Most damaging Blizzard action

[Queen of Hamsters]

Lol.

Gotta love the disconnect. Meanwhile, most if not all of us directly or indirectly support companies literally robbing people of water, or utilizing slave-like conditions.

Since the only one that was properly damaging to the brand long-term is the Diablo Immortal fiasco, I'll vote for that. The rest = not damaging or already forgotten.

[Nefarious Tea]

Blitzchung by far. Its a worrying trend in the world, all the others are just how the industry is moving (Bad refreshes, or catering to new areas, but done poorly).

Pretty much this.

Everything else is a stupid decision that negatively impacts consumers (and thus the company damages itself).

But the Blitzchung decision? That's a scary decision - Blizzard is essentially collaborating with a government famous for how comically evil it is.

Remember: When it comes to totalitarian governments, you either resist or you're a collaborator.

[SirCowdog]

I don't think it's fair to say it was logical to assume that one specific announcement on that specific blizzcon was D4 and at the same time say it's not logical to assume that one of the other unnanounced projects were not D4.

I do agree, as I've said, that they handled it poorly. Particularly with them hyping up a Diablo announcement when BlizzCon tickets went live.

I don't agree however that the backlash was warranted, not to the point of booing the devs on stage and all the online drama it generated. And certainly not that it continues to this day now that we know for sure D4 is in the works - and it does.

But aye, agree to disagree I guess

I think I might agree with you more if Blizzard had not already used up all its good will a long time ago. They haven't had the benefit of the doubt for a loooooooooooong time. And quite frankly, it amazes me that there are still people out there willing to interpret their actions in anything other than a HIGHLY negative and critical light.

But you're right: Agree to disagree. I always HOPE Blizzard will be better, but I expect them to be bad. And if they do something right, it almost certainly for the wrong reasons. That's just where they're at as a company right now.

[Kaykay]

We've gotten used to blizzard sucking, but ruining the best RTS game in history for a quick buck and a chinese studio, was the pinnacle of incompetency. And should have received a far harder backlash than it did.

[Accendor]

Blizzard’s name isn’t as clean as it used to be. This year and last saw lots of actions damaging to their good name. Which, in your opinion, was the worst thing Blizzard has done?

wtf are you not listening BfA here? WoD lost ists place as most hated expansion.

[LordVargK]

So don't play it. Play the ones they do release for PC.



Even better. Blizzard didn't waste that many resources on something that isn't very focused on their core audience.



As much as a penguin is just a reskinned chicken.

There's no factual evidence of this so far, as far as I know.



Is it really surprising for a developer/publisher to try to give credibility to a game they're making?

I can agree it's annoying, but it's far from the only franchise to have games in different platforms, and I have never seen a backlash like there was with Immortal.



So don't play it. They don't design games to cater particularly to your taste.



Far from the first uneventful Blizzcon. They make it every year and they obviously don't have exciting releases every year. People should expect this and temper their expectations.



That is a completely absurd notion. The mobile market is definitely much bigger in Asia, and in the west afaik the pc market is still ahead, but the mobile market is far from nonexistent in the west. The US is the #2 biggest mobile market with nearly 200M users and over 9 billion in revenue last year. To even begin to propose "no one outside of Asia will like D:I" is not only absolutely ridiculous, but seriously disingenuous. Especially when there have been multiple people who were at BlizzCon 2018 that actually played the demo and said it was quite good, and some have been saying that in this very forum over time.

No matter how you want to paint it you can't change the fact that what actually happened is people threw a tantrum because they didn't get what they wanted/expected.

- - - Updated - - -



Repeat after me: Subscription numbers are not definitive evidence of how popular or good the game was at any given point in time.

"Don't play it". Yes that could be said about every bad game. W3 is bad? Don't play it. Oh, you preordered? Too bad, people who preorder are stupid. WoD is bad? Don't play it.

Also it's not about whether the outrage is rectified or not; it's about the damage it did to Blizzard and how Blizzard handled it. And it was the most damaging event of this list.

[Queen of Hamsters]

wtf are you not listening BfA here? WoD lost ists place as most hated expansion.

Give it a couple of years.

BfA at least had a full patch cycle effort, unlike WoD.

[Depakote]

Merging realms, merging with Activision. how they implemented LFR (lfr is fine on it's own, it's how they always look down on it that's the problem)

[Yarathir]

Can we count things they wanted to do but didn't do because of backlash?

Mandatory Real ID on forums.

It would be, if people remembered Blitzchung a month after it happened.

In large scale nobody gave a fuck because Blizzard worked by their own rulebook.

Sounds like a cope.

[TheRevenantHero]

wtf are you not listening BfA here? WoD lost ists place as most hated expansion.

BfA may be bad in some aspects but WoD was objectively the absolute worst expansion. To this day people still talk about how insanely awful it was, often saying that BfA is bad but doesn't even compare to the dumpster fire that is WoD.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The problem isn't any one, particular incident.

The problem is that Blizzard is continually disrespecting their customers.

I used to love Blizzard. Their name, along with SquareSoft, Bioware, and GameFreak, used to synonomous with "amazing video games". The stories they told were fantastic, their artstyle was timeless, the voicelines burned into my memory, and I loved the gameplay.

But then... starting in the 2010's, something changed. The writing fell off a cliff. Sure, Blizzard writers screwed up every now and then, but that was inevietble they weren't going to knock every single storyline out of the park, especially when they had so many. Their games stopped being fun to play. Their business practices became scummy. As the years dragged on, I slowly began becoming less and less enamored with Blizzard games, and more and more frustrated. It reached a point by 2017 where I was no longer constantly playing their games. Then I eventually just stopped playing their games altogether. And then... sometimes I look back upon my fond experiences playing video games, and smile when I remember playing WoW...

And then I ask myself. "What the hell happened?"

It all began when Activision bought and merged with Blizzard in mid 2008.

World of Warcraft is a MMORPG with a monthly $15 subscription. On top of paying the monthly sub fee, you are also required to drop $60 on the latest expansion every two years in order to play the latest content, effectively making the game $210 a year to play. The expectation is, ofcourse, that you are constantly giving Blizzard money for the right to play a game that is being constantly updated. You should have access to everything in the game, right? Well, starting in 2010, Blizzard implemented a cash shop, with the first ever mount you bought for IRL money: the Celestial Steed. Rather than being able to earn this mount ingame (a game you are paying $210 a year for), you had to drop another $15 to buy this mount. Blizzard then implemented more cash shop items, with mounts costing $15, pets costing $10, and helmets costing $10. To add insult to injury, the cash shop items have far more work put into them any of the items you can earn ingame.

In 2014's WoD expansion, the player interacted with creatures such as Fey Dragons, Iron Sky Reavers, and Grinning Reavers as a part of the questing experience. These mounts were even riden as flight path mounts, and were heavily associated in lore with specific WoD factions. It was expected that they would be earned ingame by reaching exalted with their associated reputation. Lo and behold, Blizzard dangled those mounts in your face, only for them to end up being exclusive to the cash shop! Imagine if a faction iconic mount like the Horde's Wyverns or the Alliance's Griffins were ridden by faction NPCs all the time in WoW, and you even rode on them on flight paths, but you could only acquire one through the cash shop.

In 2015, Blizzard introduced the WoW token. Players could spend $20 on a WoW Token, and trade it to other players in game. Other players could then consume the WoW Token to obtain $20 of Blizzard store balance, which they could spend to buy other Blizzard games, more subscription time, mounts and pets, etc. This effectively legitimized gold selling. This by itself isn't really the problem. Prior to this, gold selling was illegal but nonetheless rampant, and constantly led to player's accounts being hacked. The WoW token created a safe alternative, and also allowed players who spent a lot of time in WoW to use their surplus gold to play for free. Crafted gear wasn't anywhere near as powerful as top end raid gear, so you couldn't really buy power anyway.

The problems came later, when Blizzard began designing the game around incentivizing people to buy the WoW token for real money. In 2018's BFA expansion, a Brutosaur mount was added to the game, was extremely prestiegeous (it's the largest mount, it's a freaking dinosaur, can carry multiple players, and is the only mount in the game with an auction house you can access anywhere). It costed 5,000,000 gold. The real scummy part came the next year, in 2019, when Blizzard announced that they would be removing the ability to obtain the mount soon. Blizzard had never done something like this before. Why? To drive up WoW Token prices ofcourse! Gotta create artificial scarcity and squeeze as much money out of their customers as possible!

In 2012, Blizzard released the fourth WoW expansion, Mists of Pandaria. It was derrided at first ("muh Pandas"), but later came to be tied with WotLK as the game's best expansion. The story was excellently written, and was to lead into the next expansion, Legion. However, the Warcraft movie was in production, and Blizzard wanted to capitalize on the public attention it would garner. Rather than heading into Legion, Blizzard pulled the Warlords of Draenor expansion out of thin air. The players would timetravel to alternate universe Draenor in the past and interact with characters from the Warcraft movie. The story made absolutely no sense and shitted over the Warcraft saga as a whole. Blizzard stopped updating the game to work on the expansion, with no content update for 14 months, or 429 days after Siege of Orgrimmar was released in September 2013, to when WoD was released in November 2014. Worse, the expansion was rushed. Once players completed the initial leveling questlines, there was no content to do. No reputation questlines at all. Worse, Blizzard axed WoD's post launch support, with the game receiving no content update for 252 days, with June 2015's Hellfire Citadel being the one and only post launch content update for the expansion. Even WORSE, Blizzard AGAIN ceased updating the game to work on the expansion, with no content update for ANOTHER 14 months (434 days) between Hellfire Citadel and the release of Legion in August 2016. Oh, and you still had to pay $180 a year in subscription fees to play the game, despite no new content coming out for years. Fortunately, once Legion hit, we were back to regular patch content, with a new content update every 77 days.

After Legion, Blizzard began development on the seventh WoW expansion, Battle for Azeroth. As usual, public beta testing began early, with players being able to test the game for five whole months. During this time, the playerbase gave feedback to Blizzard, telling the devs that the newly introduced Azerite system was not fun, and in fact very detrimental to the player's enjoyment of the game. Rather than heed the playerbase's warnings, Blizzard did nothing and released BFA with the Azerite system anyway. Predictably, the backlash was immense, and the game began bleeding players at a record rate. While Blizzard began scrambling to revamp the system (which they should have done during the five month long beta testing), they tried to incentivize players to continue paying their subscription fee for shitty gameplay by selling six month subscriptions that included an exclusive mount. Like the store mounts, the six month sub mount had far more effort poured into it than any of the mounts players could earn ingame, and if you missed the offer, you could not get it ever again.

Current World of Warcraft is not fun. Fun and interesting reputation questlines like managing your farm at halfhill, raising your Cloud Serpent mount, or learning the ways of the Shado-Pan have been replaced by bland world quests. The game has layers upon layers of RNG, where obtaining loot no longer feels rewarding, as you always feel like RNG has prevented from getting the best possible loot you could have gotten for your time invested. The story after MoP is a trainwreck.

There has been a very large and vocal part of the fanbase that has been asking Blizzard for a release of vanilla WoW for years. Each time the community asked about it, Blizzard shouted them down. "You think you do, but you don't" - J Allen Brack. When the community created private vanilla WoW servers, Blizzard sent them cease and desist notices. It wasn't until retail WoW's subscriber count reached record lows in over a decade that Blizzard decided to give their customers what they had been asking for for years.

Diablo 3 was rushed out in a poor state. In addition, it also had an auction house in which players could sell items to each other. It was two years before the game's core gameplay was fixed and the auction house was removed.

Every single game released by Blizzard since 2010 has had mandatory always online DRM, even to play singleplayer campaigns.

Overwatch launched missing core features such as ranked mode, custom games, and clans. On top of the $50 box price, Blizzard piled an additional monetization model on top of the box price: lootboxes. Rather than being able to simply use any skin in the game, you instead had to obtain skins from lootboxes. At the end of every match, you gained EXP. When you leveled up, you got a lootbox, which contained random stuff. You obtained skins from lootboxes, and the lootboxes were padded with crap like sprays and icons in order to dilute the chance of getting a skin. Ofcourse... you could drop IRL money to buy a bunch of lootboxes, upping your chances of getting a skin! It was an insidious monetization model that Blizzard implemented in HotS, and plagued the AAA industry as EA implemented it in singleplayer games like Shadow of Mordor, and even Star Wars Battlefront II.

The health of Overwatch began to decline in 2017, when updates became sparser (maybe two heroes and a map released a year), and the game became unbalanced to the point it was no longer fun. Overwatch updates are few and far between, and Blizzard hardly ever communicates what they are thinking to their playerbase. It took over two years for custom games to be implemented, and over three years for a role queue system to be implemented.

Blizzard tried to control the Overwatch eSports scene, dictating which teams could compete in the Overwatch League, rather than allowing the compettive community to organize itself. Blizzard restricted self organized tournaments from having prize pools larger than $10,000, and had prevented traditional eSports organizations from sponsoring OWL teams. Furthermore, the OWL is notorious for taking upwards of half a year to payout prize money. This has resulted in a sharp decline of interest in competitive Overwatch.

Heroes of the Storm began open beta in May 2015. The game simplified DOTA's and LoL's convoluted mechanics, removing last hitting, jungling, items, leveling up abilities, etc, and just focusing on team coordination during a match. It was extremely fun to play and had a really good monetization system. Players who spent a lot of time on a hero and mastered that hero could unlock an exclusive Master Skin, which was a badge of prestige. Players could also drop real money for whacky skins. However, in 2017, Blizzard introduced the 2.0 update, which convoluted the core gameplay and wrecked the progression system. Imitating Overwatch's success, Blizzard implemented lootboxes. Upon completing a match, you gained EXP. When you gained enough EXP to level up, you got a lootbox. In the lootbox, you could get any skin in the game... including master skins. The prestige status of master skins was gone, as now anyone could get a lucky roll and get a master skin, or a paid for skin. Worse, just like Overwatch, the loot boxes were padded with crap no one cared for like sprays and icons, in order to dilute the chances of getting a skin. Naturally, this killed the game's playerbase. Rather than making more money off of HotS, Blizzard ended up killing its revenue. One year later, in 2018, Blizzard axed support of the game, ceasing development of the game and putting it into maintenance mode.

To make matters worse, Blizzard had been hosting a yearly competitive HotS tournament, with the finals being played at Blizzcon. Professional eSports teams organized themselves around the tourney, which had been hosted for four years in a row. As Blizzard axed support to HotS, they did not notify the eSports scene that there would be no 2019 tournament. Blizzard lead the eSports scene on, leading many to believe that they would still have a job playing HotS in 2019.

During a post match interview at a Taiwanese Hearthstone tournament, the winning player named Blitzchung gave a shoutout to the Free Hong Kong movement (earlier that year, Chinese police crossed the border into the Hong Kong special territory, and began arresting people they identified as dissidents. People began protesting the government's infringement of their rights). Blizzard then revoked Blitzchung's winnings and banned him from the tournament. Blizzard also banned the two tournament casters who had interviewed Blitzchung. Blizzard did this because they did not want to risk being banned from what would soon become the largest revenue source for video games, China. At Blizzcon 2019, Blizzard gave an insincere apology and did not reverse the bans or return the winnings.

In early 2012, despite making billions of dollars a year, the upper management decided to cut corners, and laid off about 600 employees, only to then try to hire them back.

In early 2019, despite making billions of dollars a year, the upper management decided to cut corners, and laid off about 800 employees. The customer support, community management, who the playerbase trusted), and quality assurance teams were hit particularly hard. The playerbase lost their bridge to Blizzard through the popular community manager, Ythisens. WoW patch 8.3 launched disasterously due to an understaffed QA team. A year after the layoffs, Blizzard then relisted the cut positions with more responsibilities and a lower salary. Blizzard is already notorious for their below industry average salaries, and the company is located in Irivine, California, where living expenses are very high. Many Blizzard employees have to rent share and carpool together to work.

Blizzard Entertainment's long held stance on remakes is that they would rather spend their time and resources making new games, rather than remaking old games. That changed. At Blizzcon 2018, a remake of Warcraft 3 was announced, revealing Blizzard's intention to go back to the well and milk past glories. The game was advertised as having revamped graphical fidelity, redone prerendered cinematics, and new story. When the game finally released in January 2020 (after several delays), it launched in a poor state, with numerous game breaking bugs. FURTHERMORE, the graphical fidelity of the final product was greatly diminished from that of the Blizzcon 2018 demo. The prerendered cinematics were not redone, merely upscaled. No new story was implemented. Even after release, Blizzard continued advertising features that were not in the game on the Battle.net store. FURTHERMORE, just like with Overwatch, the game launched without core features such as a ranked mode or the ability to make clans. This is it folks: Blizzard is selling you a remake that is somehow less polished than fan remakes that are free. FURTHERMORE, to facilitate crossplay between old WC3 and the remake, Battle.net automatically patches old WC3 by downloading 30 GB of unusable remake art assets AND patching in new changes. You literally cannot play old WC3 anymore. FURTHERMORE, due to new EULA changes forbidding copyrighted content from being used in custom maps, many, many iconic WC3 custom maps such as Anime Fight, DBZ Tribute and Pimp My Mario, are now banned. The new EULA also means anything you make in the editor is now owned by Blizzard. The suits are still salty after letting DOTA slip through their fingers and losing in court, apparently (IceFrog approached Blizzard asking if they wanted to make a commercial DOTA game, instead inviting him to be an unpaid developer. When Valve recruited IceFrog to direct DOTA 2, Blizzard launched a lawsuit to capture its revenue and failed). To top it all off, Blizzard banned people who helped spread the word on the official forums on how to get a refund.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHo_D8LYhq8

On February 11th, 2020, Activision-Blizzard had their games pulled from the cloud streaming service, Nvidia GeForce Now. This came a couple weeks after the service's official launch, despite Activision Blizzard games having been available on the beta version of the service for over two years. Anti-consumerism at its finest.





Blizzard entertainment is dead folks. The people who made up its soul are long gone. They have been replaced by a corporate ideology that doesn't care about making great experiences anymore, an ideology that doesn't have standards, an ideology that only cares about making as much money for as little effort as possible. The Blizzard of today gives lip service to the idea of "quality", but their actions certainly don't demonstrate it. We have gone from a studio of a few guys who wanted to make great games for fun, to a corporation that shovels out half assed products and commits human rights violations.

Or maybe I'm just dumb for having thought that once Blizzard became a publicly traded company, it wouldn't have acted like one.

[Rustedsaint]

Diablo immortal.
I never cared about blitz or freeing Hong Kong

[Lex Icon]

they seem to still have quite a lot of rabid fans so they can't be doing that bad.
just look at how the gaming community talk about EA. it's pretty much the other way around there where people are so rabid about hating them they make up stuff just to meme about it.(and they still seem to be doing more than great.)

so what was this all about again?

[Stardrift]

Where's "insulting the lore fans as well as the works of their previous writers by blowing off multiple storylines that were in the works for an entire decade" option?

The shorthanded reveals in Shadowlands is what threw me over the edge. Everything else on the list certainly helped as well, though.

[Depakote]

BfA may be bad in some aspects but WoD was objectively the absolute worst expansion. To this day people still talk about how insanely awful it was, often saying that BfA is bad but doesn't even compare to the dumpster fire that is WoD.

Honestly don't think anyone who shits on WoD has ever played it. Sure it was short but it did provide was of good quality. None of this borrowed power bullshit that Legion, BfA and Shadowlands are giving us.

[Jonnusthegreat]

I understand financial decisions. Blitzchung I disagree with morally and that lost a lot of respect for me.

[Doffen]

Wow didn't know WoW was already dead.

Yeah I didnt make that line:P

With Legion the amount of active users raised above the WoD one according to blizzards quarterly result so that line is obviously not correct.

[Kolvarg]

"Don't play it". Yes that could be said about every bad game. W3 is bad? Don't play it. Oh, you preordered? Too bad, people who preorder are stupid. WoD is bad? Don't play it.

Also it's not about whether the outrage is rectified or not; it's about the damage it did to Blizzard and how Blizzard handled it. And it was the most damaging event of this list.

Except you don't know if D:I is a bad game or not. It hasn't come out, and the feedback I've seen from people who tried the demo at BlizzCon 2018 was actually fairly positive.

But yea, in general yes: What is bad for some is good for others, and they aren't sworn to make games only for the existing players/fans.

It is definitely about whether the outrage is rectified or not, because that is what my post (the one you replied to) was about.

- - - Updated - - -

I think I might agree with you more if Blizzard had not already used up all its good will a long time ago. They haven't had the benefit of the doubt for a loooooooooooong time. And quite frankly, it amazes me that there are still people out there willing to interpret their actions in anything other than a HIGHLY negative and critical light.

But you're right: Agree to disagree. I always HOPE Blizzard will be better, but I expect them to be bad. And if they do something right, it almost certainly for the wrong reasons. That's just where they're at as a company right now.

Oh same, don't get me wrong there There's always some hope deep down simply because how much I love their older work and the franchises, but generally speaking I haven't personally loved almost anything they've done in recent years so I try not to have great hopes. It's still generally decent to good work, but imo it misses that kick they used to have that set them apart from the rest of the industry.

I just think that shouldn't lead to becoming bitter and jumping at every opportunity to bash them, is all.

[TheRevenantHero]

Honestly don't think anyone who shits on WoD has ever played it. Sure it was short but it did provide was of good quality. None of this borrowed power bullshit that Legion, BfA and Shadowlands are giving us.

I played the entire life cycle of WoD. If you weren't a raider, you pretty much had absolutely nothing to do. There was insane content cuts. I honestly can't think of a single positive thing about WoD other than the raids looked nice. Leveling was a chore, dungeons were painfully easy, garrisons were a shell of what they were promised to be, the writing was some of the worst WoW has ever seen, and it was incredibly unfriendly to alts. All in all, it was a terrible expansion. At least BfA has a few redeeming qualities.

[Justpassing]

Heh, no Tracer controversy.