Does Blizzard know what they are doing?

[Qhue]

Just had this discussion at lunch (yes geeks abound in my line of work, who'd a thunk that space obsessed men and women would be geeks) and it was such a heated discussion that I figured I'd open it up to the larger community at large.


I'm going to try and do my best to present the various viewpoints that were brought up by the parties involved without overly biasing the authors original intent with my own editorializing.


Viewpoint 1:

Of course Blizzard knows what they are doing. They knew that the game would sell off retail shelves like crazy just like every other game they've made. You guys are unhappy mostly because you all played the game for over a year before it was officially released to the public. Everyone else isn't so jaded and to them its still only 8 months old. Remember how enraptured YOU were back last summer with the game? Once BWL comes out you'll giggle like little girls and all will be right in the world.


Viewpoint 2:

Blizzard is overwhelmed. They expected to do well, but they didn't expect to do THIS well and the stretch marks are showing. The sheer magnitude of their success has given them pause and they are so caught up in trying to compensate for the enourmity of the undertaking that they've stopped making forward progress. They are so busy being successful they've forgotten they still have a game to finish. I suspect that their own ideas about what audience to focus on with the expanded content have needed to be changed in order to accomodate a much larger playerbase that is by it basic nature much more casual.


Viewpoint 3:

Blizzard knew what they were doing, but all those people jumped ship in one of the two rumored "exodus" waves as companies with more vision and willing to accept more risk lured them away. The current lack of "In Progress" details is because they are re-staffing and re-tasking to compensate. I bet alot of the people working on it now really wishes that some promised details, like Hero Classes, would just go away and be forgotten. Its like Enchanters in EQ being able to make magical items. Its something that got stuck in the public mind and was featured on the box art but which the people actually making the game no longer have any intention of dealing with.


Viewpoint 4:

Blizzard has no idea what they are doing. The first "In Progress" page sounded like a "to do" list for the next month and its taken them 6 months to do it. Remember when people said Blackwing Lair would be out by X-mas?? How many more zones were in the initial game? Mt. Hyjal? Outland? the back half of Silithus? Caverns of Time? Uldum? Quel'Thelas? If one of those zones went Live each month starting today they still wouldn't have them all in before Christmas and the inevitable retail expansion. Where is the live events? Where is the big epic plotline we've come to expect from Blizzard titles? Its like EQ and NOTHING IS HAPPENING and nothing ever changes in the world! This is a next generation title? Hell Guild Wars has more exciting "dynamic world" events and it has no monthly fee!

Viewpoint 5:

Blizzard has no idea what they are doing, and they don't care! As long as they leak some patch notes that will string along the fanbois to the tune of another $20 MILLION (1 month). If you only had to write up some half-assed changes to each class and fix some geometry bugs in order to earn 20 mil would you bother working too hard? They know a good thing when they see it so why mess with the status quo. Heck package up the "free" content that you were working on and call it a $19.99 expansion for X-mas and even the small minority of players who knew it was supposed to be free will still buy it despite the whining.

[Mkopec1]

I think they know EXACTLY what they are doing. Lets face it, for the 80%-90% of the people who are playing this game, they are doing a great job.

[Jovec]

Viewpoint 5 is closest to what I think, namely, that Blizzard had a clear design and intent with WoW of being casually accessable but still having a true end-game (when, for example, 500k subs was a realistic expectation), but then as it became more and more clear of the sheer enormity of their success, management direction changed in an attempt to grow and retain as many accounts as possible, regardless of what that does to the relatively few hardcore players.

But the truth is probably a combination of all the viewpoints you list. They most likely did have setbacks from key personnel leaving. It's obvious they have infrastructure problems. Many of us feel..mislead...on what type of game WoW really is. List can go on and on...

-Jovec

[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).

[leane]

I tend to think its a bit of all the different viewpoints.

Its a lot bigger than they thought and I think they seriously underestimated how much work a company has to do for a MMPOG. Everything always looks so obvious and easy from the outside.

BUT I don't think the magnitude of the game doesn't really any affect however, if its 100k or 2M the programmers and developers and content writers can only do stuff at a certain pace. Biggest difference is in the Network admins who support them and in the GMs who deal with the issues.

People like Bill Roper and the various people who left took a large chunk of experiance and knowledge with them but again they weren't having much say in things anyway after Vivendi took over.

But overall they are doing an excellent job (excepting the battlegrounds, but I think DAOC has been dealing with similar issues for like 4 or 5 years and still doesn't have a solution either to PvP and imbalances), The game is selling well, 8 months after release they are still growing. Will probably slow down and stabalize at a lower number eventually (I'm guessing 1.5Million or so but thats a heck of a lot of players still). Personally its a game that doesn't hold my interest anymore but should work fine for the legions of fans.

[Ossoi]

I really think they have no idea what they're doing.

Honestly, what game developer in their right mind ruins a pretty well thought out zone such as Alterac Valley, by rewarding players for ignoring the team objectives and ninja looting as much as they can. The irony and stupidity is just overwhelming.

The problem of declining server populations is also a pretty big one which has so far gone unnoticed by Blizzard, and indeed the players fortunate enough to be on a decently populated realm.

-What's the point of having battlegrounds if there's not enough players on a server to support them? If Blizzard would pay attention to the numerous low-population servers and engineer a merge, it would go a long way towards retaining the disgruntled players who can't get into Warsong or Alterac without waiting 5-6 hours.

Even on medium-high population servers like Archimonde, I hear the Horde wait for CTF is terrible, because of the imbalance there. Why were Warsong matches not cross server enabled? Surely that would help reduce wait times and increase competitivity.

War3 and War3x have been played at a professional level since their release, I find it odd that Blizzard didn't learn anything about the nature of competitive gamers from War3, or did they really think guilds would be happy playing vs the same opposition/pickups each day.

The wait time for Battlegrounds is only going to get worse as more content gets added. When players have Onyxia, MC, BWL and ZG on the agenda, obviously the number of people in a BG queue is going to diminish, which means wait times are going to be even worse.

[Duppin]

Door number 2, for me.

I think they thought WoW would big, not MOTHER HUGE, and now they're scrambling still to play catch-up. I think they will, eventually, but it's a ways off still.

But what else are you going to play?

[Vaclav]

Where's the "I don't know, but I care less than Blizzard (which is hard to manage)" option?

[Creediki]

Like Dyscord said, there are a few large problems going on.

Server stability is a constant headache. They need some experts working on figuring out wtf is going on, optimizing.. etc. If these people bailed, they would have significant lead time re-staffing/training

Population imbalance, BG's... Even if the population was perfect, it's obvious some servers can not support more than 2-3 BG's.... If they put in another Alterac-type....

Class Balance - Allways and forever a headache.

Zone design and creation - With Blizzard's standards, getting artists in that can do the requisite designs may be troublesome.

Itemization - Good itemization is a key part of the game. Additional load on key people.

I'll go with a combination of overloaded/overwhelmed due to success/exodus + Mgmt rolling in $$ and not adequately reinvesting the money into the game / not really feeling the heat. Plus, maybe a few key managers got promoted / fired.

[Jait]

I think if you asked anyone on their first game if they knew what they were doing, they would say "No" in retrospect.

WoW is a massive success. Sure the hard-core have problems, and clearly many of the hard-core players they hired to alleviate this are still learning, and are finding themselves bound in ways they didnt expect. My greatest disapointment is that regardless of the this, these guys and gals are making some of the exact same mistakes they ranted and whined about for years, and sadly are using the same excuses they wouldn't accept in the past. I suppose were all hypocrites in some ways, but it still pisses me off. However with 2m subs I think that provides more than a little bit of solace to 'em.

[Qhue]

I've often thought, and said, that a FREE July update that added Blood Elves (complete with scantily clad womenfolk and guys who had Demon-hunter-esque fashion sense) to the Horde would markedly change the Alliance/Horde imbalance almost overnight. (Give them a minor newbie area linked to the Plaguelands and the Undead newbie section with a smattering of banal quests)

To keep parity you'd have to add a race to the Alliance that was tied to Night Elven newbie lands but otherwise completely uninspiring so as not to get many people eager to play it : Furbolg.

[Gamblor]

Originally Posted by Dyscord

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...

Vivendi/Morhaime shot the goose and cut it open to get more eggs fourth quarter.

Originally Posted by Dyscord

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).

Go take a look at the jobs page. We have several guildmembers who are game developers. Word gets around quickly, it's an incestuous business. WoWLive lost the entire animation team and art lead in one fell swoop to NCSoft. Only thing they wouldn't spill the beans on was if it was Vivendi suits or Morhaime himself who was the "upper management" responsible for running off a large portion of their content team.

[Merklyn]

Some of Viewpoint 3 and some of 2... and that's partially why I bailed. They were clearly overwhelmed at launch and then couldn't fix their shit for months. The stress test showed them what was upcomming but they couldn't fix things in time for release. Viewpoint 4 follows as a consequence of 3. If they still had their key staff they could have worked through their issues faster and had content churn up to speed. But it doesn't really matter because they're in a financial/subscriber situation where Viewpoint 5 can actually gain support (as laughable as that is).

[Faille]

you also have to factor in what VU might be doing to the whole situation. They are probably grabbing at the money as fast as it comes in and are not too worried about killing the goose laying the golden eggs.

[Gudrid]

Originally Posted by Dyscord

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.

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.

WoW rankings isn't 100% accurate but:
Total Alliance: 3,152 - 38%
Total Horde: 5,085 - 62%
on Deathwing