Stop flipping tables about Dev Q&A

[Soon-TM]

I, for one, don't buy OP's appeal to authority. I frankly don't care at all about what is IH saying, the stuff he does not talk about is far more interesting. But I get it, the guy has to protect his (very well paid) job, so if his boss(es) tell him to spout trivialities or outright nonsense in front of the fans, he complies. I've been following IH's statements for a couple of years already, and he never had anything of value to say except maybe "leveling isn't in a good spot" or "legendaries aren't perfect".

I'd love to hear him talk about the reasons that brought him to saturate the game with RNG mechanics. Or to timegate the hell out of new content (Broken Shore anyone?). Or how they deal with outsourcing, since every new patch breaks the game. He is a terrible communicator at best, and a corporate zombie at worst. Imo he should have stayed designing raids, which he rocks at.

And since OP didn't bother to provide a single example in his essay, his post comes to me as pretentious and utterly condescending. I see why he likes IH.

[Swalload]

Only ones flipping tables are the fanboys staring at the truth that negative nancies have been sharing since the start of Legion. It's valid critique and he just casually dismissed it like any casino owner with a good scheme going would.

Yes, his good scheme is the company is focusing on the next xpack that will be enjoyed for longer than the amount of time left for Legion. Return on investment.

And no, he can't talk about the next xpack yet. That's not how it works, but this is something you don't know about. So please, inform yourself.

[Puri]

Keeeeep going, you're literally just hearing what you want to hear to feel offended. He said it would be fine if all legendaries were utility. Which is perfectly fine with what you quoted from him. The system itself is fine, the items are not, but he won't say that, he's being polite, maybe too polite, and people like you are offended by that. You just want him to say "some people fucked up and made retarded items". Then you would be satisfied to hear that but in the end it wouldn't change anything, they can't just click a button that transform everything into a utility legendary.

I don't know what you are talking about, I am talking about the interviev excerpts that are written down on the frontpage of mmo champion. There is not a single mentioning of the "if all legendaries were utility" you keep throwing around all the time.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

The irony of this post....holy crap!

BTW, I want to thank everyone who's taking the time to break down the details of why what I said about toast is an example of what's going on in the game right now. There are some pretty serious flaws with the game, and it seems like Blizzard is hellbent on ignoring the feedback from the players despite the flaws being pretty well outlined by number-crunchers and math-wizards.

Nothing ironic about it. You thinking so, pretty much proves what I was trying to say.
Ion is not thinking about the interests of the individual. He and the powers that be are making a video game that people will play and will continue to play for many years.

The flaws are just opinions. On paper, very few of them are things that need to be fixed. The community just needs to adjust.

Right now, the biggest flaw is people complaining and then misquoting people correcting them.
Ironic.

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Only ones flipping tables are the fanboys staring at the truth that negative nancies have been sharing since the start of Legion. It's valid critique and he just casually dismissed it like any casino owner with a good scheme going would.

That's actually a pretty solid comparison.
The gamble RNG is what is keeping this game alive though. People don't seem to understand that.
You can act like idiots all you want, but titanforging, legendaries, and AP keep people playing. Many of them do it begrudgingly, but they are playing and that is healthy for the game.

Ion is right to dismiss those who disagree, because they are being selfish and only want things as easy and fast as possible.
This does not provide cohesion with the community.

[Fabinas]

I, for one, don't buy OP's appeal to authority. I frankly don't care at all about what is IH saying, the stuff he does not talk about is far more interesting. But I get it, the guy has to protect his (very well paid) job, so if his boss(es) tell him to spout trivialities or outright nonsense in front of the fans, he complies. I've been following IH's statements for a couple of years already, and he never had anything of value to say except maybe "leveling isn't in a good spot" or "legendaries aren't perfect".

I'd love to hear him talk about the reasons that brought him to saturate the game with RNG mechanics. Or to timegate the hell out of new content (Broken Shore anyone?). Or how they deal with outsourcing, since every new patch breaks the game. He is a terrible communicator at best, and a corporate zombie at worst. Imo he should have stayed designing raids, which he rocks at.

And since OP didn't bother to provide a single example in his essay, his post comes to me as pretentious and utterly condescending. I see why he likes IH.

Thank you.

[Queen of Hamsters]

I must be out of the loop, exactly what are people complaining about in WoW right now?

The question is, what are some people not complaining about in regards to WoW...
Alas, the main things right now seems to be the RNG systems implemented with Legion (which I happen to dislike too), coupled with this attitude spawned since WoD where people hate the game for being designed around the idea that people should login to progress? And this reaction those same people have when someone high up doesn't acknowledge the infinite, deep and EDGY suffering those individuals experience in playing this game...

Or something like that.

[Fabinas]

Nothing ironic about it. You thinking so, pretty much proves what I was trying to say.
Ion is not thinking about the interests of the individual. He and the powers that be are making a video game that people will play and will continue to play for many years.

The flaws are just opinions. On paper, very few of them are things that need to be fixed. The community just needs to adjust.

Right now, the biggest flaw is people complaining and then misquoting people correcting them.
Ironic.

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That's actually a pretty solid comparison.
The gamble RNG is what is keeping this game alive though. People don't seem to understand that.
You can act like idiots all you want, but titanforging, legendaries, and AP keep people playing. Many of them do it begrudgingly, but they are playing and that is healthy for the game.

Ion is right to dismiss those who disagree, because they are being selfish and only want things as easy and fast as possible.
This does not provide cohesion with the community.

Another autistic fanboy post. Really your argument is "...titanforging, legendaries, and AP keep people playing. Many of them do it begrudgingly, but they are playing and that is healthy for the game."?

It's like saying : "...roullete, black jack and coin machines keep people playing. Many of them do it to lower their money losses, but they are playing and that is healthy for the casino"
Where's the FUN in this design? Oh, you don't care, anyway. You just want stream views for your silly tube channel.

[MoanaLisa]

You don't have to be a master chef to know when the toast is burnt. :/

That response assumes that some subjective thing you don't care for is objectively wrong. That's a tautology.

I only know what things I like and dislike. I don't know Blizzard's goals for specific items and classes at the macro level.

Balance is mostly a gloss anyway and is based on raid performance for PVE which is one metric but not the one I might use. But that's also a developer choice.

[Silver Forte]

People are entitled babies. Two nights ago I was at Hardee's and a woman had finished her order at the drive-through. She stopped her car about 5 ft further ahead of the window after she was serviced. No reason for it, I guess she was checking her food. A car behind her was waiting on her to move and after a while, honked their horn to let them know to get out of the fucking way so they could go about their business. The woman who refused to move got out of her car and started a physical fight with the woman who honked her horn, then got her ass beat when reality set in and she realized two things:

1) Nobody owes her anything and she does not actually have the right to do whatever she wants even though she thinks she does

2) A reality check can be painful once someone finally comes along and stops her entitled, loud behavior in its tracks


Gamers are like this. They bitch and moan and act like everything is owed to them and if they don't get what they want, they pitch a fit like babies. Society is too pampered. Some people barely have more important shit to complain about than something being added/removed/tweaked from a video game they play enough so that they actually either forget or don't care that the person they're yelling at on the other side of the internet is a human being. People look pathetic when they get up in arms about dumb shit like this.

[Tradu]

That's great and all, but when they make a decision, players tell them it's stupid, they do it anyway, it ends up bad and then make it seem like nobody told them, that's on them. And that's what a lot of Legion's issues have been. They were told in alpha/beta, they decide not to listen to that feedback, then a year later they make those changes and then pretend they came up with it all on their own.
Then again, people should know what to expect from the Q&As by now. It's going to be an hour or however long it is of Ion defending everything they've done and telling players they're wrong, essentially.

[yyop]

I r game dev so I luv game

Ur not game dev so ur stupid and suk

Okay.

[Raziella]

It's undeniable that the RNG monster is keeping people logged in longer, but to say that's "good" for the game I don't feel is accurate.
It's good for Blizzard to be able to report to their shareholders, but it leads to a more negative sort of experience in game, for many reasons. It leads to bad morale for the playerbase that's having to grind out repetitious content for a slim *chance* of reward, instead of actually giving them something to work towards to feel actually rewarded. And, as in a job, that sort of thing doesn't make for a good environment to be in.

Having the grind be rewarding instead of a slot machine was a MUCH better system.

And either unlock flying at max level before moving the players into a new no-fly zone, or have the Pathfinder grind and leave flying in the rest of the expansion. Much like WoD (and legendaries, and paragon boxes, and titanforging,) Pathfinder was a unfun grind that didn't at all feel rewarding.

[Swalload]

I, for one, don't buy OP's appeal to authority. I frankly don't care at all about what is IH saying, the stuff he does not talk about is far more interesting. But I get it, the guy has to protect his (very well paid) job, so if his boss(es) tell him to spout trivialities or outright nonsense in front of the fans, he complies. I've been following IH's statements for a couple of years already, and he never had anything of value to say except maybe "leveling isn't in a good spot" or "legendaries aren't perfect".

I'd love to hear him talk about the reasons that brought him to saturate the game with RNG mechanics. Or to timegate the hell out of new content (Broken Shore anyone?). Or how they deal with outsourcing, since every new patch breaks the game. He is a terrible communicator at best, and a corporate zombie at worst. Imo he should have stayed designing raids, which he rocks at.

And since OP didn't bother to provide a single example in his essay, his post comes to me as pretentious and utterly condescending. I see why he likes IH.

Stay wrong, stay stupid, refuse to learn, stay ignorant, pollute the community, accomplish nothing.

If you would go inform yourself you would see that what I said makes sense. You're literally just someone who doesn't want to better himself for anything at all and feels offended by the first person who says something against your wrong and biased belief.

That being said, I completely agree that Ion is a bad communicator and what he says is corporate as fuck. But what you're looking for is career suicide and straight up franchise destruction, he can't just say "yup, what we made sucks ass". You wouldn't do that either if you were in his shoes. Because you would love your job and the people you work with, you know mistakes were made but no one gains anything by saying it out loud publicly.
And even if he does, what next?

"Yeah the class balancing is messed up and the overpowered legendaries are a pain in the ass in all of this. So what we're gonna do, since you guys ask for it, is work on more class balancing right now and modify the legendaries so they're more on equal."

Would that make you happy? He admits what was wrong and offers a solution. Sounds great, right?

Now let's see what is not said:
Making people work on more balancing for classes and items right now most likely mean pulling people away from their work on the next xpack, obviously lowering its quality. But whiny bitches will get the balancing they want sooner. How much sooner? That task will take probably another 4 months, and some other things will be wrong and they'll readjust for another 2 months. In the end there will be like 4 months left to enjoy this new balancing before the next xpack (which wont be as good as it should be cuz less work has been done on it since people asked for changes NOW). And even then, there's good chances that this new balancing wont be perfect, people will still complain even if it's better, someone's spec is still 1% less than his neighbor and he's jealous as fuck and cant be mature about it so he makes a forum post about it.

So to SHOW that they listen to feedback you want them to cripple the next xpack in a futile attempt to balance stuff that makes people happy so they can enjoy a slightly better version of Legion for the last few months that are the most meaningless part of the xpack's duration?

This is how it works in the gaming industry and the return on investment is definitely not worth it. And no, he doesn't have to say "we hear you but we can't make changes right now" cuz then people would ask WHY CAN'T YOU CHANGE IT NAAAAAAAOOO!?!?! And the only acceptable answer would be to reveal what they are doing instead on the next xpack which is not announced so he can't talk about it.
Because. That's. How. It. Works.

[Tradu]

Stay wrong, stay stupid, refuse to learn, stay ignorant, pollute the community, accomplish nothing.

If you would go inform yourself you would see that what I said makes sense. You're literally just someone who doesn't want to better himself for anything at all and feels offended by the first person who says something against your wrong and biased belief.

That being said, I completely agree that Ion is a bad communicator and what he says is corporate as fuck. But what you're looking for is career suicide and straight up franchise destruction, he can't just say "yup, what we made sucks ass". You wouldn't do that either if you were in his shoes. Because you would love your job and the people you work with, you know mistakes were made but no one gains anything by saying it out loud publicly.
And even if he does, what next?

"Yeah the class balancing is messed up and the overpowered legendaries are a pain in the ass in all of this. So what we're gonna do, since you guys ask for it, is work on more class balancing right now and modify the legendaries so they're more on equal."

Would that make you happy? He admits what was wrong and offers a solution. Sounds great, right?

Now let's see what is not said:
Making people work on more balancing for classes and items right now most likely mean pulling people away from their work on the next xpack, obviously lowering its quality. But whiny bitches will get the balancing they want sooner. How much sooner? That task will take probably another 4 months, and some other things will be wrong and they'll readjust for another 2 months. In the end there will be like 4 months left to enjoy this new balancing before the next xpack (which wont be as good as it should be cuz less work has been done on it since people asked for changes NOW). And even then, there's good chances that this new balancing wont be perfect, people will still complain even if it's better, someone's spec is still 1% less than his neighbor and he's jealous as fuck and cant be mature about it so he makes a forum post about it.

So to SHOW that they listen to feedback you want them to cripple the next xpack in a futile attempt to balance stuff that makes people happy so they can enjoy a slightly better version of Legion for the last few months that are the most meaningless part of the xpack's duration?

This is how it works in the gaming industry and the return on investment is definitely not worth it. And no, he doesn't have to say "we hear you but we can't make changes right now" cuz then people would ask WHY CAN'T YOU CHANGE IT NAAAAAAAOOO!?!?! And the only acceptable answer would be to reveal what they are doing instead on the next xpack which is not announced so he can't talk about it.
Because. That's. How. It. Works.

So maybe listen to feedback in the first place so the system doesn't end up shit. The problems Legion has are entirely on Blizzard for ignoring tons of feedback starting nearly 2 years ago in alpha. None of it is surprising in the slightest. Or they could set up the dev team similar to how Riot does it, where they have one part of the team working on balancing/fixing the live game and another working on new content, that way fixing mistakes doesn't make the "next expansion" worse. It's not like Blizzard can't afford to hire more people.

[Swalload]

People are entitled babies. Two nights ago I was at Hardee's and a woman had finished her order at the drive-through. She stopped her car about 5 ft further ahead of the window after she was serviced. No reason for it, I guess she was checking her food. A car behind her was waiting on her to move and after a while, honked their horn to let them know to get out of the fucking way so they could go about their business. The woman who refused to move got out of her car and started a physical fight with the woman who honked her horn, then got her ass beat when reality set in and she realized two things:

1) Nobody owes her anything and she does not actually have the right to do whatever she wants even though she thinks she does

2) A reality check can be painful once someone finally comes along and stops her entitled, loud behavior in its tracks


Gamers are like this. They bitch and moan and act like everything is owed to them and if they don't get what they want, they pitch a fit like babies. Society is too pampered. Some people barely have more important shit to complain about than something being added/removed/tweaked from a video game they play enough so that they actually either forget or don't care that the person they're yelling at on the other side of the internet is a human being. People look pathetic when they get up in arms about dumb shit like this.

Amen brother, let's have a beer sometime.

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I r game dev so I luv game

Ur not game dev so ur stupid and suk

Okay.

Hey let's all be offended together instead of thinking things through.

[MoanaLisa]

It's undeniable that the RNG monster is keeping people logged in longer, but to say that's "good" for the game I don't feel is accurate.
It's good for Blizzard to be able to report to their shareholders, but it leads to a more negative sort of experience in game, for many reasons.

Blizzard's business objective for the game is keeping people logged in and playing. Your personal feelings don't really enter into the calculation. If they do X and player engagement metrics rise they've done a good thing. It's as simple as that.

If your "more positive experience in game" leads to less engagement overall then they have done something wrong.

The issue is wanting Blizzard to value individual player advice over their own metrics. On any given issue during beta or after the game is implemented there will be a variety of different points of view represented. Many of these will run against the goals of the design or be directly contradictory to each other. Someone is going to feel like they weren't listened to. Game has several million players and a relatively noisy audience that rarely agrees on anything at all.

This is just simply a fact.

[Lightbull]

I've come to terms with the fact that players are whiny bitches when things don't go their way. Just telling them to "stop doing X" isn't going to help, you can't reason with them.

[Tradu]

Blizzard's business objective for the game is keeping people logged in and playing. Your personal feelings don't really enter into the calculation. If they do X and player engagement metrics rise they've done a good thing. It's as simple as that.

If your "more positive experience in game" leads to less engagement overall then they have done something wrong.

The issue is wanting Blizzard to value individual player advice over their own metrics. On any given issue during beta or after the game is implemented there will be a variety of different points of view represented. Many of these will run against the goals of the design or be directly contradictory to each other. Someone is going to feel like they weren't listened to. Game has several million players and a relatively noisy audience that rarely agrees on anything at all.

This is just simply a fact.

No, their business objective is to keep people subscribed, hence why drip feeding content in each Legion patch makes sense from a business perspective. And just because participation in some area of the game is high doesn't mean what they did is good, it might just be a mandatory thing that everybody has to do, even if they'd rather not, because the rewards are too great to pass on. This, to their credit, is something they've to some extent admitted as well, that looking purely at participation is a bad idea.

[Swalload]

So maybe listen to feedback in the first place so the system doesn't end up shit. The problems Legion has are entirely on Blizzard for ignoring tons of feedback starting nearly 2 years ago in alpha. None of it is surprising in the slightest.

Sure that's a valid point for this subject, I don't disagree. I was trying to make a situation about this subject cuz that's the big flame around here but there's a lot more shit in this fire, people complaining about literally anything. They can't just do every single thing people ask either, otherwise we would end up with rogues who never come out of stealth and the next week rogues with no stealth. They have to make decisions and yeah sometimes it's the wrong one. A giant system was built around it and now is not the right time to fix it cuz it takes longer than what people think so it's not worth it, might as well just make the next xpack better instead.

[Tradu]

Sure that's a valid point for this subject, I don't disagree. I was trying to make a situation about this subject cuz that's the big flame around here but there's a lot more shit in this fire, people complaining about literally anything. They can't just do every single thing people ask either, otherwise we would end up with rogues who never come out of stealth and the next week rogues with no stealth. They have to make decisions and yeah sometimes it's the wrong one. A giant system was built around it and now is not the right time to fix it cuz it takes longer than what people think so it's not worth it, might as well just make the next xpack better instead.

Sure, and I hope they do make it better, which to me includes getting better at listening to feedback from people who have a history of being right(not necessarily me, there's plenty of smarter people who have been giving feedback and have been ignored/told they're wrong, especially during WoD/Legion, to the point where a lot of them just gave up on it), rather than waiting for months and months with the mistake already being live before making any changes(and even then they have a tendency to make a different change than what was suggested, seemingly just to make sure it's THEIR idea they use rather than something somebody else suggested)