World of Warcraft: Current Year

BoozeCube

BoozeCube

Von Clippowicz
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Ukerric said:
Get ready for the next Pet Battles: The Future of the Warcraft Franchise on Mobile - Is Warcraft: GO Happening? (Speculation)
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Was nice knowing you Bliz

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McCheese

McCheese

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I love pet battles, but I hate leaving my house. This sucks.
 
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a c i d.f l y

a c i d.f l y

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McCheese said:
I love pet battles, but I hate leaving my house. This sucks.
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There's honestly no reason pet battling hasn't been implemented as a mobile game. PVP, random battles, pet shop. That'd be the only reason I'd ever play it, cuz I wouldn't fuck with it when actually logged in or sitting at my master race desktop that could do a million other things, like browse memes in 4K.
 
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TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Ukerric said:
Get ready for the next Pet Battles: The Future of the Warcraft Franchise on Mobile - Is Warcraft: GO Happening? (Speculation)
Click to expand...

I mean, it sucks but it makes sense... unfortunately. Shitty mobile games literally bale money. Trafficking cocaine Pablo Escobar style makes less cash than fucking Monster Strike.

Just contemplate that a moment.

I can't stand any mobile game. They're all the same shit. Here's some mildly entertaining garbage. Then it cranks up the tedium... unless you give us $0.50 every single day. Then it ramps up to $5 a day and you're all. Well that's not even a pint at the pub during happy hour. Next its $30 a week... on and on it goes.
 
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cabbitcabbit

cabbitcabbit

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Just wait until next year when you try to run a M+ dungeon and get a “You’ve run out of action points for the day! Would you like to buy 5 more for 1 Murloc coin?”
 
xzi

xzi

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Unlike Diablo, pet battle mobile is exactly what a lot of people have wanted for a long time. I'm indifferent, unless I can level up my pets ingame with it but I doubt it.
 
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BoozeCube

BoozeCube

Von Clippowicz
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  • Warcraft Go?
    • Some Blizzard developers are genuinely excited to make mobile games.
    • A lot of Blizzard developers play Pokemon Go.
    • A natural extension of this was for the new Incubation Team to develop a Warcraft version of Pokémon Go, which is supposedly in development for smartphones now.
    • People who have played the Warcraft mobile game say it’s also got a lot more to it than Pokémon Go, including single-player mechanics.
  • Diablo
    • Diablo III had a second expansion that was canceled.
    • Blizzard says cancellations show commitment to quality and that they have only released about 50% of the projects that they have worked on in the past 3 decades.
    • Project Hades was reportedly a Diablo game in development that would be more like Dark Souls, an over the shoulder dungeon crawler that was also canceled.
    • Project Fenris is the current incarnation of Diablo IV and the team is optimistic about it. Their art direction is to embrace the darkness.
    • Project Fenris is still early in development and will likely not launch until 2020 or later.
    • They still claim that there was talks to announce Diablo IV at BlizzCon, but it wasn't far enough along in time, yet one dev disputes this.
    • Blizzard is careful to announce games before they are ready now because of what happened with Project Titan.
    • Project Fenris is being worked on by a separate team from Diablo: Immortal known as Incubation.
    • Diablo: Immortal exists because they heard that China really wanted a Diablo mobile game.
  • Activision and Blizzard
    • Blizzard employees say one of the biggest ongoing conversations this year has been cutting costs.
    • Blizzard's response for comment was “Blizzard has been and continues to be a developer-driven company. All of the games we create represent ideas our game developers themselves are passionate about. This is as true for Diablo Immortal as it was for Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, or Overwatch, or any game we’ve ever made. We believe that the best games to make are ones that our developers believe in.”
    • The perception is that Activision is starting to get more and more involved with Blizzard because 2018 had been a weak year for them.
    • The meetings this year was the first time many employees heard things like cutting costs or showing growth.
    • Activision wants to boost Blizzard's content output by adding more developers and release more games on a regular schedule.
    • Mike Morhaime stepping down was a big blow because he was seen as the Anti-CEO and just wanted to make good games and keep employees happy without worrying about profitability.
Well I guess when all the talent leaves a company all that is left to produce is dog shit. If these faggots love mobile games I'm out.
 
TJT

TJT

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BoozeCube said:
  • Warcraft Go?
    • Some Blizzard developers are genuinely excited to make mobile games.
    • A lot of Blizzard developers play Pokemon Go.
    • A natural extension of this was for the new Incubation Team to develop a Warcraft version of Pokémon Go, which is supposedly in development for smartphones now.
    • People who have played the Warcraft mobile game say it’s also got a lot more to it than Pokémon Go, including single-player mechanics.
  • Diablo
    • Diablo III had a second expansion that was canceled.
    • Blizzard says cancellations show commitment to quality and that they have only released about 50% of the projects that they have worked on in the past 3 decades.
    • Project Hades was reportedly a Diablo game in development that would be more like Dark Souls, an over the shoulder dungeon crawler that was also canceled.
    • Project Fenris is the current incarnation of Diablo IV and the team is optimistic about it. Their art direction is to embrace the darkness.
    • Project Fenris is still early in development and will likely not launch until 2020 or later.
    • They still claim that there was talks to announce Diablo IV at BlizzCon, but it wasn't far enough along in time, yet one dev disputes this.
    • Blizzard is careful to announce games before they are ready now because of what happened with Project Titan.
    • Project Fenris is being worked on by a separate team from Diablo: Immortal known as Incubation.
    • Diablo: Immortal exists because they heard that China really wanted a Diablo mobile game.
  • Activision and Blizzard
    • Blizzard employees say one of the biggest ongoing conversations this year has been cutting costs.
    • Blizzard's response for comment was “Blizzard has been and continues to be a developer-driven company. All of the games we create represent ideas our game developers themselves are passionate about. This is as true for Diablo Immortal as it was for Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, or Overwatch, or any game we’ve ever made. We believe that the best games to make are ones that our developers believe in.”
    • The perception is that Activision is starting to get more and more involved with Blizzard because 2018 had been a weak year for them.
    • The meetings this year was the first time many employees heard things like cutting costs or showing growth.
    • Activision wants to boost Blizzard's content output by adding more developers and release more games on a regular schedule.
    • Mike Morhaime stepping down was a big blow because he was seen as the Anti-CEO and just wanted to make good games and keep employees happy without worrying about profitability.
Well I guess when all the talent leaves a company all that is left to produce is dog shit. If these faggots love mobile games I'm out.
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So Blizzards glacial Dev cycle is finally catching up with them. Shocking.
 
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Fucker

Fucker

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TJT said:
So Blizzards glacial Dev cycle is finally catching up with them. Shocking.
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That whole Blizz post is a sack of bull shit. They want to cut costs yet add more devs? How does this work? If they mean Chinese devs and zero effort reskins of an existing game, we all see where this is headed. Devs are passionate about making games? Tossing a zero effort reskin on a crappy Chinese mobile game is equivalent to passion?

Good thing they have Candy Crush, because the rest of their games are going down the tubes, and they have no talent left to fix things.
 
Kaige

Kaige

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Its possible that Blizzard's "vision" is getting in the way of actually producing anything. Its happened plenty of times in the game industry, where some developers keep making changes over and over again because they got new ideas or something didn't look right, etc. I wonder if they have Duke Nukem Forever syndrome and Activision is looking to give them a kick in the ass.
 
A

a_skeleton_03

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Fucker said:
That whole Blizz post is a sack of bull shit. They want to cut costs yet add more devs? How does this work? If they mean Chinese devs and zero effort reskins of an existing game, we all see where this is headed. Devs are passionate about making games? Tossing a zero effort reskin on a crappy Chinese mobile game is equivalent to passion?

Good thing they have Candy Crush, because the rest of their games are going down the tubes, and they have no talent left to fix things.
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That post wasn't "official" but most likely was accurate.
 
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Lambourne

Lambourne

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Some information from the inside, allegedly.


One of the comments was interesting too:

I started working at Blizzard in early 2005 right after the release of WoW. I wasn't in dev, I was a GM for WoW, and boy did they not let us forget that. Blizzard treated us liked shit. I was fine with the job early on, because the size of the department was small and kind of close knit. That didn't last, though. I wasn't one of the first GMs, those existed during the alpha and beta stages of the game and there were only a small handful of them. I was, however, one of the first GMs hired on after the game officially launched. I actually got the job after they handed out fliers at the Frys opening night celebration for the game. The first few months were kind of amazing. Like you said in this video, the pay was shit but I thought, "Who cares? It's BLIZZARD!" I played their games since I was a kid. I used to use my dial up modem to call another friend of mine's modem so we could play Warcraft 2 against each other. This was SUPER early multiplayer stuff. So needless to say I was a huge fan. But that only lasts so long.

Now when I started we were already understaffed and unprepared for the breakout success WoW was going to be. The ticket times were atrocious because of that. In the many months that followed Blizzard hired more and more GMs, but even so the ticket times didn't improve because WoW also got more and more players. It got to the point that ticket times took WEEKS to get answered. Some took so long that even our logs didn't go back far enough to deal with their issues. So Blizzard hired more and more. So fast forward a year and the building we're in is packed with people. It went from knowing everyone on the floor to knowing absolutely no one outside your team and maybe another few former team members. Everyone there was pushing metrics and REALLY pushing down hard on us to get the tickets done as fast as possible. That's all well and good but quality starts to suffer, a lot. Around the same time their way to fix quality issues pops up. We also had quality assurance people but around this time they start doing stupid shit. Things like, "Did you RP with the player?" I mean really? The guy is reporting another guy for calling him a "fag" in Barrens and you want me to type out some borderline ERP shit just to tell him I'll look into it? Ugh, so frustrating.

Eventually I moved on to become what's basically a tier 2 and 3 GM. Instead of talking to the people with normal tickets I'd handle the item and account issues for in-game stuff. Someone hack your account and shard all your shit? You'd get sent to me and I'd do my best to confirm it and get it back for you. I liked this a lot more because I actually felt like I was doing something for the player, not just giving canned responses while making a jerking off motion and moving onto another ticket. But even there they were pushing for faster and faster ticket times. "Don't spend so much time trying to verify their items, just look up the time they said it might have happened and if you can't find it then deny them and move on." Yeah, because that's real quality work. Eventually I just stopped caring what some of the supervisors were saying about the time and started working on what I felt was best for the player. Nothing I did was going to be good enough for them as far as time was concerned, so why bother? It got to the point that I was just so sick of their shit that I quit. Those last two weeks were some of the best I had while working there. I didn't give a flying fuck about ticket times, I just did the tickets that I could the best that I could no matter the time it took. I spent one 8 hour shift on 3 tickets. 3. Those guys were SUPER thankful, too. We didn't get thanks very often, so it was awesome having the player actually tell us thanks. Actually that particular job didn't get many interactions with players at all that weren't through email. So I left happy knowing I made some other player's day, but knowing that Blizzard was going down hill.

But I forgot the worst parts. So first of all Blizzard didn't really consider us Blizzard employees. We had our own separate building (which I understand because our department was huge and their building wasn't big enough) but even so our key cards couldn't even open up the other building. We also weren't even given priority for internal hiring. What would usually happen is there would be an internal listing for a job so that people within the company could apply before it goes out to the public. Cool, right? Well not if you were a GM or tech support. We weren't REALLY Blizzard so they treated us as if we were outside hires. They'd also normally allow transfers to different departments within the company if a spot opened up, unless you were in our building in which case we had to apply as if we didn't work for the company.

To top all of it off in the last year or so I worked there they eventually started hiring temps who never even played the game, or any games for that matter. When I got hired they were looking for gamers who were familiar with Blizzard games and Warcraft in particular. By the time I left they were literally using a temp agency to get people as GMs. THEN they decided that it would be a fantastic idea to move the entire department to Austin freaking Texas. Why? Oh they tried to pitch the idea that it was for US! That WE should be grateful for such a forward thinking ADVENTURE! Yeah, suck my nuts. The real reason was that they could use the Austin area's already large CSR resources to hire even more temps, pay people even LOWER wages, pay less in taxes, and not have to deal with any of those pesky "Blizzard" GMs dirtying their Irvine area.

So yeah, fuck Blizzard.
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Flobee

Flobee

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Some of the rumors coming out of Blizz make me feel better about passing up an opportunity to try for a job over there. Things just didn't line up for me, but I'd been kicking myself in the ass about it for over a year. Hope they get their shit together, but we've seen this song and dance go down many times before. We going to start seeing Assassin Creed style sequel schedules soon?
 
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A

a_skeleton_05

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The gaming industry always had many issues with treating employees like shit because it's a passion industry and people were willing to put up with a lot more than usual. Blizzard doubles down on that because fucking everyone loved Blizzard. You'd have people willing to work minimum wage and be treated like shit just for the privilege of being a part of that. Fuck, they probably could have staffed their CS with just volunteers if they didn't need to have so many.
 
Khane

Khane

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There seems to be a lot of naivete amongst PC gamers as well. Many of them are socially awkward and never expected much of themselves outside of gaming so they are willing to fool themselves into thinking shit jobs like that are "passions" or "following their dreams". I hear it amongst streamers today as well. Most streamers will never make a decent living doing it, but they love to say things like "sure I could make more money elsewhere, but I wouldn't be as happy as I am now!". Which is a crock of shit and an excuse the immature use to avoid having to live up to any sort of expectation they might set. And you can see that because they don't put any real effort into building their follower/viewer base and creating a bigger stream, they simply turn on twitch while they play video games normally.

Generally the people who are successful and can make a decent living streaming have personality and ambition to actually make their stream interesting and interactive or are just so good at the game they are playing they become a spectacle to watch. The latter doesn't work so well for a game like WoW where you can't REALLY tell how good someone is unless you have a very good understanding of the class they are playing and the content they are playing through. Whereas with an FPS you can see how incredible someone is fairly easily.
 
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Big Phoenix

Big Phoenix

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BoozeCube said:
  • Diablo
    • Diablo III had a second expansion that was canceled.
    • Blizzard says cancellations show commitment to quality and that they have only released about 50% of the projects that they have worked on in the past 3 decades.
Well I guess when all the talent leaves a company all that is left to produce is dog shit. If these faggots love mobile games I'm out.
Click to expand...
Commitment to quality my ass. Canceling a game or two early in development because it isnt panning out? Sure. But the amount of canceled projects at Blizzard(SC Ghost, Titan, Diablo4, WC adventure game etc.) shows they have some serious institutional retardation prevalent.

What games do they have on the horizon? A shitty mobile game farmed out to Chinese devs, and two remakes. And judging by this thread BfA has been an absolute disaster for them. Hopefully their string of failures finally allows whoever is in charge to clean house and purge the hubris that exists at Blizzard.
 
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