Are Dev's great ideas being shut down by Blizzard?

[Spiel]

I absolutely agree, but not just in Blizzard. Whenever corporate and marketers start having more power than developers, its very difficult to continue delivering a product up to the previous standard. It will go down most surely.

[Checkt]

Is he a Jaylock wannabe?

...but like the costco brand version

[Daws]

Nope it's simply that anyone with true passion for gaming has left or simply stopped caring that much at blizzard these days. As others have said this is kind of the corporate way, businesses start as small groups who want to be innovative and create something new but the more successful they become the bigger the drive is to become a safe company never taking a risk or rocking the status quo.

[Trend]

The thing is that blizzard doesn't hire people with "great" ideas. They hire people who can make them a lot money. Blizzard is not after new ideas. Their main goal is business.

You, like the OP, sound like you've probably never had a professional job, but certainly not one related to software development. This false dichotomy that the conspiracy theorists continually present in which good design is counter to money making is laughable at best.

[Soon-TM]

The shitshow that is Blizzard, is in their own making, not because Bobby Kotick stepped in and said: "Make more money, but cut the quality"

Actually, both things can be true at the same time. Or at least that's how I see it.

You, like the OP, sound like you've probably never had a professional job, but certainly not one related to software development. This false dichotomy that the conspiracy theorists continually present in which good design is counter to money making is laughable at best.

Isn't it a bit too early in the year for mega strawmen? It isn't that "good design is counter to money making", like you put it, it's just that big publishers tend to be conservative, and good design often implies a good dose of audacity, or "thinking outside the box" - which tends to be met with skepticism at management level.

[Trend]

Nope it's simply that anyone with true passion for gaming has left or simply stopped caring that much at blizzard these days. As others have said this is kind of the corporate way, businesses start as small groups who want to be innovative and create something new but the more successful they become the bigger the drive is to become a safe company never taking a risk or rocking the status quo.

I find this so odd. The things I dislike the most in BfA are big departures from what they were doing before with the one exception of the AP grind.

[Risheru]

The "Blizzard ist controlled by Activision"-topic is like the "flat earth"-topic. People will look at everything and think they found something groundbreaking, they go and post on forums and people with the same ideas come storming into their thread, echoing the same sentiment.

Blizzard was making tones of money before. Are CFOs still trying to maximise everything they can squeeze out of the customerbase? Sure, but that has been the same ever since the ingame store was introduced.
As long as they don't go on and introduce lootboxes or pay2win mechanics into the game, nothing's changed. Apart from that people don't like BfA (myself included).

Legion was great and largely created by the same people that are now running the show for BfA. They fucked it up by introducing new features they couldn't finish on time for release and now are struggling to make everything work like they wanted it to be. Everyone that saw the BfA announcement panels could see that the potential of BfA was immense, so was the time needed to introduce and properly implement three new features. Island Expeditions, Warfronts and Azerite Armour are all considered flops. The retention system that worked in Legion (mainly due to Legiondaries) is showing it's bad sides now that there is no incentives anymore, the rewards are missing or maybe people just burned out on Legion.

All in all, there are many issues with BfA but my take on it is that the development team overestimated their abilities to get the new features done in time and are now playing catch up, which is showing.

[Lochton]

This is a theory of mine i would like to hear your opinion on.
IMO there are great minds at Blizzard's HQ having many great ideas for the game...but they are being shut down by the higher ups in game development at Blizzard.

The reasons for said great ideas being shut down could be because:
They are risky
cost more
not their target audience because they want to make the game "for everyone"
fear
etc

Why do i think this:
Because its insane to believe there arent any brilliant Devs in a company as big as Blizzard.
You are telling me there isnt a single RPG nerd out there with crazy ideas for the game?
One socially awkward 40 year old dude who played a ton of RPG's with great ideas?
Come on, i find this really hard to believe.
But its just an opinion. What do you guys think of it?

edit:
Im not trying to imply the CEO of Activision Blizzard is making ingame design decisions.
Im trying to say The "higher ups" in game development are stopping ideas from normal Dev's

Blizzard has said before that some ideas sadly gets archieved because they might not be the right time for the idea, or they take more planning than the time they have. As well, this is also in the topic of the store sold items - some were ideas of the design team but were put in a pile for later use.

[Unholyground]

I think your opinion is wild speculation with no basis on actual game development.

Work at a game conpany as a designer. You will then know more about the difficulties of adding 'brilliant ideas'. The biggest hurdle may actually not even come from development, but by jaded gamers who played some form of the same design you spent 3 months testing and polishing and felt it was just a mediocre contribution or gave it 4 minutes of attention before moving on.

Lets be honest though, coming from Legion, BfA is hot garbage and a shadow of what made Legion a great expansion. Anyone who argues against that clearly has not played BfA for very long, I was in Alpha and Beta so I have more time in it than most.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

I don't know anymore. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. What I do know is that the Blizzard I knew is dead.

[TheVaryag]

This is a theory of mine i would like to hear your opinion on.
IMO there are great minds at Blizzard's HQ having many great ideas for the game...but they are being shut down by the higher ups in game development at Blizzard.

The reasons for said great ideas being shut down could be because:
They are risky
cost more
not their target audience because they want to make the game "for everyone"
fear
etc

Why do i think this:
Because its insane to believe there arent any brilliant Devs in a company as big as Blizzard.
You are telling me there isnt a single RPG nerd out there with crazy ideas for the game?
One socially awkward 40 year old dude who played a ton of RPG's with great ideas?
Come on, i find this really hard to believe.
But its just an opinion. What do you guys think of it?

edit:
Im not trying to imply the CEO of Activision Blizzard is making ingame design decisions.
Im trying to say The "higher ups" in game development are stopping ideas from normal Dev's

Imean that's essentially business, you give Ideas that you know will help players and they will enjoy It but the higher ups are not sold because they know the shareholders will not be sold on big risks. But unfortunately that's what they are forced to do with WoW unless they want WoW to fail but that's a different matter.

In my current job as a Hotel Receptionist, I can give suggestions to the higher ups about Implementing something for guests In rooms or other things, but will they listen to a young nobody whose barely worked a few years? Doubtfully, I mean they themselves have never worked my menial "Up front with people" job In their lives, In retail and talking to people, essentially being customer support for the Hotel.

And that's just business, I know that adding these things Into rooms, like more slippers, towels, free bottles of water and so on would spread via word of mouth and create more Interested people In our hotel. But unless they see that earning them thousands of euros In a month, they won't care. And that's when you have business minded people leading hotels and not people who want to make people's stay In a city, a hotel, a spa or anywhere else enjoyable, but rather want the Dollar or Euro signs up keep going up.

I doubt Blizzard lets their low-level nobody developers say anything least they are already In the higher levels of management and that's the shame, Isn't It. Imagine there was a high level management person telling the team "We will scrap the Mists of Pandaria Bonus Reputation system next expansion" and some low level dev goes "But It's a good system, people like It, It promotes playing alts and grinding rep easier and quicker and It's less repetative that way" but then the higher up goes "Well I want It scrapped, It didn't do 100 % only 90 % In my eyes, and so we're reinventing the wheel" as Blizzard does, trying to Reinvent the wheel every damn expansion.

Even though If they just looked back at one or two systems from EACH expansion since TBC, put them all together Into the next expansion they'd have an amazing expansion on their hands.

[Thelxi]

I really don't think so. Thinking of Blizzard as this benign poor little company that is controlled by external evil corporate forces might help people cope with the blatant greed, stubbornness and laziness that permeates design in most of their games atm, but in reality I'm pretty sure the situation is much more harmonious with everyone on the same page and most of them having their hands in the same pie. They all want to make money, and they are all more than willing to manipulate the shit out of the sods that will throw their money at a turd on a platter as long as it has a blizzard logo on it.

Having said that, I do definitely do think that unfortunately money gets in the way of good design at Blizzard these days. The RNG and timesinks that have crept into every corner of WoW are very revealing.

[MoanaLisa]

Having said that, I do definitely do think that unfortunately money gets in the way of good design at Blizzard these days. The RNG and timesinks that have crept into every corner of WoW are very revealing.

Another thing that gets in the way is that Blizzard learned a lesson from Warlords. People want something to do. We may not like the things there are to do these days but complaining that there's something to do is better than complaining there's nothing to do.

I'm not sure people realize how important to Blizzard the failure of Warlords was about this. Legion with it's plethora of stuff that needed to be done was a direct response to the Warlord's valid criticism that there was nothing to do outside of raids.

It's accepted that MMO's are grindy. It's accepted that there's no way that developers are going to keep up with player consumption. So the content gets stretched. Anyone is free to walk away from it at any time and come back later to catch up which is remarkably easy and well provided for.

[clevin]

What's the point of this? No one here can know if this is happening so it's just another bitching thread.

[Izzyfurious]

You could say that for the majority of topic starters on MMOC.

Yeah and i actually find them pathetic, it's becoming more and more similar to those that suddenly writes something outrageous on Social Media. Gets a bucketload of videos made about it and then becomes the NEXT BIG topic everywhere for a while.

[clevin]

Another thing that gets in the way is that Blizzard learned a lesson from Warlords. People want something to do. We may not like the things there are to do these days but complaining that there's something to do is better than complaining there's nothing to do.

But they failed to ask why these complaints were not as loud in TBC, Wrath, etc. Part of the answer at least was that more of the already released content was relevant to alts. Your alt in TBC would run heroics and Kara etc if they weren't up to the T5 stuff, etc. Now? You can gear an alt in no time for little effort and mostly alone. My main rogue for BfA is 361. By alt druid, with 3 days /played is... 362. None of the druid's gear is from high key mythics or Uldir past LFR.

I'm not sure people realize how important to Blizzard the failure of Warlords was about this. Legion with it's plethora of stuff that needed to be done was a direct response to the Warlord's valid criticism that there was nothing to do outside of raids.

I'd change the last part to not only outside of raids but outside of whatever the current raid was.

It's accepted that MMO's are grindy. It's accepted that there's no way that developers are going to keep up with player consumption. So the content gets stretched. Anyone is free to walk away from it at any time and come back later to catch up which is remarkably easy and well provided for.

Sure but again, ask why people tended to stay subbed for more of the expansions early on. A team leadership that's fine with people leaving is a bad team leadership. They may accept that there will always be some level of churn, but they should want to make a game that minimizes it and is as attractive as possible for as many people as possible.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

I mean sometimes, sure. Biggest reason, as I just heard on the lore stream, "If we had infinite time."

And no it's not a BFA new thing. Look at Azshara Crater. That was a huge idea, a DOTA-style battleground, that's come up two or three times and been shut down multiple times.

[Deleted]

Reckon blizzard could give each player a loyal girlfriend it could help the game out? Patch 9.0 fixing In real life to cure ethereal home?

[Trururu]

I believe, blizzard dev team are very poorly structured. This is very common situation in big IT companies. Companies paying huge money to consulting companies, to help them organize and scale their projects. First world problem, I know.

So, I think(or hope) that there's a lot of great ideas in the air, but because of very messy dev processes, half of ideas are not making it to release at all, and the other half making it barely in unfinished state. Plus everything gets moderated by business-people in a first place, some thing getting de-prioritized over another, and so on.
This is why the initial release state with every expansion are getting worst with every year, and even small fixes requires minor patchs with 3 months of development, and in general, reaction time to players concerns becoming slower and slower.

[Triceron]

Lets be honest though, coming from Legion, BfA is hot garbage and a shadow of what made Legion a great expansion. Anyone who argues against that clearly has not played BfA for very long, I was in Alpha and Beta so I have more time in it than most.

To be specific about 'new great ideas', everyone will see these features differently and our collective view of what a Great idea and what a Terrible idea is all subjective. From a developer point of view, they can't control whether or not a new feature will be well accepted, ignored or even hated any more than you could make a meme and decide whether it will be Viral or not before you even post it.

Was Pandaria a great idea or not? Was adding playable Demon Hunters a great idea or not? Was removing flight a great idea or not? We will guage two ways - one based on personal opinion, and one based on our perception of the collective. But these decisions are not rolled out on the basis that they will be great ideas any more than a video can be decided to be viral before it's put on youtube.

As to address your comment, the difference between Legion and BFA is the content that was provided. I think Legion followed the heels of Wrath's design of throwing a ton of content at the players and the players enjoyed that. By content, I also include gameplay mechanics like Artifact talents which added depth to each class. BFA is doing badly because it's content-bare. It's not because of a lack of ideas; there's just as many new ideas in BFA but the problem is there's less content overall and the gameplay suffers for it.