Blizzard wants to cut out World of Warcraft overwork on their workers

[FelPlague]

Think you misunderstand. A non-react youtuber will have to do a lot of research. Streamers? Dunno varies
Office work will be much more mental shit for sure. I've not worked in game development so my insight is flawed and bias as fuck I'll admit.

How is spending 8 hours a day at your computer doing research and making youtube videos (what im literally doing right fucking now)
different then spending 8 hours a day drawing/coding/designing/fixing/spreadsheeting/bookkeeping/etc.

game development is INSANELY mentally draining.

imaging spending 40-50 hours a week working as hard as you can on something
to get home and have hundreds of thousands of people say "this fucking sucks, fire the person who made this, they don't belong in the industry."

also streaming is VERY draining, you spend hours playing for viewers, talking with fans, and trying to keep things fun for the audience, you dont have the possibity to edit out 4 hours of grinding, so you have to find some way to make that fun, or do that on your off time to skip doing it on stream.

[SirCowdog]

Think you misunderstand. A non-react youtuber will have to do a lot of research. Streamers? Dunno varies
Office work will be much more mental shit for sure. I've not worked in game development so my insight is flawed and bias as fuck I'll admit.

Even a reaction streamer or Cam-girl has to do some work in order to set up their studio, get their audio and presentation quality up, etc. It may not involve as much work as someone else, but they're still presenting a product and letting the market decide if it's good enough.

What's the measure of "real" work then?

[FelPlague]

Yeah, I know we don't agree on much about videogames, but this job thing....I'm right there with you. The idea that any one job is less "real" than any other is ridiculous. You find a skill you're good at and you get paid for doing it.

Yeah when i told my family about my job, my dad was probthe closest as hes an electrical inspector, so alot of his job is driving around, entering stuff on his laptop, going onto a site, taking a long look around then driving to the next place. rest of the family was stuff like right out electrician, manager at a home depot, nurse, doctor, waiter/chef, etc.

[FelPlague]

You better not take my idea of mmo-champ says stupid shit! I'll sue!

nah that is not our kinda content.

[tripleh]

Can I ask what do you work with? And what kind of working hours do you have? Do you take breaks during the day or just burn 16h full productive days 7 days a week?

How does your company handle crunch time? You sound like you work in constant crunch environment. Have you been doing that for a long time?

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Why China though? It's not really known as software sourcing country? (if anything their laws mean you often want to keep your IP development out of the country). Care to elaborate your logic on this?

45+ hours a week, company requires breaks and lunches. Also I doubt blizz employees work 16hrs a day 7 days a week, unless there management. They claimed to have hired more programmers yet the content they released doesn't show proof of that. China or any other country that can do the work would help with development since the current dev team can't seem to handle things. Remember back in wotlk they released alot more content that had story that made sense. The current dev team is laughable/disgrace.

Also California is one of the few states that requires lunches and breaks for employees.
https://calaborlaw.com/california-me...for-employees/ If blizzard is ignoring this they can get in trouble.

[clownpenisfart]

The solution against crunch time in the video game industry is to have teams made up for the most part of experienced developers.

I work for such a company (owned by a major publisher) and I never have to do overtime unless I want to. (I am actually on vacation right now because I have accumulated a ridiculous amount of paid days off and they actually demanded that I fucking use them already)

In an industry that likes to burn people out and drive them away from game development, this is not always a given. Then you have huge idiots like EA that like to perform a bizarre self mutilation ritual whenever a project fails, firing entire teams of talented developers each time. (no wonder they can't even hack making a star wars asscreed clone, lol)

Now I hope blizzard doesn't have overtime issues on a game whose development process have been refined for the past 15 years. But if they do it probably means that they have a wee bit too many inexperienced developers and managers around the team, and/or that knowledge isn't properly shared and gets lost as people leave the team (it does seem to be the case for the design team at least - wow's tech is pretty good and solid, but the game systems design and the progression... Urgh. It's one step forward, two steps backwards from one xpack to the next.)

[MoanaLisa]

They're from California. What's crunch time work week look like? 30 hrs?

Honest answer: There have been lots of reports of 60 up to 100 hours a week as expansion launch gets within the last month or so. It depends on who you are, what you do and how your piece of the development pie looks against goals. I have no doubts that it happens at other times as well. Development on any large project usually has timelines and goals. If your personal part of a project is behind that timeline you're going to be in crunch whether the release date is a month away or a year.

You can be flip about it but that's more the rule than the exception at studios large and small.

The article linked below starts with the story of someone who went through nine months of 80-hour work weeks.

https://kotaku.com/crunch-time-why-g...urs-1704744577

By the way that article is from four years ago and here we are, still talking about how it's a problem. Frankly, it's distressing and disgusting to see people making light of this.

The solution against crunch time in the video game industry is to have teams made up for the most part of experienced developers.

That's not going to help when management plans release dates that include crunch time. Experienced developers are the ones who are complaining about this and have been for years.

[clownpenisfart]

That's not going to help when management plans release dates that include crunch time. Experienced developers are the ones who are complaining about this and have been for years.

Yeah, I misspoke. I meant experienced developers and managers.

There's an unfortunate bad culture of not caring about people in the game industry, and a lot of it is caught in a vicious circle of burning out developers (and managers) before they are able to build up the necessary experience to conduct a project properly.

Some companies are extremely professional and manage to largely avoid these problems, but you hear mostly about the pathological cases.

[MoanaLisa]

Yeah, I misspoke. I meant experienced developers and managers.

There is really zero excuses to have crunch time on a 15 years old game, especially with very formulaic expansion packs as they make in wow. They should know exactly what they're building, how long each development phase takes, they should know their tools, they should know which major production issues to anticipate, they should know their processes, they should know their velocity. This should be a very well oiled process by now.

If it isn't, there's something very wrong somewhere.

It's not always the same developers expansion after expansion and when teams expand and contract things get shaken up. They also have large teams so a bug or problem in one place can have ripple effects extend everywhere else. What you wrote seems sensible but I don't think the actual reality is quite that much on rails. Trying to overlay a 15-20 year code base is always an adventure in the unexpected.

[clownpenisfart]

It's not always the same developers expansion after expansion and when teams expand and contract things get shaken up. They also have large teams so a bug or problem in one place can have ripple effects extend everywhere else. What you wrote seems sensible but I don't think the actual reality is quite that much on rails.

I wasn't sure you were specifically talking about wow so I edited my post. Obviously in the case of a long lasting project like wow there will be some turn over, but that's also something that have to be managed. And if there is a massive amount of it from one xpack to the next to the point that the whole team is shaken up each time, then that's also wrong.

The transition from one xpack to the next is probably not that clear cut for the dev team, the work on a new xpack is probably staged with concept artists and creative team starting to work on it first while the programmers/level designers/3d artists work on content patchs for the current expansion and are then gradually moved over to the next expansion pack, with programmers and mission designers likely coming in relatively late (you don't need new tech to produce new levels except perhaps tool and rendering tech upgrades, however you need the level design to be well on its way before you start adding missions in there, and new game systems may come later depending on how they go about things).

(At least that's how we do it on the game I work on, but I doubt wow is extremely different)

[Velshin]

Found your own company and soon you will find out why. Competition is a bitch and bills keep coming every month.

Diabo 1 and 2 and pretty much most of the Blizzard North old games really says hi.

This is what I am talking about, when the mentality of the gaming company is "Quality first then money will come with it as long as the quality is good" = you get masterpiece games.


The moment the gaming company goes with the mentality of "produce money as fast as possible so other companies can't compete with us quickly go go go!" then yeah you have low quality games with loads of micro transaction and lootboxes.

[Galathir]

Did you actually read the article? I bet you didn't.
It talks about Blizzard wanting cut crunchtime. It has nothing to do with anything you posted above. And linking back to 6 month old video and even older Glassdoor reviews.. what's the point?

The point is that I won't give Blizzard a medal for saying they are trying not to abuse their employees when said employees at the same time get paid so far below industry standard that they can't live off their wages.

[Eurhetemec]

I really don't think most expansions come down to over/underwork so much as good/bad ideas at the core of them.

There was clearly a ton of development put into BFA. Levels of detail certainly comparable to Legion, even surpassing it in some regards (more music comes to mind, with them having more raid and night music this time around). But core ideas in the center that didn't jive with the playerbase like azerite armor, warfronts, and island expeditions meant players just weren't having as much fun. Especially since they made the conscious choice to prune many of the things players did like in Legion.

Cataclysm has gotten a lot of flak over the years as well, but there again you can see tons of dev work went into it. They revamped ALL OF 1-60 for crying out loud, PLUS an expansion of endgame content. They were stretched thin, and compromises certainly must've been made.

I think that overwork does play into this, though, quite heavily.

The recent revelations about Bioware and their irrational belief that "Bioware Magic" (i.e. crazy overworking at the last minute) would ensure their games came out good sort of suggest that overwork can lead directly to stuff being kind of messed up, either technically or conceptually or both.

Cataclysm is a really interesting example because technically it's well-done, but conceptually it feels like the whole thing, prior to Firelands anyway, was totally half-baked, possibly even cocaine-fuelled (in a bad way).

Uldum as a zone is a great example. If Blizzard had had time to sit down and think, and carefully considered whether theming an entire questing zone after a cheap, lazy re-enactment of an Indiana Jones movie, which also totally deprotagonizes the PC in the lamest way possible (i.e. not "cool lore characters fighting as you watch/help", which is kinda okay deprotagonization, but just making you a needless sidekick to a dull adventure), I suspect they would have come to the conclusion that that was a bad idea. In reality, I suspect that, before Cata came out, they worked out that it was a bad idea, but they were so overworked and so under pressure form redeveloping basically the entire game that there was absolutely no way they could have gone back significantly changed it.

A lot of the Cataclysm zones feel that way - not all - some are carefully developed. But a lot feel like someone wrote down a rough, undeveloped, ill-considered idea and they were like "Okay, no time to think, just GOGOGOGOGOGOGO and get it done!", and then that lead to us having a lot of really dubious zones and zone stories, both in the 1-60 and max level areas. Even many Cata quests feel that way - they often make even less sense than typical WoW quests.

Yet technically it wasn't unpolished. The dungeons and raids were overtuned initially (I say that as someone who was fine with them, but they made previously "okay" players weep), but they weren't buggy or bad-looking. Nor was it bad-looking generally. Just massively conceptually rushed.

You are right that there was a fundamental conceptual flaw, too, though. That being that it was fine to change the whole of Azeroth to this one, very specific, time in WoW's history - the Cataclysm. The original WoW had been somewhat timeless and vague, it had a setting but it wasn't tied to it. Cataclysm tied 1-60 to that specific period. I presume the assumption was that in future they'd go back and update the whole thing again for a later era, but that was a deeply flawed assumption if so. Equally if they'd had more time to consider this, they might have worked out that this hyper-specific theme-ing wasn't a great plan...

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They claimed to have hired more programmers yet the content they released doesn't show proof of that. China or any other country that can do the work would help with development since the current dev team can't seem to handle things.

It's just not that simple, and remarkable how many people who know really nothing about software development, especially online games, think that it is.

If it was easy and effective to outsource coding to China or the like, do you think any company would not be doing it? Because that's just irrational. Companies want profits. If outsourcing brings profits, they'll go for it.

In reality, though, after the outsourcing boom of about 2004-2014, it's become increasingly obvious that outsourcing, especially in the context of developing games, does not reliably enhance actual profitability, nor allow you to put out more and better content. There are places it works pretty well - animation is one of them. But WoW's issues are not some sort of massive programmer shortage.

For them to have quality content, they need good writers, good designers, and good people scripting and implementing the quests (which is not the same as programming), and those last group need to understand the designers on a pretty deep level (indeed many of them are effectively designers or designers-in-training). None of that can be outsourced to China or Pakistan or Singapore or the like effectively. What could probably be outsourced would be cutscenes. If your main criticism of Blizzard is that there aren't enough cutscenes and they aren't high enough quality, then you can say that more outsourcing might help there. Blizzard have their own teams for this, and they are extremely busy, and it could be argued that Blizzard don't actually need them. But that's the only place where your argument really would make sense.

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Yeah, I misspoke. I meant experienced developers and managers.

There's an unfortunate bad culture of not caring about people in the game industry, and a lot of it is caught in a vicious circle of burning out developers (and managers) before they are able to build up the necessary experience to conduct a project properly.

Some companies are extremely professional and manage to largely avoid these problems, but you hear mostly about the pathological cases.

Indeed, one big problem in game development, which has been around since the 1990s at the very least, is that the vast majority of managers and directors are simply designers/programmers/artists of various kinds who have been promoted to that position because they have "experience" (but not in managing), and if they didn't get promoted and thus get a big salary bump, would have gone elsewhere. This means that you're really rolling the dice on whether they will be good and reasonable managers. Many of them have no real management experience when they enter the role, and a lot of them have an ethos which is incompatible with good, modern management practices, because they like working themselves hard, so why not work everyone as hard as they did, eh? Or worse they just lack the basic project management or interpersonal skills to be a good manager, but it was promotion or they left, so promotion it was.

This isn't a problem that only the game industry has, but it's a lot worse there. And yet when you do bring in people who trained managers, who have experience managing, and who are good at it, they're often sneered at by industry professionals because they aren't "part of the gang" (this is far less true in 2019 than it was in 2004, though).

[Yunru]

Found this image on internet today:
On May 9th, 2019, journalist Eoin Higgins posted a picture of anti-union flyer allegedly created by Delta Airlines, which encourages employees to spend the money they would spend on union dues to instead purchase a video game system with "the latest hits.



Now i wonder if acti-blizzard may use similar employie anti-union propaganda. Or they are already using those.
Or any other gaming studio.

[clownpenisfart]

Found this image on internet today:
On May 9th, 2019, journalist Eoin Higgins posted a picture of anti-union flyer allegedly created by Delta Airlines, which encourages employees to spend the money they would spend on union dues to instead purchase a video game system with "the latest hits.

(pic)

Now i wonder if acti-blizzard may use similar employie anti-union propaganda. Or they are already using those.
Or any other gaming studio.

American companies always seem scared shitless by unions. How dare the peons assert their rights!

In the video game industry though, the value of a company mostly comes from the employees, much more so than from technology or from intellectual property. The later two won't do you any good if you don't have skilled and experienced employees to build great games with it (see how EA has the exclusive rights for one of the strongest IPs for video games (star wars) and can't manage to make anything of it).

If you treat your employees like shit in the game industry, you are harming yourself in the long term.

[rda]

I don't think the quality of Blizzard games is going down due to overwork. I don't doubt that crunches happen, but they happen in all game companies. There are just way bigger factors here (lack of vision is a big one).

I don't think the quality of Blizzard games will go up significantly if they reduce crunches.

I don't really understand the point of the poll - everyone is against crunches, that's a lowball question. It is unclear how serious Blizzard is regarding removing them - they might be somewhat serious, trying to bolster their dev efforts and trying to help morale, they might not, who knows. Good luck to them if they are. But in the end, I don't think this will have much of an effect. I mean, it's still good, do it, whatever, but that just isn't where most of the problems are.

[Grevmak]

Whether or not I agree with certain Design decisions, the amount of work put into the game or other things, making your workers either work more than 50 hours a week or get fired is not a decision I wish to support.

I'm glad Blizz isn't supportive of this, as an interview given by GGG a short while ago showed that even with insane schedules like Path of Exile's you can make it with quality work over just pumping out insane amounts of hours. Your workers will just be burned out after a while anyway, screw that.

I think WoW and other Blizzard games are going in the wrong direction, sure, but overwork isn't one of the reasons I had in mind. It's mostly a disconnect between the playerbase and the devs; They wanna make a game for dozens of types of players and by that they are making a game few wanna play.

Like, who honestly heard about Warfronts and thought "This sounds cohesive and fun!"? I thought it sounded weird, thrown together and all over the place.

It turned out to be LFR but different, awarding powerful gear for AFK players. Yay. Just what the game needed more of.

[clownpenisfart]

I don't doubt that crunches happen, but they happen in all game companies.

There's crunch and there's crunch. There are game companies where whatever crunch period happens is extremely mild compared to others.

Bad management like to shrug insane crunch time off as a being a fact of life in the game industry, but having worked both for companies like that and for a company that manages to plan things sufficiently in advance, where people know not to overextend, where features are always cut or pushed back to a future patch as needed, and where were serenely finish up bug fixing a good month before the game (or content patch) is due to go live, I can tell you that there is nothing inherent to the video game industry that justifies crunch time. It just doesn't have to be that way.

As a matter of fact, the company I currently work at is also making the biggest and most successful game of all the games I worked on. Most other companies I worked for in the past where projects always ended up as a typical crunch time clown show are either defunct or moribund. That's not a coincidence either.

[Isilarya]

No it wouldn't lol.

Other games don't have to timegate a 10 minute story by 2 weeks or a month. Nor should Blizzard.

We just got the end of Stormbloods story, it was definitely timegated too. If you look at what was in the broken up patches that slowly released the story you definitely could have just had most of that at ship but they planned to release it over time to keep player engagement up. Every game is guilty of this crap.

[Eleccybubb]

We just got the end of Stormbloods story, it was definitely timegated too. If you look at what was in the broken up patches that slowly released the story you definitely could have just had most of that at ship but they planned to release it over time to keep player engagement up. Every game is guilty of this crap.

Story has always been patch content in that game. Was not timegated at all.

Stop spreading misinformation that it's guilty of the same thing WoW is doing when it's not please. And what FF14s story has to do with this thread is irrelevant so I'm not going to continue this any further in this thread about other games because it's completely off topic.

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I don't think the quality of Blizzard games is going down due to overwork. I don't doubt that crunches happen, but they happen in all game companies. There are just way bigger factors here (lack of vision is a big one).

I don't think the quality of Blizzard games will go up significantly if they reduce crunches.

I don't really understand the point of the poll - everyone is against crunches, that's a lowball question. It is unclear how serious Blizzard is regarding removing them - they might be somewhat serious, trying to bolster their dev efforts and trying to help morale, they might not, who knows. Good luck to them if they are. But in the end, I don't think this will have much of an effect. I mean, it's still good, do it, whatever, but that just isn't where most of the problems are.

Exactly. Highly doubt being overworked is the reason for WoWs current state. Nor would it improve it.