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

[Chickat]

It's actually proven that workers in a typical 40 hour week are more productive than workers in crunch. Even if that's not the case, these are just video games and people come first. #downwithcrunch

[Xemioza]

I heard that its not guaranteed in USA to get 21/26 days of holiday at work, is it true ?

[mardathkul]

I heard that its not guaranteed in USA to get 21/26 days of holiday at work, is it true ?

companies aren't legally required to give any vacation days.

[Kumorii]

Blizzard keeps making more Islands and they're iterating on Warfronts with a heroic mode. Pretty sure they have a better idea of what % of players do content than Joe Shmoe on MMO-champ or YouTube.

Doubt they'll carry over to the next expansion, because they're tied pretty heavily to BfA, but that doesn't mean anything. People loved class halls, after all, and we don't have those in BfA.

They can easily reuse the design for them in future expansions. Hopefully both islands and warfronts are things that will grow better with time if done right.

[Soon-TM]

Your bias is showing again. Might want to work on that. Is it painful, lurking around on forums all day just to insult a company that you feel has personally betrayed you for not being exactly what you want it to be?

Are you done with your ad hominem, or are you going to provide "constructive" posts, as you like to preach?

On topic: the less overtime, the better for workers. I just hope that this guy's words are true instead of mere PR bullcrap.

Still, OP provided an interesting read, kudos

[seleri]

They can easily reuse the design for them in future expansions. Hopefully both islands and warfronts are things that will grow better with time if done right.

Yeah, I don't doubt that we'll see them evolve in some way. Just like how islands are a different take on MoP scenarios. I just doubt we'll see them exactly as is and called "island expeditions" and "warfronts". They appeal to casuals and casuals pay the bills. If I had to guess, I'd say we'll see "islands" where the race aspect is the hard mode instead of standard.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

They can easily reuse the design for them in future expansions. Hopefully both islands and warfronts are things that will grow better with time if done right.

I’m really hoping they keep them going but maybe change Azerite to just gold or something. If islands were a source of gold and they dropped the Azerite grind it would be amazing.

[FelPlague]

WoW had new systems, new ways to play for years after release and it made the game grow to heights no MMO or game had ever seen at the time. Keeping true to the core while at the same time adding new features that don't gate, frustrate or ruin player experiences is absolutely possible and they did it in the past.

All their new ideas are now is RNG.

Mind explaining how all their new ideas are RNG?
cause azerite gear is not RNG
warmode is not RNG
warfronts are not RNG
I guess islands could be RNG but they are RNG cosmetic rewards, which have always been a thing in the game.
if you have more that are not BFA specific feel free.

also idk if you know but the game has ALWAYS been filled with gated content
did you know tbc introduced daily quests to gain reps, making rep gains time gated
they also made heroic dungeons, which meant doing dungeons to get great gear was now daily locked, as you could only do them once a day.
so unlike vanilla were you could do a dungeon all day, you can now only do it once a day, gating the time to get dungeon gear.

hell they have had gated content since vanilla, raids were locked to specific lockouts that reset after some time for a reason...

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They can easily reuse the design for them in future expansions. Hopefully both islands and warfronts are things that will grow better with time if done right.

warfronts are fine, and actuallty enjoyable if they were difficult, during the initial testing there was times where they were harder since alot of people were undergeared. and it was overtuned, it was difficult.
so heroic warfronts might be pretty good.

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I’m really hoping they keep them going but maybe change Azerite to just gold or something. If islands were a source of gold and they dropped the Azerite grind it would be amazing.

That would be horrible, cause then they would fill up with bots.
i am fine with them as they are now, dubloons for the dubloon vendor
azerite
and mounts, toys, pets, and mogs.

issue with having bots in instanced content is then you dont have players reporting them as often, i ran into a bot a few weeks back that was like 30 boomkins runnning around thundle isle killing stuff and looting.
reported and i suppose banned cause they dissapeared with the banwave of model changers

[Lorgar Aurelian]

That would be horrible, cause then they would fill up with bots.
i am fine with them as they are now, dubloons for the dubloon vendor
azerite
and mounts, toys, pets, and mogs.

issue with having bots in instanced content is then you dont have players reporting them as often, i ran into a bot a few weeks back that was like 30 boomkins runnning around thundle isle killing stuff and looting.
reported and i suppose banned cause they dissapeared with the banwave of model changers

Ah I hadn’t thought of that, they Proabbly shouldn’t be gold. An expanded doubloon vender seems like a good idea.

[enigma77]

Back in the old days they used to work themselves nearly to death and the game was good!

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Blizzard is already pretty generous I think with vacations. But reducing workload should always be welcome.

[rrayy]

I am going to say it now, Ion is going to get "some" slack now that a new name has been put out there that brought in "gated content"

Blood is in the water now.

Edit" I will say this, its not the lack of work harder or faster. Its the lack of effort and lack of creativity that is hurting WoW. If a team can not create 8.1 from Launch day to 8.1 release which was 4 months with most of it gated. 8.2 from 8.1 being 6 months or so. None of that is demanding, that is just unorganized

I love how people claim that the developers aren't giving any effort. "I don't like the game therefore there is no effort being made". That is such BS.

[FelPlague]

Ah I hadn’t thought of that, they Proabbly shouldn’t be gold. An expanded doubloon vender seems like a good idea.

Yeah more stuff added to the dubloon vendor would be good, or make the rep tokens cost far less, cause they cost way too much.

[Eleccybubb]

WoW had new systems, new ways to play for years after release and it made the game grow to heights no MMO or game had ever seen at the time. Keeping true to the core while at the same time adding new features that don't gate, frustrate or ruin player experiences is absolutely possible and they did it in the past.

All their new ideas are now is RNG.

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Don't be that way. You know it for a fact and you know players dislike them. Go look at google trends for WoW if you want an interest comparison in WoW. Those features are lacking extremely and It sucks because I was excited for two of them.

You're just in denial man. I don't know anyone who could honest to god like Azerite without just saying it to be an opposing opinion. What does Azerite do that adds enjoyment?

Yep. RNG is everywhere in this bloody game.

It's irritating. And it's hurting them by doing things like that.

Just once I'd like to see something progression wise that has no RNG tied to it outside of "drop %" if it's a piece of loot.

[Hammerschlag]

Thats just a myth. Everyone is working for paycheck, enjoying it is just a bonus.
What you are describing is just bunch of boems who are happy with their creation alone, nothing else matters. People like that exist only in unhcr field teams.

I very much disagree, especially in regards to the founding of Blizzard Entertainment and the creation of World of Warcraft.

[Eleccybubb]

I very much disagree, especially in regards to the founding of Blizzard Entertainment and the creation of World of Warcraft.

Yeah from learning about the founding it looked like the original guard had a proper passion for games and were the kind of people sat there maybe having a game of D&D now and then after hours.

Nowadays within Blizzard its all corporate and you got Activision telling them to cut costs and go aggressive on profit making even if it means sacrificing their integrity, passion and drive.

[Hammerschlag]

Yeah from learning about the founding it looked like the original guard had a proper passion for games and were the kind of people sat there maybe having a game of D&D now and then after hours.

Nowadays within Blizzard its all corporate and you got Activision telling them to cut costs and go aggressive on profit making even if it means sacrificing their integrity, passion and drive.

Agreed, this is the point I was trying to make.

[Alvito]

Any company worth it's salt doesn't want to have a shortage or excess of employees. Unfortunately it isn't very easy to make these things happen. People want time off, sickness, vacations, family events and other random parts of life happen pulling people out of the office. On the workload side of things you have an ebb and flow of work that needs to be done at a company like Blizzard no two days are going to be carbon copies of each other so you will have people being over and under worked. When you want people that specialize in certain fields to work for you part of the trade off of their expertise is they are locked into certain jobs. You could try to have a jack of all trades work and do many things, but they almost certainly wont excel at any of them. Now the kicker is if people on here had to pay an extra dollar much less several to make sure employees got time off they would lose their shit and complain about Blizzard charging too much.

[MoanaLisa]

Nowadays within Blizzard its all corporate and you got Activision telling them to cut costs and go aggressive on profit making even if it means sacrificing their integrity, passion and drive.

The department that took the biggest hit by the Blizzard layoffs was IT, which lost 41 employees. Marketing and Live Experiences lost 29 employees each, followed by a global insight department. The rest of those impacted were spread across a variety of departments including publishing, quality assurance, mobile, marketing, customer service, finance, and Battle.Net.

Over the course of 2019, we plan to increase the number of developers working on our key franchises by approximately 20%, ultimately allowing us to put even more content into the hands of existing and new fans around the world.

Source

All those non-developers that were laid off have everything to do with passion, integrity and drive on the part of the developers and designers where there was no cost-cutting at all and promises of budgets being expanded.

[Alvito]

Blizzard keeps making more Islands and they're iterating on Warfronts with a heroic mode. Pretty sure they have a better idea of what % of players do content than Joe Shmoe on MMO-champ or YouTube.

Doubt they'll carry over to the next expansion, because they're tied pretty heavily to BfA, but that doesn't mean anything. People loved class halls, after all, and we don't have those in BfA.

I do think Blizzard often confuses participation with people liking content. Legion invasions are a good example. They weren't exactly compelling game play, but they did offer good gear, ap, rep & resources for many alts, new 110 characters and lower gear characters. For characters below the level cap they gave you a ton of xp for 10 to 30 minutes time with the same AP, rep and resources benefiting you. Having some options for quick content is good something that is only done for the reward not for the game play itself. Once the bulk of the game becomes like that you don't have any reason to keep on going though. People are willing to do some chores to progress their characters and allow them to do the content they really want to do, once the game just turns into a series of chores people opt out.