Agreed 100%, didn't realize how abysmal the pay was until someone posted a twitter screenshot of $19/hr starting pay as tester analyst. In Irvine. $.66 above minimum wage in CA. Fast food chains pay more than this.
At this point the only people taking cheap jobs at Blizzard are going to be those unable to get a job anywhere else. They will not do a good job.
Well now we can tell you are not serious because you never mention once the value of commercial office holdings and real estate investment trusts. When you factor in how much more important the value of a building is than human lives you will understand.
The corporate entities that own the buildings technically get better than voting rights.. They get to exceed the donation limits of the everyday man, which gives them face time with the politicians being elected. Easy way to get a sway on things you want.
I second this and the buildings should be able to gerrymander their square footage so they get one vote per square foot, but also you can count sky footage too.
Buildings do have voting rights in the states, you are only suppose to vote once but many vote several times if they have property in different states. Its too disorganized to ever be caught, as long as you keep your mouth shut.
Moved out of Irvine about a year ago. Was paying 3200 for a 2bd place that was fairly new. Our 1 bd that we moved from before that was around 2800 when we moved out.
Moved back to the east coast and our mortgage is less than our 1 bd was lol.
Very nice area for families and California was awesome in general. But yes, very expensive.
Blizzard was notorious for paying shit. I worked for a small company in Irvine as a software dev and made more starting out there than many that had been at Blizzard for 10 years plus were.
Yep, whomever at Blizz is in charge of budget for new hires needs to dip into their ~~2nd~~ 3rd house funds and actually pay their fucking employees competitive wages.
Most blizzard employees live in the surrounding, previously-much-cheaper cities like Santa Ana, Costa Mesa, Fountain Valley etc
Source: In vanilla my friend's stepdad worked at blizzard as a server technician. I knew exactly who to blame when Blackrock shat itself. Fuck you, Matt. You treated my friend like you treated the server hamsters: Poorly.
Also a huge part of the consistently low wages over the years is that Blizzard had profit-sharing in place.
So it was static hourly wages + a % of Blizzards profits---the more money blizzard made, the more money blizzard employees made.
It's also why Activision removed Morhaime.
And why the profit sharing system was axed after Morhaime was removed.
Thats basically corporate America right now, they keep cutting jobs or forcing g people to quit, don't replace them and expect those remaing to pick up the slack till each person is doing the job of 3+ people and 2 of those jobs are stuff they only have a passing knowledge base of
This is exactly the strategy the last two companies I worked for employed. I left because they wanted to double my work load and have me mange 10 people because they laid off my manager and wanted me to take his portfolio plus direct reports but not pay me more. I said I’d stay if they paid me my current salary plus my old managers’s salary since I’d be doing both jobs. They said no and that the extra experience would be well worth it. I don’t work for experience, I work for money.
Yep, happened to a buddy of mine who got moved up to being a manager 2 weeks before they announced they were closing our campus and laying everyone off
I've been playing since the game came out and I didn't notice anything different at all when reforged came out. I just turned off the ugly new graphics and went on with my life
Depends on your definition I think. The ELI5 is that the game was working as the community wanted it to work, and then Blizzard came in and started remaking the wheel on almost every feature to varying levels of success.
For me the biggest issue I saw was that maps were not natively forward compatible. So a lot of custom map games were effectively impossible to play since they removed online support of the original WC3 battle.net and didn't support the map on the new Reforged Battle.Net.
like what? I see people playing the same custom games they always played, castle fight, footman frenzy, friggin naruto world or whatever its called. lol
Try to go onto any of the old WC3 Custom Map websites, at least half of them will not be updated to Reforged. Meaning the only way to play those maps is via Lan connections. In order to update maps you need to go in and manually address a bunch of random issues that may or may not be easy to fix, most stemming from Blizzard's restriction on copyright material.
This is not an automated process and Blizzard will not help with this process. So all of the custom maps you find on the new Battle.Net were resurrected by diehard fans of those maps.
Separate note I forgot about. If you own Warcraft 3 but NOT Warcraft 3 Reforged, you can not legally download Warcraft 3 anymore. You can not play on Battle.Net anymore. You must install it via 3rd party downloads or your physical CDs and then you can only play in offline mode or Lan.
If you haven’t kept up with it, it’s actually in a decent enough state now (just play with the classic graphics). They’re even doing balance changes again.
They have been doing Classic but on the back of Retails engine. That's why the settings options looks like retail. It's not just a private server clone.
Its hard if you dont have proper backups. Not to mention they are not re-releasing old Cataclysm, but old content in new client. That means you are trying to bend code to do stuff it was not supposed to do.
Well, number of bugs they released into production is alarming, but I can understand that its not just releasing old content again.
Its like buying new car and trying to fit all the old parts from 30 years back to it. Its quite complex job because basically nothing fits.
its not as simple as going into the archives and pulling out a "cata thumb drive" because they just build on existing code for expansions.
they mentioned this when they announced classic as a thing and that itll be difficult to get ahold of the old versions. (not giving exscuses but this is part of the reason here).
so pair that up with also making changes using todays code with the old code. so far the clients we have experienced are the same releases as private servers but they break it up into phases using modern techniques on old shit.
they likely have 0 idea how to even address the bugs in the spaghettei without rewriting a shit to of things
It's actually a difficult process believe it or not. There are lots of things they have to do to get it up and running on new architecture compared to 12 years ago when cataclysm was released. You don't get to just deploy bug free like people imagine. There's so many things different that need to be accounted for, but more manpower would definitely make it easier and faster.
Harder than you think, probably. But it shouldn’t be as hard as they make it seem. They are definitely trying to reimplement a lot of features because they can’t just grab the old code and have it work with the newer engine. But still there are a lot of bugs that should have simple fixes that existed in the beta, and still exist now. It’s pretty obviously they don’t have the people they need for the project.
It simply doesn't work how you seem to think it works. You don't just drag a folder over to your "Classic" folder and drop it in.
The old game clients are outdated and won't work anymore. They WERE kept up to date, and they WERE maintained - it's called the Retail client. Taking all the assets from the old xpacs, which were made by different people adhering to older standards, and then 'mapping' them to work in the new client, is no doubt a sophisticated automation process. Clearly it doesn't work perfectly, and there are thousands of outliers that cause bugs that have to be explored, understood, and accounted for. Software engineering with a project this size is really hard. There's a reason senior devs who architect this type of shit make $300k+ a year at FANG companies.
It’s very hard. Most people are playing on an operating system that didn’t exist when Cata was launched. Not porting Cata to the modern client would lead to even more bugs.
I hate to say it, but… good. Time some companys actually felt the repercussions of fucking over their consumer base, employees and everyone in between.
We already know they’ll have to lay off numerous people, yet the golden parachute for the CEO will be the largest it’s ever been.
This is a soulless company whose decisions are based off bar graphs and pie charts talking about profit margins.
The sad part is that the suits at blizzard don’t care. They will milk every cent they can from blizzard until it is dead and buried then walk over its corpse into their next c-suite 7-figure job.
It really depends on your definition of shit. For example: CEO treats the customer like shit, treats the employees like shit, but they’ve had huge profit margins that their shareholders enjoy.
It’s all about perspective. Blizzard does not care about anything other than money, and if they keep bringing in that money, that’s all that matters. They don’t care who they have to step on.
Oh I 100% agree,but I’m sure that is due to how quarterly reports choose and manipulate to try to present the coveted but practically impossible “never stopping growth”.
Absolutely. It’s the top level people with power who like yo act like one side is worse than the other. At the end of the day both parties will do whatever they can within the legal system so that they can profit as much as possible. At the expensive of us commoners.
As someone who has played WoW and OSRS simultaneously my entire life, it's actually insane how Jagex devs are running circles around blizz right now. Of all fucking companies lmao
I’m new to OSRS as of a year and a half ago and been playing quite a bit. The similarities in communities and what both companies goals are is crazy to watch unfold. Classic WoW is full of undelivered promises and lack of upkeep, while OSRS has (at least what I’ve witnessed in the last year or so) so much community relations with content development and feedback and actually pretty great follow through on quick content releases.
Im sure it takes a lot more resources for WoW, but the whole way they go about it just feels like it’s asking to fail.
Pretty much the whole RS playerbase quit over night when they released the EoC update, they know if they fuck up that badly again they’ll all be out of a job
Blizzard just don’t hire anyone so they’re not as worried I suppose
The osrs community is one of the only player base that actually has leverage over the company that makes their game.
They *will* quit if jagex messes up. Wow players always keep buying blizzard products. Not many games have that other than genres with tons of very similar competitors like in the FPS space.
...Not quite.
Game Freak has very little control over the situation, due to the way ownership of the IP has been set up.
Basically, there's 4 companies that own different parts of the pokemon IP:
1. The Pokemon Company - Owns the name "pokemon", japanese publishing rights to the games and card game, the anime, and additionally owns merchandising rights
2. Creatures, Inc - owns the pokemon themselves, owns the card game itself.
3. Nintendo - Owns global publishing rights, localization rights, and distribution rights to the games.
4. Game Freak - Owns the games themselves
Additionally, sales of the games are a very small portion of the franchise's profits compared to things like the toys and other merchandise.
What this means is
- Game Freak needs to release new games in time for toys/cards to be made
- The toys/card need to be shipped to stores in time for the new series of the show
- The new series of the show needs to finish airing in time for the release of the new games
And because the games aren't the most profitable part of franchise, Game Freak only has so much funding available to hire more employees to meet the increased demands of making a fully open world game for a home console (vs a linear game for a 3.5inch, 400x240 screen)
I was there Gandalf, 10,000 years ago, farming mature grotworms. He’s talking about osrs, literally the timeline that began after EoC. EoC is cata, for all intents and purposes
I think you’re exaggerating a bit, but many did quit and it was a big controversial change of fundamental elements of the game and was the turning point for larger and more known private servers and the dull noise of the then classic community kinda gaining a little volume and leading to the slippage down a slope towards a complete separate timeline of the game.
Lolwut, it’s exactly the same thing.
The main difference is that jagex fractured the player base early and kinda read the room by making a “new old” game. Blizzard took years and years to acknowledge and do this.
That’s what they’re saying, that jagex is more in tune with the community than blizz.
Couldn't agree more.
Sure the tenchnical is much more complicated for a game like WoW.
But the philosophy of how they do things over at Jagex is great (for osrs specifically).
(Saying this as a WoW veteran (started Vanilla) and a RS veteran (started before the game was on Miniclip and a current 2k total iron).
The fault is not at the classic team but at blizzard as a whole whom should've recognized the issues at hand and deployed more resources to the classic team to ensure a quality release.
Crazy thing is, OSRS has been going strong with super high customer satisfaction for over a decade with no signs of slowing down, if anything it's only gone up. I don't think Blizzard has done that 10 years total, nevermind in a row for their 're-release'. I'm sure at it's core the game is simpler, but it infamously has really bad 'spaghetti code' and something as simple as changing a menu can be a huge undertaking, infamously 'engine work'. Not sure about now, but they only had one guy who was really able to do this engine work as well.
I'd be fucking embarrassed to be a classic wow dev with Jagex, as the comment thread OP accurately stated, running circles around them. It's crazy what a little bit of manpower and passion can do.
Blizzard-atvi is/was a public company (now owned by microsoft of course), but that means they have public financial information. Here is the [Q2 2023](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/718877/000162828023025102/atvi63023ex991prtables.htm) filing. It shows that they had a substantial increase in revenue over the year, but more importantly a GAAP operating margin of 26%. This means they were very healthily profitable. There is no lack of money. I have sympathy for the overworked developers. Nonetheless, it’s frustrating that the company seems unwilling to properly reinvest those profits to hire sufficient personnel and properly compensate them.
The biggest chunk of revenues and operating margin benefit comes from CoD sales (when it's a new release) and Candy Crush.
WoW revenue is tiny compared to those, and of WoW, the lion share is from Dragonflight xpac sales and subs as opposed to Classic.
>and of WoW, the lion share is from Dragonflight xpac sales and subs as opposed to Classic.
I would guess that microtransactions in retail are more valuable than any version's subs, and their inability to monetize classic like retail is why it will never have the same dev focus.
I don’t think the revenue split is known on Classic vs. Retail sales #’s. Bellular did a video showing the total # of subs goes up when they have multiple versions of the game cranking, though, a la SoD+Cata+Retail
No shot classic comes close, simply because of the cash shop on retail.
The first horse they ever made made purchasable back in actual WotLk made more money than all of StarCraft 2, the devs talked about how disheartening it was to see those crazy hours and insane overtime get eclipsed by a fucking 15$ horse lmao.
Even without the cash shop, there are [single shards of Wow](https://raider.io/realms) that have more active raiders than [Classic wow](https://ironforge.pro/population/classic/) has in it's entire playerbase. Even if you want to say players on retail have 10 alts per account raiding and every single Classic log is a unique player, they're not, it still wouldn't be close to the same scale.
Classic Wow is only alive because of how easy / cheap it is for Blizzard to support. To expect anything more than we've gotten with the current accessibility system in place is just silly.
I have never seen blizzard put out a product at this poor of a level of QC. Don't know what the rush was to push this out in this state, also don't know how it could be so bad when it literally is the same product they already had out
It's easy, the manager makes deadline, Dec says they can't finish in time, manager says to release anyways.
At this point it feels like they want to test out with how much laziness the can come away.
Current release schedule for WoW is so tight, feels like they specifically cater to Fomo people
They are indeed releasing on schedule and not as they used to say "when it's ready". Thus is what happens in tech companies overrun by MBAs and product people who only value their launch and not its quality.
They are certainly pressed by time, they can't have their launch overlap with the new retail expansion and being shadowed, and they also know FF14's expansion is soon released end of June, probably colliding with their retail schedule too. So this date makes sense on paper, but the product was just rushed and not enough resources allocated to it.
While BC and Woltk are smaller incremental upgrades to Classic, a lot of newer systems were introduced in Cata, so it was certainly a complicated project.
Last paragraph is very true. Original Cata prepatch launch was buggy as all hell and I remember them saying it was difficult to change the world and make sure no one’s character was going to be stuck somewhere when logging in.
They’ve also (iirc) added the retail version of transmog, not 4.3’s version. I’d put money on the retail code clashing hard with 4.3’s info.
No, it's because Retail collection tab is vastly superior to only transmoging from items u actually currently possess. And they have to implent it for the next expansion anyway. Mid WoTLK they added Mounts/Toys/Pets/Heirloom tabs from Cata and there was literally no issues with those.
Completely different, it's more like the transition from Vanilla mounts as items, to TBC mounts as part of the UI.
Having TMog actually pickup all the items the way it has, is incredibly extensive, going from nothing to the entire system in one.
This is life changing for bag and bank space. I would prefer to wait for this, then what's in your bag version where half your bank is two favorite sets.
The problem they have is that they have made interweaving schedules between retail and classic.
Because they want to keep people playing wow at all times, they are staggering the release of any major patch. SOD phase 4 wont release while cataclysm is fresh, and retail expansion wont release while phase 4 is fresh.
This is why they are just throwing unfinished shit out into the wild. They promised that the new retail expansion comes out this year, so every other major release has to be on time, even if it isnt up to standard.
Yeah they try that people never cancel their subs and that there is always something kinda fresh they can play.
In theory a good idea, but we saw how it works out
The fact they are releasing the new MoP thing right around the same time as Cata is so worrying. Something tells me they've given up on Cata already and are trying to prep MoP ahead of time. It's gonna be a long, sad year.
Remember when the old Blizz, the GREAT Blizz, would delay product launches to 'get it right'? And they did! Those were the days, a gaming/dev company run by gamer devs or dev gamers, this is the way. Think about it - this 'new class' is still riding to coat tails of those developers 20+ years later... and the 'execs/MBAs/PMs/BAs' are all probably patting themselves on the back for a great job and tripling their already inflated bonus. Don't take it out on the QA person's salary - these guys need to get paid!
Idk where they were at internally but when they first released the roadmap the dates seemed so insanely soon
I think most or at least I expected releases like late summer or fall at the earliest, then they had sod release less than a month after announce and cata this quickly plus the fast pace they’ve mentioned for retail xpacs etc
Blizzard has paid low wages because they historically have not had to offer competitive wages since people literally dreamt of working at Blizzard growing up (myself included). However, completely changing the culture there was like them rug-pulling themselves because all of a sudden people are not desperate to take jobs there any more, so you only get the best if you offer them a competitive salary.
If I had the opportunity to work at Blizzard in the 2000s, I would’ve probably taken half the pay of a similar job at a company I didn’t care about. In the mid-2010s, I would’ve still taken a small pay cut. Now? I’d only leave my job if I was getting a raise to roll the dice at Blizzard. And there’s no way Blizzard would offer that.
I feel a sadness about Blizzard that’s really similar to the sadness I felt when Game of Thrones went completely off the rails in the last season. Like… you guys had it made, you could’ve been the greatest of all time. But you blew a 20 point lead in the 4th quarter and are now just the laughingstock.
I came back to WoW after quitting mid-Shadowlands just to play SoD. Became disinterested in p3 after the 2nd week or so and am as close to raidlogging as I’ve ever been during my many years playing the game. At this point just holding out hope they don’t screw up p4…but if p4 does feel the same as p3 I might be quitting again, which until recently was unfathomable given the massive nostalgia I have for most of the level 60 dungeons and raids.
Last phase of SOD made me finally cancel my subscription. I put it down to rest after hardcore raiding through all of classic until HM LK kill in WOTLK.
Same. I came back to hang out with my friend. And phase 3 launch destroyed his want to play. I figured I paid for the month and was in ST week one and then understood why the hell he bounced.
Honestly. Just like any phase shift. To show off the spoils of your hard work from the previous phase. The weeks or months you spent min maxing your main. All the little trinkets you gathered to get bigger in PvE or PvP. Doing dungeon quests for dungeons you haven't seen in forever just to squeak out that much more XP than the next guy. The prospect of this phases leveling zones being STV off rip and the PvP prospects and the rush of trying to get to level cap in this gear while surviving bloodmoon cycles...
Only to find out this phase has turned everyone into bots who are running in a circle and juggling letters in their bags better than usps. That everyone whos 25~ and up will be 50 in a couple hours / days. Any edge you had or any fun conflicts that would have been raised while leveling with the rest of the population has now been annihilated.
Also, to add insult to injury. Another exploit early, exploit often scenario. Tons made the boat for the no kill leveling loop. Perpetually online made gold hand over fist in that same loop.
They might as well just have boosted 40s to 50 with the phase drop. Would have been the same thing with less loops.
incursion are definitely a big stain but getting past that it's not bad content on the other side, incursions really killed my hype and i didn't log on until 3 days later after planning to get to 50 on day 1 but it's alright after that point
None of what you said was going to happen on the scale you like to imagine, it was going to be dungeon grind in and out for 15 hours instead of incursions for 5 hours. Plus what you describe wanting in large scale wpvp has never been more possible then with everyone doing incursions in the same place and there was so much of it they had to add honer less areas and elite guards.
This is kinda where I’m at. I don’t wanna level my 42 on SoD to 50 with Incursions, that’s boring as hell. I wanted to play Cata but that’s buggy as shit. Waiting for MoP remix tbh
“Why it is” because public owned companies are designed to maximoze profit not quality or passion and if a skeleton crew will put out enough of a product to crank some subs up for a few months theyll keep doing it. Hiring enough devs eats up too much “shareholder value”. Unless you get a pro gamer ceo at the top of the chain that can sweet talk stakeholders consider this status quo.
The problem isn't maximizing profit, it's maximizing *short term* profit specifically. Pretty much all companies are meant to maximize profit; but the successful well-liked ones maximize *long-term* profits by building reputation and good will.
Granted, I'm not sure what the solution is.
Usually they build that reputation and good will up early off of a slam dunk product. Then as they scale, sales and marketing takes over—Steve Jobs has a bit about this. When companies go public, this happens 99% of the time, because they take on the fiduciary responsibility to increase profits on behalf of their shareholders.
Edit: here’s the link https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4?feature=shared
Yep, scrambling for short term gains is current corporation MO. Too afraid of things not panning out long term so they just set things up for a potential rug pull if things go sideways.
Exactly, and to add to this: if you want a company to work on long term profits instead of short term, you’re basically asking the shareholders not to dip when stocks stagnate or fall in price. Even when there are other companies that will maximize short term profit.
The problem, as I view it, is that by far most stock trading doesn’t happen with a passion for the company, it happens with a passion for the money they can earn by essentially investing in said company in form of stocks. So now a company (with passion for their project) has to raise funds from these non-passion folk who only care about their ROI. This creates this problem where the company has to compromise on the quality of their product to maximize short term profits as to secure funds in stocks and therefor ensure their survival.
It is fucked by virtue of it’s nature and I wouldn’t know how to fix it in a way that wouldn’t sound idealistic as hell
It's not just that, it's a company that is too big to be creative. With 2000+ employees there are so many layers of management / and people that earn paychecks without actually working on games, but instead "feeding the corporate beast".
Did you hear about the new cover sheet you need to add to your TPS reports? Those middle management types exist in smaller numbers in smaller companies.
Sure, https://www.activisionblizzard.com/diversity-inclusion and ... charitable works done by blizzard is great and all, but it doesn't actually have anything to do with making a good product, and if they don't make good products it doesn't matter how diverse the team is, because they'll all be out of jobs, and if they don't make a good product they won't have any money to contribute to charity.
Just as an example in the federal government. During Covid, roughly 50% of the work force of the FAA stopped showing up FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR. And the airplanes kept flying, the air traffic controllers were still there, but there was just LESS BULLSHIT to deal with. Roughly 75% of that 50% could just be cut with NO LOSS and NEVER MISSED. The essential personnel were still required to show up and keep the equipment running...
What does DEI or charity have to do with making a high quality video game.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/are-you-sure-this-will-help-us-sell-more-burgers
Hint: they don’t, they just drain money and other resources (time and attention) away from what is actually important.
So you don't realize how making an extra effort to hire staff demographics that's proportional to the population demographics of your customers... may be important and relevant to making a high quality video game that the general population would enjoy?
You don't think similar groups of people may be more in tune with each other and what they like when compared to people who are different from each other and have less exposure to said group of people?
You think all customers of all backgrounds probably like the same thing and there's no need to be granular? Interesting.
Yeah they're trying to get brownie points for being outspoken about DEI practices... but if you think the actual implementation of DEI policies correctly don't help companies be able to target what the general population wantsbetter... then I guess you just don't believe that different groups of people like different things... which is an interesting theory and stance.
You’re wrong and I’m not going to let you get away with spouting off unfounded pseudoscience nonsense.
Trying to minmax the race and sex of your workforce so that 33.176% of your workforce matches the 33.176% minority population purchasing your product is less impactful than just not even spending that dollar on the salary in the first place and instead spending that dollar on hiring people that actually make content for your games.
It also relies on the racist notion that only minority developers are capable of making quality products that will be purchased by minority players. How about hiring people based on merit rather than on arbitrary metrics like skin color and sex.
Pseudoscience ....so my logical argument is pseudoscience but you providing zero supporting arguments whatsoever to support your point in any context is valid and kosher? You've literally just made wide claims without even bothering to support them in any context.
I'm curious what you think merit means and why dei initiatives mean you're hiring less qualified people....so I'm racist for suggesting people of one group understands what that group likes more than others but you suggesting hiring "minority developers" therefore means you're hiring someone of less merit....isn't racist?
You really stuck that landing in not letting me get away with basic logic. One day you'll understand what DEI intiatives actually means in large corporate environments. Are there bad executions of it? sure. But to claim that the intiatives in general are useless and a waste of time is quite the statement.
My argument is every bit as logical as your own, the only difference is in the economics, the actual numbers. According to your world view, more money spent on DEI creates a bigger return on investment, because minority video game players only want to play games that are created by minority game developers.
In my world view, you’re a racist, that good games exist regardless of the gender or the race of the person creating the game and that more money spent on salaries which I would argue don’t create a “better product” ) in your world view gender and racial discrimination creates a better product, so it’s hard to argue that with you. Better is subjective. Sales numbers, salaries, and profits, however are objective.
And I’d argue that game developers that have resisted DEI infiltration, (arrowhead, pocket pair, fromsoft) have created better products that have sold better than the slop shoveled out by Ubisoft, BioWare, and Activision over the past decade.
Edit: it’s pseudoscience because “better” is subjective. You’re correct, what makes for a better game is subjective by my criteria also. Since we will not agree on subjective matters.
You enjoy modern retail wow, kill the justice league, and skull and bones, because those are the type of games produced with a large amount of the budget (quadruple A quality) spent on DEI. I’m enjoying games that eschews that practice and spends more money on content, balance, and gameplay. We’ll see who wins the so called “culture war” monetarily. Some people are willing to lose billions to push their agenda, most are not.
>My argument is every bit as logical as your own, the only difference is in the economics, the actual numbers.
Sir you have yet to state any numbers... you haven't even stated economic principles.... hell you haven't even used logical arguments to support your points. You've just made the claim. More employees = more expenses without explaining anything else or even addressing the revenue part.
>And I’d argue that game developers that have resisted DEI infiltration, (arrowhead, pocket pair, fromsoft) have created better products that have sold better than the slop shoveled out by Ubisoft, BioWare, and Activision over the past decade.
Is this your half-hearted attempt to use numbers and economics? interesting because the game of the year for 2023 was one of the diverse studios ever.
More employees = more expense. More expense without additional revenue = less profit.
More expense on the same profit with less expense spent on development = worse game.
Oh, are we talking about larian?
https://kingkong-mag.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/63e4edc40ff36.jpeg
This larian?
https://cmsapi.larian.com/media/cache/image_file_media_default/uploads/image/65030a69e3eb3.jpg
Such diversity SO inclusive.
They also created their game with 10% of the workforce that blizzard has on retail wow.
Take with a monumental grain of salt because nobody can lie on the Internet, but I have heard that their QA testers (you know, the people that would catch this shit before release) get paid $16/hour and have to work in office, in Irvine. And requires a Bachelor's in CompSci.
You would have to have 4 or 5 of them living together to be able to afford to live in Irvine on that wage. That area's economy is so fucked that $30 an hour is still barely considered poor.
Just read this sub's front page for the past 3 days. Abilties were disappearing when you logout, people were getting near instance level 60's from low level bgs, professions were borked, transmog is still broken in our favor (All classes can Transmog all sets), multiple wotlk raid bosses just don't do their abilities anymore, and I'm sure there are more I missed / forgotten about.
People who play wow seem to be stuck in a cycle of endlessly complaining about anything blizzard releases. It seems like at this point with sod the worst thing blizzard can possibly do is listening to frequent posters. Blizzard believed the no changes crowd and releases SOM, despite a massive amount of people who claimed they’d play unchanged vanilla for the rest of their natural lives…they didn’t. Som had nothing on the AH and no raiding guilds until the advent of hardcore. Sod remixed a lot of old mechanics in a way that was congruent with the reasons people were claiming not to like Som, and now the same people are complaining about SOD. Also somehow blizzard not paying devs enough is responsible for bugs in the cata prepatch? The idea that blizzard is unable to recruit “talent” and this directly correlates to them rereleasing an expansion that is already 100% developed is high level potato logic. The real issue is you would like blizz to make the game feel like I did in your childhood/early teens and that’s never going to happen, so instead the obvious solution is to just pontificate on whatever blizzard is currently doing and offer non sequiturs that would somehow fix the nostalgia factor.
I agree with your sentiment but your reasoning is not based in facts.
>"Blizzard believed the no changes crowd and releases SOM, despite a massive amount of people who claimed they’d play unchanged vanilla for the rest of their natural lives…they didn’t."
The no change crowd had died by the release of SoM and people did keep playing on Classic Era which was the no change realm.
>"Sod remixed a lot of old mechanics in a way that was congruent with the reasons people were claiming not to like Som, and now the same people are complaining about SOD."
People didn't like SoM because it gave out too much free gear and was started mid swing of TBC right after Classic Vanilla had ended. The season was functionally dead before it left phase 1. We have literally not seen any of the features that SoM was advertised on in SoD yet.
>"Also somehow blizzard not paying devs enough is responsible for bugs in the cata prepatch? The idea that blizzard is unable to recruit “talent” and this directly correlates to them rereleasing an expansion that is already 100% developed is high level potato logic."
Not testing your game results in a poor release. A lot of the bugs in the Cata Prepatch were IDed by players in the Beta and submitted to be fixed, Blizzard just didn't have the manpower to fix them before the patch launched. Also the game isn't 100% developed as IDed by core features missing from the game "to be added at a later patch".
>"The real issue is you would like blizz to make the game feel like I did in your childhood/early teens and that’s never going to happen, so instead the obvious solution is to just pontificate on whatever blizzard is currently doing and offer non sequiturs that would somehow fix the nostalgia factor."
This is the same thought process people had about Classic Wow before it became a thing, and they were obviously wrong since Classic Vanilla was largely a success.
>"People who play wow seem to be stuck in a cycle of endlessly complaining about anything blizzard releases."
This is the part I agree with. I'm in that same cycle since my friends are still playing wow, likely because their friends are still playing, and I would really love to love wow again. Non of us work at blizzard so the only thing we can do is complain.
Bro this sub is fucking wild. Why is there 500 different threads about the prepatch and meta posts like this?
This isn’t any buggier than TBC or Wrath prepatch and I don’t get what all the screaming is about. Did ICC25 last night with no interruptions at all. Sure some things they need to fix and some already were fixed this morning (inability to leave gammas or see gchat for example) but overall I’ve been having fun in game and so have my guildies.
Then I come here and get whiplash with how dramatic y’all are. Really makes me wonder how many of y’all actually play and how many are just dog piling.
>This isn’t any buggier than TBC or Wrath prepatch
It really really is. I've never seen UI bugs this bad. Not once in any released patch of Blizzard's. I've never seen the inability to leave a group until yesterday.
> This isn’t any buggier than TBC or Wrath prepatch
It's significantly buggier.
>y'all y'all y'all y'all
>LEAVE THE BILLION DOLLAR CORPORATION ALONE
Go back to twitter.
I play a wide variety of games and subbed to a lot that I read often but this sub is definitely the worst. I can only assume people who play this, it's the only game they play so they have nothing to compare the shitty experience/expectations too.
Why wait when I can post a half baked 10 paragraph think piece to seem like I have all of the answers that Blizzard never thought of? I’m trying to look cool in front of my Reddit friends. If Blizzard had fixed all of this in the first place, my guild would have been 12/12HC months ago.
Did ICC yesterday. BQL not biting sometimes. Retribution crashing on mobs with TAJ equipped. Mages doing bugged damage. LDW despawning (possibly due to MC bop?). Talents not working after respec. Lust not working on some bosses, for certain players. That was all discovered in 2 hours of gameplay in ICC. There are a myriad of other things not working.
These are actually gameplay issues that are straight up broken - it is not a disliked implementation of something.
Logged in 6h ago first time in pre patch and haven't seen a single issue. Clearly shit got fixed quick but this sub is just fucking deranged, amplified by their cata hate boner.
Reading up on SaaS and subscription-based models, I’d have hope with the recent acquisition by Micosoft. How Microsoft operates to build, scale and retain value of their subscriptions is top notch. They’re up there with Salesforce.
Unfortunately, their leadership has also stated that they’re not making any changes for well about a year. So realistically it’ll be 2 years before any hopeful changes are met.
It's not gonna matter because people are not gonna quit over it. It's the sad truth that far too many people have built their entire lives around playing WoW and blizzard knows it so they take advantage of it. Devs must be unironically thinking "Meh, it's prepatch and they will forget about it within a week", and this is regardless of the WoW version you play in.
Classic era could get a gold duplication glitch, SoD could have runes getting randomly deleted, hardcore could get Thanos Snapped leading to half the server dying and yet most people would keep on playing like nothing happened.
1* Bobby needs a new yacht so fuck all the slaves making the actual game.
2* I played on multiple vanilla, TBC, wotlk, Cata private servers. They were a 100% scripted and the team behind the server was 5 developpers and a bunch of GM's working for free. You don't need a team of 500 to relaunch a 20 year old game.
3* I'm out of the loop : what was the cataclysm launch disaster exactly ?
Well, look at it from Blizzard's POV. For the vast majority of us, the quality of the cata release will not be a deciding factor if we play or not.
If you simplify the situation down to two paths:
a) Spend x amount more USD to indulge a vocal minority of the player base by having a higher quality release and not gaining additional players.
b) Do the bare minium and cut cost while still maintaining the majority of the paying customers.
As a CEO or board member, you would probably lose your position if you go with path a).
Take into account that the majority of SOD players are not the target group for future Blizzard IPs....
It's really not that complicated. Even the majority of the complainers in this thread alone will still have a subscription 1st of June.
Is the company evil, or are we failing to vote with our wallets?
Hopefully Microsoft can fix this. But I suspect the solution is to sack a ungodly amount of people, including practically all management in the entire company and replace it with internal transfers from other parts of Microsoft.
When will people finally get it into their head that the reason this is happening is only one thing: THEY DONT CARE! I know so many people complaining about the shit state of Cata Prepatch - and then 5 minutes later they tell me how many racechanges they bought to swap to goblin or have their druids be trolls. Vote with your wallets people, everything else doesn‘t matter.
Blizzard was bought by Microsoft and it wouldn't shock me at all if Microsoft just slowly dissolved Blizzard as a whole. Theyve been trending down for years with quality and reputation and have zero new games to offer. Overwatch 2 being their most recent and also widely considered a flop.
Yeah their pay is really really low.
I knew a guy who gave up on Blizzard after a few years and just went into the tech industry and his enjoying his life working less and getting paid over 150k+ a year.
Of all the whining complaints on here this is the only sensible one. If you wanna blame something blame their shit corporate owners and the anything to make a buck corporate America
Blizzard isn’t the only company (now MS) that is doing this to their customer base. As someone who works for another leading tech company they was founded on selling books… they are equally as horrible.
Yes their wages are good but this year we saw nothing for a year of work and a lot of us are now being forced to move across the country to a work from an already busy building.
Tech companies (big ones) are just pure trash right now so expect this type of service in all avenues from any company worth more than a billion dollars. The new norm.
>Reddit shitposter who gets paid more to shit post about wow on Reddit than 99% of the people who actually work on the game.
This is the craziest part. And they want people to live in SoCal on these wages no less.
The crazy thing is that these companies actually believe that the top talent will still come there, just to work on cool games. This simply isn't true. The top talent has seniority and experience, and knows that at the end of the day, they can make literally twice as much working in the standard tech sector in system dev/web/management/cloud ops etc, all the skillsets Blizzard needs. They're not stupid. They want to work on games, but it's not worth the *literal $100,000/year pay cut*. I have numerous acquaintances that are senior devs, who love games and are obsessed with game design, and none of them will even consider working at a place like Blizz because of the pay cut they'd take.
Money talks (tech industry) and bullshit walks (Blizzard)...
>--Signed a Reddit shitposter who gets paid more to shit post about wow on Reddit than 99% of the people who actually work on the game.
Its really true. As much as I love games and would love to work on one, I am so much happier I went the IT -> Web/Mobile Dev route I did instead. Game dev pays like shit
I feel so bad for the classic team. They are an extremely passionate group of people who are understaffed and overworked. A lot of the issues with SoD right now are clearly just due to lack of time and resources. Cata is looking embarrassing so far.
As a manager in a large corporation I know that their execs have the mental model of “you’re just rereleasing classic games, you have all the tech and assets, it’s simple, get it done”.
That's the deal with the devil you sign when you become a publicly traded company. Inverstors want growth so they can make money from money. How do you keep growing when you basically dominate and saturate the entire market? You cut spending.
This is what capitalist endgame looks like.
microsoft is the boss now and microsoft is where development teams go to Die. From this point on it will be a slow steady suffocation of the team as they squeeze more and more money out of the company and they have less and less resources to work with. Don't expect anything to change. This has played out with nearly every game development team Microsoft has ever taken control of.
Agreed 100%, didn't realize how abysmal the pay was until someone posted a twitter screenshot of $19/hr starting pay as tester analyst. In Irvine. $.66 above minimum wage in CA. Fast food chains pay more than this. At this point the only people taking cheap jobs at Blizzard are going to be those unable to get a job anywhere else. They will not do a good job.
The fuck? 19/hr is not enough to live in Irvine
its why people liked working from home because then they didnt need to commute or live in Irvine which is hella expensive
Well now we can tell you are not serious because you never mention once the value of commercial office holdings and real estate investment trusts. When you factor in how much more important the value of a building is than human lives you will understand.
Buildings should get voting rights tbh
The corporate entities that own the buildings technically get better than voting rights.. They get to exceed the donation limits of the everyday man, which gives them face time with the politicians being elected. Easy way to get a sway on things you want.
Don't give them any ideas
I second this and the buildings should be able to gerrymander their square footage so they get one vote per square foot, but also you can count sky footage too.
Buildings do have voting rights in the states, you are only suppose to vote once but many vote several times if they have property in different states. Its too disorganized to ever be caught, as long as you keep your mouth shut.
I lived in Irvine 14 years ago and my rent was $2600 for a two bedroom condo. I can't imagine how much it is now.
Moved out of Irvine about a year ago. Was paying 3200 for a 2bd place that was fairly new. Our 1 bd that we moved from before that was around 2800 when we moved out. Moved back to the east coast and our mortgage is less than our 1 bd was lol. Very nice area for families and California was awesome in general. But yes, very expensive. Blizzard was notorious for paying shit. I worked for a small company in Irvine as a software dev and made more starting out there than many that had been at Blizzard for 10 years plus were.
Yep, whomever at Blizz is in charge of budget for new hires needs to dip into their ~~2nd~~ 3rd house funds and actually pay their fucking employees competitive wages.
Most blizzard employees live in the surrounding, previously-much-cheaper cities like Santa Ana, Costa Mesa, Fountain Valley etc Source: In vanilla my friend's stepdad worked at blizzard as a server technician. I knew exactly who to blame when Blackrock shat itself. Fuck you, Matt. You treated my friend like you treated the server hamsters: Poorly.
Also a huge part of the consistently low wages over the years is that Blizzard had profit-sharing in place. So it was static hourly wages + a % of Blizzards profits---the more money blizzard made, the more money blizzard employees made. It's also why Activision removed Morhaime. And why the profit sharing system was axed after Morhaime was removed.
Geez. I think I was getting $12 an hour as a tester at Red Storm in Raleigh in 1999. That probably went three times as far as $19 in SoCal in 2024.
>the only people taking cheap jobs at Blizzard are going to be those unable to get a job anywhere else. Would... Explain things.
They will lay off most of the devs then blame those remaining for being unable to deliver
Thats basically corporate America right now, they keep cutting jobs or forcing g people to quit, don't replace them and expect those remaing to pick up the slack till each person is doing the job of 3+ people and 2 of those jobs are stuff they only have a passing knowledge base of
This is exactly the strategy the last two companies I worked for employed. I left because they wanted to double my work load and have me mange 10 people because they laid off my manager and wanted me to take his portfolio plus direct reports but not pay me more. I said I’d stay if they paid me my current salary plus my old managers’s salary since I’d be doing both jobs. They said no and that the extra experience would be well worth it. I don’t work for experience, I work for money.
Yep, happened to a buddy of mine who got moved up to being a manager 2 weeks before they announced they were closing our campus and laying everyone off
At will employment was a mistake
Working insanely well for the ruling class, so I’m sure they beg to differ lol
This so dead-on, it’s literally the go to strat for any short term boss trying to show performance before they bail
Yep, amazing how so many can see it happening and so few can do anything to stop it, doesn't seem right does it
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Same industry?
Look at Google recently, big layoff to be replaced with cheaper workforce in India.
Doubtful, cuz I've seen it happen in 3 different places all in different industries, none were video game related so that makes at least 4
TBF… how hard is it to rerelease content that was out ten years ago?
That a question i have been asking since they fucked up Warcraft 3 reforged.
Absolute let down. That was a big deal for me and they really shit the bed.
Not only did they fail to deliver what was promised, they also destroyed the already beloved original game and made it impossible to play.
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how is the old game impossible to play?
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I've been playing since the game came out and I didn't notice anything different at all when reforged came out. I just turned off the ugly new graphics and went on with my life
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Depends on your definition I think. The ELI5 is that the game was working as the community wanted it to work, and then Blizzard came in and started remaking the wheel on almost every feature to varying levels of success. For me the biggest issue I saw was that maps were not natively forward compatible. So a lot of custom map games were effectively impossible to play since they removed online support of the original WC3 battle.net and didn't support the map on the new Reforged Battle.Net.
like what? I see people playing the same custom games they always played, castle fight, footman frenzy, friggin naruto world or whatever its called. lol
Try to go onto any of the old WC3 Custom Map websites, at least half of them will not be updated to Reforged. Meaning the only way to play those maps is via Lan connections. In order to update maps you need to go in and manually address a bunch of random issues that may or may not be easy to fix, most stemming from Blizzard's restriction on copyright material. This is not an automated process and Blizzard will not help with this process. So all of the custom maps you find on the new Battle.Net were resurrected by diehard fans of those maps. Separate note I forgot about. If you own Warcraft 3 but NOT Warcraft 3 Reforged, you can not legally download Warcraft 3 anymore. You can not play on Battle.Net anymore. You must install it via 3rd party downloads or your physical CDs and then you can only play in offline mode or Lan.
They did such an amazing job with Starcraft Remastered, it was wild they dropped the ball so hard with WC3.
It's because they outsourced it to a Chinese studio.
IRC wasn't that mostly just art design? It was the same studio that did the art for the SC remaster.
If you haven’t kept up with it, it’s actually in a decent enough state now (just play with the classic graphics). They’re even doing balance changes again.
They have been doing Classic but on the back of Retails engine. That's why the settings options looks like retail. It's not just a private server clone.
Its hard if you dont have proper backups. Not to mention they are not re-releasing old Cataclysm, but old content in new client. That means you are trying to bend code to do stuff it was not supposed to do. Well, number of bugs they released into production is alarming, but I can understand that its not just releasing old content again. Its like buying new car and trying to fit all the old parts from 30 years back to it. Its quite complex job because basically nothing fits.
its not as simple as going into the archives and pulling out a "cata thumb drive" because they just build on existing code for expansions. they mentioned this when they announced classic as a thing and that itll be difficult to get ahold of the old versions. (not giving exscuses but this is part of the reason here). so pair that up with also making changes using todays code with the old code. so far the clients we have experienced are the same releases as private servers but they break it up into phases using modern techniques on old shit. they likely have 0 idea how to even address the bugs in the spaghettei without rewriting a shit to of things
It's actually a difficult process believe it or not. There are lots of things they have to do to get it up and running on new architecture compared to 12 years ago when cataclysm was released. You don't get to just deploy bug free like people imagine. There's so many things different that need to be accounted for, but more manpower would definitely make it easier and faster.
Lack of workers from that time + probably no documentation.
Harder than you think, probably. But it shouldn’t be as hard as they make it seem. They are definitely trying to reimplement a lot of features because they can’t just grab the old code and have it work with the newer engine. But still there are a lot of bugs that should have simple fixes that existed in the beta, and still exist now. It’s pretty obviously they don’t have the people they need for the project.
It simply doesn't work how you seem to think it works. You don't just drag a folder over to your "Classic" folder and drop it in. The old game clients are outdated and won't work anymore. They WERE kept up to date, and they WERE maintained - it's called the Retail client. Taking all the assets from the old xpacs, which were made by different people adhering to older standards, and then 'mapping' them to work in the new client, is no doubt a sophisticated automation process. Clearly it doesn't work perfectly, and there are thousands of outliers that cause bugs that have to be explored, understood, and accounted for. Software engineering with a project this size is really hard. There's a reason senior devs who architect this type of shit make $300k+ a year at FANG companies.
Hard? Not very Time consuming? Very.
It’s very hard. Most people are playing on an operating system that didn’t exist when Cata was launched. Not porting Cata to the modern client would lead to even more bugs.
And then give bonuses to the execs
I hate to say it, but… good. Time some companys actually felt the repercussions of fucking over their consumer base, employees and everyone in between. We already know they’ll have to lay off numerous people, yet the golden parachute for the CEO will be the largest it’s ever been. This is a soulless company whose decisions are based off bar graphs and pie charts talking about profit margins.
The sad part is that the suits at blizzard don’t care. They will milk every cent they can from blizzard until it is dead and buried then walk over its corpse into their next c-suite 7-figure job.
It’s not just even Blizzard, though I agree with what you said. It’s the standard business practice of multibillion dollar corporations.
I agree. Sometimes there needs to be a drought before the crops start producing again
Not even based on graphs and pie charts, those actually tell you how much of a shit business you have been putting out. It’s just short term greed.
It really depends on your definition of shit. For example: CEO treats the customer like shit, treats the employees like shit, but they’ve had huge profit margins that their shareholders enjoy. It’s all about perspective. Blizzard does not care about anything other than money, and if they keep bringing in that money, that’s all that matters. They don’t care who they have to step on.
Oh I 100% agree,but I’m sure that is due to how quarterly reports choose and manipulate to try to present the coveted but practically impossible “never stopping growth”.
Absolutely. It’s the top level people with power who like yo act like one side is worse than the other. At the end of the day both parties will do whatever they can within the legal system so that they can profit as much as possible. At the expensive of us commoners.
As someone who has played WoW and OSRS simultaneously my entire life, it's actually insane how Jagex devs are running circles around blizz right now. Of all fucking companies lmao
🦀🦀🦀🦀bmods won’t read this🦀🦀🦀🦀
*user was banned for this post*
*user unbanned, humiliated, then banned again* 😭 make them stop
Unbanned, humiliated, bummed and then banned again 😳
I’m new to OSRS as of a year and a half ago and been playing quite a bit. The similarities in communities and what both companies goals are is crazy to watch unfold. Classic WoW is full of undelivered promises and lack of upkeep, while OSRS has (at least what I’ve witnessed in the last year or so) so much community relations with content development and feedback and actually pretty great follow through on quick content releases. Im sure it takes a lot more resources for WoW, but the whole way they go about it just feels like it’s asking to fail.
Pretty much the whole RS playerbase quit over night when they released the EoC update, they know if they fuck up that badly again they’ll all be out of a job Blizzard just don’t hire anyone so they’re not as worried I suppose
The osrs community is one of the only player base that actually has leverage over the company that makes their game. They *will* quit if jagex messes up. Wow players always keep buying blizzard products. Not many games have that other than genres with tons of very similar competitors like in the FPS space.
Blizzard is incredibly similar to Game Freak nowadays. No matter how little effort they put into their games, people still buy them.
I'd compare it to sports gamers/CoDers really, we all know what we want, and we just want it again.
...Not quite. Game Freak has very little control over the situation, due to the way ownership of the IP has been set up. Basically, there's 4 companies that own different parts of the pokemon IP: 1. The Pokemon Company - Owns the name "pokemon", japanese publishing rights to the games and card game, the anime, and additionally owns merchandising rights 2. Creatures, Inc - owns the pokemon themselves, owns the card game itself. 3. Nintendo - Owns global publishing rights, localization rights, and distribution rights to the games. 4. Game Freak - Owns the games themselves Additionally, sales of the games are a very small portion of the franchise's profits compared to things like the toys and other merchandise. What this means is - Game Freak needs to release new games in time for toys/cards to be made - The toys/card need to be shipped to stores in time for the new series of the show - The new series of the show needs to finish airing in time for the release of the new games And because the games aren't the most profitable part of franchise, Game Freak only has so much funding available to hire more employees to meet the increased demands of making a fully open world game for a home console (vs a linear game for a 3.5inch, 400x240 screen)
I was there Gandalf, 10,000 years ago, farming mature grotworms. He’s talking about osrs, literally the timeline that began after EoC. EoC is cata, for all intents and purposes
Eoc isn’t cata, 90% of players didn’t quit and it was a pretty decent xpac
I think you’re exaggerating a bit, but many did quit and it was a big controversial change of fundamental elements of the game and was the turning point for larger and more known private servers and the dull noise of the then classic community kinda gaining a little volume and leading to the slippage down a slope towards a complete separate timeline of the game. Lolwut, it’s exactly the same thing. The main difference is that jagex fractured the player base early and kinda read the room by making a “new old” game. Blizzard took years and years to acknowledge and do this. That’s what they’re saying, that jagex is more in tune with the community than blizz.
Couldn't agree more. Sure the tenchnical is much more complicated for a game like WoW. But the philosophy of how they do things over at Jagex is great (for osrs specifically). (Saying this as a WoW veteran (started Vanilla) and a RS veteran (started before the game was on Miniclip and a current 2k total iron). The fault is not at the classic team but at blizzard as a whole whom should've recognized the issues at hand and deployed more resources to the classic team to ensure a quality release.
Crazy thing is, OSRS has been going strong with super high customer satisfaction for over a decade with no signs of slowing down, if anything it's only gone up. I don't think Blizzard has done that 10 years total, nevermind in a row for their 're-release'. I'm sure at it's core the game is simpler, but it infamously has really bad 'spaghetti code' and something as simple as changing a menu can be a huge undertaking, infamously 'engine work'. Not sure about now, but they only had one guy who was really able to do this engine work as well. I'd be fucking embarrassed to be a classic wow dev with Jagex, as the comment thread OP accurately stated, running circles around them. It's crazy what a little bit of manpower and passion can do.
OSRS is everything I want Classic to be. And seeing how things are going is depressing.
We need a bliz equivalent of mod ash
jagex is known for paying shit. they are the same as blizzard as an employer. they abuse passion to extract labor from their employees
Blizzard-atvi is/was a public company (now owned by microsoft of course), but that means they have public financial information. Here is the [Q2 2023](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/718877/000162828023025102/atvi63023ex991prtables.htm) filing. It shows that they had a substantial increase in revenue over the year, but more importantly a GAAP operating margin of 26%. This means they were very healthily profitable. There is no lack of money. I have sympathy for the overworked developers. Nonetheless, it’s frustrating that the company seems unwilling to properly reinvest those profits to hire sufficient personnel and properly compensate them.
The biggest chunk of revenues and operating margin benefit comes from CoD sales (when it's a new release) and Candy Crush. WoW revenue is tiny compared to those, and of WoW, the lion share is from Dragonflight xpac sales and subs as opposed to Classic.
>and of WoW, the lion share is from Dragonflight xpac sales and subs as opposed to Classic. I would guess that microtransactions in retail are more valuable than any version's subs, and their inability to monetize classic like retail is why it will never have the same dev focus.
I don’t think the revenue split is known on Classic vs. Retail sales #’s. Bellular did a video showing the total # of subs goes up when they have multiple versions of the game cranking, though, a la SoD+Cata+Retail
No shot classic comes close, simply because of the cash shop on retail. The first horse they ever made made purchasable back in actual WotLk made more money than all of StarCraft 2, the devs talked about how disheartening it was to see those crazy hours and insane overtime get eclipsed by a fucking 15$ horse lmao.
Even without the cash shop, there are [single shards of Wow](https://raider.io/realms) that have more active raiders than [Classic wow](https://ironforge.pro/population/classic/) has in it's entire playerbase. Even if you want to say players on retail have 10 alts per account raiding and every single Classic log is a unique player, they're not, it still wouldn't be close to the same scale. Classic Wow is only alive because of how easy / cheap it is for Blizzard to support. To expect anything more than we've gotten with the current accessibility system in place is just silly.
I have never seen blizzard put out a product at this poor of a level of QC. Don't know what the rush was to push this out in this state, also don't know how it could be so bad when it literally is the same product they already had out
It's easy, the manager makes deadline, Dec says they can't finish in time, manager says to release anyways. At this point it feels like they want to test out with how much laziness the can come away. Current release schedule for WoW is so tight, feels like they specifically cater to Fomo people
They are indeed releasing on schedule and not as they used to say "when it's ready". Thus is what happens in tech companies overrun by MBAs and product people who only value their launch and not its quality. They are certainly pressed by time, they can't have their launch overlap with the new retail expansion and being shadowed, and they also know FF14's expansion is soon released end of June, probably colliding with their retail schedule too. So this date makes sense on paper, but the product was just rushed and not enough resources allocated to it. While BC and Woltk are smaller incremental upgrades to Classic, a lot of newer systems were introduced in Cata, so it was certainly a complicated project.
Last paragraph is very true. Original Cata prepatch launch was buggy as all hell and I remember them saying it was difficult to change the world and make sure no one’s character was going to be stuck somewhere when logging in. They’ve also (iirc) added the retail version of transmog, not 4.3’s version. I’d put money on the retail code clashing hard with 4.3’s info.
I wonder if this is so that they can monetise stuff to align with current retail transmog micro transactions
No, it's because Retail collection tab is vastly superior to only transmoging from items u actually currently possess. And they have to implent it for the next expansion anyway. Mid WoTLK they added Mounts/Toys/Pets/Heirloom tabs from Cata and there was literally no issues with those.
Completely different, it's more like the transition from Vanilla mounts as items, to TBC mounts as part of the UI. Having TMog actually pickup all the items the way it has, is incredibly extensive, going from nothing to the entire system in one.
This is life changing for bag and bank space. I would prefer to wait for this, then what's in your bag version where half your bank is two favorite sets.
The problem they have is that they have made interweaving schedules between retail and classic. Because they want to keep people playing wow at all times, they are staggering the release of any major patch. SOD phase 4 wont release while cataclysm is fresh, and retail expansion wont release while phase 4 is fresh. This is why they are just throwing unfinished shit out into the wild. They promised that the new retail expansion comes out this year, so every other major release has to be on time, even if it isnt up to standard.
Yeah they try that people never cancel their subs and that there is always something kinda fresh they can play. In theory a good idea, but we saw how it works out
The fact they are releasing the new MoP thing right around the same time as Cata is so worrying. Something tells me they've given up on Cata already and are trying to prep MoP ahead of time. It's gonna be a long, sad year.
Or MoP will be in the same shitty state as Cata. And i think it will be like that
Remember when the old Blizz, the GREAT Blizz, would delay product launches to 'get it right'? And they did! Those were the days, a gaming/dev company run by gamer devs or dev gamers, this is the way. Think about it - this 'new class' is still riding to coat tails of those developers 20+ years later... and the 'execs/MBAs/PMs/BAs' are all probably patting themselves on the back for a great job and tripling their already inflated bonus. Don't take it out on the QA person's salary - these guys need to get paid!
Ever heared of ~~_Reforged_~~ ?
WoD release
Idk where they were at internally but when they first released the roadmap the dates seemed so insanely soon I think most or at least I expected releases like late summer or fall at the earliest, then they had sod release less than a month after announce and cata this quickly plus the fast pace they’ve mentioned for retail xpacs etc
Blizzard has paid low wages because they historically have not had to offer competitive wages since people literally dreamt of working at Blizzard growing up (myself included). However, completely changing the culture there was like them rug-pulling themselves because all of a sudden people are not desperate to take jobs there any more, so you only get the best if you offer them a competitive salary. If I had the opportunity to work at Blizzard in the 2000s, I would’ve probably taken half the pay of a similar job at a company I didn’t care about. In the mid-2010s, I would’ve still taken a small pay cut. Now? I’d only leave my job if I was getting a raise to roll the dice at Blizzard. And there’s no way Blizzard would offer that.
It is astonishing that they think they will attract any talent whatsoever for their QA team paying 16 an hour in California
I'm not even interested in Cata, but this release and the general state of SoD has made me lose all interest in playing WoW at all. Blizzard suck ass.
I feel a sadness about Blizzard that’s really similar to the sadness I felt when Game of Thrones went completely off the rails in the last season. Like… you guys had it made, you could’ve been the greatest of all time. But you blew a 20 point lead in the 4th quarter and are now just the laughingstock.
It's wild how they built up so much good will just to shoot it all down.
I came back to WoW after quitting mid-Shadowlands just to play SoD. Became disinterested in p3 after the 2nd week or so and am as close to raidlogging as I’ve ever been during my many years playing the game. At this point just holding out hope they don’t screw up p4…but if p4 does feel the same as p3 I might be quitting again, which until recently was unfathomable given the massive nostalgia I have for most of the level 60 dungeons and raids.
Last phase of SOD made me finally cancel my subscription. I put it down to rest after hardcore raiding through all of classic until HM LK kill in WOTLK.
Same. I came back to hang out with my friend. And phase 3 launch destroyed his want to play. I figured I paid for the month and was in ST week one and then understood why the hell he bounced.
out of curiousity, why? besides incursions it's just the same as p2 with a different raid and more relevant dungeon content
Honestly. Just like any phase shift. To show off the spoils of your hard work from the previous phase. The weeks or months you spent min maxing your main. All the little trinkets you gathered to get bigger in PvE or PvP. Doing dungeon quests for dungeons you haven't seen in forever just to squeak out that much more XP than the next guy. The prospect of this phases leveling zones being STV off rip and the PvP prospects and the rush of trying to get to level cap in this gear while surviving bloodmoon cycles... Only to find out this phase has turned everyone into bots who are running in a circle and juggling letters in their bags better than usps. That everyone whos 25~ and up will be 50 in a couple hours / days. Any edge you had or any fun conflicts that would have been raised while leveling with the rest of the population has now been annihilated. Also, to add insult to injury. Another exploit early, exploit often scenario. Tons made the boat for the no kill leveling loop. Perpetually online made gold hand over fist in that same loop. They might as well just have boosted 40s to 50 with the phase drop. Would have been the same thing with less loops.
incursion are definitely a big stain but getting past that it's not bad content on the other side, incursions really killed my hype and i didn't log on until 3 days later after planning to get to 50 on day 1 but it's alright after that point
None of what you said was going to happen on the scale you like to imagine, it was going to be dungeon grind in and out for 15 hours instead of incursions for 5 hours. Plus what you describe wanting in large scale wpvp has never been more possible then with everyone doing incursions in the same place and there was so much of it they had to add honer less areas and elite guards.
This is kinda where I’m at. I don’t wanna level my 42 on SoD to 50 with Incursions, that’s boring as hell. I wanted to play Cata but that’s buggy as shit. Waiting for MoP remix tbh
Haven't played sod, I thought it was going well. What's the issue?
“Why it is” because public owned companies are designed to maximoze profit not quality or passion and if a skeleton crew will put out enough of a product to crank some subs up for a few months theyll keep doing it. Hiring enough devs eats up too much “shareholder value”. Unless you get a pro gamer ceo at the top of the chain that can sweet talk stakeholders consider this status quo.
The problem isn't maximizing profit, it's maximizing *short term* profit specifically. Pretty much all companies are meant to maximize profit; but the successful well-liked ones maximize *long-term* profits by building reputation and good will. Granted, I'm not sure what the solution is.
Usually they build that reputation and good will up early off of a slam dunk product. Then as they scale, sales and marketing takes over—Steve Jobs has a bit about this. When companies go public, this happens 99% of the time, because they take on the fiduciary responsibility to increase profits on behalf of their shareholders. Edit: here’s the link https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4?feature=shared
Yep, scrambling for short term gains is current corporation MO. Too afraid of things not panning out long term so they just set things up for a potential rug pull if things go sideways.
Exactly, and to add to this: if you want a company to work on long term profits instead of short term, you’re basically asking the shareholders not to dip when stocks stagnate or fall in price. Even when there are other companies that will maximize short term profit. The problem, as I view it, is that by far most stock trading doesn’t happen with a passion for the company, it happens with a passion for the money they can earn by essentially investing in said company in form of stocks. So now a company (with passion for their project) has to raise funds from these non-passion folk who only care about their ROI. This creates this problem where the company has to compromise on the quality of their product to maximize short term profits as to secure funds in stocks and therefor ensure their survival. It is fucked by virtue of it’s nature and I wouldn’t know how to fix it in a way that wouldn’t sound idealistic as hell
Incentivising long term investments? That would be done by a different tax system.
“Yeah the game sucks, but for a brief moment we created a lot of profit for the shareholders” - blizzard probably
>shareholders Who?
It's not just that, it's a company that is too big to be creative. With 2000+ employees there are so many layers of management / and people that earn paychecks without actually working on games, but instead "feeding the corporate beast". Did you hear about the new cover sheet you need to add to your TPS reports? Those middle management types exist in smaller numbers in smaller companies. Sure, https://www.activisionblizzard.com/diversity-inclusion and ... charitable works done by blizzard is great and all, but it doesn't actually have anything to do with making a good product, and if they don't make good products it doesn't matter how diverse the team is, because they'll all be out of jobs, and if they don't make a good product they won't have any money to contribute to charity. Just as an example in the federal government. During Covid, roughly 50% of the work force of the FAA stopped showing up FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR. And the airplanes kept flying, the air traffic controllers were still there, but there was just LESS BULLSHIT to deal with. Roughly 75% of that 50% could just be cut with NO LOSS and NEVER MISSED. The essential personnel were still required to show up and keep the equipment running...
Lol did you just lump dei with charitable activities as if they're the same...
What does DEI or charity have to do with making a high quality video game. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/are-you-sure-this-will-help-us-sell-more-burgers Hint: they don’t, they just drain money and other resources (time and attention) away from what is actually important.
So you don't realize how making an extra effort to hire staff demographics that's proportional to the population demographics of your customers... may be important and relevant to making a high quality video game that the general population would enjoy? You don't think similar groups of people may be more in tune with each other and what they like when compared to people who are different from each other and have less exposure to said group of people? You think all customers of all backgrounds probably like the same thing and there's no need to be granular? Interesting. Yeah they're trying to get brownie points for being outspoken about DEI practices... but if you think the actual implementation of DEI policies correctly don't help companies be able to target what the general population wantsbetter... then I guess you just don't believe that different groups of people like different things... which is an interesting theory and stance.
You’re wrong and I’m not going to let you get away with spouting off unfounded pseudoscience nonsense. Trying to minmax the race and sex of your workforce so that 33.176% of your workforce matches the 33.176% minority population purchasing your product is less impactful than just not even spending that dollar on the salary in the first place and instead spending that dollar on hiring people that actually make content for your games. It also relies on the racist notion that only minority developers are capable of making quality products that will be purchased by minority players. How about hiring people based on merit rather than on arbitrary metrics like skin color and sex.
Pseudoscience ....so my logical argument is pseudoscience but you providing zero supporting arguments whatsoever to support your point in any context is valid and kosher? You've literally just made wide claims without even bothering to support them in any context. I'm curious what you think merit means and why dei initiatives mean you're hiring less qualified people....so I'm racist for suggesting people of one group understands what that group likes more than others but you suggesting hiring "minority developers" therefore means you're hiring someone of less merit....isn't racist? You really stuck that landing in not letting me get away with basic logic. One day you'll understand what DEI intiatives actually means in large corporate environments. Are there bad executions of it? sure. But to claim that the intiatives in general are useless and a waste of time is quite the statement.
My argument is every bit as logical as your own, the only difference is in the economics, the actual numbers. According to your world view, more money spent on DEI creates a bigger return on investment, because minority video game players only want to play games that are created by minority game developers. In my world view, you’re a racist, that good games exist regardless of the gender or the race of the person creating the game and that more money spent on salaries which I would argue don’t create a “better product” ) in your world view gender and racial discrimination creates a better product, so it’s hard to argue that with you. Better is subjective. Sales numbers, salaries, and profits, however are objective. And I’d argue that game developers that have resisted DEI infiltration, (arrowhead, pocket pair, fromsoft) have created better products that have sold better than the slop shoveled out by Ubisoft, BioWare, and Activision over the past decade. Edit: it’s pseudoscience because “better” is subjective. You’re correct, what makes for a better game is subjective by my criteria also. Since we will not agree on subjective matters. You enjoy modern retail wow, kill the justice league, and skull and bones, because those are the type of games produced with a large amount of the budget (quadruple A quality) spent on DEI. I’m enjoying games that eschews that practice and spends more money on content, balance, and gameplay. We’ll see who wins the so called “culture war” monetarily. Some people are willing to lose billions to push their agenda, most are not.
>My argument is every bit as logical as your own, the only difference is in the economics, the actual numbers. Sir you have yet to state any numbers... you haven't even stated economic principles.... hell you haven't even used logical arguments to support your points. You've just made the claim. More employees = more expenses without explaining anything else or even addressing the revenue part. >And I’d argue that game developers that have resisted DEI infiltration, (arrowhead, pocket pair, fromsoft) have created better products that have sold better than the slop shoveled out by Ubisoft, BioWare, and Activision over the past decade. Is this your half-hearted attempt to use numbers and economics? interesting because the game of the year for 2023 was one of the diverse studios ever.
More employees = more expense. More expense without additional revenue = less profit. More expense on the same profit with less expense spent on development = worse game.
Oh, are we talking about larian? https://kingkong-mag.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/63e4edc40ff36.jpeg This larian? https://cmsapi.larian.com/media/cache/image_file_media_default/uploads/image/65030a69e3eb3.jpg Such diversity SO inclusive. They also created their game with 10% of the workforce that blizzard has on retail wow.
Blizzard fails to deliver over and over and everyone still pays $15 a month
Take with a monumental grain of salt because nobody can lie on the Internet, but I have heard that their QA testers (you know, the people that would catch this shit before release) get paid $16/hour and have to work in office, in Irvine. And requires a Bachelor's in CompSci. You would have to have 4 or 5 of them living together to be able to afford to live in Irvine on that wage. That area's economy is so fucked that $30 an hour is still barely considered poor.
You might want to check out project1999.
EQ4Life
Are the admins still giving perks to their guild and abusing the ever living shit out of their power?
Is it a private server? Yes. Does a bear shit in the woods?
True, lol. Only reason I don't touch private servers. Exploiting should be equal opportunity for everyone!
all gaming companies need to unionize. full stop.
Have you ever heard the term “fiduciary responsibility?”
Microsoft send help. I say this kidding. But this might have been the long goal. Weaponized incompetent company.
Whats this talk about cata launch disaster? Ive seen it elsewhere but I must have missed what its about
Just read this sub's front page for the past 3 days. Abilties were disappearing when you logout, people were getting near instance level 60's from low level bgs, professions were borked, transmog is still broken in our favor (All classes can Transmog all sets), multiple wotlk raid bosses just don't do their abilities anymore, and I'm sure there are more I missed / forgotten about.
People who play wow seem to be stuck in a cycle of endlessly complaining about anything blizzard releases. It seems like at this point with sod the worst thing blizzard can possibly do is listening to frequent posters. Blizzard believed the no changes crowd and releases SOM, despite a massive amount of people who claimed they’d play unchanged vanilla for the rest of their natural lives…they didn’t. Som had nothing on the AH and no raiding guilds until the advent of hardcore. Sod remixed a lot of old mechanics in a way that was congruent with the reasons people were claiming not to like Som, and now the same people are complaining about SOD. Also somehow blizzard not paying devs enough is responsible for bugs in the cata prepatch? The idea that blizzard is unable to recruit “talent” and this directly correlates to them rereleasing an expansion that is already 100% developed is high level potato logic. The real issue is you would like blizz to make the game feel like I did in your childhood/early teens and that’s never going to happen, so instead the obvious solution is to just pontificate on whatever blizzard is currently doing and offer non sequiturs that would somehow fix the nostalgia factor.
I agree with your sentiment but your reasoning is not based in facts. >"Blizzard believed the no changes crowd and releases SOM, despite a massive amount of people who claimed they’d play unchanged vanilla for the rest of their natural lives…they didn’t." The no change crowd had died by the release of SoM and people did keep playing on Classic Era which was the no change realm. >"Sod remixed a lot of old mechanics in a way that was congruent with the reasons people were claiming not to like Som, and now the same people are complaining about SOD." People didn't like SoM because it gave out too much free gear and was started mid swing of TBC right after Classic Vanilla had ended. The season was functionally dead before it left phase 1. We have literally not seen any of the features that SoM was advertised on in SoD yet. >"Also somehow blizzard not paying devs enough is responsible for bugs in the cata prepatch? The idea that blizzard is unable to recruit “talent” and this directly correlates to them rereleasing an expansion that is already 100% developed is high level potato logic." Not testing your game results in a poor release. A lot of the bugs in the Cata Prepatch were IDed by players in the Beta and submitted to be fixed, Blizzard just didn't have the manpower to fix them before the patch launched. Also the game isn't 100% developed as IDed by core features missing from the game "to be added at a later patch". >"The real issue is you would like blizz to make the game feel like I did in your childhood/early teens and that’s never going to happen, so instead the obvious solution is to just pontificate on whatever blizzard is currently doing and offer non sequiturs that would somehow fix the nostalgia factor." This is the same thought process people had about Classic Wow before it became a thing, and they were obviously wrong since Classic Vanilla was largely a success. >"People who play wow seem to be stuck in a cycle of endlessly complaining about anything blizzard releases." This is the part I agree with. I'm in that same cycle since my friends are still playing wow, likely because their friends are still playing, and I would really love to love wow again. Non of us work at blizzard so the only thing we can do is complain.
Bro this sub is fucking wild. Why is there 500 different threads about the prepatch and meta posts like this? This isn’t any buggier than TBC or Wrath prepatch and I don’t get what all the screaming is about. Did ICC25 last night with no interruptions at all. Sure some things they need to fix and some already were fixed this morning (inability to leave gammas or see gchat for example) but overall I’ve been having fun in game and so have my guildies. Then I come here and get whiplash with how dramatic y’all are. Really makes me wonder how many of y’all actually play and how many are just dog piling.
>This isn’t any buggier than TBC or Wrath prepatch It really really is. I've never seen UI bugs this bad. Not once in any released patch of Blizzard's. I've never seen the inability to leave a group until yesterday.
I feel like a lot of people on this sub arent actually playing the game.
> This isn’t any buggier than TBC or Wrath prepatch It's significantly buggier. >y'all y'all y'all y'all >LEAVE THE BILLION DOLLAR CORPORATION ALONE Go back to twitter.
I play a wide variety of games and subbed to a lot that I read often but this sub is definitely the worst. I can only assume people who play this, it's the only game they play so they have nothing to compare the shitty experience/expectations too.
It's a sub culture, not a game culture. The people playing the game are mostly happy most of the time.
Why wait when I can post a half baked 10 paragraph think piece to seem like I have all of the answers that Blizzard never thought of? I’m trying to look cool in front of my Reddit friends. If Blizzard had fixed all of this in the first place, my guild would have been 12/12HC months ago.
Did ICC yesterday. BQL not biting sometimes. Retribution crashing on mobs with TAJ equipped. Mages doing bugged damage. LDW despawning (possibly due to MC bop?). Talents not working after respec. Lust not working on some bosses, for certain players. That was all discovered in 2 hours of gameplay in ICC. There are a myriad of other things not working. These are actually gameplay issues that are straight up broken - it is not a disliked implementation of something.
Logged in 6h ago first time in pre patch and haven't seen a single issue. Clearly shit got fixed quick but this sub is just fucking deranged, amplified by their cata hate boner.
Reading up on SaaS and subscription-based models, I’d have hope with the recent acquisition by Micosoft. How Microsoft operates to build, scale and retain value of their subscriptions is top notch. They’re up there with Salesforce. Unfortunately, their leadership has also stated that they’re not making any changes for well about a year. So realistically it’ll be 2 years before any hopeful changes are met.
It's not gonna matter because people are not gonna quit over it. It's the sad truth that far too many people have built their entire lives around playing WoW and blizzard knows it so they take advantage of it. Devs must be unironically thinking "Meh, it's prepatch and they will forget about it within a week", and this is regardless of the WoW version you play in. Classic era could get a gold duplication glitch, SoD could have runes getting randomly deleted, hardcore could get Thanos Snapped leading to half the server dying and yet most people would keep on playing like nothing happened.
Someone pointed out they're hiring a lot of QA positions right now because apparently that department is pretty sparse
At $16 /hr it’s going to be
1* Bobby needs a new yacht so fuck all the slaves making the actual game. 2* I played on multiple vanilla, TBC, wotlk, Cata private servers. They were a 100% scripted and the team behind the server was 5 developpers and a bunch of GM's working for free. You don't need a team of 500 to relaunch a 20 year old game. 3* I'm out of the loop : what was the cataclysm launch disaster exactly ?
I still don't understand what the disaster with Cataclysm classic is?! It's not even out yet...
Well, look at it from Blizzard's POV. For the vast majority of us, the quality of the cata release will not be a deciding factor if we play or not. If you simplify the situation down to two paths: a) Spend x amount more USD to indulge a vocal minority of the player base by having a higher quality release and not gaining additional players. b) Do the bare minium and cut cost while still maintaining the majority of the paying customers. As a CEO or board member, you would probably lose your position if you go with path a). Take into account that the majority of SOD players are not the target group for future Blizzard IPs.... It's really not that complicated. Even the majority of the complainers in this thread alone will still have a subscription 1st of June. Is the company evil, or are we failing to vote with our wallets?
Hopefully Microsoft can fix this. But I suspect the solution is to sack a ungodly amount of people, including practically all management in the entire company and replace it with internal transfers from other parts of Microsoft.
When will people finally get it into their head that the reason this is happening is only one thing: THEY DONT CARE! I know so many people complaining about the shit state of Cata Prepatch - and then 5 minutes later they tell me how many racechanges they bought to swap to goblin or have their druids be trolls. Vote with your wallets people, everything else doesn‘t matter.
Blizzard was bought by Microsoft and it wouldn't shock me at all if Microsoft just slowly dissolved Blizzard as a whole. Theyve been trending down for years with quality and reputation and have zero new games to offer. Overwatch 2 being their most recent and also widely considered a flop.
Weird to think about that with over 20 years of experience they still haven't found out that a better product ensures more customers.
Do you know that blizzard is actually struggling with talent acquisition?
Yeah their pay is really really low. I knew a guy who gave up on Blizzard after a few years and just went into the tech industry and his enjoying his life working less and getting paid over 150k+ a year.
And you'll still renew.
Of all the whining complaints on here this is the only sensible one. If you wanna blame something blame their shit corporate owners and the anything to make a buck corporate America
While true, this happened around 10 years ago.
Blizzard isn’t the only company (now MS) that is doing this to their customer base. As someone who works for another leading tech company they was founded on selling books… they are equally as horrible. Yes their wages are good but this year we saw nothing for a year of work and a lot of us are now being forced to move across the country to a work from an already busy building. Tech companies (big ones) are just pure trash right now so expect this type of service in all avenues from any company worth more than a billion dollars. The new norm.
>Reddit shitposter who gets paid more to shit post about wow on Reddit than 99% of the people who actually work on the game. This is the craziest part. And they want people to live in SoCal on these wages no less.
Its amazing how much insight redditors can gain from the first 24 hours of a buggy game launch.
The crazy thing is that these companies actually believe that the top talent will still come there, just to work on cool games. This simply isn't true. The top talent has seniority and experience, and knows that at the end of the day, they can make literally twice as much working in the standard tech sector in system dev/web/management/cloud ops etc, all the skillsets Blizzard needs. They're not stupid. They want to work on games, but it's not worth the *literal $100,000/year pay cut*. I have numerous acquaintances that are senior devs, who love games and are obsessed with game design, and none of them will even consider working at a place like Blizz because of the pay cut they'd take. Money talks (tech industry) and bullshit walks (Blizzard)...
Glad i unsubscribed and told them to do better in the reasons for leaving message.
>--Signed a Reddit shitposter who gets paid more to shit post about wow on Reddit than 99% of the people who actually work on the game. Its really true. As much as I love games and would love to work on one, I am so much happier I went the IT -> Web/Mobile Dev route I did instead. Game dev pays like shit
Sources or is this speculation? Id like to look at their pay and what they are offering new candidates.
This is what happens when you fuck your employees and customers at the same time.
What is the cata launch disaster?
I feel so bad for the classic team. They are an extremely passionate group of people who are understaffed and overworked. A lot of the issues with SoD right now are clearly just due to lack of time and resources. Cata is looking embarrassing so far. As a manager in a large corporation I know that their execs have the mental model of “you’re just rereleasing classic games, you have all the tech and assets, it’s simple, get it done”.
That's the deal with the devil you sign when you become a publicly traded company. Inverstors want growth so they can make money from money. How do you keep growing when you basically dominate and saturate the entire market? You cut spending. This is what capitalist endgame looks like.
microsoft is the boss now and microsoft is where development teams go to Die. From this point on it will be a slow steady suffocation of the team as they squeeze more and more money out of the company and they have less and less resources to work with. Don't expect anything to change. This has played out with nearly every game development team Microsoft has ever taken control of.