Insider leak on the current happenings inside Blizzard | Hacker News Reader

Insider leak on the current happenings inside Blizzard

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26 pointsthrowkeep15 comments

There are “leaks” on 4chan every day. I would take it with a grain of salt.

Yeah, it's pretty much the worst place for me to consider it in any way reliable. Why would you choose to leak to 4chan instead of anywhere else?

Like where? Is there any other community that is open, respects free speech and allows anonymous, long posts?

There are a large number of video game journalists at respected publications (e.g. Bloomberg, Vice) who would gladly publish this info if vetted, using industry-standard privacy measures.

if this is real, i doubt the intention is to get a bunch of publicity. really seemed more like venting

I trust 4chan over "journalists" any day.

This "leak" is also mostly just "confirming" popular external speculation and doesn't really have anything original, which is pretty suspicious.

The one concrete thing claim it contains is that they're trying to get the next WoW expansion out in early 2022, which is very unlikely even as a goal. The normal length of a WoW content patch is 5-6 months and going shorter than that causes problems for the more casual raiders who need that long to beat each raid. 9.1 just came out and 9.2 is happening, so the earliest they'd even want to release the expansion for proper pacing would be May 2022.

I dont know how true this is, but as someone who's played WoW since vanilla, it has been heading downhill in terms of enjoyement for a while now. There's clearly an antagonistic relationship between the developers and the player base. The devs have a vision for the game that doesnt really match what the players want. They keep doing things, like introducing a global cool down, borrowed power systems, never ending grinds for artifact power that players hate. During beta testing respected and experienced players kept passing warnings about aspects of the game they believed didnt work and were totally ignored by the devs. When the xpac when like the systems failed and were the disasters predicted and the devs then spent the next two patches trying to sort the failures out. As one well know wow youtubers said, "it feels like WoW is just one long beta test".

The content when it comes out is agressively time-gated, the story is inconsistant, what there is of it, other than grinding AP there isnt much else to do.

From whats been said more is earned from the cash shop than from subs so the general playerbase isnt their main objective, its the whales paying for mounts every few months.

I really do love WoW and want it to suceed, but it really does feel like they dont want us anymore.

On this topic, if an old fan of WoW (and single player FF games) who hasn't played any other MMORPGs since WoW wanted to play a new one, what would an RPG-savvy gamer recommend? I tried going back to WoW some years ago, but found myself spending so much time running to and fro that I quickly got bored and quit.

You should try FFXIV. It's not just a fad - it's pretty much the "MMORPG" experience you're looking for. There's really nothing like it at the moment.

Coincidentally, player numbers over the last two weeks have risen so much that it's hard to find a world to make characters on.

Is there a FFXIV or are there multiple things which fall under the FFXIV umbrella? I find the site confusing.

FFXIV is a single linear game, which gets prolonged by regular expansion packs (Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and now Endwalker coming out this year). To progress, you have to play the base game and then the expansion packs in their release order.

Starting point options are:

- Free trial (base game + first expansion pack) w/ a few restrictions.

- Purchase base game + first expansion pack + monthly subscription

- Purchase base game + all expansions + monthly subscription

Most people say that the quality of the base game is significantly lower than the expansion packs that came after. It is also possible to pay to skip ahead but I would not recommend it as the game eventually builds on its initially weak story.

> FFXIV is a single linear game

So MMORPGs have turned into normal games where you are forced to pay a subscription and play with other people?

Personally, I play 3 MMO's on a regular basis and they are very different so the question is what sort of experience you're looking for. Do you want a "go anywhere do anything at any time" experience, where you look at nearly all the content from first level? Then Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) may be your jam - you can jump in at lvl 1 to the newest content (except raiding and max level dungeons). Do you want well crafted story with solid structure and the constant knowledge of what to do next? That's FFXIV - it's got a main story that's going to guide you through content all the way from lvl 1 to lvl 80, but you can't just go off for 30 lvls and come back and expect the content to match your level - you'll have to go back and catch up on things. I really like them both. I think FFXIV is superior in terms of enjoyment for your investment, but if you want content you can pick up and just go without any real commitment or requirements ESO is great.

Anecdotally (because this leak is likely not true), I did resubscribe to WoW for Patch 9.1 and it's surprisingly empty in my high pop realm/battlegroup, which is an issue when a large amount of new content is group-oriented and the time it takes to get a group makes the endeavor not worth it.

I cancelled my subscription.

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