Shame really. The Warcraft universe is something I grew up with and with WoW met many long lasting friends.
Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
181–190 of 230 posts
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Convenience features are not the issue. Sure, there are people that don't like them but there are even more that would never bother playing without them. It's a convergence of multiple factors that's destroying WoW, and not all off them is entirely in Activision Blizzards control. I cannot remember playing any games in recent history that had a community as toxic as WoWs to non veteran players. Their effectively P2W…
> not all off them is entirely in Activision Blizzards control. I cannot remember playing any games in recent history that had a community as toxic as WoWs to non veteran players. I think community toxicity is very much Activision Blizzards's fault. There are no community guidelines anywhere, griefing is explicitly allowed (almost encouraged) in World PvP, game masters are few and far between. The report system is mo…
That's a convincing argument, I never looked it like that but it does ring true.
The community still shouldn't be considered entirely on Activision Blizzard, but they haven't tried to really address the issue from their side either, so I can definitely see your point.
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#183Blizzards reputation has been going downhill since the merge with Activision. Some of my veteran WoW friends returned with the release of classic and TBC classic, but no one stayed for long. Blizzard has been destroying all of their franchises WoW - convoluted imbalanced hot mess Diablo - repetitive. Diablo immortal. Warcraft III - buggy and laggy steaming pile of undelivered promises Overwatch - imbalanced. Overwatc…
I find it a fascinating case study that some of the company’s most anticipated releases are just re releases: Diablo 2 resurrected, WoW classic, Warcraft 3 reforged. Death by a thousand lapses in game quality and you get a lot of hype about refurbished old games. Some of it is rose covered nostalgia but IMO there’s been a sea change in game design since the advent of the attention economy, pay to progress, micro tran…
It doesn't say great things about the game industry in general that remasters and rereleases are so prominent.
The best Bioware game I've played in years is Mass Effect 1 in the Legendary Edition. The best Total War game in a decade is the rerelease of Rome Total War.
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#184Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once an organization has grown to multiple layers of management the people on top will eventually become those who are good at climbing the ladder. How we choose our leaders is IMHO one of the most important problems we yet don’t really understand. It’s partly a function of how we structure our organizations.
Just trying to play devils advocate, im not sure it’s possible to do it differently. You simply can’t replicate true founder attitudes and mentality and choices with a management with stock options and fiduciary responsibility. Steve Jobs seemed to be very concerned about this and spent a lot of time trying to create an innovative organisation independent of him. What have we got since him? A smart watch and ever inc…
> ever increasing apple taxes on the App Store.
This rate was 30% since launch, right? How is it ever increasing? Apple recently reduced the fee for developers making less than $1M/year[0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/18/apple-will-cut-app-store-fee...
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#186I'm not under an illusion that it does any good, but I swore off all Blizzard products after the Blitzchung incident. It doesn't feel right giving money to a company that would side with the CCP over human rights in Hong Kong. I'd previously played Hearthstone and Overwatch, and I'd been a Blizzard fan since the original Warcraft. That happy company is dead, and something ugly is animating its corpse. I think company…
I'd rather have a western company obey the CCP enough so that they can make money in the largest nation in the world than see them give the Chicoms the middle finger and be kicked out. If they get barred from of China, Chinese gamers will just have to play games by some "Yes man" company that grovels at the feet of the CCP.
By building up a reputation in China, Blizzard would over time gain leverage to expose Chinese gamers to Western products and build a relationship that benefits everybody.
This kind of dilemma is actually something I see a lot in many situations. Someone thinks that the larger organization is wrong, so they disobey the rules and get fired. Then, some "yes man" is hired and no improvement is made. People should remember that the only way you can do good and potentially get changes to be made is to not get fired in the first place.
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was no need for inverted commas in the GGP post. Intellectual property is precisely a government-granted monopoly under specific rules. Nobody else can make a Call of Duty game: they have a monopoly on the market for Call of Duty games.
Yeah, but having a monopoly over their own IP isn’t in any way noteworthy. I took the scare quotes to mean that they had pseudo-monopoly in the broader space (WoW -> MMORPG, CoD -> console FPS). I’m not sure I agree with them, but stating that they have a monopoly over their own IPs is so obvious and uninteresting that I find it hard to believe that’s what they were going for.
It's interesting in the sense that as a consumer of CoD games, you're not getting any innovation from Activision. You're just getting a new bottle every couple of years. Compare that to Apple, where arguably you're not just getting a new bottle: if you're in the ecosystem, you're getting an M1, air pods, a watch, lidar on your phone, the opportunity to spend 3 figures on a "pencil", whatever. Very different approaches.
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just reminded me that SC2 was split up into 3 parts. I'd completely forgotten. I can't remember how they justified it at the time, but through the lens of history and their other actions it certainly looks like they thought it'd just be easy to make us pay 3 times. Either way, I enjoyed SC2 for a while but it just felt like it was missing something compared to Brood War. I never did buy the other 2 parts.
The campaign took a different focus on each parts of SC2. I personally enjoyed this, and thought it was much better than a much shorter storyline crammed into one game (or alternatively a delay of several years before release). IMO SC2 was a great success, but it feels like they are no longer giving it much love because it’s not a recurring revenue driver for them :(
Pretty sure they hated KeSPA piggybacking off their game and they hated the entire idea of eSports. They took an extremely hands-off approach on that side of things and intentionally or not did a lot to try and cripple it for SC2.
I feel like I need to share the old bnet 2.0 vs rock picture now: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/c7ft8/stone_vs_b...
This was possibly my first exposure to the situation where a major new software release looks prettier but loses so many useful features. I have fond memories of playing SC1 on custom servers, and even downloading custom chat clients to talk to friends in channels but without the game open. Bnet 2.0 completely destroyed a lot of the culture around the game, just like peer to peer matchmaking did when it replaced servers for some FPS games. The game itself was solid and despite all that did have some legs as an eSport, but it was the first time I really felt that Blizzard was changing, which was solidified with Diablo 3 and then Hearthstone. Both those games were designed with a recurring revenue stream, and I'm thinking SC2 got a little less attention because it didn't have that.
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies ignore the vast majority of political events and issues. Consider a hypothetical startup where all employees are working too many hours to keep track of current events: recent political/cultural developments will necessarily be missing from company policies and products.
Being ignorant of politics isn’t the same thing as being able to operate in that state. Imagine your hypothetical team had been (over)working on a game which was all about the “valiant mujahideen freedom fighters in Afghanistan fighting off the Soviet Union” when 9/11 happened? Or they started working with the likeness of any of Prince Andrew, Rolf Harris, Kevin Spacey, etc. before they became personae-non-grata? Jus…
Postal was published after the Columbine shooting and did well enough to warrant a sequel. I can't imagine a less justifiable premise.
The United States has large numbers of contrarians and free speech supporters - they even enjoy constitutional protections. Neither the free market nor the state obstructed Postal's success.
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#190I'm not under an illusion that it does any good, but I swore off all Blizzard products after the Blitzchung incident. It doesn't feel right giving money to a company that would side with the CCP over human rights in Hong Kong. I'd previously played Hearthstone and Overwatch, and I'd been a Blizzard fan since the original Warcraft. That happy company is dead, and something ugly is animating its corpse. I think company…
> Does anyone know why this happens?
One hardly needs to theorize; Bobby Kotick is on record saying he wanted to take the fun out of game development a couple decades ago now.
Management like him, Mitt Romney, need people generating the right statistics. Their families expect the good life.
It’s our nation state past-time to extract financial profit, to support the political choice decades ago to force the dollar down the worlds throat.