View Poll Results: Ghostcrawler fired?

Voters
1517. This poll is closed
  • 100% he was fired

    101 6.66%
  • Very strong chance he was fired

    127 8.37%
  • 50/50

    117 7.71%
  • Very strong chance he left on his own

    371 24.46%
  • 100% he left on his own

    801 52.80%
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  1. #361
    Quote Originally Posted by MoanaLisa View Post
    One would imagine that they would fire the game director instead if that were the case. And GC is in a place where I'm quite sure that he could entertain a game director position elsewhere with a major studio or for that matter start a new studio of his own to make games. Maybe in your mind no one ever leaves Blizzard without being forced out but people leave and for their own reasons.

    I'll ask you the same question I've asked others: Why, if they're so hot to fire him, did they have him on four prominent panels at Blizzcon?
    Not only on just the panels but just overall being at Blizzcon? He was part of discussion not only on the panels but also off the panels and drinking with the community. If he were in that bad of standing at Blizzard, surely they would want him far away from Blizzcon as they wouldn't want him spilling any potential negativity either on stage or when hanging out with the fans.

    The guy was generally enthused about his job and his experience there. It definitely didn't give the feel of someone who was leaving on bad terms.
    Quote Originally Posted by Connal View Post
    From my perspective it is an uncle who was is a "simple" slat of the earth person, who has religous beliefs I may or may not fully agree with, but who in the end of the day wants to go hope, kiss his wife, and kids, and enjoy their company.
    Connal defending child molestation

  2. #362
    Quote Originally Posted by Gheld View Post
    Something like that would never actually happen. GC is a human being and ultimately in the end he's going to do what's best for GC. Knowing this, to prevent industrial sabotage no company in their right mind would hire him directly off of Blizzard's roster without a raise or a promotion. Nor would he be given the power to singlehandedly "destroy" a game franchise.

    And there's a good chance he's going to an rpg or mmo type franchise, considering that he was the lead system developer for the most successful MMO ever made. He's obviously not going to get hired to work on a first person shooter or anything like that. And he would also come with knowledge of future ideas that WoW might explore, and future avenues that it might explore with system design, etc. So you can in denial all you want, but this is actually a gigantic kick in the balls for WoW.

    And on Blizzard's side they not only have to deal with the abovementioned but now there is going to be a major leadership change. And anybody who has ever worked in a company for long enough to experience leadership changes would know that leadership changes are never easy to deal with.
    Heh, I wasn't being serious. Though I could say why it would appear otherwise considering the content of the rest of this thread.

    What I genuinely think is that when the old heads moved back to WoW from Titan there were suddenly too many managers: career advancement halts, control over your team gets divided up, overhead on the project goes up, some petty blaming increases. Suddenly, leaving the company seems best for everyone and a friend at another company has an opening that sounds great.

    The cool thing about that situation is it all works out, with no malice from any party, and those who were part of the decision for him to leave will think it happened for different reasons.

    The mole theory is way more fun and exciting though.

  3. #363
    I definitely wonder if there's more to the story than we've heard, but honestly, with so many moving parts, it would be damned hard to pinpoint what could've happened, and even more difficult to decipher whether or not his departure will be good or bad.

    I will say this much; while I don't necessarily agree with all of his philosophies (he seemed to value "balance" over immersion, where I think the two should be held as equal), there's simply no denying that with his departure, we're going to be left in the dark a lot more. He was basically the only line of communication we had with the actual Devs -- Community Managers are super friendly, but you don't feel like it's a direct line, where your feedback gets taking into consideration.

  4. #364
    Quote Originally Posted by xenogear3 View Post
    Why does any company offer him a job/promotion while he caused WoW to lose millions of sub?
    Some men are very good at talking the talk, but struggle at walking the walk.

    As an personal anecdote, my last project, an 2D adventure was an take-over after the investor was unhappy with the initial design and hired me (as I work as freelancer) to change it. In the end, I needed to throw it completely out and start a new as the story, the puzzle design, dialogues and mostly the whole navigation in the game was beyond awful. The investor agreed with my decisions and in a private conversation told me that he will never ever let this designer to do any design as most of his projects ended in such way. BUT he has promoted him to the rank of an executive produced, based on his industry experience and connections to various artists, programmers and companies. In the end, he has done terrible job, but got a raise, a promotion and his own office. Imagine that.
    My wife came to me and asked: "What have you done to the poor cat? She is half dead..."

  5. #365
    Quote Originally Posted by hrugner View Post
    Heh, I wasn't being serious. Though I could say why it would appear otherwise considering the content of the rest of this thread.

    What I genuinely think is that when the old heads moved back to WoW from Titan there were suddenly too many managers: career advancement halts, control over your team gets divided up, overhead on the project goes up, some petty blaming increases. Suddenly, leaving the company seems best for everyone and a friend at another company has an opening that sounds great.

    The cool thing about that situation is it all works out, with no malice from any party, and those who were part of the decision for him to leave will think it happened for different reasons.

    The mole theory is way more fun and exciting though.
    I think it's really a combination of a number of reasons.

    -Denied promotion by return of old faces.
    -Constantly thrown under the bus by having to entertain questions about controversial changes that have nothing to do with his role on the team.
    -Lots of companies would pay top dollar for a senior member of the WoW team.

    The perfect storm.

  6. #366
    He probally just got offered a better job, and doesnt feel as Satisfied with wow anymore.

  7. #367
    Quote Originally Posted by Gheld View Post
    I think it's really a combination of a number of reasons.

    -Denied promotion by return of old faces.
    -Constantly thrown under the bus by having to entertain questions about controversial changes that have nothing to do with his role on the team.
    -Lots of companies would pay top dollar for a senior member of the WoW team.

    The perfect storm.
    Yeah I imagine someone like Riot Games would be more than willing to outpay Blizzard for someone like Greg. Promotion + more money + change of scenery. He was as far up the Blizzard ladder as he was ever going to get.
    Quote Originally Posted by Connal View Post
    From my perspective it is an uncle who was is a "simple" slat of the earth person, who has religous beliefs I may or may not fully agree with, but who in the end of the day wants to go hope, kiss his wife, and kids, and enjoy their company.
    Connal defending child molestation

  8. #368
    Quote Originally Posted by Amorise View Post
    Yeah I imagine someone like Riot Games would be more than willing to outpay Blizzard for someone like Greg. Promotion + more money + change of scenery. He was as far up the Blizzard ladder as he was ever going to get.
    Blizzard's WoW team also seems to have developed the whole rock star/rock band mentality. I honestly believe that each and every senior member of the WoW dev team thinks that they are single handedly responsible for it's success. The game has developed a very modular feel to it, as though different parts of the game have become a different development leaders "solo album". You can spend 3 hours logged into WoW and feel like you spent that time playing 3 entirely different games sometimes.

    So if this is the case, it could also explain Blizzard not making a strong enough counter-offer to keep GC without having to assume that he was fired.

  9. #369
    Quote Originally Posted by Amorise View Post
    Yeah I imagine someone like Riot Games would be more than willing to outpay Blizzard for someone like Greg. Promotion + more money + change of scenery. He was as far up the Blizzard ladder as he was ever going to get.
    Try Betshesda, Bioware or Bungie (to stick with the Bs), Riot provides a competitive game, where balance is vital and the last thing is someone who talks for years how the balance is hard for him and acknowledges the abundance of CC in the game by adding more CC. LoL does not need super duper powerful abilities with no drawbacks, "smart heals" and similar stuff. If Street goes to Riot, LoL will lose 50% of the players after 1 quarter after his first balance patch, as lots of their best players are former WoW Pvp-ers who had enough of Ghostcrawlers "balance" decisions.
    My wife came to me and asked: "What have you done to the poor cat? She is half dead..."

  10. #370
    Quote Originally Posted by Schroedinger View Post
    Try Betshesda, Bioware or Bungie (to stick with the Bs), Riot provides a competitive game, where balance is vital and the last thing is someone who talks for years how the balance is hard for him and acknowledges the abundance of CC in the game by adding more CC. LoL does not need super duper powerful abilities with no drawbacks, "smart heals" and similar stuff. If Street goes to Riot, LoL will lose 50% of the players after 1 quarter after his first balance patch, as lots of their best players are former WoW Pvp-ers who had enough of Ghostcrawlers "balance" decisions.
    How are LoL and WoW even comparable? WoW is hard to balance because of two major aspects to the game (PVE and PVP), gazillion of different skills and items.

    It's not possible to balance WoW completely because PVE exists without making them totally separated. And we all know that isn't going to happen.
    Quote Originally Posted by xenogear3 View Post
    Why does any company offer him a job/promotion while he caused WoW to lose millions of sub?
    Because they are not as uninformed as you are and can actually reason to a level. Sorry for the slightly offensive wording, but it's intended.
    Quote Originally Posted by MaxJr View Post
    Except that's not how real life works, for example you simply don't leave a job paying you 150k for a job that will pay 80k...
    There are a lot of companies that can outright outpay his current pay check. How do you even know how much he earns right now or how much he would be earning? Also, I'd gladly take slightly lower paycheck if I didn't have to take all the bullets against the company and keep a smile on my face, daily.
    Last edited by Thes; 2013-11-30 at 07:42 PM.

  11. #371
    Quote Originally Posted by Schroedinger View Post
    Try Betshesda, Bioware or Bungie (to stick with the Bs), Riot provides a competitive game, where balance is vital and the last thing is someone who talks for years how the balance is hard for him and acknowledges the abundance of CC in the game by adding more CC. LoL does not need super duper powerful abilities with no drawbacks, "smart heals" and similar stuff. If Street goes to Riot, LoL will lose 50% of the players after 1 quarter after his first balance patch, as lots of their best players are former WoW Pvp-ers who had enough of Ghostcrawlers "balance" decisions.
    Class balance wasn't just on Ghostcrawler. It was a collaborative effort between Ghostcrawler, encounter design (now Ion Hazzikostas,) Cory Stockton, and whoever was in charge of PvP at the particular time (Holinka now.) The only responsibilities that solely fell on GC were UI, itemization/stats, and new system management (LFD/LFR, transmog, etc.)

    GC also stated he wasn't going to an MMO as any others would feel anticlimactic after working on WoW.

    Also, none of the current pro players are former WoW PvPers so not sure where you got that from.
    Last edited by Bullettime; 2013-11-30 at 07:40 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Connal View Post
    From my perspective it is an uncle who was is a "simple" slat of the earth person, who has religous beliefs I may or may not fully agree with, but who in the end of the day wants to go hope, kiss his wife, and kids, and enjoy their company.
    Connal defending child molestation

  12. #372
    Quote Originally Posted by Ferg View Post
    You realize that it was under GC that WoW hit its all time high in terms of subs, right?
    Yes, at that time he was still "in charge" of content that other people were responsible for (Tigole et all). Once GC's design decisions came into the game, it went downhill.

  13. #373
    Quote Originally Posted by Slant View Post
    Yes, at that time he was still "in charge" of content that other people were responsible for (Tigole et all). Once GC's design decisions came into the game, it went downhill.
    What particularly bad decisions were his? Name few? Are they bad because you don't like them or are they bad because no one likes them?

    If this was still vanilla after all the years, I wouldn't play anymore. I don't like all the changes, but they're not game killing. People just get bored. People often cry about "casualcraft" and about all the other things that they just happen to dislike, yet Wrath (when WoW had the highest amount of subscribers) was the most casual friendly version of the game we've seen yet. Not everyone liked that either and we had a lot of criers on the forums (QQ casualcraft, remember?), so your logic is flawed.
    Last edited by Thes; 2013-11-30 at 07:49 PM.

  14. #374
    Quote Originally Posted by Thes View Post
    What particularly bad decisions were his? Name few? Are they bad because you don't like them or are they bad because no one likes them?
    People think LFR is bad despite it actually slowing the loss of subs during the decline of the MMORPG genre over the last few years.
    People blame LFD for killing server communities, despite server communities being a volatile environment from the start no different than any other game.

    And these are just the two areas that actually fell under him. People think PvP being imbalanced is on Ghostcrawler and not realize that they have a lead PvP designer who also works on class balance. People who don't like the raids blame Ghostcrawler instead of looking at Mercer (up to Wrath) or Hazzikostas.
    Quote Originally Posted by Connal View Post
    From my perspective it is an uncle who was is a "simple" slat of the earth person, who has religous beliefs I may or may not fully agree with, but who in the end of the day wants to go hope, kiss his wife, and kids, and enjoy their company.
    Connal defending child molestation

  15. #375
    Quote Originally Posted by Kangodo View Post
    That IS how real life works.
    People want new things, people want something different.
    It happens often that people give up their "well paying job" because life is not a mathematical equation.
    Many people will even take a slight reduction in pay to go somewhere else with advancement opportunity. There's no point in staying somewhere if you have no chance to move up the ladder. If I were making say 25 an hour, I would gladly go work somewhere else for a bit less if it meant there were promotion opportunities down the pipeline to pay back on the loss.
    Quote Originally Posted by Connal View Post
    From my perspective it is an uncle who was is a "simple" slat of the earth person, who has religous beliefs I may or may not fully agree with, but who in the end of the day wants to go hope, kiss his wife, and kids, and enjoy their company.
    Connal defending child molestation

  16. #376
    No way he got fired. Chances are he finally got sick of taking all the flak from the community for absolutely every single thing they don't like about this game.

  17. #377
    he was approached at a certain event by a certain company, and those people at that event were telling people that he's going to join them. I'm sure it's no surprise when people hear who got him. I'd say where he went but it's not my business to tell, and if I told you how I know, people would never believe me.

    best of luck to him.

  18. #378
    The Undying Slowpoke is a Gamer's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MaxJr View Post
    People are so naive, why would anyone with half a brain leave that position on their own? The game has lost almost 5 million subs in the last 24-30 months, blizzard had to make changes and they started by firing the lead designer, its that simple...



    Metzen is wow, they fire the guy and wow goes with him...
    Perhaps because Ghostcrawler realized he wasn't going to get promoted beyond Lead Systems Developer. Especially since Blizz opted to bring back the old developers for top slots rather than promoting from within the team.

    So another company comes along with an offer of a Game Director position and higher pay, and GC bites on it.

    It may seem greedy, but in the end it's "just business" and we can't say we did anything to make him want to stay. This thread just proves it. People claiming that now WoW will be perfect or that now we need to fire Metzen as well.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Mukor View Post
    he was approached at a certain event by a certain company, and those people at that event were telling people that he's going to join them. I'm sure it's no surprise when people hear who got him. I'd say where he went but it's not my business to tell, and if I told you how I know, people would never believe me.

    best of luck to him.
    I have a feeling he's going over to Wildstar, considering a lot of former Blizzard devs are working on that project now.

    Though I also wouldn't be surprised if he's moving onto a new MMO where he'll be Game Director.
    FFXIV - Maduin (Dynamis DC)

  19. #379
    Quote Originally Posted by Slowpoke is a Gamer View Post
    Perhaps because Ghostcrawler realized he wasn't going to get promoted beyond Lead Systems Developer. Especially since Blizz opted to bring back the old developers for top slots rather than promoting from within the team.

    So another company comes along with an offer of a Game Director position and higher pay, and GC bites on it.

    It may seem greedy, but in the end it's "just business" and we can't say we did anything to make him want to stay. This thread just proves it. People claiming that now WoW will be perfect or that now we need to fire Metzen as well.

    - - - Updated - - -



    I have a feeling he's going over to Wildstar, considering a lot of former Blizzard devs are working on that project now.

    Though I also wouldn't be surprised if he's moving onto a new MMO where he'll be Game Director.
    He stated on twitter it wasn't going to be an MMO since he considers that anticlimactic after leaving the WoW team.

    So probably something in the RTS or MOBA field.
    Quote Originally Posted by Connal View Post
    From my perspective it is an uncle who was is a "simple" slat of the earth person, who has religous beliefs I may or may not fully agree with, but who in the end of the day wants to go hope, kiss his wife, and kids, and enjoy their company.
    Connal defending child molestation

  20. #380
    Quote Originally Posted by theturn View Post
    What blizzard game is balanced?
    Right...balance can never be till Kalgan is erased. Get rid of him!

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