The "Blizzard A team and B team" discussion

[vertigo12]

Yeah, like I"m saying, the art and general story for the next expansion probably starts getting worked on really early (I wouldn't be surprised if they have a team working on it now) but systems work with other features I doubt is getting much thought already.

Those who build the foundation for the entire vibe and feel of the entire expac still get in touch with each respective micro-groups assigned on specific tasks and have supervision. There is a probably daily meeting as to turn in report of daily tasks, a mid week for team leaders across department and a weekly for the head of each team with a general meeting with higher ups. Specially now they have gated their features and are closely monitoring on live performance of everything for major/minor hotfixes some of the major work might be internally under rigorous testing.

I believe they have been working on 8.1 during the release of pre-patch content and during the course of the following weeks beta testing will be conducted for 8.1 features. Take note this raid would definitely have end boss cinematics as well.

[Kuntantee]

Wouldnt a shit team ahve run the game into the ground after more then 10 years?

That's exactly what's happening, WoW is slowly dying. There is a reason why they stopped reporting subscription numbers; then again you are one of those people who would buy "it's not a proper metric" kind of insult of a reason. The death is slow, because Blizzard has one of the most loyal, addictive and frankly ignorant costumer base out there.

[Deleted]

If there is a team 1 and 2, their work isn't split by whole expansions. One day Team one might be working on garrisons, the next day team one works on highmaul and team two does finishing touches on Garrisons.

[Celarent]

Having worked for a big corporation for almost 10 years, my impression is that once a corporation is large enough, they develop a strong tendency to have positions of power (sometimes even those at the very top) occupied by people who have got there through manipulation and office politics, rather than by their own merits. Such enterprise bureaucrats (by lack of a better description) cannot realistically be purged, but just kept out of harm's way, and ONLY if the very higher ups actively police every single department. It seems that no one cares enough about that point after Metzen left.

Definitely. The irony is that qualities making someone an effective leader are too often not the qualities that earn someone a corporate promotion.

Judging by common threads in employee reviews and changes in public demeanor, corporatization of Blizzard finally took hold after 2012 or 2013. The company seems to be a less serious casualty of the Culture First!® movement: talented developers can be loud and obtuse asshats, so to staff all the new workstations corporate HR seems to have fouled up logic, and went and sought out loud and obtuse asshats. Clearly not most or all of Blizzard employees; and there are very public devs that I think are worth the admiration they get. But some others just hit you in the face with "so not a team player."

To bring this back to the OP, I don't believe in the even-odd/Team A-Team B theory. What I think instead happens is a lot of crap behavior prevents a complex set of teams from working effectively to produce game titles on the level of expectations. Their work from title to title affects players differently, and enough to raise one expansion over another. There's potentially a psychological effect in which a player reasons that two disliked expansions in a row mean he or she really shouldn't be subscribed anymore, so they rationalize that the last or current expansion was or is acceptable to justify remaining.

[vertigo12]

A 45 mins. long credits roll. See who's behind BfA production and possible culprit to blame , praise, bash or thank

[micwini]

Could be, could not be. Maybe it is their plan to only do complete new stuff every other expac. Maybe there are 2 teams. Point is that there has always been a pattern of a good expac following a bad one and the other way around, while both the good and the bad expacs keep getting worse.

[Deleted]

While it is true that many games consist of multiple dev teams, and that post launch often gets delegated to an external studio, I personally do not think that WoW's dev team is as simple as just having an A team and a B team. Many core systems carry over from one expansion to the next, which are ingrained in the design and gameplay flow of the expansions, and which is then further built upon This has been the case since Wrath.

And in addition to that, we all know WoD had a patch that was cut and a massive content gap between HFC and Legion, which is most likely due internal restructuring and the WoD post launch content team being moved to work on Legion instead.

Chances are that Blizzard works more in a fragmented fashion, having each team responsible for their corner of the game, and as soon as their work is done, they are shifted to the next expansion. Good example of this would be the Open World team, once they are done with the zones, quests, etc, majority of them are moved to the next project. That's how it works in other AAA companies.

There is no such thing as a A and B team in development studios. Sometimes management just fumbles up, or a game designer is really pushing hard for a piece of content that ultimately does not work in practice. These expansions are shat out on a 2-3 year production cycle, and most of it is kept internally, and thus they have no actual feedback from the actual playerbase.

[Al Gorefiend]

I'm pretty sure that Blizzard wouldn't want the working atmosphere that would arise if you split your employees into "team good" and "team bad".

Nowhere I stated one is better than the other. Regardless if you call it Team A/B. 1/2, X/Y nothing I suggested indicated one is bad and one is good.

[Silver Forte]

The problem is, and especially when it came to performance and game stability, the best expansions were Burning Crusade, Cataclysm, Draenor, and now, Battle for Azeroth. Legion had vsync issues, MoP ran poorly on the old game engine, especially when threading through cross-server play, Wrath required a lot of folks to upgrade hardware, and Vanilla was ... well, Classic! I dunno. The game felt alive once the Draenei and Blood Elves came into the fray.

I have no idea what you're talking about and I'm super sensitive about performance issues. Vsync issues? What? In Legion before fullscreen was gone, you could use windowed and force vsync on with your control panel unless you had integrated graphics, which is your problem and not the game. Some systems run better with the in-game vsync but I have never had issues with that in WoW.

[geromeR]

A billion dollar company couldn't forsee this coming? I couldn't even play this game without bugs the few times I do manage to get some free time.

[camicio]

When you put it into this perspective, it all makes sense.