Afrasiabi left Blizzard?

[TheRevenantHero]

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

That is absolutely NOT true.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

That is absolutely NOT true.

8.2 alone had like 8 or so high quality mounts with comply new models as well as reskins just as good as any of the shop reskins, throw in 8.1 and its likely with in 1 or 2 mounts difference for the whole of the shop.

[TheRevenantHero]

8.2 alone had like 8 or so high quality mounts with comply new models as well as reskins just as good as any of the shop reskins, throw in 8.1 and its likely with in 1 or 2 mounts difference for the whole of the shop.

What high quality mounts were obtainable outside of the shop that looked better than the shop mounts? I'm legitimately curious what you think are better than shop mounts.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

What high quality mounts were obtainable outside of the shop that looked better than the shop mounts? I'm legitimately curious what you think are better than shop mounts.

looking better is subjective Id personally say the only shop mount that looks any good is the year of the dog one which is the only one I have, but id say the wheel crab and spiderbot beat out even my favorite shop mount.

But onto the less subjective side of things new models are more work and more unique then reskins new skeletons are even further beyond that which 8.2 had a bunch of them there's texture quality which even the lamest 8.2 reskin beats out older shop mounts like the steed or winged guardian.

[SirCowdog]

looking better is subjective Id personally say the only shop mount that looks any good is the year of the dog one which is the only one I have, but id say the wheel crab and spiderbot beat out even my favorite shop mount.

But onto the less subjective side of things new models are more work and more unique then reskins new skeletons are even further beyond that which 8.2 had a bunch of them there's texture quality which even the lamest 8.2 reskin beats out older shop mounts like the steed or winged guardian.

Yeah...I still can't tell if you're being serious or not.

You're saying the crab or the spiderbot is higher quality than something like the Steamscale Incinerator? It's obvious that the textures and details on the store mounts are given more time and care by the art team. I'm not sure how the examples you gave match up to that in any other terms besides personal preference(which is purely subjective).

[Houle]

Hmm, if thats true then idk how to feel about it.
Granted, the guy wasnt really good at his job, but still, the people who are going to replace him are likely far worse, from hat weve seen so far.
And you cant sweep aside how many "old dogs" left Blizz over the last couple of years. And especially once someone like Morhaime leaves, ears should be up. That doesnt just happen like that. (btw, did anybody noticed he and some othe rold blizzz OGs founded a new video game company in 2020, called Dreamhaven)
The Blizz that created classics like Diablo1+2, WC3 and SC1 is truly dissolved at this point.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Yeah...I still can't tell if you're being serious or not.

You're saying the crab or the spiderbot is higher quality than something like the Steamscale Incinerator? It's obvious that the textures and details on the store mounts are given more time and care by the art team. I'm not sure how the examples you gave match up to that in any other terms besides personal preference(which is purely subjective).

Id say if you think this
looks better textured then this

you likely need to get your eyes checked.

[Thage]

Too many people get caught up in the idea that Warcraft exists within the minds of a few adult men like Metzen and Didier and any outside force is a disruption in story. WoWs storyline gets checked, crafted and approved by an entire team of people. Metzen didn't just walk up to a bunch of dorks behind computers and ramble off his storyline, it was always a collaborative process

In fairness, a lot of interviews suggest it was exactly like that. He would bust in like a whirlwind, come out with these ideas, and there'd be a storm of people gassing each other up because for all his faults as a narrative lead, Metzen knew how to many odd story picks work and, hell, he even managed to get the Draenei Retcon 'over' with most of the audience, even if people liked to rib him about it.

Afrasiabi's problem is an issue seemingly endemic in Blizzard of late: he was promoted above his competence and they just kept promoting him until they hopefully found somewhere he could do the least damage, and as soon as Pardo was gone, Afrasiabi's career trajectory hit a brick wall. One can assume being made creative lead was where Blizzard felt he could do the least damage.

Assuming this is legitimate, that Afrasiabi left the company back in June, and did so quietly, one of three things happened:

1) He left of his own accord, taking the opportunity presented by the shift to work-from-home during the pandemic to phase out and find something else to do with his time.

2) He was terminated due to performance. This is... possible, but unlikely, since WoW has regularly performed well financially even while it was hemorrhaging players at an unprecedented rate during Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor. Furthermore, his performance as creative lead is one that the money men may not be paying too much attention to, which suggests the issue is with his work ethic or interpersonal communication--this is a possibility given his long-standing history, but there's no way to confirm this unless someone at HR springs a huge leak. Even more so, if he were terminated and didn't feel it justified, Alex Afrasiabi of all people most assuredly would not have remained silent for five months about it unless Legal was involved.

3) He was terminated in lieu of having charges filed or undergoing a civil suit for behavior at the workplace. This is the most unlikely, but would also explain why his departure was kept silent and his presence on Blizzard's Linkedin was scrubbed when Blizzard seems unwilling to scrub former employees. Especially with a surge in public awareness at the time of the AAA gaming industry having an epidemic of workplace harassment and predatory behavior, sexual and otherwise, perpetrated by executives toward lower-ranked employees. With the Ubisoft story breaking shortly thereafter, it makes sense Blizzard would want this as quiet as possible, to the point of getting Legal in to put Afrasiabi under an NDA regarding his departure and the reasons thereof.

[HitRefresh]

Id say if you think this
looks better textured then this

you likely need to get your eyes checked.

It is better textured than that though...

[SirCowdog]

you likely need to get your eyes checked.

Uhh...okkkayyyy.....

[therealbowser]

I just want the writers gone.

The problem isn't the writers. The problem is Activision. If they got new writers the writing would continue to be stunted and feel bad. This is never going to change while WoW is under Activision's yoke, that is to say... it is never going to change. WoW has never really had good writing though, the last time Blizzard had a game with a truly good story was Warcraft III. Long before Activision was even a vague consideration...

Not that I am defending WoW's writing, as it is as bad as ever in many ways. The best I can hope for is that it is entertaining, which it sometimes is able to be still. It could be a lot worse...

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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.

A good point. While it's possible he was just fired as Moana said earlier, I don't think this is the case, unless the guy got fired and just decided to retire early, and Activision just decided to make it a non-event? I don't know, it feels off.

[Dalheim]

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?

Do... do you not?

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What high quality mounts were obtainable outside of the shop that looked better than the shop mounts? I'm legitimately curious what you think are better than shop mounts.

Just to name a few..

Invincible
Arcadian War Turtle
Vicious Gladiator Kodo (and skeletal horse)
The Pandaren Phoenix mounts
Clutch of Ji-Kun
Darkmoon Dirigible

It's all subjective however.

[8bithamster]

Do... do you not?

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Just to name a few..

Invincible
Arcadian War Turtle
Vicious Gladiator Kodo (and skeletal horse)
The Pandaren Phoenix mounts
Clutch of Ji-Kun
Darkmoon Dirigible

It's all subjective however.

let's continue,

most legion class mounts
Archimonde mount in HFC
Guldan mounts in Nighthold
etc
etc
etc

[Mehrunes]

What the fuck?

Why?

Golden isn't some useless old-guard dude who got hired with zero experience and zero talent.

Golden got hired because she's hard-working and highly experienced at what she does. She's not even a decision-maker. If you've got problems with WoW's story, maybe take it up with Danuser, who is a decision-maker about it, or I dunno, the ex-creative-director, Alex Afrasiabi, who is in charge of that and subject of this thread. Shitting on a random writer, who you probably only know the name of because she's female, seems pretty fucking weird mate. Asking to fire an actual worker for the boss' decision is a lot of what's wrong with the world today, frankly. All we actually know about her is that she's a bit better at writing than some of the people who write for Blizzard.

She's highly experienced at what she does? You mean pumping out low quality tie-in books for various other works that sell because of IP? I mean, sure, but that's not exactly high praise you're giving her here. And Golden's so hard working her research process when writing a book that was largely about the Forsaken did not extend to even reading up the race's first post-Cata quest on wowpedia and as such she couldn't get something as basic as "Forsaken isn't a catch-all term for all free-willed undead" right. Even though she previously wrote about Alliance Death Knights in another book. And it's not something you can blame on the higher ups, because everything that came after that followed the previous lore on this topic, not her grand revelations from Before the Storm.

Also, you're wrong about her not being a decision-maker. While the overall direction comes from the Creative Director, Blizzard claimed the creative process in the WoW team is a collaborative one. And since she's a senior writer, she's in on the collaboration process. Which is why they used pictures of her pitching ideas during brainstorming sessions when talking about it.

Any particular reason why? Are people still on the “she’s ruining the story” kick even though she has stated multiple times she doesn’t direct the story and mainly just does cutscenes and some story’s/books?

You're misrepresenting what she said. She said that she does the dialogues for most cinematics. Not that most of what she does are the cinematics. She's a senior writer for god's sake, the idea that she doesn't do much beyond cinematics is ridiculous. Especially since Blizzard had a panel dedicated to WoW's writing process on either the last or the penultimate Blizzcon, where they hammered the point that the main story beats are a collaborative process. With the pictures they used to showcase that being that of Golden pitching ideas, like her circling the name Anduin 50000 times.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

You're misrepresenting what she said. She said that she does the dialogues for most cinematics. Not that most of what she does are the cinematics. She's a senior writer for god's sake, the idea that she doesn't do much beyond cinematics is ridiculous. Especially since Blizzard had a panel dedicated to WoW's writing process on either the last or the penultimate Blizzcon, where they hammered the point that the main story beats are a collaborative process. With the pictures they used to showcase that being that of Golden pitching ideas, like her circling the name Anduin 50000 times.

Neither the story being collaborative or them memeing at at blizzcon contradicts what I said, golden isn’t a decision maker by her own admission she doesn’t even work on the wow team so acting like she has some huge role in said collaboration has no backing unless we’re just assuming she’s lying for some reason.

[Ethas]

Blizzard died a long time ago tho.. I would not be suprised if they are just disgusted to look at the company they once created and loved at this point

Indeed. All the nerdiness is gone and the company is filled with pretty subpar corporate managers now. That’s why they try to make shit by copying Disney rather than have their own exclusive path that was compelling to millions.

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let's continue,

most legion class mounts
Archimonde mount in HFC
Guldan mounts in Nighthold
etc
etc
etc

Just to jump on this train of discussion of the store mounts. Most of the shop mounts look terrible compared to the cool ones from bosses.

[Mosotti]

They wouldn't just have fired him because of "performance". They don't do this for long time employees, in that case he would just been moved to another position. If he's gone he probably left by himself...

[Shadowferal]

Yeah I'm pretty sure Golden isn't making the creative decisions on the writing. She's familiar with it all, and probably can make suggestions but the decisions come from above. She's more like a freelance writer. She gets told what the story will be and it's up to her to try to make it coherent.
Kinda sucks, but it's like a lot people that work for years at a place...and watch mgmt make one bad decision after another seeing the place crumble as a result...but as long the checks keep coming...

[Beazy]

Good, now fire Ion and maybe WoW can be a decent MMO again.

[Eurhetemec]

She's highly experienced at what she does? You mean pumping out low quality tie-in books for various other works that sell because of IP? I mean, sure, but that's not exactly high praise you're giving her here. And Golden's so hard working her research process when writing a book that was largely about the Forsaken did not extend to even reading up the race's first post-Cata quest on wowpedia and as such she couldn't get something as basic as "Forsaken isn't a catch-all term for all free-willed undead" right. Even though she previously wrote about Alliance Death Knights in another book. And it's not something you can blame on the higher ups, because everything that came after that followed the previous lore on this topic, not her grand revelations from Before the Storm.

Yeah, she's a highly experienced writer. The fact that your only criticisms here appear to be lore nitpicks (albeit ones a lot of people would have caught) speaks volumes, frankly. If you compare era where she's been writing to previous ones, the dialogue, motivation and so on for the characters are vastly improved. That's not all her - the improvement started in WoD (well, it started in MoP from a certain perspective, but I'd say not), and particularly in Legion, but is even more obvious in BfA and SL, which are just drastically better-written in terms of what characters say and how they say it. It doesn't really matter what what she's experienced with isn't super-high-quality stuff, because it's still higher-quality than most MMORPG writing.

(As an aside, it's interesting that some writers can write great stuff for games, but shit-tier novels - Drew Karpyshyn of Mass Effect 1/2 fame is a good example (he also wrote good stuff for SWTOR and other things). Great in-game, terrible novels. Novel/comic-book writers tend to do decently when writing for games, but even then there are exceptions - I can't remember a great example off the top of my head but I bet someone can.)

Also, you're wrong about her not being a decision-maker. While the overall direction comes from the Creative Director, Blizzard claimed the creative process in the WoW team is a collaborative one. And since she's a senior writer, she's in on the collaboration process. Which is why they used pictures of her pitching ideas during brainstorming sessions when talking about it.

This is just sad.

You clearly don't know what a decision-maker is (I kind of wonder what job you can possible do and be so divorced from reality on this), or are desperately hoping that I don't, and I go with this bullshit definition you want to use which is "has influence". No. Decision-makers are the people who have the final say. By your logic, most employees at a well-run businesses is "decision-maker", because they have some influence on decisions. But that's nonsense. In my job, I have have absolutely massive influence over certain decisions, people listen to me or seek out my advice, but my actual decision-making power is virtually non-existent, because I don't get the final say. Thus I'm not a decision-maker. Neither is Golden.

The idea that someone pitching ideas is a decision-maker is particularly deliciously ignorant.