Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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Amazing how less profitable sports leagues are even with the insane sweetheart corporate welfare they receive.
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Blizzard dies and Bobby rides
- Thread starter Araxen
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Mist
Eeyore Enthusiast
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Well, you have to pay athletes actual money, unlike Blizzard employees apparently.
Those employees also have to have talent, unless they're Jets.
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Mist
Eeyore Enthusiast
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And that kind of Bobby Kotick logic is exactly how Blizzard turned into the soulless husk of a company that it is today.
So yes, but also no.
Games *aren't always* art, but the good ones that drive the industry forward and build IPs and brands that last for decades certainly are.
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yerm
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Programming type work is heavily into the 80/20 rule and then some. One really good dev could quite possibly be more productive and useful than a dozen merely average cubecrawlers. With that type of work it's compounded because shit devs can actually add to the workload if their code is too long or sloppy or buggy and the chaddier coder has to deal with or fix it later.
So basically you really SHOULD have your star athlete franchise driving dev being paid literally a dozen times the salary of an ordinary peer. You just can't usually ID that quickly, and worse for him, it's very very hard to prove you're that guy on a job market unless you also have the skillset to subcontract or something. So if you're just a dark room code blasting autist who doesn't want to deal with bullshit and just drop results upon results? You might, maybe, if you're lucky, get a couple more % than the half assing team player. Probably not.
So basically you really SHOULD have your star athlete franchise driving dev being paid literally a dozen times the salary of an ordinary peer. You just can't usually ID that quickly, and worse for him, it's very very hard to prove you're that guy on a job market unless you also have the skillset to subcontract or something. So if you're just a dark room code blasting autist who doesn't want to deal with bullshit and just drop results upon results? You might, maybe, if you're lucky, get a couple more % than the half assing team player. Probably not.
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Mist
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Programming and game design have very little in common and honestly very little overlap at this point outside of indie titles. The people who do the programming are not the people who design the content and the systems.
Modern WoW retail's programming is great (up until you hit mass-combat situations.) Overwatch's programming is fantastic (has some of the lowest input latency of any game ever.)
No one is saying Blizzard doesn't have good programmers. What they're saying is all the good designers have left.
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Juvarisx
Florida
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Strange the Mists point is hard to see when we are seeing it daily in the FF14 thread. If WoW had a YoshiP, it would be in a much stronger position. Hell If WoW still had a Kaplan it would be in better shape, Ion is still the main reason shit is SHIT not random programmer.
Ion just wants to do raid design, it is what he is good at and raids in WoW still have stellar encounters and are generally fun to this day. The design is varied, every boss is different from not only eachother but every boss that came before it. Perfect, move him back to just doing that and find someone who has an overall vision for the game. The daily gameplay loop is shit and the best programmers in the world wont fix that without being told HOW to make it better.
Ion just wants to do raid design, it is what he is good at and raids in WoW still have stellar encounters and are generally fun to this day. The design is varied, every boss is different from not only eachother but every boss that came before it. Perfect, move him back to just doing that and find someone who has an overall vision for the game. The daily gameplay loop is shit and the best programmers in the world wont fix that without being told HOW to make it better.
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Mist
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Yeah, WoW would not be in the shape it was in if Kaplan was still there, or if he'd cultivated people who actually cared about having a vision for the game to take over after he left.
Ion is the perfect designer for a Bobby Kotick style leadership. "Hey lets just destroy the soul of the game and crank this skinner box up to 11."
Ion is the perfect designer for a Bobby Kotick style leadership. "Hey lets just destroy the soul of the game and crank this skinner box up to 11."
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GuardianX
Perpetually Pessimistic
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And yet, most games, back in the day, started with a garage development budget.
If most of these games started with bare bones teams, still functioned, still released content, maybe the issue isn't with pay but bloat?
Maybe them hiring a billion bimbos was a nerd dream that accounting should have been like "No, fuck off, Cindy Lu with Double D's can't code for shit, get back to work Alex." instead of being like "Oh Golden Boy Furor has idea for betterment of office moralle?!?!" *HORKHORKHORK*
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My general theory is this, once you start throwing money at a thing with 0 accountability, you end up with shitty bland, boilerplate content.
Once people feel like they don't have to fight to get money, they don't. They coast, they chill, they know their next meal is bought and paid for, they know they have nothing to fear. You want good outcomes, make people work their ass off for small wins, ensure they have the funds to continue doing great things but make them work their ass off to attain those funds.
This applies to most all creative content like movies, music, and games.
The issue that makes it so that nothing will change once a company shifts to this "Throw Money" model is that autismos still buy that shitty, bland, boilerplate content thus validating the decision to throw money at a problem and making things terrible.
Yall remember how long "DON'T PRE-ORDER" lasted? Was it minutes? Seconds? "DON'T PRE-ORDER!!! OH SHIT YOU SEE THE PRE-ORDER BONUS?!?!"
It's all connected..
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Mist
Eeyore Enthusiast
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Already addressed this. If you want good games designed by small teams, play indie games. There's tons of them, and a bunch of them are great.
The bloat involved in GaaS products is the same bloat found in all SaaS products. I work in the SaaS/IaaS industry. It's definitely filled with bloat; I have a job and a lot of people even less valuable than I am also have jobs.
Chris
Potato del Grande
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Is the problem not that WoW is also over designed as well as having bad designers?
Every FF14 expansion has the same structure: 6 zones with MSQ/sidequests/FATEs, one dungeon every other level, three storyline raid bosses, two new classes and a reworked class, gear that has 3 out of 4 main secondary stats and a few gem slots. Patches alternate between 8 and 24 man raids with dungeons/storyline raids thrown in as required for story/catch up loot. Crafting has cosmetics/housing items/endgame loot updated each patch.
No system has been added, infact they took away cross class abilities, took away TP as a melee mana equivalent and took away belts because they were only stat sticks. Where they do experiment is in the totally optional endgame grind zone or endless dungeon, those are mostly just being iterated to be better.
Now look at JUST THE GEAR in WoW. Do we enchant/oil/socket/gem/inscribe/reforge/warforge/titanforge/upgrade items? It's totally random in each expansion with no apparent reasoning behind the changes.
They should just have 1 enchancement slot (eg Enchants/Librams/Armor Patches/Oils) and some coloured gem slots, that's PERFECT and we had that in Burning Crusade and everyone fucking loved the game.
Every FF14 expansion has the same structure: 6 zones with MSQ/sidequests/FATEs, one dungeon every other level, three storyline raid bosses, two new classes and a reworked class, gear that has 3 out of 4 main secondary stats and a few gem slots. Patches alternate between 8 and 24 man raids with dungeons/storyline raids thrown in as required for story/catch up loot. Crafting has cosmetics/housing items/endgame loot updated each patch.
No system has been added, infact they took away cross class abilities, took away TP as a melee mana equivalent and took away belts because they were only stat sticks. Where they do experiment is in the totally optional endgame grind zone or endless dungeon, those are mostly just being iterated to be better.
Now look at JUST THE GEAR in WoW. Do we enchant/oil/socket/gem/inscribe/reforge/warforge/titanforge/upgrade items? It's totally random in each expansion with no apparent reasoning behind the changes.
They should just have 1 enchancement slot (eg Enchants/Librams/Armor Patches/Oils) and some coloured gem slots, that's PERFECT and we had that in Burning Crusade and everyone fucking loved the game.
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Juvarisx
Florida
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There is nothing inherently wrong with systems being added. People do like having something to grind for, I remember all the arguments of adding an AA system into WoW, and I think it could have worked but the team at the time I imagine was concerned about AA bloat that EQ has now in spades. I personally liked Legions artifact weapon system, in my opinion that was generally a good system to increase player power and you could have one for each spec giving you something to do that you could feel was making you stronger. On the flip side BFA's was supposed to be that system without the crazy grind but it was so passive and made gearing so stupid it went off the rails immediately.
The game DOES need something to do outside of just running mythic+. I liked the little farm in Mists and helping all the villagers, it made money, you felt like you were making progress towards something. WoD took that and made it TOO good, you never had to leave your fortress because it had everything you could possibly want and nothing outside of it made a damn but of difference. Im kinda surprised they haven't tried a stardew like thing where you have a farm you can make improvements on and have it connected to a village where you can help them out improving all of it. Maybe a villager needs an item from a dungeon boss from WoTLK so a max level char has to queue for an old dungeon which can help new people leveling up (ontop of that make it so all dungeons are timewalking all of the time like FF14). SO much of what i learned in FF14 was max level players showing me the ropes when I was leveling in a dungeon not having a clue what to do or where to go.
FF14 does have a small issue with not having enough to do at times, particularly at the start of the expansion. I haven't had time to jump into endwalker since I am playing TBC classic with friends, but I dont feel like im missing anything since I can jump in in 6.3 get crafted gear and have way more content to burn threw and not miss any player power.
Gearing I wont disagree, but FF could do a better job at the acquisition of it, theres so many tokens and shit with vendors that its very confusing outside of crafted
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Juvarisx
Florida
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Yes if a moron adds them poorly then it can be bad, but giving players a grind or something to do is not inherently bad even if it just lasts 1 expansion. I always felt the artifact weapons should have been used moving forward, but how does a new player get caught up to someone who has had theirs for 4 years, and then that gear slot isnt really a gear slot anymore. I get why they removed it but what they added was retarded
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GuardianX
Perpetually Pessimistic
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You can have good games designed by big teams but you can't have the money so easy to access.
*aaS shit is A problem but it's not THE problem because some things make sense to offer as a service.
The issues stems from too many useless people being employed that don't have a clue what an industry is, this applies to most all businesses. Those people then apply the same logic of "If I have a hammer, everything is a nail." to, as the saying implies, everything. Realistically, most businesses that are massive could likely still function incredibly well with 70% less employees. This is really apparent with companies like Google where people "invent" shit, that already exists, to ensure they retain their job, then they shutter shit so they can build...the same shit they just shuttered in a worse way.
The foundational problem comes from the idea that, how do you hire for an expanding business where you have an opening for ONE person that needs to have a certain skill-set that includes X, Y and Z when HR (The MOST useless department in an entire company) is only showing you:
"X-2 and likes to volunteer at womens marches"
"X-1 and Y-1, identifies as female, with a beard and hairy legs"
"Z-3 but """DIVERSE""""
That is where you get self-important people who are nothing but employment bloat. That is where you start having issues inside the office as the ACTUAL workers refuse to work with the bloat and then get fired for -ism's, the remaining ACTUAL workers then see the office as a hostile work place and either quit or try to cause issues so they can get fired.
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I was just talking to my wife about FFXIV, I think it suffers from a different issue than over-engineering. I can't quite place it though. I think it's just blandness.
All the content is +1 betterer for gearing, you don't really have "New" mechanics that you have to learn for an encounter, it's all basically cut and paste.
The "End Game" in a non-meme sense really is just fashion-quest.
I enjoy playing FFXIV but I find myself constantly bored by the content once I finish the story.
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Chris
Potato del Grande
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I think it's just the constant churn of added/nerfed/removed systems and similar systems.
You can add a system but that has to be THE system.
Take Enchanting, that was how you upgraded gear as there wasn't usually much choice in what stats were available on most slots. There were also Enchants from rep amd other professions. But then they added multiple difficulty level versions of loot and then RNG warforging and then a currency upgrade system for some items. All of these share the same design space, except Enchanting has a strong fantasy to it. Enchanting (and other professions) could have been iterated to be the only way how you upgrade the item level on your loot.
Take Jewelcrafting, that was how you customised the stats on your gear. But then they added reforging which was the same thing without a fantasy to it, again a second system was added to the same design space for no reason - they could have just added more gem slots.
Take Inscription. It was shit. But that was how you upgraded your talents even though talents already did that. Then they added Artifact Weapons, then they iterated Artifacts worse, twice. Again there was a design space overlap, for this one Inscription is still in the game somehow though.
They need people to properly iterate and improve the systems they have, not add additional systems to satisfy their ego.
FF14 has... gem slots. That's it. Maybe you can mix and match raid and craft gear to maximise specific secondary stats. It's fucking great, you just play the fun raids and dungeons and level an alt.
I do love me some systems though and WoW is an incoherent mess of them I can't enjoy.
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AladainAF
Best Rabbit
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I have always felt this way about FFXIV and despite loving the game overall, I do get the total blandness of it. The gameplay loop is the same every expansion, you simply just rename some currencies, add a few ticks to stats of gear, and name the first word of every piece of gear. Steel Helm of the Dragon is the first expansion becomes Titanium Helm of the Dragon in the second, and Golden Helm of the Dragon in the 3rd. Crafting went much the same way (red/blue scrips, etc). It's all just a basic, elementary, brain dead gameplay loop at every single facet of the game other than encounters.
And this is also why it does so well. I think the type of gamer that wants some challenging combat systems but the rest of the systems to be brain dead basic repeatable and regurgitated things every single expansion is plentiful. People want this. They really want the lowest common denominator. But gamers like us usually get bored with this repeatable design fairly quickly. I see my fav game atm (PSO2) going this route with NGS. The first major update, while nice and welcome, is pretty much the same as the first once you're done with the story. The gameplay loop is basic, repeatable, regurgitated things and the main thing to do there is phashionquest end game.
It's probably why I'm playing more and more indie or more unknown games lately.
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Temporary systems were their answer to feature bloat. They were very open about the fact that you can't just keep adding new abilities to a class expansion after expansion or you end up like EQ2, needing a pipe organ to play. Around WoD they started playing around with modifiers to existing abilities and by Legion just went all in on the artifact. I don't even think the problem is all the weird systems with their interactions, part of the charm of an MMO is that your class can change patch to patch or expansion to expansion and you have to learn new things. The main problem is that all of the systems have terrible shitty mobile time gaps on them, which makes it a real pain in the ass to invest in for something that is 'temporary' and will be clearly thrown out at the end of the xpac.
Legion was fun because you could easily switch over to another class and play some of the low hanging fruit of the class storylines / artifact. If the systems didn't require such a time sink or really annoying RNG (legion legendaries / corruption powers), I don't think they would be as poorly received.
Legion was fun because you could easily switch over to another class and play some of the low hanging fruit of the class storylines / artifact. If the systems didn't require such a time sink or really annoying RNG (legion legendaries / corruption powers), I don't think they would be as poorly received.
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