Any of this sound familiar?
"Here is what happneded as far as I can tell
somewhere around 1998: Work on WoW begins
2000: Anet is formed Blizzard loses WoW's lead programmer and the people who create Bnet's network and go on to make an awesome PvP game.
2002: 95% of Blizzard Noth leaves Blizzard. The people who made Diablo and Diablo2 are all gone. They also lose people like Bill Roper who werer important producers of former WC/SC totles
2002: Jeff Kaplan is hired as a designer, he has no experience in game design, but knows Rob Pardo, VP of deisgn, personally. They were both former leaders of the EQ uber raiding guild Legacy of Steel.
later in 2002: Steig Hedlund Lead designer of WoW leaves and is now working on Gods Heroes. Jeff Kaplan inexplicably is promoted to Lead Design.
around that same time in 2002: various other designer/ programmers and at least one team lead aleave and found Red 5 studios.
2004: WoW is realease but half of the original Blizzard is gone. Of the big names only Pardo and Metzen is left. The game that is released was mostly made by people like Stieg Hedlund and polished by Kaplan's team, which includes replacements like Tom Chilton(Kalgan in WoW and Evocare in UO)
Jan 2005: Its been about a year, with an uber raider at the helm 5 top end raids have been released and nothing to balance them. The game has morphed from its original design into a raiding game. Non-raiders are incredibly pissed. PvP are getting tired of the crappy honor system. People like me see the writing on the wall and cancel our accounts.
It took about 2 years for them to screw things up completely but from what we know of blizzard's speed that makes sense. It only took them 7 months to screw up PvP. if you look at the history you can see the seeds of all WoW's current problems from bad networks to raid imbalance to bad pvp. They lost people who could have delivered all those, but not so early that the original game wasn't good. I have no idea why so many people left around 2001-2002 but they did.
Now they are run by a jumped up unqualified EQ raider who hates pvp and thinks non-raiders are inferior and by replacements from other games such as UO. Tom Chilton ( Evocare/Kalgan), the PvP Lead Deisgner, was apparently the Lead Dev on an uber item based expax for UO that many credit with seriously screwing up UO pvp. Sound familar?
The old Blizzard is dead, welcome to the new Blizzard."
full thread: http://www.mmorpg.com/mobile/forums....threadId=86993