Blizzard wants to cut out World of Warcraft overwork on their workers

[Isilarya]

Story has always been patch content in that game. Was not timegated at all.

Stop spreading misinformation that it's guilty of the same thing WoW is doing when it's not please. And what FF14s story has to do with this thread is irrelevant so I'm not going to continue this any further in this thread about other games because it's completely off topic.

The point was its industry standard to dripfeed fragments of story over an expansions lifecycle. Atleast Blizz does story ingame now as opposed to years gone by where if you didnt buy books you had no idea wtf was happening.

[tripleh]

For them to have quality content, they need good writers, good designers.

BFA lacks good writing so outsourcing writers would be a good thing. Since Danuser and his crew suck at telling a story that makes sense. Darkshore is proof of that. As for Quality BFA lacks that already classes, rng, etc for example.

[Eurhetemec]

BFA lacks good writing so outsourcing writers would be a good thing. Since Danuser and his crew suck at telling a story that makes sense. Darkshore is proof of that. As for Quality BFA lacks that already classes, rng, etc for example.

Oh boy. Dude, wow. This sort of ridiculous thinking has cost so many companies so much money.

2010:

"Our IT department stinks, right guys?!"

*Everyone in boardroom mumbles agreement, remembering the time they had to wait a couple of hours for something to get fixed*

"Well let's outsource them, I've found we can get 24-7 support by a much bigger team for cents on the dollar! They can't possibly be worse!"

Huge amounts of money is spent and goodwill lost and productivity lost switching to the outsourced IT.

2014

"Holy shit this outsourced IT sucks so bad! 24-7 cover but they just mindlessly read scripts at you, can't understand really basic problems, and it takes days for things to get resolved because of the escalation structure! Let's get in-house IT again!"

*Rest of board mumbles agreement, remembering that time they were forced to listen to a script, then passed around and put on hold for hours, and still didn't get their problem fixed*

And inevitably it costs waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more to get a new, functional in-house IT department to replace the outsourced one than it would have cost to just keep the in-house one going, and that's not even accounting for the huge productivity losses from outsourcing. But in the long term it makes more sense, because it's more effective. This is why there's so much "onshoring" and so on now.

And the idea that you can "outsource the story" or "outsource the design" is obviously beyond laughable. Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean you can outsource it, and it very definitely doesn't mean that will improve it.

[cparle87]

What does that have to do with Blizzard trying to reduce crunchtime for developers?

Nothing. Eleccy and friends just need to meet their quota of anti-Blizzard posts for the day or Square won't pay them.

[Calfredd]

Story has always been patch content in that game. Was not timegated at all.

Stop spreading misinformation that it's guilty of the same thing WoW is doing when it's not please. And what FF14s story has to do with this thread is irrelevant so I'm not going to continue this any further in this thread about other games because it's completely off topic.

Okay ministabber, take it back to FF14.

[mojojojo202]

Companies should be forcing (either directly or indirectly) their employees to work overtime when they don't want to or when it isn't good for their well being. If that means that enough work isn't being done quickly enough then either a) hire more people or b) set more realistic release dates. If a game cannot be finished by the date it is set employees shouldn't be expected to work ridiculous hours to finish it, it should be delayed. Sure, it might annoy customers, but, frankly, fuck 'em.

[MoanaLisa]

Being blunt: If you don't like Azerite armor it's not because a bunch of coders were working 16 hour days for a month to get the design to work. The problem goes further up the chain than that.

[tripleh]

The current state of the game isn't doing that well so there doing something wrong. Especially when you figure in the loss of subs. Personally just hoping next list of layoffs has Danuser, Alex, Ion and Lore on it. The current team needs an overhaul and Activision needs to flex its authority again to make it so.

[Lazuli]

Exactly.

To be honest I genuinely feel for the workers at Blizzard who joined that company to make amazing products or because they wanted to be a part of the Blizzard family

Because nowadays that isn't the case. The Blizzard "family" is nonexistant and I can't imagine any dev there is excited to be working on Blizzard products these days especially with a good chunk of their talent being forced onto mobile garbage.

Imagine going to work for Blizzard then being put on a mobile development team LOL.

The issue isn't overwork in Blizz, clearly. I mean look at D3 and BfA. I don't even need to explain. Even Legion, the begin of the worst class design in the games history.

Their priority #1 is longevity in the way of endless grinds and timegates, instead of what really matters.. FUN design. You know, the one thing that actually keeps players playing. If only they played their own shitty games maybe they would understand, but this isn't the Blizzard that we grew up with who were actual gamers. All that's left is suits and people just there for a paycheck.

[threads]

class balance team must have stopped working right after bfa came out.

[clownpenisfart]

The current state of the game isn't doing that well so there doing something wrong. Especially when you figure in the loss of subs. Personally just hoping next list of layoffs has Danuser, Alex, Ion and Lore on it. The current team needs an overhaul and Activision needs to flex its authority again to make it so.

Not that I disagree but I wouldn't bet on Activision doing the right thing here. They are driven by shareholder value and as such completely blind to long terms solutions. All that counts is short term profit. Trying to brute force players into playing longer by adding frustrating RNG and time gating everything is exactly the kind of short sighted solution that it would entail.

Corporations are basically like domesticated animals. Just like animals are driven by their instincts and will sometimes do dumb things and hurt themselves if left to their own devices, corporations are driven by short term profit and will often do very dumb things that will hurt then in the long term if it means a greater share value today.

See Boeing for a great recent example of doing unbelievably stupid shit for short term profit that is now causing them (and the families of 346 unfortunate people) nothing but pain and suffering.

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Come to think of it, I think that what wow really needs are veterans who worked on completely different but successful games to bring a fresh and critical look at what wow is doing, both from a design point of view and a creative point of view. Heck, even people who worked on tv shows maybe, when it comes to the narrative team.

Imo wow originally revolutionized the mmorpg world simply because it was the first time that veteran game developers in a different game genre looked at mmorpgs and realized that all mmorpgs of the time were of super amateurish quality so they could do better.

Now I think that wow has reached the same point that the pre-wow mmorpgs were at: why is the gameplay so simplistic and repetitive compared to other modern games? Why are world quests mostly a bunch of trash minigames and still the usual fare of "right click these 10 things" and "kill these 10 things"?

And more importantly, why is the story and story telling so mindbogglingly awful, both in writing and execution? Whenever I hear a character say something, or when I watch a cinematic, I can't help but roll my eyes so hard that I'm afraid I might tear off my optic nerve some day. Characters are one dimensional and cliche as hell, and the whole thing takes itself so seriously while being such trash that it's almost laughable, although not quite in the "so bad its good" category either. To think that they must be spending so much budget to achieve such overwhelming mediocrity.

It feels like wow is designed by people who have been immersed in wow and only wow for so long that they just can't take a step back and look at any of this critically.

[Zandalariprelate]

class balance team must have stopped working right after bfa came out.

They got lay off before BFA even started to be developed