Does Blizzard know what they are doing?

[Duppin]

Originally Posted by Gudrid

On Deathwing (PvP) it's quite the opposite. A bunch of lvl60 alliance have rerolled horde. Every night AV always ends the same with 40 horde and 20ish alliance.

Possibly, but this is very definitely the exception rather than the rule.

On the majority of servers, Alliance has a significant population advantage over Horde.

All of Caydiem's "census mods are inaccurate" blather is just a smokescreen.

[Kether Am I]

The ever-increasing focus on quarterly results of company boards makes it difficult for anyone working in company so structured to develop 'long term vision'. The only problem with min/max operations is when they are run with the narrow temporal focus of a 5 year old. Unfortunately such is fostered by stockholders with equally deficient patience.

Pseudo off-topic, but I was just talking with a friend whose F100 company is once again 'leaning' itself. They do so with such regularity that most of their mangers don't dare waste an hour of their time undertaking tasks that won't show results for 3 years because they fear (rightly so) that they will be axed at the beginning of each quarter.

[leane]

Originally Posted by Dyscord

Personally, its a combination of everything, I think.

I think they're overwhelmed. They're probably still trying to consolodate having so many servers, with so many people, with many people leaving the company. I'm no dev, but I think there's a small group of top devs who have to make all the big decisions, and they're paralized right now because there are to many big decisions to make.

As for communication, I think they're to afraid to kill their golden goose (or stir up the hen house to much) by admiting they have problems. They probably feel the silent treatment is best, as any proposed major changes would cause the game to errupt. When you have 2 million subs and a large amount are quite vocal...

I think the horde/alliance imbalance is a case in point. They HAVE to know there's a problem. Horde have largely given up PvP, and even if they haven't, alliance are still waiting for hours. The overall horde alliance pop is like 70/30. Thats completely unacceptable. Blizzard, however, refuses to admit they have a problem. They're a). to afraid what people will do with the news b). have no clue how to fix it. But really, who knows why they don't want to talk about it. I just hope some dev is losing sleep over it.

But a lot of this really shouldn't come as a shock. Blizzard should have renamed their company Glacier, because thats the pace they're infamous for working at. How long were all their games delayed? Hell, how long does it take them to even implement armor graphics (its like they only have one artist on staff, and he does all the modeling and skinning). They ARE working, its just really... really... slow. Like frost removal and Blessing of Freedom are finally getting fixed. Some desperately needed fixes are coming to Alterac. We're FINALLY getting BWL. Blizzard is trying, they're just remarkably silent on issues they don't want to talk about (population imbalance, queues, etc).

The side imbalance is somthing to look at DAOC for. For a long time they wouldn't admit that one side was seriously skewed. Once they finally accepted it they've been slapping bandaids such as the /level 20 and /level 30 to try and jumpstart the ailing realms. When I last left DAOC there were a number of servers where the Hiberian and Midgaard had just about quit the RvR entirely because of the mass Albion Zerg (I quit actually because I was Albion and couldn't do anything really except a few buffs, I try AoE Mezz and it would last all of 2 seconds before AOE DDs landed all over, So much for tactics...)

[Wodin]

Yes, they know what they're doing, but the caveats mentioned are fairly accurate. Given the number of open positions there has almost certainly been employee attrition, and getting up to speed on a game as big and complex as WoW will take a lot of time. So you've got resources being devoted to ensuring new employees are getting up to speed. Then you need people doing class balancing - the current strategy tends to get myopic and focus too much on individual classes, but definitely evinces lots of work. That's more manpower. Then you've got all of the itemization issues, both graphical(making epic armor and weapons actually look epic) and balancewise. They're working and making improvements here, but there's still work to be done. All of this work requires manpower, and that's apparently in short supply.

Server stability is a whole different ball of wax, and I pity their poor network engineers. The fact that Battlegrounds have fubared the instance servers is definitely a very frustrating problem, as if the instance servers are fucked the raiding guilds aren't going to care if the rest of the world is purring along perfectly. But this is a point they absolutely have to nail, because players that can't play quit.

Then there's the communication issue. Half the playerbase still don't understand how the mechanics of the game work, and they scream bloody murder because of it. The population imbalances are pretty horrible and are spoiling the battlegrounds for a lot of people. We didn't see the problem on the test servers because there were actually people who wanted to play, but it's currently a big problem on any server with an imbalance. People are complaining because Battlegrounds are fun, and they can't play them because nobody from the other side wants to bother. I'm not sure how you fix problems caused by the community, though. I suspect you just have to live with those.

How do they improve their image? Tell us what's going on. Tigole's post in the Raids and Dungeons forum is exactly the kind of valuable feedback that players enjoy. Was it vague? Yes. But it gave us a snapshot of where the devs were, what to expect, and a general timeframe in which we could expect it. Don't make us read leaked patch notes from China, post them yourselves.

[Creediki]

It's sad when leaked patch notes are the best communication you have with your playerbase.

[Samus Aran]

I'll take door #5!

[Braen]

I beter post my opinion before my WoW account expires and I am completely unable to talk about WoW at all.

I will say 5. I honestly believe that with the amount of money Blizzard/VUG is taking in they can afford to lose players to a slow dev cycle and they know it. Since the game is built around the "Anyone can be a uber raider" mentality, then they can count on always having people at all levels of content. Why spend all that money (20+ million a month) on development when you can use it to pad your numbers for your stockholders? Which, as we all know, are the real game developers.

Even if they lost 50% of the playerbase they are still SUPER profitable, so who cares what they do as long as it has the Blizzard name on it.

[Dokomo]

1, and from an EQ Vet too!

[Kasonic]

-They didn't expect it to be this popular, but most of the issues concerning that (serverwise) are over.

-Their PR and Community's internal communication with the developers is terrible. It's pretty clear by how the CM's speak that their communication with the developers is horribly lacking, and it seems that they have to plead to the devs to get anything through.

-Blizzard's business model does not translate into MMORPGs well. Their philosophy of "Done when it's done" produces excellent quality, but with the immense demand created by MMOs this does not work. Look at Dire Maul, Maraudon, all of WoW: High quality stuff with lots of work put into it. But when the demand of the hardcore players(where 5 raid zones a month still isn't fast enough) is introduced into the equation, things start getting flawed fast.

-The loss of staff is probably hurting them. An MMO takes lots of manpower, between artists, GMs, programmers, creative teams, writers, etc, and given the rumors that have been flying it seems like Blizzard's numbers are between painful and destroying the company.

[Vagoo]

Half of #1 for me.

Blizzard knows what they are doing in terms of how to make money, but they do NOT know how to satisfy hardcore gamers.

That being said, they probably (not probably - look at content and bug fix priorities) don't give a fuck about hardcore gamers. We are a dying breed.

[Dynalisia]

I'm going with:

People left and combined with the way-bigger-than-expected success of WoW, Blizzard's ancient, veteran uber dev's are _swamped_ with work. Blizzard has an environment where people have multiple responsabilities and now the fact that Blizzard managers are also Designers/Creative input and on top of that also part of their production squads has become a big problem for them. I don't think any gets done there without the big names sticking their finger in it first and giving it a good taste and with those big names being overworked like hell, stuff is just crawling.

I also think the big names are very very arrogant and want to do everything their own way. They don't even think about looking at games like EQ (or FPS games for BG stuff), they just take the basic concept and reinvent the wheel all by themselves to give it that unique Blizzard leetness (for them that is).

Lastly I think that those big names know jack shit about MMO balancing on classes, items and abilities/spells and are just giving it their best newbie shots by trying to adapt to stuff they know about diablo and warcraft to WoW (which obviously didnt work). They have probably realized the error of their ways, but by now the young and informed people that have been warning them to "not be so god damn cocky and learn from others" from the start have left the company and only a skeleton crew of *real* talent is left in their design dept. I wouldn't be surprised that after months of ignoring Furor and Tigole where it comes to game design and keeping them in the dark and tightly leashed, they have finally asked them something like "So eh....what would you do eh?" and the result were some positive changes here and there.

I'm not even touching the other departments of blizzard yet, because who the hell was responsible for the cockup that is their server trouble?
For now they'll just be trying to clear the rubble and get their shit back on track.

This is just my not nearly informed enough sideline take on it though, don't take it bad

[Cybsled]

Viewpoint 6: Vivendi is fucking things up

[Sampo]

Word is Vivendi takes almost every dime.

The blizzard division are like starving artists.. minus the upper management etc.. but they suck of course

[Eomer]

Anyone find it ironic that WoW, which is arguably Blizzard's biggest success yet, may perhaps be the downfall of the company? If all the rumors are true about them losing staff left right and center, and the huge demands being placed on them by WoW, I wonder if they have the capability or appetite to even make any other games? I know there's that Ghost game being worked on, but that's sounded like a complete fiasco from the start (they've already pulled it from one dev's hands, not sure who's working on it now).

WoW may well doom Blizzard to becoming a one trick pony for the foreseeable future, which would be a shame. On the other hand, there's now several splinter companies out there who are putting out or have already put out their own games (Guild Wars), and in the end that may be a good thing for gamers in general.

[Suineg]

I meet people online and in stores that are talking about their level 24 Paladin with pride. They talk about just doing the Deadmines or something else and how they finally got to use shoulders and they are thrilled about it.

This is the majority of the people I hear from.

Face it Blizzard is catering to the money market that they need to. It saddened me but then I just moved on. Can't take it anymore so gonna wait for the next best thing (BBD) if it comes. I am not jumping head first into another mmorpg for a while. I will get my feet wet but that is about it.

Face it we installed we levelled we conquered. Then Alexander looked over all the lands and said "Now what?" and became a homo. Let us not go down the same path.