Why did Blizzard blow their load on Mechagon?

[themaster24]

Yeah. This is basically why people are speculating in here that they rushed out Mecha. The pacing makes no sense, hindsight being 20/20.

I just don't understand what their ultimate goal was, if there wasn't going to be an 8.4 at some point. Rushing Mechagon doesn't help that the faction war, although I generally liked the culmination of it, went on for too long as center stage for an expansion might have only planned to have 3 major patches. If it took the B note quickly after 8.1, that would have been different, but I can't see what their end game would have been. I still generally enjoyed all the story beats and environments, but focusing 85% on the War made everything else feel significantly less important.

[Sondrelk]

It feels like Brooks' Law took effect and the influx of devs from other projects actually WORSENED the development cycle and forced delays, push backs, and cuts and, from there, it's snowballed into Shadowlands being behind schedule.

I would rather think they realized that the core systems of islands/Warfronts and azerite didn't pan out like they wanted, and instead of patching it up they cut their losses and moved Devs over to Shadowlands instead.

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Yeah. This is basically why people are speculating in here that they rushed out Mecha. The pacing makes no sense, hindsight being 20/20.

I say Mecha wasn't rushed, but rather delayed. Had it been 8.1 content it would have been lauded as massively ambitious for a patch usually only given reused zones with a new quests. Maybe a dungeon if we are lucky.

[Luxeley]

Over compensation for a terrible beginning and complete under-estimation of the success of Classic.

[Voidwielder]

Because they had to. BoD came out as bare as TBC raid patches.

[UndedoKoleda]

Mechagon was actually better zone than Nazjatar, IMO.

I actually think that they should do MORE of that side-tracking, it's because of it that we got expansions like MOP and other cool stuff. When they do that they have the freedom to experiment and are not bound by expectations from the playerbase(most recent was Nyalotha, not to mention Argus). Their creativity could go wild without having to bother(much) about previous lore and such.

Plus they kind of had to release Mechagon, because the mid-expansion dungeon(and PvP Arena) was bound to it, and this is not something that you decide to develop over a patch. Waiting till the last patch to get a new dungeon would have made people rage even more, than they already do.

That was one of the few things that they did right in this expansion, I think.

[Redroniksre]

QA IS part of Dev. That's the problem here. Everything QA can find early reduces the amount of dev time. The current shit-show with 8.3 means that devs have to fix stuff instead of working on shadowlands.

Please, learn this: QA is part of dev, and being stingy on QA costs exponentially. To give you a simple example from my company:

With QA:

Dev creates new feature.
QA finds bug, sends it back.
Dev can fix it.

Without QA:

Dev creates new feature.
Customer reports bug.
Service has to document bug and start the process.
Product Management gets this and decides on what to do in conjunction with the development lead.
Dev has to fix it, but probably not the same person and even if she/he probably has forgotten a lot - takes longer.
New builds for customer + delivery + installation.
Update of Manuals.

Trust me, every bug QA finds in house before the User is a massive cost saver on dev but also dev support time.

Sadly, the pencil pushers at Activision/Blizzard are not aware of that.

Right, but like you said Customer reports bug, meaning we have to get said content first. In reality is means more bugs in the content we get, but they won't hold all the devs back to fix bugs, just fix critical ones and move on.

They cancelled 8.3.5, Ian already said so, nothing till 9.0

Prepatch is not x.x.5, Prepatch is considered 9.0. Usually we get that what, 2 week - month before release? I just hope we get it a bit sooner.

[glowpipe]

Blizzard spent time and effort on mechagon and 8.3 was going to top that. But the endless whine from people on mechagon this and nazjatar that made them basically cancel bfa and 8.3 is the unfinished mess it is. You can blame yourself for the mess bfa has become

[Lolites]

Did the performance improve? Do you really think the debacle of 8.3 and the slow down of Shadowland is cheaper than the salary of 11 people? Well, we both don't know what the impact is, but fact is the QA sucked for 8.3 and they fired QA staff. Make with that what you will, though my point wasn't really to pin the current problems on firing QA, but i wanted to counter the notion that QA is not part of dev.

well but we also dont know that with those people still there QA for 8.3 or shadowlands would work better... its not always about amount of people...
what we do know is that they fired aprox 3% of wowb QA, and some people how they "butchered" or "gutted" as if they cut down 90%

[Gasparde]

Lol, cities are kingdoms now? What should they have been? The new continent of Nazjatar? lol

Yes? Like, Nazjatar should've at least been the size of Suramar (for reference, this is what the place looked like before going down: https://wow.gamepedia.com/Kaldorei_E...in-Azshari.jpg). Instead, what we got was a random ass kelp forest with ruins of like 1-2 buildings and the Eternal Palace - a zone that showed us like 5% of what this ancient Naga empire supposedly looked like. Fuck, the Cataclysm dungeon version of the place looked ten times more impressive than Nazjatar.

It's like one of the oldest and greatest civilizations in Azeroth's history. On top of that they had like tens of thousands of years of time to rebuild the place into the great Naga empire, instead all we got was a fucking forest that was sitting like 5 feet under water.

Same shit happened with Argus. We go to the literal home world of the most dangerous force of the universe and all we get to see are 2 rather barren wastelands with like 2-3 buildings in them and a zone that managed to be entirely unscathed despite being on said planet. Same shit is currently happening with Nyalotha. This (https://preview.redd.it/yg6etcoy9zr3...=webp&69df981f) is what the place looks like... and all we actually get to see is the tiny ass temple.

All of these lore-heavy places will forever have to live up to what Suramar looked like. A giant ass zone where more than half of it was an actual city - and inside that actual city where 3 fucking instances that showed us every-fucking-inch of said city. And then we get fucking Mechagon, a huge pile of copy pasted dirt with a single instance that, again, shows us tons of crazy shit in the background... but doesn't actually let us explore any of it. Fucking Nazjatar is a fucking disgrace to the lore of Azshara.

[themaelstorm]

Because someone on the dev team likes Gnomes way more than litearlly every person on the planet.

I like them more. Fite me.

[GeorgeDb]

QA IS part of Dev. That's the problem here. Everything QA can find early reduces the amount of dev time. The current shit-show with 8.3 means that devs have to fix stuff instead of working on shadowlands.

Please, learn this: QA is part of dev, and being stingy on QA costs exponentially. To give you a simple example from my company:

With QA:

Dev creates new feature.
QA finds bug, sends it back.
Dev can fix it.

Without QA:

Dev creates new feature.
Customer reports bug.
Service has to document bug and start the process.
Product Management gets this and decides on what to do in conjunction with the development lead.
Dev has to fix it, but probably not the same person and even if she/he probably has forgotten a lot - takes longer.
New builds for customer + delivery + installation.
Update of Manuals.

Trust me, every bug QA finds in house before the User is a massive cost saver on dev but also dev support time.

Sadly, the pencil pushers at Activision/Blizzard are not aware of that.

Also finding an error early in the development cycle of new content also saves time than finding it late(before release). Totally agree how important having a solid QA team is.

But half of the forum just spams "Blizzard devs are lazy" so... :'D

[cparle87]

There are definitely signs of drastic cuts. Warfronts I would imagine was abandoned right as they began work on Darkshore, given how only the Alliance side makes sense, with the Horde one being the same with different NPCs.

Same with islands, they got far enough to be mostly done with the Pandaria one then decided to pull the plug when it became clear the system was unsalvageable.

And now with 8.3. where we can easily infer that they had the assets made, then decided that putting all the resources over to Shadowlands sooner rather than later would be a good idea.

How does the Horde side not make sense? When you've literally just taken territory from an enemy you want to fortify yourself in the most defensible location, which is Lor'danel. Enemy forces have to land somewhere else and work their way to you. It's just like in Alterac Valley. Both sides are playing the same strategy.

[Pannonian]

Also finding an error early in the development cycle of new content also saves time than finding it late(before release). Totally agree how important having a solid QA team is.

But half of the forum just spams "Blizzard devs are lazy" so... :'D

Because Dev sets deadlines

I mean, Dev should have a say - our development lead can move the deadline (after talking to management) - but the release dates are not set by Dev.

To give you another example: We have 2 testers for our web application. One of them uses Chrome and Firefox, the other one IE and Edge (i know...) both tested the same feature for me. Chrome, Firefox and Edge worked fine, but the column i had added had a problem in IE 11. Now i put it back to development and 5 minutes later it is fixed.

Now of course i could save money by only having 1 tester and him just using 2 browers. In this case some customer would have probably found it, contacted service, service would have tried to reproduce, then inform me, i'd have to re-open the ticket, or even create a new Design Feature Request - we talk about 10 times the amount of time needed.

And i don't know if the release problems of 8.3 was because of firing QA stuff, or QA fucking up, or something else, but fact is, fixing all that stuff costs dev time. If you have an additional layer of searching for player stuff + currencies/whatever and fix that, additional scripting time is needed, which would have been unnecessary if the bugs were found before release.

[GeorgeDb]

Because Dev sets deadlines

I mean, Dev should have a say - our development lead can move the deadline (after talking to management) - but the release dates are not set by Dev.

To give you another example: We have 2 testers for our web application. One of them uses Chrome and Firefox, the other one IE and Edge (i know...) both tested the same feature for me. Chrome, Firefox and Edge worked fine, but the column i had added had a problem in IE 11. Now i put it back to development and 5 minutes later it is fixed.

Now of course i could save money by only having 1 tester and him just using 2 browers. In this case some customer would have probably found it, contacted service, service would have tried to reproduce, then inform me, i'd have to re-open the ticket, or even create a new Design Feature Request - we talk about 10 times the amount of time needed.

And i don't know if the release problems of 8.3 was because of firing QA stuff, or QA fucking up, or something else, but fact is, fixing all that stuff costs dev time. If you have an additional layer of searching for player stuff + currencies/whatever and fix that, additional scripting time is needed, which would have been unnecessary if the bugs were found before release.

Yes i know and agree. I am currently trying to find the root cause for a production bug that got through our QA :'D .

But a small percentage knows the software development lifecycle and how things works so blaming the "Devs" is their go to.

The QA Firing it was before 8-9 years i think, and from some reports i saw on the forum only few people from the QA team got fired.
I think the major problem was deadlines.

We saw the 8.3.5 was canceled so the majority of the dev teams are probably working like crazy for shadowlands and this is why 8.3 was a bit of a "budget patch".

[Pannonian]

Yes i know and agree. I am currently trying to find the root cause for a production bug that got through our QA :'D .

But a small percentage knows the software development lifecycle and how things works so blaming the "Devs" is their go to.

The QA Firing it was before 8-9 years i think, and from some reports i saw on the forum only few people from the QA team got fired.
I think the major problem was deadlines.

We saw the 8.3.5 was canceled so the majority of the dev teams are probably working like crazy for shadowlands and this is why 8.3 was a bit of a "budget patch".

Yeah, it's impossible to know why things went the way they did. All we can do is speculate.

I just don't like the notion that QA is not part of Dev, and "no dev roles were fired" is just wrong. Maybe because i myself started in QA 15 years ago i'm a bit irritated if people want to downplay QA as some unimportant support and not a vital part of Dev.

[FelPlague]

someone had a link on a list to people that were fired and it was whole 11 people from wow QA from 337 people there... so yeah, must had a huge impact...

Most of the people fired were GM, CM, CS.
(Game masters, community managers, and customer support)
there was a few QA but yes as you said only about 11 people.
especially since those 800 fired were ALL of activison blizzard, activision, king, blizzard, etc, only about 200 was blizzard.
compared to back in 2012, when blizzard only fired... 600 people...

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Yeah, it's impossible to know why things went the way they did. All we can do is speculate.

I just don't like the notion that QA is not part of Dev, and "no dev roles were fired" is just wrong. Maybe because i myself started in QA 15 years ago i'm a bit irritated if people want to downplay QA as some unimportant support and not a vital part of Dev.

QA is not a dev role, but it is an important role.
hiring more devs means you can make more content, but hiring more QA means less time needs to be spent AFTER the fact fixing what they made.

[Pannonian]

Most of the people fired were GM, CM, CS.
(Game masters, community managers, and customer support)
there was a few QA but yes as you said only about 11 people.
especially since those 800 fired were ALL of activison blizzard, activision, king, blizzard, etc, only about 200 was blizzard.
compared to back in 2012, when blizzard only fired... 600 people...

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QA is not a dev role, but it is an important role.
hiring more devs means you can make more content, but hiring more QA means less time needs to be spent AFTER the fact fixing what they made.

Mhm, maybe a semantic argument. Yes, they are not developers, but are a vital part of the development process. The notion of Activision/Blizzard was that only support roles were cut, which would not impact the development of their games. And that, i think, is just wrong.

[czarek]

Seems like a waste to put so many resources on Mechagon with the big dungeon and world content when that could have been used for Nzoth stuff instead. Besides giving the alliance an allied race that barely anyone wants to play what was the point? Mechagon is so isolated from the rest of the story that BFA wouldn't have really been affected if it didn't exist. Why not just do Mechagon in another expansion?

Blizzard was already chewing on too many themes in BFA already. Sargeras sword stuck in azeroth, wrathion/dragons, Horde vs Horde&Alliance, the drust, Ghuun, Azshara, Nzoth, Voljin & Bob Salami, Azerite, Sylvanus plans, exploring Zandalaar & Kul'tiras and then amputee gnomes out of nowhere?? Blizzard lost focus with this expansion and just tried to throw everything in the can and shake it up and see what holds. This led to us feeling like there's little to no resolution on many of the core themes BFA tried to explore. Why does it feel like the thing they put they most effort into this expansion was the side story?

I think they had big vision on the begining how BfA should looks but there were a lot of layoffs throu the long way. Some PR problems. Activision things. And general issues inside the company. I feels like BfA is cutted in a half and squished to the end to start over again in Shadowlands. Classic made some subs i bet BfA made sales well so they decide to pack it up and close story faster. Cheers.

[Sondrelk]

How does the Horde side not make sense? When you've literally just taken territory from an enemy you want to fortify yourself in the most defensible location, which is Lor'danel. Enemy forces have to land somewhere else and work their way to you. It's just like in Alterac Valley. Both sides are playing the same strategy.

Not make sense might be a poor choice of words.
Rather my point is that only the Alliance side feels like it was crafted with a clear endgame, the Horde one is literally the same one.

I very distinctly remember some Devs talking about the Horde starting with a scuba team instead of the landfall the Alliance had, similarly I always imagined the Horde attacked from the opposite side ending in where Alliance makes landfall.

Overall though I feel confident stating the Darkshore warfront was cut down short mid development when it became clear it wasn't worth the time.

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I think they had big vision on the begining how BfA should looks but there were a lot of layoffs throu the long way. Some PR problems. Activision things. And general issues inside the company. I feels like BfA is cutted in a half and squished to the end to start over again in Shadowlands. Classic made some subs i bet BfA made sales well so they decide to pack it up and close story faster. Cheers.

My guess is their vision for BfA hinged on islands, warfronts and azerite armour being well received.
When they realized no amount of patching could salvage it in time they probably just decided to scrap it like what happened with WoD after they realized they were behind schedule.

[Sorrowseer]

I dislike steampunk and gnomes annoy me, so the mutilated gnomes of mechagon digust me, hate the zone.