God damn every single one of the artists that worked on the cutscenes for Diablo 4 need a fucking raise cause they are so fucking beautiful.
The gameplay is kinda alright...
It is just a shame that the game itself isn't as good as blizzard cutscenes. If we could get games with that kind of blizzard polish again it would be just mua *chef's kiss*
Fwiw season 4 is coming with massive changes, feels like the game is actually launching for real this time. Basically what happened with D3 except there's *way* more shit to do in D4. Build variety on the recent PTR was crazy.
Thing is though - blizzard can monetize D4 players with mtx. They can't monetize classic WoW players beyond tokens in Cata so yeah they aren't gonna give a shit about classic.
Give it a few months and you'll prolly see more mtx in Cata though
We got it all back and more in s2 but yep, they struggled hard af out of the gate. Pretty clear the game went through years of development hell, s4 feels like a completely different game
Current PoE league has really bad retention. Looking forward to finishing up my Original Sin Spark Pathfinder and playing the new D4 season when it drops. It’s not like you have to choose one or the other.
Nothing crazy, just the usual “should’ve been in the game since launch”, “ideas stolen from PoE/Last Epoch”, and “they’ll never get players back from PoE/Last Epoch”. It’s fine that is his opinion, just a bit weird he didn’t want to stand on it.
"Too many cooks spoils the broth". While 1-man team sometimes can outperform 1000-people team in terms of gameplay, the latter are going to win at other parts.
And it's not like they couldn't dedicate 10 or 15 people to SoD. They totally could - there is no way it doesn't bring enough people to justify it.
It’s a slam dunk from a golden parachute business standpoint. A dedicated fanbase that has no concrete expectations, flip assets with a skeleton crew to make the bare minimum of content to take in short term profits that can be repeated ad nauseam billed as seasonal experimentation.
WoW players will hemorrhage as the content drags regardless, so short term freshes will pull in the majority of those profits unless the team elects to take a more substantiated risk that is unlikely to please the divisive and ultimately confused fanbase as to what they actually want.
On some sick level, it’s really what the community deserves. Content can’t be hard, it can’t take too long, it can’t be involved, there has to be simultaneously a lot but nothing to do, it has to adhere to the contrivances of objectively bad vanilla era design that were obliterated within 2 years of its inception such as consumable and buff stacking, classes need to stay the same but also be completely fresh takes, the economy needs to be stimulated but also irrelevant, you shouldn’t buy gold or use gold as a means of participation but everyone does it so we need to be heavyhanded, but you need gold even though most don’t want to pick flowers in current year so here’s catch up mechanics for it and gear because as mentioned we can’t require true involvement, paratext runs rampant we can’t address as it’s how the majority of the playerbase interacts with our braindead content and above all let’s be beholden to nostalgia for manchildren.
Seems like an easy task, no? Golden parachute makes more sense every day.
> WoW players will hemorrhage as the content drags regardless
This is why they're expanding to, what I'm betting will eventually be referred to as, "the Universe of Warcraft" (with one subscription, eventually handled likely through Gamepass instead of Battle.net) with all their different slices of time such as Era, Classic, Retail, SoD, Pandaria Remix, Hardcore Classic, so on, so forth.
If they drop from one version, you *probably* stand a good chance of nostalgia-hooking them on a *different* version long enough to cook up *another* version for them to get sucked into.
I don't get how games with a tiny fraction of the players and revenue are able to support much larger teams. This "it doesn't bring enough people to justify it" doesn't make sense unless you're some bean counter who doesn't care about future profit, only immediate.
It is not about what they can Support.
You have to keep in Mind most devs work on a on project Basis at blizzard. All versions of wow are done by a Skeleton crew after most people get fired when expac or so is done. This is also why they dont really have any high skill devs in nessecary quantitirs. The Moment they become skilled the already are fired and need to hope to be rehired for the next project.
Bottom line is blizzard always tries to have as few people hired at any point as possible, to reduce cost as much as possible. Good games havent been any prio in years.
That's not really the argument though, because the few devs on SoD aren't even close to working full time on it. They have Era and also WotLK and Cataclysm to take care of.
Talk about overworked. The criticism towards Blizz execs is 150% warranted. We should actually be SCREAMING at them for being so greedy.
True, but Diablo 4 was more bad grand design decisions. It had a tremendous amount of work put into it.
SoD has the framework to be brilliant, but is held back by the fact that developers simply don't have the manpower to pull anything truly great off. So they stick to insane broken, buggy, bland messes like incursions because they are simple to make with a tiny team.
SoD and Classic just... don't make enough MTX money. It's that simple. If I had to guess, classic/sod probably has a third of the player base but probably makes less than 5% the money that Retail does. I can only imagine the kind of insane drama that has emerged with the classic/retail divide in the WoW offices.
That sounds to me like evidence of burnout and staff turnover.
Making it onto the credits for game development doesn't require being on the project from start to finish (nor should it).
The sad reality is that the one failing of D4 was the itemization, the rest of the game is beautifully done. I don't get why they can't just retain Diablo 2's itemization, it's such a perfect system and is still replayable 24 years later.
i still enjoy them alot and my guild who has over 130 active members also enjoy it. not to mention the efull servers we are on... so..... they still make enjoyable games...
It'd break the news if Blizzard execs and higher ups publicly announced slashing their salaries to rebuild Blizzard into a respectable company again.
Now that I think about it, I think this would break news if any namable company did so.
Wishful thinking though, cash rulez
The Classic Team, and really everyone at Blizzard but the executive team, are also making well below the industry standard. So inevitably, we get Devs who are at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to competency, and since everyone in the industry knows this, the noobs who join Blizzard these days lack any passion behind their work - unlike indie devs who are trying to make a legacy for themselves.
This pretty much. Blizzard lived on their Reputation the first x years of its time. When it was the coolest thing ever to work for them and money was secondary. Today blizz is well known as a shitty greedy soulless cash Grab company on the Level of ubisoft/Ea etc. So if they underpay people today, that directly translates to the quality of the products.
Paying the same subscription fee amount that you paid in 2004 doesn't get you anything these days.
Blizzard has amassed billions over those years to continue funding actual CS? Nah, you're mistaking that for what Bobby used on his golden parachute.
There are like 5 different games currently going for the subscription fee that in 2004 just got you vanilla. For the same sub, you now have Classic Era, Classic Cata, Classic Seasons, Retail, and soon Pandaria Remix.
Saying "you don't get anything" for the same fee is an unserious take.
Oh yeah 5 games okay so lets say they are normal $60 games without subscription fees, that's $300 for 5 games. If you played classic since launch in 2019 you're at like $800 spent in monthly fees. $800 spent for a game that was made in the early 2000s lol like how do people even think that's a good argument. And for retail you already have to pay for the expac which is the same price (or close to) as most full games out there.
EDIT: absolutely insane in 2024 I'm getting downvoted for saying this. Yall are psycho addicted to WoW losers like wtf. How are you just throwing logic out the window? We ALL know the value of that subscription fee has gone down SIGNIFICANTLY since 2004. What we are paying for is a fucking joke. We are all watching them cut corners and save costs for executive bonuses and stock buybacks and you STILL DEFEND hundreds of dollars spent on a video game when other games offer the same for less? Absolute insanity.
how many hours did you spend playing wow?
cinema tickets, standard netflix or going to the zoo cost the same as a monthly sub.
you are leaving out a lot of important context to make a shitty argument and talk yourself into rage or insulting others because they are not narrow minded.
what about the cost of running a 24/7 service? what about the cost of developing and maintaining software? care to share your data to support your argument?
a lot is wrong with wow, but acting entitled because of subscription cost is peak manchild behavior. if its not worth your money, move on in life. i can tell who the real addicted psycho is easily.
I would give you Credit for what you said if it wasnt a well known fact that blizzard:
Severly underpais its staff.
Works on a on project Basis and has no interest what so ever in retaining skilled devs.
Cutting cost as much as possible and trying to "earn" every Dollar percivable and even thoose not percivable.
Honestly they are listing 3 new colors on hair and 2 on skin as some great new cosmetic.
They have all the ressources imagineable and earened enough money to keep Servers going for the next 50 years in the first few years of wow. That Is not an Argument at all.
Calm down bro, I’m pretty sure it’s just 1 or 2 people saying the same thing in every thread. I had the exact same ‘you’re paying the same sub as 2004’ bullshit on several of my comments yesterday.
Blizz probably paying bots to make the same comment everywhere.
Ehh I honestly think they wasted a lot of effort. The dev team would be more efficient if they didn't make any pvp & pve events, and not worry about revamping gear.
Let us enjoy the vanilla world like we always have except with new runes and the new raids.
Bis gear would be what we already had available to us, just grinded from such miscellaneous sources.
I feel like gear was so systematically changed there's no vanilla feel to it imo.
100% Agreed. They have overwhelmed themselves with the incursions, STV Events/Ashenvale. People did not want a revamped leveling experience. They wanted additional endgame content and some balancing tweaks. They went 100% overboard with SoD, and the game could have been much tighter in balance had they not made it into such a large scope.
But, this was a cashgrab. The level bands are part of that cash-grab. They're injecting subs into their revenue stream every single quarter with the new phases, it's very obviously designed to increase quarterly revenues at a low cost.
Please dont believe for a second that you speak for the "people". Leveling in classic was the worst. Total waste of time. If i got my will we would have been able to directly make lvl 60 characters, as many as we want for free. SoD is the next best thing and they should put the exp buff to a 1000% imo.
Wont Happen but not all people wanted to experience the most shitty made braindead aweful lvlgrind again as it was. Most didnt want to in 2019 btw. As seen as dungeons had more inhabitants a Single Day then the open world got in a Month.
One of the tenets of software development is adding more Devs to solve a problem makes it take longer and end up worse, it's a 50yr old rule that still apparently holds up today (I'm not a dev, but got pals who are.)
[The Mythical Man-Month](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month)
It's more about you can't throw devs at it to make it go faster in the short term. They still need to hire, should've done it long ago, but next best time is now. The time to ramp new hires to productivity (6+ months) isn't going to get any shorter the more they delay.
That's only true if you already have enough developers to begin with, which is definitely not the case here. To my knowledge there aren't any dedicated devs working on SoD, only part timers focusing the rest of their hours on Cata.
It depends entirely on the situation, if these five people have been working on it for a year or more, they will have their own flow, systems and interactivity between each other. It depends on what is "too much work than they could handle" actually means.
Adding new people in both takes time away from work while one or more people get them up to speed (which can take months and months) and also causes a complete disregulation in the established working pattern.
If it's early on in a project sure you can likely add more, but it's about the only time it's effective.
as P4 approaches I'm kinda feeling this too...
like its nice of them to remind us why this or that is or is not possible however, this doesn't change my intents and desires about the game. What Blizzard doesn't seem to realize is that it is a very tenuous thread that keeps me interested in a game i played 20 years ago. Am I here for the raiding experience again. no not per se. For the content? well depends.. and how much. If its just rehashed raids - I'm not up for the whole lvl 60 experience.
Ast to the 'future plans':
Tbh I expected new npcs, gear, some quests, improved graphics, maybe some new race and opening of closed areas. I now hear that SoD is not Plus. If thats the case then I hope they allow transfers to a Plus realm whatever that is .. cos I'm not doing the whole lvl 1-60 thing again just to be on a Plus realm. In fact the more I think of it the more im inclined to not being interested in WoW in a year or 2 from now.
So do i feel empathy for a team of devs working in Orange county for one of the biggest game devs around?
I dunno my degrees of empathy for people squid fishing or diamond mining in Congo is higher and i still eat squid. So while blizzard may have my undertanding that wont be the same as to how I chose to spend my free time.
long story short?
- feels like too little too late for me already
They dont want u to get everything at once, they smart af, releasing everything one by one, we gonna get another season after SoD and u gonna be paying more and more, wow is gonna be here for another 20 years
OP out there thinking big corpos exist only to please their customers. They do the bare minimum they need to get you to sub, everything after that is money wasted.
If you want games made for the actual players to enjoy look at indie games or games made 20+ years ago by a bunch of nerds.
Nah Blizzard can't afford that. Their only revenue streams are 7 million $15 a month subscriptions, micro transactions for cosmetics, micro transactions for character services, selling gold, and selling new expacs/games(D4). That's clearly not enough to reinvest into the game.
Average video games are the norm. It's not Blizzard nor anyone else's fault that we don't have the "insane gaming experiences" we would like.
Insanely exceptional people need to create them.
Because the devs are not in charge and the shareholders wanna minmax profit before they sell or abandon. This would've been a great game with a small dev team and much longer waittimes like osrs.
They need people dedicated to A SINGULAR project at a time I think is the real issue. If they wanna have 4 versions of classic running at once then yea, they need more devs probably, but if those devs are all hopping around to each version (especially between drastically different version like cata and sod), then quality won't go up no matter how many they add. They won't be able to effectively parse good and bad feedback, they won't be able to properly test new features, and they won't be able to keep track of a dedicated vision for the project
They're just going to maximize the use of AI to replace workers where ever possible. They've already pretty much tanked their reputation as a good place to work in not just the usual aspects but they've even gone so far as to include rampant sexual harassment.
Blizzard IS a mobile game copy paste company desperately using nostalgia as a veil. Shadow legends is their competition; not POE or FFXIV.
This sub is so toxic. WOW classic is basically in sustainment right now. It's incredible the number of features we are getting every couple of months.
SOD has been fun. I might not be playing WOW if it wasn't for SOD. It's not perfect but it's a nice experiment and we might not get more seasonal WOW choices if people just complain every day.
SoD has been pretty good. Could it be better with more resources? **Absolutely.** The complaints towards greedy Blizz execs not allocating proper resources to a project of this scale are more than 100% warranted.
This isn't about the devs (who are doing pretty much the best job they can), this is about Blizz not investing in their classic team properly.
I agree. If they were able to focus entirely on SoD I can only imagine what we would get for our subscription money. Gnomeregon went from a meme dungeon that was only useful for Feral Druids farming Crowd Pummeler to a fun raid with good loot. Even the map design is technically better because the electric fences make it obvious where you’re meant to go after each boss even if you went in almost completely blind.
> not allocating proper resources
But they are allocating their resources properly, from their perspective. Sure, SoD/cata probably has 25-30% of the playerbase, but they make probably less than 5% of the money that retail does simply because we aren't overloaded with MTX the way retail is.
Blizz is stupid, but they are unfortunately smart to keep classic/sod at a barebones operation as long as it barely makes any money compared to their other cash cows.
I wouldn't be playing WoW if not for SoD. I'm the guy that quit playing during the OG TBC and never looked back. My buddy told me in December about SoD and I was adamantly against it but we don't get a lot of time to hangout anymore these days so I said fuck it. I got my account back after dealing with CS for a few days and started playing. Holy hell am I having fun. So much so I made a second account and now have 2 accounts with 5 level 50s between the 2. I run ST 5 times a week and play a ton of PvP. I hate the damage reduction. It feels amazing to be able to just blast people and if I get blasted that's just the way it is. The respawns are quick. Excited for phase 4 though. Gonna be lit!
What the hell is toxic about this post? People like you that defend everything and everyone are unbelievable annoying. It's normal criticisms and no hate towards the dev themself, it's just sad and people are mad at blizzard. No idea where you see something toxic but defending everything won't help anyone.
Your fear is almost laughable if it wouldn't be sad. You think blizzard will stop seasons because people make critic? Blizzard doesn't really care about people arguing on reddit, please stop kneeling for a billion dollar company.
What it toxic about this post? people expected more from SoD and on the Cata front you can absolutely clearly see the lack of work put into the game and you call people wanting finished and fleshed out products being "toxic"? lol
Oh it pretty much is. Pretty much no new enemies, no new assets, no new dungeons (recycled, ok), a few recycled abilities. Incursions are a phased zone with existing enemies and a few quests items.
The items they added are neat. Let's see what the next phases bring but don't act like they put soon many resources into sod.
They always do. Hop into a pug, lose an item, hop on r/classicwow with a low effort meme or 4th grade six paragraph think piece about how they can “solve the game with this one simple trick!”
It’s so fucking funny man.
Also, imagine thinking anything they do is going to make everyone happy with it. People complain about every single aspect of the game and every change they do make, and every change they don't make.
They have been cutting costs consistently since the Draenor expansion and the merger of Activision and Blizzard. I still remember when they sold all their physical servers and transferred everything to the cloud—that was an insanely bad experience.
Everything was so laggy with any release, especially when encountering more than 20 people outside of an instance. Meanwhile, private servers like Light's Hope handled around 20,000 people during the AQ opening, whereas Blizzard's classic servers were extremely laggy. I spent about an hour in a queue at the flight master just waiting to land.
They're still cutting costs. They've fired most of the GMs and support staff; it seems like only about 10 people are working on Cata Classic, and half of them are also working overtime on SoD after completing their main tasks.
I have no idea how it could possibly get worse.
I think this is what most of the posts in the sub come down to at their core. The devs do what they can on a shoestring but it feels like overall negligence from Blizzard toward a game we have adored for a lot of our lives. Huge company making billions and they throw scraps at Classic
If everything was perfect, everything would be perfect.
Blizzard doesn't care about an insane gaming experience, they want a live-service game that has an insanely profitable shop with minimal effort to show off to the investors that graph go up.
Honestly been thinking about this for awhile. I think the sub price needs to go up. It should be at 25 bucks now or even closer to 30.
Theres no reason for that to happen when micro transactions out pace it though for revenue.
Yeah a quick check says 7m subs currently for WoW. Oh and don’t forget the 8bn per year revenue with operating profit of ~30%. Insanity to suggest we need to give them more money
Srsly and that's just wow, don't even forget how much they made off D4 even though it was shit, how much they continuously make from OW2 (basically just monetized OW1) and all the other shit they put out like WC3 Reforged. Guy is delusional to think we should pay more.
Sucks because how do they argue for more financial backing on a failing project that probably never would have been failing had it had a decent team size to begin with.
There’s just too many versions of the game. It feels unfair to pick which one gets cut and which ones stay. Sod seemed cool but didn’t stick the land. I hope they try again but with ideas more in line with classic sensibilities.
Nah we get mobile games with cash shops
MC in SoD is 'Molten Incoresions,' the first raid that can be done from mobile. Run around Rag with your whole raid 30 times for 100g.
First time purchase doubles the chance for legendary drop
Friendly reminder that 9000 people worked on diablo 4 and it still turned out as it is
8999 of them were game artists - made a perfect job. But all other aspects of the game - shit.
God damn every single one of the artists that worked on the cutscenes for Diablo 4 need a fucking raise cause they are so fucking beautiful. The gameplay is kinda alright... It is just a shame that the game itself isn't as good as blizzard cutscenes. If we could get games with that kind of blizzard polish again it would be just mua *chef's kiss*
Fwiw season 4 is coming with massive changes, feels like the game is actually launching for real this time. Basically what happened with D3 except there's *way* more shit to do in D4. Build variety on the recent PTR was crazy. Thing is though - blizzard can monetize D4 players with mtx. They can't monetize classic WoW players beyond tokens in Cata so yeah they aren't gonna give a shit about classic. Give it a few months and you'll prolly see more mtx in Cata though
The big nerf that came last June just killed diablo 4 for me. Stripping away so much power felt awful.
We got it all back and more in s2 but yep, they struggled hard af out of the gate. Pretty clear the game went through years of development hell, s4 feels like a completely different game
Been waiting to hear something like this to dust the game off. Glad it's going in a good direction.
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Current PoE league has really bad retention. Looking forward to finishing up my Original Sin Spark Pathfinder and playing the new D4 season when it drops. It’s not like you have to choose one or the other.
He deleted that real fast lol Weird
What did it say?
Nothing crazy, just the usual “should’ve been in the game since launch”, “ideas stolen from PoE/Last Epoch”, and “they’ll never get players back from PoE/Last Epoch”. It’s fine that is his opinion, just a bit weird he didn’t want to stand on it.
Yep, and I'm over here like "yes PLEASE give me PoE and LE systems with D4's combat, sound design, engine, etc" Just an odd complaint
Disagree. Diablo 4 art style is BORING. Uninspired and has no soul
That count is not actual 9000 developers though, not even close.
"Too many cooks spoils the broth". While 1-man team sometimes can outperform 1000-people team in terms of gameplay, the latter are going to win at other parts. And it's not like they couldn't dedicate 10 or 15 people to SoD. They totally could - there is no way it doesn't bring enough people to justify it.
It’s a slam dunk from a golden parachute business standpoint. A dedicated fanbase that has no concrete expectations, flip assets with a skeleton crew to make the bare minimum of content to take in short term profits that can be repeated ad nauseam billed as seasonal experimentation. WoW players will hemorrhage as the content drags regardless, so short term freshes will pull in the majority of those profits unless the team elects to take a more substantiated risk that is unlikely to please the divisive and ultimately confused fanbase as to what they actually want. On some sick level, it’s really what the community deserves. Content can’t be hard, it can’t take too long, it can’t be involved, there has to be simultaneously a lot but nothing to do, it has to adhere to the contrivances of objectively bad vanilla era design that were obliterated within 2 years of its inception such as consumable and buff stacking, classes need to stay the same but also be completely fresh takes, the economy needs to be stimulated but also irrelevant, you shouldn’t buy gold or use gold as a means of participation but everyone does it so we need to be heavyhanded, but you need gold even though most don’t want to pick flowers in current year so here’s catch up mechanics for it and gear because as mentioned we can’t require true involvement, paratext runs rampant we can’t address as it’s how the majority of the playerbase interacts with our braindead content and above all let’s be beholden to nostalgia for manchildren. Seems like an easy task, no? Golden parachute makes more sense every day.
> WoW players will hemorrhage as the content drags regardless This is why they're expanding to, what I'm betting will eventually be referred to as, "the Universe of Warcraft" (with one subscription, eventually handled likely through Gamepass instead of Battle.net) with all their different slices of time such as Era, Classic, Retail, SoD, Pandaria Remix, Hardcore Classic, so on, so forth. If they drop from one version, you *probably* stand a good chance of nostalgia-hooking them on a *different* version long enough to cook up *another* version for them to get sucked into.
I don't get how games with a tiny fraction of the players and revenue are able to support much larger teams. This "it doesn't bring enough people to justify it" doesn't make sense unless you're some bean counter who doesn't care about future profit, only immediate.
It is not about what they can Support. You have to keep in Mind most devs work on a on project Basis at blizzard. All versions of wow are done by a Skeleton crew after most people get fired when expac or so is done. This is also why they dont really have any high skill devs in nessecary quantitirs. The Moment they become skilled the already are fired and need to hope to be rehired for the next project. Bottom line is blizzard always tries to have as few people hired at any point as possible, to reduce cost as much as possible. Good games havent been any prio in years.
That's not really the argument though, because the few devs on SoD aren't even close to working full time on it. They have Era and also WotLK and Cataclysm to take care of. Talk about overworked. The criticism towards Blizz execs is 150% warranted. We should actually be SCREAMING at them for being so greedy.
True, but Diablo 4 was more bad grand design decisions. It had a tremendous amount of work put into it. SoD has the framework to be brilliant, but is held back by the fact that developers simply don't have the manpower to pull anything truly great off. So they stick to insane broken, buggy, bland messes like incursions because they are simple to make with a tiny team. SoD and Classic just... don't make enough MTX money. It's that simple. If I had to guess, classic/sod probably has a third of the player base but probably makes less than 5% the money that Retail does. I can only imagine the kind of insane drama that has emerged with the classic/retail divide in the WoW offices.
That sounds to me like evidence of burnout and staff turnover. Making it onto the credits for game development doesn't require being on the project from start to finish (nor should it).
The sad reality is that the one failing of D4 was the itemization, the rest of the game is beautifully done. I don't get why they can't just retain Diablo 2's itemization, it's such a perfect system and is still replayable 24 years later.
Enjoyable videos games is not their goal.
i still enjoy them alot and my guild who has over 130 active members also enjoy it. not to mention the efull servers we are on... so..... they still make enjoyable games...
If you’re having fun then what are you doing in the r/ihatewow sub?
Do you know how expensive that is, think of the poor share holders who need to by their 3rd yacht
Let's never forget that blizzard fired a designer because he made a greedy goblin saving up for a new yacht
Did not know that. Thanks for the info, its pretty sad
They did? How have I missed this?
[https://www.pcgamesn.com/world-of-warcraft/wow-dev-fired](https://www.pcgamesn.com/world-of-warcraft/wow-dev-fired) It's madness
It'd break the news if Blizzard execs and higher ups publicly announced slashing their salaries to rebuild Blizzard into a respectable company again. Now that I think about it, I think this would break news if any namable company did so. Wishful thinking though, cash rulez
Slash their salaries and put it into stock options!
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The Classic Team, and really everyone at Blizzard but the executive team, are also making well below the industry standard. So inevitably, we get Devs who are at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to competency, and since everyone in the industry knows this, the noobs who join Blizzard these days lack any passion behind their work - unlike indie devs who are trying to make a legacy for themselves.
This pretty much. Blizzard lived on their Reputation the first x years of its time. When it was the coolest thing ever to work for them and money was secondary. Today blizz is well known as a shitty greedy soulless cash Grab company on the Level of ubisoft/Ea etc. So if they underpay people today, that directly translates to the quality of the products.
But they only need the bare minimum to be one of if not the best mmo out there, so why bother investing more money - is probably what they think
Paying the same subscription fee amount that you paid in 2004 doesn't get you anything these days. Blizzard has amassed billions over those years to continue funding actual CS? Nah, you're mistaking that for what Bobby used on his golden parachute.
Only reason it's still the same sub fee is because the ingame shop makes a shit to of money. The first shop horse in cata made more than starcraft 2
There are like 5 different games currently going for the subscription fee that in 2004 just got you vanilla. For the same sub, you now have Classic Era, Classic Cata, Classic Seasons, Retail, and soon Pandaria Remix. Saying "you don't get anything" for the same fee is an unserious take.
Oh yeah 5 games okay so lets say they are normal $60 games without subscription fees, that's $300 for 5 games. If you played classic since launch in 2019 you're at like $800 spent in monthly fees. $800 spent for a game that was made in the early 2000s lol like how do people even think that's a good argument. And for retail you already have to pay for the expac which is the same price (or close to) as most full games out there. EDIT: absolutely insane in 2024 I'm getting downvoted for saying this. Yall are psycho addicted to WoW losers like wtf. How are you just throwing logic out the window? We ALL know the value of that subscription fee has gone down SIGNIFICANTLY since 2004. What we are paying for is a fucking joke. We are all watching them cut corners and save costs for executive bonuses and stock buybacks and you STILL DEFEND hundreds of dollars spent on a video game when other games offer the same for less? Absolute insanity.
how many hours did you spend playing wow? cinema tickets, standard netflix or going to the zoo cost the same as a monthly sub. you are leaving out a lot of important context to make a shitty argument and talk yourself into rage or insulting others because they are not narrow minded. what about the cost of running a 24/7 service? what about the cost of developing and maintaining software? care to share your data to support your argument? a lot is wrong with wow, but acting entitled because of subscription cost is peak manchild behavior. if its not worth your money, move on in life. i can tell who the real addicted psycho is easily.
I would give you Credit for what you said if it wasnt a well known fact that blizzard: Severly underpais its staff. Works on a on project Basis and has no interest what so ever in retaining skilled devs. Cutting cost as much as possible and trying to "earn" every Dollar percivable and even thoose not percivable. Honestly they are listing 3 new colors on hair and 2 on skin as some great new cosmetic. They have all the ressources imagineable and earened enough money to keep Servers going for the next 50 years in the first few years of wow. That Is not an Argument at all.
Calm down bro, I’m pretty sure it’s just 1 or 2 people saying the same thing in every thread. I had the exact same ‘you’re paying the same sub as 2004’ bullshit on several of my comments yesterday. Blizz probably paying bots to make the same comment everywhere.
Ehh I honestly think they wasted a lot of effort. The dev team would be more efficient if they didn't make any pvp & pve events, and not worry about revamping gear. Let us enjoy the vanilla world like we always have except with new runes and the new raids. Bis gear would be what we already had available to us, just grinded from such miscellaneous sources. I feel like gear was so systematically changed there's no vanilla feel to it imo.
100% Agreed. They have overwhelmed themselves with the incursions, STV Events/Ashenvale. People did not want a revamped leveling experience. They wanted additional endgame content and some balancing tweaks. They went 100% overboard with SoD, and the game could have been much tighter in balance had they not made it into such a large scope. But, this was a cashgrab. The level bands are part of that cash-grab. They're injecting subs into their revenue stream every single quarter with the new phases, it's very obviously designed to increase quarterly revenues at a low cost.
Please dont believe for a second that you speak for the "people". Leveling in classic was the worst. Total waste of time. If i got my will we would have been able to directly make lvl 60 characters, as many as we want for free. SoD is the next best thing and they should put the exp buff to a 1000% imo. Wont Happen but not all people wanted to experience the most shitty made braindead aweful lvlgrind again as it was. Most didnt want to in 2019 btw. As seen as dungeons had more inhabitants a Single Day then the open world got in a Month.
One of the tenets of software development is adding more Devs to solve a problem makes it take longer and end up worse, it's a 50yr old rule that still apparently holds up today (I'm not a dev, but got pals who are.) [The Mythical Man-Month](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month)
Too many cooks in the kitchen essentially
It's more about you can't throw devs at it to make it go faster in the short term. They still need to hire, should've done it long ago, but next best time is now. The time to ramp new hires to productivity (6+ months) isn't going to get any shorter the more they delay.
That's only true if you already have enough developers to begin with, which is definitely not the case here. To my knowledge there aren't any dedicated devs working on SoD, only part timers focusing the rest of their hours on Cata.
Lol that's not at all true if a project has only like 5 people working on it and they all have way too much work than they could handle themselves.
It depends entirely on the situation, if these five people have been working on it for a year or more, they will have their own flow, systems and interactivity between each other. It depends on what is "too much work than they could handle" actually means. Adding new people in both takes time away from work while one or more people get them up to speed (which can take months and months) and also causes a complete disregulation in the established working pattern. If it's early on in a project sure you can likely add more, but it's about the only time it's effective.
This. You want to get better quality? Normalize longer development cycles. But that also means content drought periods.
as P4 approaches I'm kinda feeling this too... like its nice of them to remind us why this or that is or is not possible however, this doesn't change my intents and desires about the game. What Blizzard doesn't seem to realize is that it is a very tenuous thread that keeps me interested in a game i played 20 years ago. Am I here for the raiding experience again. no not per se. For the content? well depends.. and how much. If its just rehashed raids - I'm not up for the whole lvl 60 experience. Ast to the 'future plans': Tbh I expected new npcs, gear, some quests, improved graphics, maybe some new race and opening of closed areas. I now hear that SoD is not Plus. If thats the case then I hope they allow transfers to a Plus realm whatever that is .. cos I'm not doing the whole lvl 1-60 thing again just to be on a Plus realm. In fact the more I think of it the more im inclined to not being interested in WoW in a year or 2 from now. So do i feel empathy for a team of devs working in Orange county for one of the biggest game devs around? I dunno my degrees of empathy for people squid fishing or diamond mining in Congo is higher and i still eat squid. So while blizzard may have my undertanding that wont be the same as to how I chose to spend my free time. long story short? - feels like too little too late for me already
They dont want u to get everything at once, they smart af, releasing everything one by one, we gonna get another season after SoD and u gonna be paying more and more, wow is gonna be here for another 20 years
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yes but that doesnt factor 1 bit in the equation of how people decide to use their free time - especially if there is alternatives.
OP out there thinking big corpos exist only to please their customers. They do the bare minimum they need to get you to sub, everything after that is money wasted. If you want games made for the actual players to enjoy look at indie games or games made 20+ years ago by a bunch of nerds.
Nah Blizzard can't afford that. Their only revenue streams are 7 million $15 a month subscriptions, micro transactions for cosmetics, micro transactions for character services, selling gold, and selling new expacs/games(D4). That's clearly not enough to reinvest into the game.
Something something hopefully it improves now that they're owned by Microsoft
I don't understand this. SoD has been overall really enjoyable. What do you want?
What if the SOD/class+ is a full on remake with retail client... Not bound with many limitations... But meh, it will cost too much for them.
Average video games are the norm. It's not Blizzard nor anyone else's fault that we don't have the "insane gaming experiences" we would like. Insanely exceptional people need to create them.
Maybe pserver experience really is better
I'm the guy except it's "if i do more archaeology i'l definitely get the sword"🙃
In software development more workers =/= better product
This was me in phase 2
How can blizzard hire more people if microsoft the owner doesn't let them and fires those who were in the team?
Because the devs are not in charge and the shareholders wanna minmax profit before they sell or abandon. This would've been a great game with a small dev team and much longer waittimes like osrs.
If if if. Too many hypotheticals for real life, my friend
are you willing to pay more per month? :)
They need people dedicated to A SINGULAR project at a time I think is the real issue. If they wanna have 4 versions of classic running at once then yea, they need more devs probably, but if those devs are all hopping around to each version (especially between drastically different version like cata and sod), then quality won't go up no matter how many they add. They won't be able to effectively parse good and bad feedback, they won't be able to properly test new features, and they won't be able to keep track of a dedicated vision for the project
They're just going to maximize the use of AI to replace workers where ever possible. They've already pretty much tanked their reputation as a good place to work in not just the usual aspects but they've even gone so far as to include rampant sexual harassment. Blizzard IS a mobile game copy paste company desperately using nostalgia as a veil. Shadow legends is their competition; not POE or FFXIV.
More devs doesn't necessarily mean a better game. Take Starfield for example.
This sub is so toxic. WOW classic is basically in sustainment right now. It's incredible the number of features we are getting every couple of months. SOD has been fun. I might not be playing WOW if it wasn't for SOD. It's not perfect but it's a nice experiment and we might not get more seasonal WOW choices if people just complain every day.
SoD has been pretty good. Could it be better with more resources? **Absolutely.** The complaints towards greedy Blizz execs not allocating proper resources to a project of this scale are more than 100% warranted. This isn't about the devs (who are doing pretty much the best job they can), this is about Blizz not investing in their classic team properly.
I agree. If they were able to focus entirely on SoD I can only imagine what we would get for our subscription money. Gnomeregon went from a meme dungeon that was only useful for Feral Druids farming Crowd Pummeler to a fun raid with good loot. Even the map design is technically better because the electric fences make it obvious where you’re meant to go after each boss even if you went in almost completely blind.
> not allocating proper resources But they are allocating their resources properly, from their perspective. Sure, SoD/cata probably has 25-30% of the playerbase, but they make probably less than 5% of the money that retail does simply because we aren't overloaded with MTX the way retail is. Blizz is stupid, but they are unfortunately smart to keep classic/sod at a barebones operation as long as it barely makes any money compared to their other cash cows.
I wouldn't be playing WoW if not for SoD. I'm the guy that quit playing during the OG TBC and never looked back. My buddy told me in December about SoD and I was adamantly against it but we don't get a lot of time to hangout anymore these days so I said fuck it. I got my account back after dealing with CS for a few days and started playing. Holy hell am I having fun. So much so I made a second account and now have 2 accounts with 5 level 50s between the 2. I run ST 5 times a week and play a ton of PvP. I hate the damage reduction. It feels amazing to be able to just blast people and if I get blasted that's just the way it is. The respawns are quick. Excited for phase 4 though. Gonna be lit!
What the hell is toxic about this post? People like you that defend everything and everyone are unbelievable annoying. It's normal criticisms and no hate towards the dev themself, it's just sad and people are mad at blizzard. No idea where you see something toxic but defending everything won't help anyone. Your fear is almost laughable if it wouldn't be sad. You think blizzard will stop seasons because people make critic? Blizzard doesn't really care about people arguing on reddit, please stop kneeling for a billion dollar company.
What it toxic about this post? people expected more from SoD and on the Cata front you can absolutely clearly see the lack of work put into the game and you call people wanting finished and fleshed out products being "toxic"? lol
Imagine thinking SoD is the bare minimum
Oh it pretty much is. Pretty much no new enemies, no new assets, no new dungeons (recycled, ok), a few recycled abilities. Incursions are a phased zone with existing enemies and a few quests items. The items they added are neat. Let's see what the next phases bring but don't act like they put soon many resources into sod.
OP really thought he was doing something with this
They always do. Hop into a pug, lose an item, hop on r/classicwow with a low effort meme or 4th grade six paragraph think piece about how they can “solve the game with this one simple trick!” It’s so fucking funny man.
"My dot class should be top of the meters on glorified dungeon fights. These devs are stupid!"
Also, imagine thinking anything they do is going to make everyone happy with it. People complain about every single aspect of the game and every change they do make, and every change they don't make.
It is though and Cata kinda shows that it's because the devs have no capacity at all.
If only the employees started working instead of harassing coworkers
I go to sleep thinking will tomorrow be the day my server finally dies? I'd like the process to start already so I can get a transfer!
This place is really wild to read lmao.
Players having a better time does not make them more money unfortunately.
They have been cutting costs consistently since the Draenor expansion and the merger of Activision and Blizzard. I still remember when they sold all their physical servers and transferred everything to the cloud—that was an insanely bad experience. Everything was so laggy with any release, especially when encountering more than 20 people outside of an instance. Meanwhile, private servers like Light's Hope handled around 20,000 people during the AQ opening, whereas Blizzard's classic servers were extremely laggy. I spent about an hour in a queue at the flight master just waiting to land. They're still cutting costs. They've fired most of the GMs and support staff; it seems like only about 10 people are working on Cata Classic, and half of them are also working overtime on SoD after completing their main tasks. I have no idea how it could possibly get worse.
you are not that wrong with the number of devs. i think i read somewhere that classic as a whole has 8 core devs.
I think this is what most of the posts in the sub come down to at their core. The devs do what they can on a shoestring but it feels like overall negligence from Blizzard toward a game we have adored for a lot of our lives. Huge company making billions and they throw scraps at Classic
But the bare minimum devs and pays is giving blizzard an insane money experience. tldr : why bother when money is still flowing ?
If everything was perfect, everything would be perfect. Blizzard doesn't care about an insane gaming experience, they want a live-service game that has an insanely profitable shop with minimal effort to show off to the investors that graph go up.
I see you are new to capitalism.
OP really thinks more = better 🤣
It kinda is up to a certain point.
Blizzard has 12,000 employees. The problem is, none of them are talented. The skilled/talented people left Blizzard decades ago.
Honestly been thinking about this for awhile. I think the sub price needs to go up. It should be at 25 bucks now or even closer to 30. Theres no reason for that to happen when micro transactions out pace it though for revenue.
Ah yes the 6 million subscribers they get 15 bucks a month from isn't enough
Yeah a quick check says 7m subs currently for WoW. Oh and don’t forget the 8bn per year revenue with operating profit of ~30%. Insanity to suggest we need to give them more money
Srsly and that's just wow, don't even forget how much they made off D4 even though it was shit, how much they continuously make from OW2 (basically just monetized OW1) and all the other shit they put out like WC3 Reforged. Guy is delusional to think we should pay more.
I'm making the statement their money should come from subs and not micro transactions. OSRS is almost the same sub cost at this point...
Sucks because how do they argue for more financial backing on a failing project that probably never would have been failing had it had a decent team size to begin with.
There’s just too many versions of the game. It feels unfair to pick which one gets cut and which ones stay. Sod seemed cool but didn’t stick the land. I hope they try again but with ideas more in line with classic sensibilities.