, the classes are super boring and entirely why I no longer PvP.

[shoegazing]

I personally believe they pruned the classes because it was their attempt to contain the arena game and make it more "esports friendly". I mean, with Legion we saw the rollouts of even more pruning and PvP talents and templates.

I also believe most people only did arena because of the rewards, and if the rewards weren't there they'd choose to play something else. (Though obviously I understand there are people who are hardcore arena junkies, the real question is just how many exactly?)

Btw, I agree, the classes are super boring and entirely why I no longer PvP.

Think through this carefully, because there's a contradiction in your views:

If most people are only doing arena for the rewards, then it makes no sense at all to dumb the classes down for the arena players.

In fact the entire arena community has been very vocal and outspoken against the pruning. From top players like Cdew, multi-glads like Tosan, and average joes and janes like me. We are all united against the pruning. In fact the Celestalon Tablet meme even originated on a thread on the US arena forums.

During the beta there was a megathread on the beta PvP forums about how the ability pruning was absolutely ruining PvP gameplay. Watcher himself came down and made some stupid comments which proved he hadn't paid any attention to PvP since he was a duelist shaman in Burning Crusade.

We were hardly the target audience for these dumbed down classes... we absolutely hate them and can't stand them.

The classes weren't dumbed down for the sake of hardcore WoW players who have played for over a decade. They were pruned and dumbed down to try to keep a higher proportion of first-time subscribers to stick with the game instead of giving up because they don't want to put in the effort required to learn how to be raid viable.

It's all PvE driven. The original explanations for the first round of pruning (WoD) was entirely PvE driven. "Make the game more accessible for new players". "Make classes easier so we can focus on developing more challenging encounter mechanics" (what are the implications of that for PvP where the classes themselves are the encounters?)

One of them even told me on Twitter "we felt like we had to prune Remove Curse from Mages because a new player could get yelled at in a dungeon for not pressing it, and that could feel bad for that person".

[blehmeh]

Think through this carefully, because there's a contradiction in your views:

If most people are only doing arena for the rewards, then it makes no sense at all to dumb the classes down for the arena players.

Yes it does, because the goal was to bring in more players overall. That's usually the logic behind dumbing games down in the first place, to make it more accessible. When I say they tried to make the game more "esports friendly" I mean it through their false idea of "esports friendly", which really is just dumbed down for mass consumption. When dev's talk about esports, rarely do they talk about genuine game design that compliments it, it's usually more about how to get people to watch, and thats all that matters to them.

Eyeballs > all.

In fact the entire arena community has been very vocal and outspoken against the pruning. From top players like Cdew, multi-glads like Tosan, and average joes and janes like me.

We were hardly the target audience for these dumbed down classes... we absolutely hate them and can't stand them.

The classes weren't dumbed down for the sake of hardcore WoW players who have played for over a decade. They were pruned and dumbed down to try to keep a higher proportion of first-time subscribers to stick with the game instead of giving up because they don't want to put in the effort required to learn how to be raid viable.

It's all PvE driven. The original explanations for the first round of pruning (WoD) was entirely PvE driven. "Make the game more accessible for new players". "Make classes easier so we can focus on developing more challenging encounter mechanics" (what are the implications of that for PvP where the classes themselves are the encounters?)

One of them even told me on Twitter "we felt like we had to prune Remove Curse from Mages because a new player could get yelled at in a dungeon for not pressing it, and that could feel bad for that person".

Exactly, because the hardcore are the minority (which is true) but in their old outdated view the believed that a small sacrifice from the top would bring more interest to those on the bottom, and thus overall an increase in participation. And they seem to now be seeing that that view has cost them, because without reason to climb to the top there is no bottom (or even a purpose). The only way to know if Blizz truly learned from their mistake is what they do next. Now that Celestalon is gone, there is hope, but until I actually start seeing the depth being brought back I'm not going to assume they've learned anything just yet. Tho this is clearly the first step towards progress.

[Kpmk]

Damn he was one of the best. Not quite on a ghost crawler level though. Game won't be the same without him.

[MiiiMiii]

Game won't be the same without him. Luckily.

[Abillioncats]

You know I didn't know or care who this guy was, and I still don't. But apparently it's someone you guys seem to blame every little thing you don't like in WoW on this guy.

You...you do realize that the WoW development is made of a large group of people right? Not just one guy?

Well, have fun being retarded or whatever.

[blehmeh]

You know I didn't know or care who this guy was, and I still don't. But apparently it's someone you guys seem to blame every little thing you don't like in WoW on this guy.

You...you do realize that the WoW development is made of a large group of people right? Not just one guy?

Well, have fun being retarded or whatever.

Didn't idiots like you believe that nothing would change when Ghostcrawler left too?

Yes, these games are made by large teams, but its not a democracy, there are leads who are in charge of the overall direction.

Change leaders, change direction.

So, have fun calling people who understand this retarded or whatever.

[Dizzzzzzzzz]

GOOD RIDDANCE

Almost everything this guy has said toward the WoW community has been completely fucking stupid, but my all time favorite has to be https://twitter.com/Celestalon/statu...03778441469952 this tweet.

Feel bad for the hearthstone community though, glad I don't play.

[Florida Man]

I am so happy to hear this. Not because of any changes to the game made under his management, but because he was an asshole on the forums. Especially during the last two betas.

As someone who has worked in customer service for decades, I would have fired him a long time ago. I hope he does better in Hearthstone.