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Comment by brobdingnagians | Hacker News Reader

It used to be exciting when a Blizzard release was coming out. Now it's just scary and a bit depressing when they announce something. I was excited all the way up through Overwatch 1, then the WC3 remaster and Overwatch 2 were awful. If they only messed up new releases it wouldnt be so bad; it's the incessant fiddling and worsening of what was good. Even of games that weren't meant to be "live service" games.

I already have WC2 on GoG and this preservation program commitment makes me think I should start ramping up buying other games from my childhood with GoG.

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Even World of Warcraft which used to be seamless in terms of issues, has had increasingly more and more obvious bugs. A sad state from the "Blizzard polish" of yesteryear.

Try playing WoW with a new account. The initial mission has incredibly ugly graphics (much worse than the main game), a flat progress bar during loading (literally just a simple blue rectangle - no borders, gradients, or shadows, just something that a basic box(x, y, x1, y1) function would draw), and a yellow rectangle instead of a rope connecting your hero to a flying vehicle. It’s not a 3D bar, just a 2D yellow rectangle that looks like a censorship block on the screen, and you’re supposed to imagine it’s a rope hanging from a helicopter-like vehicle.

I understand it’s an old game, but these parts seem like pure laziness. I’m sure this laziness costs them a lot of players who leave the initial mission in disgust and never get to see the beautiful parts of WoW.

Same applies to many MMOs, even GW2 and FFXIV are terrible at the beginning, compared the current content.

World of Warcraft has never been without issues. When it launched it was full of bugs, servers kept crashing (but they did refund a lot of gametime back then) and so on.

And every expansion was just a nightmare start, without being able to get to the new zone, servers again crashing.

You just have golden memories of a state that never happened. Game wise, WoW has gone forward a lot since DF (the disaster of SL taught them something) and is actually in a lot better state than before. Sure, it has bugs, but it's also a massive game. And they do keep fixing a lot of bugs with quite good response time these days instead of what it used to be.

Bugs and infrastructure are two different things. Yes when a game first launches it will potentially be quite buggy, but every expansion until recently has been impressively slick.

You mention a really interesting point. My heart also sinks in my stomach whenever I see "X announces Y" and X is in a set of names such as "Electronic Arts", "Activision", and many more. I really wonder if these companies are aware that their customers have this reaction, but I doubt they see it as a bad thing.

Even for someone who only really played Hearthstone for a while many years ago but tries to stay somewhat current with the industry, my perception of Blizzard has indeed massively changed somewhere after Overwatch. Most of their moves I was reading about since were rather baffling, which was very unlike how I perceived Blizzard before.

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