Blizzard's poor excuses

[sephrael]

Well, not sure why you think they owe you an explanation or excuse, for one.

For the second, read a book: The whole "more developers will fix it" approach to project management was tried way back in the 70's. Guess what? It didn't work, and now we have principles like Brooks' Law. There's a whole book about it, called The Mythical Man-Month.

[Dasani]

The reality is...

"We don't have time or resources to dedicate to your proposed idea because we have too many of our staff currently working on pay-to-play features such as new store mounts, store pets, and new features being added to the game only accessible by spending additional real world money. We hope you understand and accept the fact we care more about money than we do about you."

[laughtrey]

Why do you think it all bullshit? The majority of the reviews seem positive and the negative issues are typical of any large company. Although some reviews seem to point to Blizzard still having a small company mentality which has been my feeling for a while and would go some way to explaining why no-one has has been fired over WOW's shortcomings in the past few years.

WoW is, from a business perspective, a wildly successful franchise that has absolutely no reason for anyone to be fired whatsoever.

I hope you were being ironic or something, because you just evoked that one nerd from the simpsons who asked about the xylophone in Itchy and Scratchy making a different sound for the same key, saying "I hope someone was fired for that blunder"

Just because you get nerd-rage frustrated doesn't mean people are getting fired.

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You're missing the point. Why do the same (thirteen? ...really?) people who work on raids/dungeons have to be tasked with it?

Because if you have a super successful game and you're not quite sure how, you don't fuck with the 'secret sauce'.

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The reality is...

"We don't have time or resources to dedicate to your proposed idea because we have too many of our staff currently working on pay-to-play features such as new store mounts, store pets, and new features being added to the game only accessible by spending additional real world money. We hope you understand and accept the fact we care more about money than we do about you."

Haha, how many people do you really think it takes to make that specific stuff? Would it make you more buttmad or less buttmad to think that one dude probably made the Celestial Steed in his spare time costing the company nothing and making it about 3+ million dollars?

[Vankrys]

i know some of you may not like this game, but look at the exemple of assassin's creed. A new game about 50-60 hours of content every year. yes i know, that game is reusing game engine and mechanic, and people are getting tired of always the same kind of game, but in the end, that's what an MMO is, same engine, same mechanic, different story.

and a new assassin creed cost 4 month of wow subs, have more content than wow content patch. So if ubisoft can do it, what can't blizzard. and yes, i'm comparing a single player to an MMO, because, aside the net code already in place, creating additional content within an already existing engine is not so different. it's about creating the storyboard, the art, the game world (dungeon, quest zone), coding the AI (or encounter script) and testing for balance and bug.

given the price of the subscription, WoW should have a major content patch (a $60 full game size content patch) every 4 month. Blizzard is getting tons of good will from its consumer, they let slide many thing they wouldn't from another publisher, but i feel the good will is not eternal.

[laughtrey]

i know some of you may not like this game, but look at the exemple of assassin's creed. A new game about 50-60 hours of content every year. yes i know, that game is reusing game engine and mechanic, and people are getting tired of always the same kind of game, but in the end, that's what an MMO is, same engine, same mechanic, different story.

and a new assassin creed cost 4 month of wow subs, have more content than wow content patch. So if ubisoft can do it, what can't blizzard. and yes, i'm comparing a single player to an MMO, because, aside the net code already in place, creating additional content within an already existing engine is not so different. it's about creating the storyboard, the art, the game world (dungeon, quest zone), coding the AI (or encounter script) and testing for balance and bug.

given the price of the subscription, WoW should have a major content patch (a $60 full game size content patch) every 4 month. Blizzard is getting tons of good will from its consumer, they let slide many thing they wouldn't from another publisher, but i feel the good will is not eternal.

This entire post is wrong.

Assassin's Creed has 2 development teams. This makes the games suffer. Assassin's Creed is also not built on the last one at least in terms of gameplay balance and tech.

The price of your WoW sub isn't to fund expansions. It's to pay for server maintenance and customer support.

You have no idea how games are actually made do you?

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soz guys were going to make more store mounts instead of fixing patch days and our horrible servers

Right, the same guy who makes the mounts is also the server admin.

[Condemner]

Please GO check the jobs Page on battlenet, then delete this thread please. Also inb4 "why hire marketing intern when they need 3D designers". Yeah, no clue AT all.....

[Grishnok]

In the end it all boils down to $$$. The people they "moved" from Titan and other projects are still on the same Blizzard payroll so its no cost to them to add a few more members to the WoW team that way. To hire more qualified people that could speed the process along and divide and conquer more development on the other hand would cost more $$$$. That is not something Blizzard or especially Activi$ion is willing to do under any circumstances. It isnt an excuse because its legitimate. What brings my piss to a boil though, is the fact that they keep telling and or "promising" faster and better released content. They have been doing it for a few years now and it just isnt happening. I mean look at SoO. Its the next DS and ICC in terms of how long the content is going to be drug on. I mean the EARLIEST we will see WoD released is probably July and Id be more willing to put my money on August/September release.

SoO was released on Sept 10th of 2013. If we get the xpac at its earliest (July) thats 11 months. If we hit the more likely September/August Mark thats a year to 13 months of doing the same content. It was more surprising that we didnt see an annual pass at Blizzcon because they used that tactic last time because they knew DS was gonna drag on forever and they didnt want to lose subs.

ICC was a year, DS was almost a year.. and Blizzard repeatedly said they would never match ICC again in terms of content gaps, but its really looking like the release of WoD will be the next ICC and Blizzard will once again have to eat their words. Shit, I remember back when WoW vanilla was released Blizzard publicly stated that they wanted to release 1 xpac a year and were going to do so. It was over 2 years after the release of vanilla before we saw BC.

TL;DR: Blizzard rarely follows up on what they say. Hope for the best, expect the worst as in any aspect of life, especially when a blood sucking corporation like Activi$ion/Bli$$ard is involved. I knew from the second they said that the WoW team had grown because of Titans restart and that now shit would come out faster for WoW to expect that none of that was going to happen. AFterall, they have been saying that for years. So far it hasnt happened once.

[Vankrys]

This entire post is wrong.

Assassin's Creed has 2 development teams. This makes the games suffer. Assassin's Creed is also not built on the last one at least in terms of gameplay balance and tech.

The price of your WoW sub isn't to fund expansions. It's to pay for server maintenance and customer support.

You have no idea how games are actually made do you?

one team, two teams, ten teams. what you said is in agreement with the OP, ubisoft have hired more dev to develop content in a timely fashion.
and no, i am no game developer, only a chemical engineer.

[IKT]

In the end it all boils down to $$$. The people they "moved" from Titan and other projects are still on the same Blizzard payroll so its no cost to them to add a few more members to the WoW team that way. To hire more qualified people that could speed the process along and divide and conquer more development on the other hand would cost more $$$$.

http://blog.patchspace.co.uk/why-you...ore-developers

Many factory and warehouse jobs are largely fungible, in that the time to bring someone up to full productivity is inconsequential (hours or days). This is not true of development, where even if a new hire knows the programming language, framework and even the generic business domain, it will still take a long time for tacit knowledge of the codebase to flow into his head.

They have moved guys from Titan over to WoW, but if you have one bit of knowledge about programming other peoples stuff you'll know it's not a matter of minutes to get up to scratch, especially with the giganto fucking huge codebase that wow is.

This is of course in addition to the fact that they already have one of the biggest if not the biggest development teams in the industry.

[Sal the Shieldhog]

Quick question; if you guys hate on Blizzard so much, and the way we play the game, and the way they design and what-have-you, why are you still here?

[Danifilth]

Its hard to hire developers in america since the education is poor here according to the global ranks.

[Pann]

WoW is, from a business perspective, a wildly successful franchise that has absolutely no reason for anyone to be fired whatsoever.

I hope you were being ironic or something, because you just evoked that one nerd from the simpsons who asked about the xylophone in Itchy and Scratchy making a different sound for the same key, saying "I hope someone was fired for that blunder"

Just because you get nerd-rage frustrated doesn't mean people are getting fired.

WOW, whilst it is still incredibly successful in terms of customer base and revenue generation, it has been losing large numbers of customers consistently for over three years. Whilst Blizzard's loyalty to their staff, although it is a pity this loyalty does not extend to the customer service staff, is admirable I cannot think of another single company that would tolerate their employees continuing to make the same mistakes that are costing the business millions of dollars each quarter. It has nothing to do with "nerd-rage" when a business is losing customers and therefore income at the rate Blizzard is, management have to actually manage their staff and that may mean recognising that some of them are not capable of doing the jobs they are employed to do and managing them out of the business.

[Santoryu]

You can't honestly say BC raids were as detailed as launch ones in later expansions.

Detailed in what way? Do you mean graphically or boss-wise?

The 5 mans were also far less intricate then,

Far less intricate? Have you not done the 5 mans in mop or wotlk? They're pathetically easy and most people can't stomach them any more.

Currently valid and heartcrushingly unattainable aren't the same thing.

It's a shame really, seeing as back then in TBC people were ok and indeed it was ok to be behind and play catch up. It kept you busy and looking forward.

No. Your argument here is that putting a wall between 2 points allows you to build stuff while it's taken down. Nevermind that back in vanilla and BC people were also whining about the length of tiers.

Not a wall as much as a couple of fortresses you need to conquer.

Q-over-Q argument on it versus Firelands is silly on a few levels. Not least of which being the scope of 2.3 or 2.4 versus 4.2.

Firelands was supposed to come together with the Abyssal Maw. If that had happened, you could say that 4.2 had scope. But the raid was way too lackluster and the daily quests boring as all hell.

Besides, both 5.1 and 5.3 added actual content. It just wasn't major content.

So they shouldn't have had the same number index as a major patch.

Changing location doesn't break up monotony just because it's a different name. Unless you were in T5, you were doing the same raid nonstop anyway.

It wasn't just a different name. It was an entirely different instance with entirely different bosses. And no, T4 had 3 raids you could do, those being Karazhan, Mag and Gruul.

People keep crapping on Blizz when there's multiple raids.

Do they? Having 2 different 7 boss raids per tier is way better than one 14-boss one.

Now you repeat that for 5-25 abilities, then get the test team to check it out and give thoughts.

Blizzard has a test team? Since when? I mean considering every raid is done to death on the PTR every single time....

The most complex bosses in BC aren't as complicated as any boss in post-launch Mists raids. At least as far as dev time. Again, just because you can turn a dial doesn't mean the dial was quick to implement.

Doing complex stuff is easy, making stuff simple yet challenging is hard.

[Tomana]

http://blog.patchspace.co.uk/why-you...ore-developers

That is a nice link, thanks for posting this!

[Sunaka]

Detailed in what way? Do you mean graphically or boss-wise?

I fail to see the difference as far as the point is concerned. There is far more to the content (per-boss/quest/dungeon/etc) now than there was then. This can't be disputed. Vanilla dungeons were generally larger, but had no mechanics and the fidelity compared to now is nonexistant.

Far less intricate? Have you not done the 5 mans in mop or wotlk? They're pathetically easy and most people can't stomach them any more.

The difficulty or staleness of them has nothing to do with the point. Again, there is far more to those dungeons than any BC (or even many LK) dungeons. Many of the Mists bosses have more complexity (in every meaning) than whole wings in BC. Trying to argue that because they're easy or that they're "old" ignores all the details of the content involved.

It's a shame really, seeing as back then in TBC people were ok and indeed it was ok to be behind and play catch up. It kept you busy and looking forward.

You were either 'part of the elite', not playing, or ignoring the playerbase. A ton of people hated the raid structure in BC (and Vanilla) because of how exclusionary it was. The only people happy with the way it was set up were those who were able to join guilds who could progress, which was a very small minority.

Firelands was supposed to come together with the Abyssal Maw. If that had happened, you could say that 4.2 had scope.

Sorry, but no. The Firelands patch was the second largest in the game's history from a content standpoint. They said Abyssal Maw was a planned dungeon, which they had to scrap due to resources and a variety of other reasons.

But the raid was way too lackluster and the daily quests boring as all hell.

Molten Front dailies still are perfectly fine. Definitely better than QD's dailies, and especially 2.1's dailies. They were short, effective, acceptably varied, and gave good rewards. The raid was fine by itself, mechanically and otherwise. The problem comes from, again, expectations. I think it was far better than any raid that had a similar or fewer number of bosses as of the time it released. If your criteria for its acceptability is due to the dev time, there's a few raids that're a lot worse.

So they shouldn't have had the same number index as a major patch.

Why? Because you arbitrarily believe so? They were important enough to get the number. That's their choice, not yours. Voice chat wasn't a major content addition, and it was 2.2. 1.12 had no major content, but it was a 'major' patch by your criteria. 1.10 had weather, and again it was a 'major' patch. Blizz is the one who chooses what warrants a x.x versus x.x.x. Your arbitrary definition is meaningless.

It wasn't just a different name. It was an entirely different instance with entirely different bosses.

K? ICC has different bosses between wings. Ulduar has different bosses across the board. SSC has a bunch of water bosses and an elfdemon. You're still missing the point. Changing your venue does not necessarily break up the monotony. If you're stuck on the second boss in 2 different raids, you're still stuck x/x in a tier, which means you're fighting the same bosses seeing the same crap week in and week out. Being able to change your surroundings isn't unique to different raids, which you're still not getting. They just have sucked at accomplishing that since LK. DS did a mildly good job of this, actually, but the raid itself was bad to the point that it ruined the effect.

And no, T4 had 3 raids you could do, those being Karazhan, Mag and Gruul.

You're really good at missing points. Single-boss (Maulgar doesn't count, despite it being my personal favorite BC boss) raids are easily less-than-a-raiding-day raids, whereas Karazhan was easily multiple days for progression. Meaning you're in the same raid. There's not going to be a bunch of return trips to Mag once you've killed him on Tuesday.

Do they? Having 2 different 7 boss raids per tier is way better than one 14-boss one.

No, having 14 good bosses (with nonlinearity being a bonus) is way better than having 14 crap bosses. Different raids don't remotely guarantee that. And yes, they do. They don't get crap for multiple raids existing, they get crap because people have to nitpick. Even back in T5 people complained about how drab SSC was and how blinding TK was.

Blizzard has a test team? Since when? I mean considering every raid is done to death on the PTR every single time....

Attacking the test process. New and unique. Insightful. Helpful! That's the kind of statement that makes the test team hate the playerbase. The point of the PTR is that the test team can't plan for everything. If there were no test team, even the raids on PTR would be atrocious. Launch BC raids prove that rushing (or ignoring) the internal testing process leads to crap content.

Doing complex stuff is easy, making stuff simple yet challenging is hard.

You're confusing complex from the playing and developing perspective. Stop focusing on the player perspective. This thread is about development, development resources, and development time. Lei Shen is a complex fight from both playing and development standpoint. Elegon is a simple fight from a playing standpoint, but a complex one from a development standpoint. Far fewer bosses (proportionately) are simple from a design standpoint compared to BC, or especially Vanilla.

If you aren't even going to focus on the point of the conversation (development, not player position/opinion), then you aren't part of the conversation.

[arcaneshot]

one team, two teams, ten teams. what you said is in agreement with the OP, ubisoft have hired more dev to develop content in a timely fashion.
and no, i am no game developer, only a chemical engineer.

If both teams don't agree on where Assassin's Creed is going then you'll notice the problems.

And you think you're being smart about it, but you're only reinforcing the thought that there aren't enough developers that Blizzard likes.

[Vankrys]

If both teams don't agree on where Assassin's Creed is going then you'll notice the problems.

And you think you're being smart about it, but you're only reinforcing the thought that there aren't enough developers that Blizzard likes.

unless you're working at blizzard in some high position, you can't really know the company policies and strategy. Could the developement of WoW post release have been different, for better or worse, possibly, we will never know.

i do not pretend being smart or even know anything about game developement. The only thing i can know, is the answer to the question "is this worth the asking price?" This is a very personnal question, and i expect different people comes up with different answer. In my case, i find the answer is no, which i give the reason for earlier. For $15 a month, i expect more.

[rda]

I really don't get why there's so much discussion around the question of whether or not more people can produce more and better game content.

Of course, they can.

Yes, it takes time to integrate new devs, but Blizzard had plenty of time already, I am not sure we have seen more content, the only "more" that we had is more bosses in the same (small) number of raids. /shrug

I am also not pleased with the amount of content we get per year for $180. $180 is a lot for a game, quite frankly, I don't think Blizzard delivers on that. For example, right now, we have almost a year with nothing but SoO + Timeless Isle (which lasted a whole of a week) and we'll have to pay extra to move on to WoD. Is that good value? Worth $180??? I don't think so.

[Sunaka]

For $15 a month, i expect more.

For $55 (expansion + 1 month) you get more content-time than most releases like AC. For $15-30 (2 months) after a tier is out, you can fully progress through it, and still likely get more content-time. You can expect all you want, but your AC example falls flat since of the 6 primary AC games, 3 are considered inferior, and their brand fatigue is even worse than CoD.

I really don't get why there's so much discussion around the question of whether or not more people can produce more and better game content.

Of course, they can.

Sure, but not drastically more.

Yes, it takes time to integrate new devs, but Blizzard had plenty of time already

How so? It's a multiple-months process to fully integrate a new team member in this context. Considering they're always hiring, I'd say they're trying.

I am also not pleased with the amount of content we get per year for $180. $180 is a lot for a game, quite frankly, I don't think Blizzard delivers on that.

Then unsub. Really. If you only want fresh content, sub at patches.

For example, right now, we have almost a year with nothing but SoO + Timeless Isle (which lasted a whole of a week) and we'll have to pay extra to move on to WoD. Is that good value? Worth $180??? I don't think so.

It's been 4 months, and even if it's a year it's still comparable to 3.3>Cata. Even 1.11>BC was 7 months, and a good chunk of BC was done long before that. Admittedly they could've split them up more, but then people would whine about IoT opning and then having to wait a couple months for ToT. They're always in a lose-lose.

[Last Starfighter]

And if you want a baby in 1 month, just hire 9 moms, right?

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Oh no, you beat me to it

Except it would be impossible to get 9 women to put out a baby in one month. Ain't happenin. More competent ppl working on a project can definitely get things done quicker. Not impossible at all.