Blizzard dies and Bobby rides
- Thread starter Araxen
- Start date
For me Blizzard died with Diablo3. I was so hyped for that game which completely destroyed my expecations. Poor replayability, real money Auction house, etc it was clear it wasn't the same company it once was. Never even tried overwatch or the card game.
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Sieger
Trakanon Raider
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Yeah but hitting max level in AO wasn't nearly as meaningful in most other MMOs, AO is honestly like a left turn or some shit of the MMO family, I probably shouldn't have mentioned it because it's almost like its own weird niche that's even smaller than EQ1 is.
Doesn't shock me at all, I saw WoW beta at a friends house probably 10-15 times in the year before WoW launched (I actually was a weird early naysayer of WoW, and I quit playing it after a month of release due to not liking it, I gave it another go like 4.5 months later and in that short time they'd improved a lot of the problems I had with the game and I played it through til Cataclysm after.) The fact that there was only one beta server into mid/late 2004 is how you know the number of people in the beta was not huge at all. Before sharding and other things a single WoW server didn't easily support more than 5,000 concurrent players, just in terms of having mobs to kill and level up on etc. I remember when the realm I was on got force-split and then was given two free offers later in vanilla to go to a new split server (those weren't forced), we had supposedly 20,000 "active accounts" with characters on the server, but no more than like 3-4000 at the time. I think Ion or someone even confirmed that WoW Classic servers can easily support much bigger populations and cited a figure in the 3-4,000 range as the most the game can easily support pre-sharding etc in a single game world of classic. And I don't mean like EQ TLP "the server starts crashing" (although that did happen in early WoW on my high pop server), so much as I just mean there's finite shit to level up on and farm in open world and it would be crazy packed above 4-5k.
Meanwhile the times I was playing around in beta the population in Alliance cities was like 1/4th or less what I'd see when WoW launched, it was just clearly not that packed.
Sieger
Trakanon Raider
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To me I think the real watershed was WC3 remastered being a fail. That's the sort of project that should be free $ and acclaim for Blizzard. Why? Because WC3 is a classic, iconic game, massively well received when it launched. Remastering it to look good on modern high-res displays should be both a technical layup and a financial slam dunk. The much less popular Age of Empires series did a remaster some years ago that was super well received, and it's almost like free money to do it.
The fact they managed to shit the bed on that to me was a sign the ship was too far gone to be righted. I fully suspect the D2 remaster is going to be a shit show as well.
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Araxen
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Their real money auction house set the genre back a few years. It has left such a bad taste in people's mouths that people scream that any type of AH in these games are bad.
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Mist
Eeyore Enthusiast
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Yeah, people are actually actively pushing for games to not have a player economy at all due to how poorly the RMAH was received.
I still don't think it was the fault of the RMAH directly, I think it was the difficulty cliff making people feel like they had to go to the RMAH to progress from Act 1 Inferno to Act 2 Inferno.
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Sorry misty but youre wrong there. Having some 1000 hrs in D2, its much worse off now without Activision and its studios making content for them. We got 3 huge updates out of the activision days, Mars Warmind expansion, Forsaken which was huge and then the moon expansion which were all pretty much done by Activision studios, or at least the majority of the work. Since Bungie broke off from activision weve been getting shit. Dumb seasonal content that is truly lacking, Beyond Light which was also lacking in the content department vs what Shadowkeep and Forsaken were. They did a dumb ass loot sunsetting which took away the majority of the guns we ground for the better part of 2 yrs only to replace it with shit since then. PvP has also taken a back seat without any major updates in like a year. Plus cheaters still running rampant in competitive modes and Trials without any mention of solving this problem by bungie. All they seem to be doing now is taking Destiny 1 content and moving it forward to D2.
Kirun
Buzzfeed Editor
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So much this. I'm fully convinced that this is the primary reason PoE doesn't have an "AH-esque" system in place and why many of its players recoil at the idea.
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Mist
Eeyore Enthusiast
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Yeah that was probably the single decision that broke Blizzard in the eyes of the fans.
Mist
Eeyore Enthusiast
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PoE at least has a player economy, it just doesn't have an ingame AH. There's some games like modern D3 where you can't even trade items.
Furry
WoW Office
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D3 cinematic were rather uninspired, and the boss popping its head up every 30 seconds to tell you how much he was going to beat you up really was just tiresome. It was the first blizz game where I really though they fucked it up, and was definitely the point where I started getting off the train.
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Mist
Eeyore Enthusiast
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Kirun
Buzzfeed Editor
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LOL sure it does. You only have to access it via an API on a 3rd-party website. But, yeah..."player driven!".
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Kiki
Log Wizard
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Chris
Potato del Grande
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Yeah but like Bobby Kotick says, it's not the sort of billion dollar project Blizzard should be concentrating on in order to buy his next Yacht.
*looks at Tower Defence, Auto Chess and MOBA genres*
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Come on dude, its not an AH but its for sure a player driven economy. And the trade site is on their web site now. There are still others to buy mass items like splinters and currency, but most people use the official PoE site now for majority of item trades.
It would be nice to have an AH in PoE, but with it would also come with its own problems. Like more market manipulation by all the RMT that exists in the game.
jayrebb
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
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Pride got in the way. The game needed to be treated like beta and gutted to mimic competitors more. Including copying pacing, carrying, and individual contributions to a fight if you're fed.
Blizzard trying to make it their own the Blizzard Way was it's biggest problem. The victories in HOTS are evermore bitter.
I'll play HOTS right now if they swallowed pride and 180'd the design direction back to just a MOBA clone....welll not really, there's no saving that wreck. They had their chance. Years of dev time wasted instead of perfecting a traditional MOBA.
Mist
Eeyore Enthusiast
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That's still better than making everything BoP.
The D2 bnet economy was remembered fondly and all you had was Trade Chat.
The problem with an AH is that it commoditizes everything, and opens up the whole thing to be manipulated by bots.