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Comment by abledon | Hacker News Reader

its Activision wearing blizzard's dead skin. Most blizzard "minds" have left for other pastures.

I dunno. In one of the AMA's one of the engineers spoke about rediscovering the code he wrote for vanilla WoW back when he was a younger programmer. That sounds like a pretty long stint at a single games company (many people don't last that long in the games industry as a whole).

Also possible Blizzard asks their more senior people to do these AMA's I guess...

This is my own perspective from what I've been reading/ seeing as a customer for the past few years and how the company has changed from its warcraft/diablo even world of warcraft days to now.

Yes there are still people working for Blizzard that have been there for 15 years or longer. (Is that a good thing? yes and no. The motivation declines the longer you are at a specific job, not that it applies to everyone but I consider that to be a a big factor)

The issue here though isn't about how long someone has been working on a project like WoW or for the company itself. The main issue is that like any other company out there that became successful it went in full corporate mode.

That dev that has been working in wow since 2002 and before the game was even out, has probably very little say of what happens to the game. The game as any other game that is coming out from blizzard right now feels like its build by pure stats. It feels like a marketing specialist, sat down with a stats guru and they decided on what people like based on trends and what people are doing. That combined with the business people demanding more money, more game currency transactions, more gambling involved into the game and RNG being the top, have made games like WoW being awful to enjoy.

The difference between Blizzard back then and Activision-Blizzard now is that Blizzard a small/medium game studio was building games that the team would love to play. WoW was a pure unexplored world ready to accommodate any kind of player - it was an adventure. Nowadays the WoW of today is like a themepark where every ride is very specific.

Again personally I spent so much time in WoW during the first 2-3 expansions, and nowadays I want to play but the game is just not good enough.

So as a player yes I'd say you are right to say there are people still working for Blizzard that were working back then but the small/medium studio that would put passion behind their games, turned into a corporation trying to build games based on stats.

And I hope that there will be another indie company that will eventually become like valve, blizzard or ea. Us gamers need that, we need a company that will produce amazing games with loads of passion and not just for the moneygrab.

Vanilla server (run on private servers (pservers)) is actually a rather popular niche. This is bringing that experience back. How it does at-large will be interesting to see.

The other argument is that Blizzard tends to do remastered releases of games ~15 years after their original release, and guess what, it's been 15 years. So it fits into that bucket as well.

While it's definitely a grab at more players, people are also asking for it. Go poking around to see how much people are excited about this thing (there are various podcasts, https://countdowntoclassic.com/ being one I've listened to).

Oh come on, Activision has owned Blizzard for over a decade, during which Blizzard has released many of the most popular games and expansions for WoW.

But WoW was basically the death of the Warcraft series. There hasn't been a mainline game since.

Wasn't there a few articles recently (like end of last year) on how Activision was increasing their control of Blizzard, with, for example a voluntary redundancy plan?

Oh wow i didnt know that. The acquisition happened much earlier than I thought!

Like who you replied to, i sort if blame activision for the death of blizzard, but that timeline doesnt really line up. I wonder whats going on? Changing demogrpahics, I suppose.

Blizzard had a fair amount of inertia. They had been working on Diablo III (2012) for years but it shows how quickly Activation destroyed what made Blizzard great. The problem was not really core gameplay mechanics at release, it was the final balancing being completely out of whack that destroyed the game. This meant early review where generally positive, but gamers quickly stopped playing as late game was simply broken.

Similarly, Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King are pure Blizzard. Cataclysm (2010) was controversial. On the other hand Mists of Pandaria (2012) was generally disliked, Warlords of Draenor (2014) was an inane mess.

I'd disagree that Wrath of the Lich King was pure Blizzard, in fact I'd claim the final patches of Burning Crusade marked the beginning of the end for many players. IIrc, monetization efforts such as faction transfers[0,1] and pets were introduced during that expansion and "casual-friendly" tools such as the dungeon finder[2] and heirlooms[4] were developed to attract more players. All of these changes were already extremely controversial.

[0] https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Character_Transfer

[1] https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Faction_Change_service

[2] https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Dungeon_Finder

[4] https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Heirloom

The merger was 7/8/08, years after character transfer from mid 2006.

[4] “The precursors to modern-day heirlooms were introduced in Vanilla/Classic World of Warcraft. Heirlooms up to the Wrath of the Lich King expansion were items that were sold by a specific battleground vendor. There were Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin and Alterac Valley heirlooms.”

[2] This depends on how you mark an expansion. IMO, after the initial bug fixes are put that’s the expansion. Everything after that like 3.3.0 is it’s own separate patch.

My bad, I mistook the character transfer with the faction change service. Still, I remember there being a push for it which seems to be confirmed by the wiki: "initially, there was a 6 month cooldown between character transfers. In late February 2008, the cooldown was reduced to 1 month. In July 2009, the cooldown was reduced to 3 days."

Regarding heirlooms, they were introduced in WotLK:

"Heirlooms that increase experience and scale based on character level were introduced in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion."

The line is blurry, but I believe that a trend was definitely noticeable even in late Burning Crusade. In particular, efforts to attract a broader player base. It is unfortunately surprisingly hard to track and timestamp all the controversial changes introduced to the game.

Mists of Pandaria was disliked upon release mostly due to the new elements added (Kung-fu panda "knockoff", pet battles, etc), but is now considered a very good if not great expansion based on the actual content and game play.

Legion went through the same thing where at the start it was considered even worse than Warlords, but is now considered a high water mark.

Personally, I disliked Pandora because of it’s poor story and gimmicks like farming. Our guild went from doing heroic raids in Cata to 1/2 the guild quitting the game within 3 months of expansion and many people never hitting the new max level.

I assume people that remain generally liked the changes, but from what I can tell the player base tanked.

Activision's games are themselves popular. Popularity doesn't mean the something can be liked by the same people as the last popular thing.

For some people, there hasn't been a great traditional Blizzard game in many years.

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