Afrasiabi left Blizzard?

[Lorgar Aurelian]

This is easy to explain. See, Blizzard makes subpar products. And subpar products are only made by miserable employees. This is common sense. It's written somewhere in the Bible.

Ah your right I should have never doubted such wisdom It’s the only thing that makes sense.

[Relapses]

Ah your right I should have never doubted such wisdom It’s the only thing that makes sense.

My insider source from Bellular's Patreon-only Discord also informed me that Blizzard's art team is frequently chauffered around on the back's of the class design team while Ion sits atop a throne of solid gold and barks commands at the team in Latin. This explains the declining quality of recent expansions as well as the obvious communication barrier that exist between the class design team and the director.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

My insider source from Bellular's Patreon-only Discord also informed me that Blizzard's art team is frequently chauffered around on the back's of the class design team while Ion sits atop a throne of solid gold and barks commands at the team in Latin. This explains the declining quality of recent expansions as well as the obvious communication barrier that exist between the class design team and the director.

Really? My sources say Ion him self is the throne and Mr activision him self sits upon his back wearing a suit made of money smocking cigars made of the original wow teams ideas pushing the employees to stop adding stuff to the game and add more to the cash shop.

[rrayy]

This is easy to explain. See, Blizzard makes subpar products. And subpar products are only made by miserable employees. This is common sense. It's written somewhere in the Bible.

So you have absolutely no evidence and are projecting your opinion and trying to present that as proof. Pretty much all nonsense.

[Relapses]

So you have absolutely no evidence and are projecting your opinion and trying to present that as proof. Pretty much all nonsense.

I figured "it's written somewhere in the Bible" was enough to tip you off that I was being 100% facetious but alas.

[Queen of Hamsters]

My insider source from Bellular's Patreon-only Discord also informed me that Blizzard's art team is frequently chauffered around on the back's of the class design team while Ion sits atop a throne of solid gold and barks commands at the team in Latin. This explains the declining quality of recent expansions as well as the obvious communication barrier that exist between the class design team and the director.

Literally cackled out loud at this.

Damned be Ion and his fancy, Latin Lawyer speak...

- - - Updated - - -

Really? My sources say Ion him self is the throne and Mr activision him self sits upon his back wearing a suit made of money smocking cigars made of the original wow teams ideas pushing the employees to stop adding stuff to the game and add more to the cash shop.

He needs to git gud at cracking that whip, because I still see 50 mounts added for every 1 that goes to the store... ಠ_ಠ

[Eurhetemec]

Given how bad BfA was in a lot of respects, it's going to be difficult for SL to not be an overall improvement. But we'll have to wait and see how things go over the next year and a half. With Diablo Immortal being the only real new game coming out of Blizzard(that's not even a new IP), and nothing else really on the horizon, I'd say a lot rides on the performance of SL.

Potentially, yeah, and so far for me SL is light years ahead (yeah I know it's been like three days but w/e!) of BfA and well ahead of early Legion.

Be surprised if Blizzcon doesn't feature a new IP, or at least hints re: one (they may want to keep focus on SL, D4 and OW2 for now).

I think I know who you're talking about. But I thought he was moved to another project shortly after? Maybe I'm misremembering. I'll see if I can find it. Or maybe someone else in the thread can help us out.

I found him, it's David Kim, he went from D4 Lead Systems Designer and is now WoW Principal Game Designer. I've got some hopes for him. He was an internal promotion as was his replacement on the D4 team, which is generally a good sign re: someone's competence and a team's stability. He's mostly worked on high-quality RTS (including SC2, but also CoH and DoW1 before that) before moving to the HotS team then spending 4 years on D4, and now he's been on WoW for 3 months.

All I'll say about that guy is that I hope he's one of the people who worked on Reaper of Souls, and not the base game. XD

Haha yeah. He didn't actually work on D3, for better or worse.

I don't know why people keep misunderstanding my position on flight. We have a thread for that already, so make your replies there. But suffice to say, I do not, nir have I ever asked for flying 100% of the time.

People misunderstand because you frequently say stuff that sounds way more extremist than stuff you've said previously. Certainly I don't see the Maw as suggesting an "anti-flying" attitude, just a "this zones is supposed to be peculiar and scary" attitude.

The real question I would like to ask, then, is: If having a larger budget allows the art team to do such amazing things, wouldn't it stand to reason that giving other teams(like class or game balance or whatever) more money would also generate a similar effect?

That's probably not a direct comparison. Money doesn't always equate to success for things like this.

Yeah I think the issue that it's not a direct comparison as you say. Even with art, there's eventually a limit, it's just you can potentially throw a lot more budget there to have bigger teams simply making/polishing more art (which, in this case, due to the way WoW is designed, is pretty easy to integrate into the game - if WoW had really complex animation and stuff it might be a different issue).

With gameplay/balance stuff, there's a limit to how many people can helpfully work on something before they start getting in each other's way, or falling away from a central vision. Spending too little can be harmful, especially if you lose people due to insufficient recompense (but I notice most people leaving Blizzard aren't gameplay people in the last few years - 10+ years ago they often were) but you can also find games with both complex and excellent gameplay and tiny numbers of gameplay designers, sometimes just one.

I do think with a game the complexity of WoW, you probably need a pretty decent size team for gameplay, but it's sadly not something you can necessarily chuck money at - hell sometimes even hiring "the best" doesn't pay off. Just ask Valve about Artifact! They hired Roger Garfield, who is extremely good designer with a lot of experience, but for complex reasons they ended up with a product that was never going to be popular with the gaming public (and Valve's echo-chamber culture seems to have prevented them from understanding this - Blizzard have had the same problem historically, but it seems to be less bad in the last few years - no coincidence a bunch of key echo-chamber types have left I think. Peak echo-chamber for Blizzard was and will hopefully always be RealID - no way that would have happened a company which had more open culture).

[ReleaseDay]

The original Warcraft was thought up by the older people, the newer people are responsible for the woke Warcraft. It's a collaborative process indeed, but you'd have to be retarded to think the newer Blizzard has the same mindset as before. They have totally different goals and storylines in mind.

Very sad news this.

Looking at how radical, extremist political standpoints Blizzard has taken, especially this year, along with how most of the OGs seems to have dropped off now, I'm guessing there isnt exactly a great workplace vibe overthere...

[Forogil]

Him changing jobs isn't odd, Blizzard hiding that information is odd. Not sure why this is difficult to understand.

Agreeing, and there's something even stranger.

Changing jobs involves starting a new one - and it seemed unclear what that job is. It could be that he enjoys early retirement, or it's a new super-secret project - but otherwise it is odd: Linkedin is used both to announce your new job to the world - or to announce that you are looking for a new one.

[Gadzooks]

You're entitled to your opinion but absolutely nothing about WoW's story was groundbreaking even when Metzen was in charge. And I get different strokes for different folks but if story elements are your motivating factor for playing a WoW expansions I feel genuinely sorry for you.

I said nothing about "groundbreaking", just that Danuser would never reach Metzen's level - regardless of what metzen's standing is in the overall industry, and I didn't rate Metzen's level.

You can feel sorry all you want, with your insipid guilt trip. WoW is no longer a game I want anything to do with, with specific reasons after playing the actual content. What you think about it, or feeling 'sorry" for me? Irrelevant, in every way.

PS - I didn't say the story was the only reason. Words mean things. Reading for comprehension is a much better thing to do, instead of lashing out emotionally when someone rejects your addiction.

[Lolites]

[QUOTE=DuskSP;52832760If you need a story or a big reward to convince a player to drudge through your game... then something is wrong.[/QUOTE]

you speak like someone who never met another human being...
vast majority of people wouldnt bother doing anything if there wasnt some reward/incentive behind it...

- - - Updated - - -

Sad reality is that the vast majority of games are going to be like this. Handholding, streamlining, removing any sort of thinking or problem-solving, adventuring etc is all gone.

if Classic did only one thing (and it did) is that it showed us people want everything figured out before they even start... so tbh, its not "problem" with game, its "problem" with people...

[Relapses]

I said nothing about "groundbreaking", just that Danuser would never reach Metzen's level - regardless of what metzen's standing is in the overall industry, and I didn't rate Metzen's level.

You can feel sorry all you want, with your insipid guilt trip. WoW is no longer a game I want anything to do with, with specific reasons after playing the actual content. What you think about it, or feeling 'sorry" for me? Irrelevant, in every way.

PS - I didn't say the story was the only reason. Words mean things. Reading for comprehension is a much better thing to do, instead of lashing out emotionally when someone rejects your addiction.

Holy shit my dude. It's pretty difficult to fill in the gaps when you smugly proclaim your disdain for the current creative team with phrasing like "story was a big part of it." Like I said, twice, I have no problem if that's your main gripe -- just that compartively speaking, for all the reasons you can dislike the game, story elements seem like a particularly weak rebuke. But that's just, like, my opinion, man, and it is, as you said, completely irrelevant.

PS - If we're talking about reading comprehension I'd like to point out that I never said it was the only reason.

[SirCowdog]

He needs to git gud at cracking that whip, because I still see 50 mounts added for every 1 that goes to the store... ಠ_ಠ

Quality vs quantity. If all the in-game mounts matched the quality of the store mounts I doubt there would be nearly as much complaining about them.

[Relapses]

Quality vs quantity. If all the in-game mounts matched the quality of the store mounts I doubt there would be nearly as much complaining about them.

And how exactly does one determine the relative quality of a store mount versus an in-game mount? Perhaps a board of players who count the number of polygons in each model to ensure all mounts are created equally?

[Gadzooks]

Holy shit my dude. It's pretty difficult to fill in the gaps when you smugly proclaim your disdain for the current creative team with phrasing like "story was a big part of it." Like I said, twice, I have no problem if that's your main gripe -- just that compartively speaking, for all the reasons you can dislike the game, story elements seem like a particularly weak rebuke. But that's just, like, my opinion, man, and it is, as you said, completely irrelevant.

PS - If we're talking about reading comprehension I'd like to point out that I never said it was the only reason.

"but if story elements are your motivating factor for playing a WoW expansions"

Sure thing. Whelp, I've wasted enough of my time on you, that will now end.

[Deventh]

I saw this earlier when I was double checking a quote he made but since the LinkedIn seems to be privated/deleted I didn't think much of it. Doing a quick google search brings up no major news from him this year and checking the edit history on that pedia article it seems it was updated with that line on the 22nd. So I'm guessing Afrasiabi might have recently hid his account and the MMWQ guy noticed the update before he did so or it might be a mistaken edit.

Edit: Don't think it's a mistaken edit, it was also posted in their Discord on the 22nd and no one questioned it. I'm guessing the editor is at least friends with him on LinkedIn to be able to see it and he seems to be a long time member/editor on Wowpedia. I think Alex Afrasiabi might have actually left in June and Blizzard isn't acknowledging it/he doesn't want it public.

Lol. What do you mean he doesn't want it "public". It will be public no matter what. Delaying the inevitable announcement of his leave will only add fuel to the fire. Why hide that? I guess a lot of people left Blizzard and WoW team in particular in the last few months. This is a huge yikes tbh.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Quality vs quantity. If all the in-game mounts matched the quality of the store mounts I doubt there would be nearly as much complaining about them.

It sure is a good thing that we get more ingame mounts at just as high a quality as any thing in the shop then right?

[SirCowdog]

It sure is a good thing that we get more ingame mounts at just as high a quality as any thing in the shop then right?

Can't tell if serious.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Can't tell if serious.

Just look at BFA 8.1 and 8.2 likely beats out the whole of the shop when it comes to high quality mounts.

[Relapses]

"but if story elements are your motivating factor for playing a WoW expansions"

Sure thing. Whelp, I've wasted enough of my time on you, that will now end.

Since you want to pointlessly semantic, you do understand the word 'if' is not an accusation, right?