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Comment by john-shaffer | Hacker News Reader

I boycotted Blizzard after their censorship regarding Hong Kong. It was a great decision since it saved me from the dumpster fire to end all dumpster fires that was Warcraft III Reforged [1]. I would strongly suggest that if anything about Blizzard pisses you off, just be done with them entirely. The people who created the great games of the past don't work there. Blizzard is no longer capable of producing good products, and has no purpose other than to suck every last penny out of the existing IP.

[1] https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/warcraft-iii-reforged

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I feel like their entire mission changed around the time of their merger with Activision. I remember reading a long time ago the original devs saying they made games they would want to play, and I believe it showed. The most obvious example of that to me were the game stories. Back then the stories and background lore had depth and were fascinatingly interesting. Characters felt like they had real motivations and reasons for doing things, the worlds felt believable, gritty, and sometimes unforgiving.

I don't know if it was Activision's influence, many of the original devs moving on, or World of Warcraft coming out, but since then everything about the company seems to have changed. So much of what they do nowadays just seem like money grabs. They release pay to win content meant to be addictive, dumbed down their art style to looking like cartoons that appeal to the least common denominator, follow trends instead of doing anything innovating, and seem to have completely stopped caring about making any interesting story. The villains in Diablo 3 were comically badly written.

At some point they even tried to force users to use their REAL WORLD names on battle.net[1].

It really isn't the same company as it used to be in the early 2000's.

[1]https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/blizzard-requires-rea...

The decline started when Vivendi (the owners) drove off the Blizzard North (ex-Condor) devs. The Blizzard North leaders were ignored to the point that they submitted their resignations in protest. Rather than actually give the team a voice, Vivendi decided to accept the resignations. They shut down the studio entirely a year or two later because it couldn't perform. They would have made a lot more money if they had listened to their proven leaders.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080702062733/http://www.netwar...

What changed is that all of the people who made the pre-WoW games so great did not work on them, because they were no longer at Blizzard.

Isn't it going to be hard to stay away from both blizzard and Activision? They made/make really good stuff.

The concept that if anything about x pisses you off, just be done with it entirely would be great in theory if a large portion of the market felt the same way but in the end it's vidja games and a lot of people are sucked in and don't want to give up something fun for some high minded ideal that doesn't really impact them

> Isn't it going to be hard to stay away from both blizzard and Activision? They made/make really good stuff.

Not really. The last good game that Blizzard made was StarCraft 2, 10 years ago. It's free anyways, so you can cost the company a few cents in server charges without supporting them. I don't play console games, so Activision is completely irrelevant to me.

> The concept that if anything about x pisses you off

I was talking about Blizzard specifically, not x. Ditching Blizzard will save you years of disappointment and frustration. It's quicker & easier to forget them for moral reasons than to be gradually disillusioned by their releases.

It’s not hard at all. While they make (some) good games, they’re hardly the only videogame creators out there. Even should you discount the thousands of indie creators (and you really shouldn’t), there’s several dozen AAA creators that you can still pick games from.

If you can avoid the COD and “Blizzard games are always the best” hype trains, there’s a lot out there to play, and a lot of games which respect your pocketbook.

Boycotts work. I enjoy playing competitive FPS shooters occasionally, and I’ve personally been able to stay away from COD since the private server debacle with no issues. To claim that their games are so good no boycott will ever work (so why bother) is conceding defeat before you’ve even tried.

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