I keyed tons of people. It wasn't hard in the sense of difficult but it was a long, time consuming process and a huge pain in the ass.
I played Everquest, so I thought it wasn't long at all really. Different perspective, admittedly. The process also rewarded people who did it intelligently and worked with their guildmates.
That and Burning Crusade was worse, so vanilla felt easy honestly. Vanilla is how the keying should be done, imo, BC was too far.
XBL: Bizazedo
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
The nature of getting people keyed means guilds were always more interested in poaching already ready people. Why spend all that time getting someone keyed and then sending gear their way to get them up to snuff and teaching them all the encounters and all that when you could just grab someone who's already ready to raid.
Well....I mean, we keyed people pretty easily. You could take 40 people into 5 man dungeons.
The major barrier was impatience. Our Horde side server first LUCIFRON KILL (yeah baby!) was two guilds working together.
Keying was never hard in vanilla for organized people / people who gave a damn.
I keyed tons of people. It wasn't hard in the sense of difficult but it was a long, time consuming process and a huge pain in the ass.
I think the point of Classic is going back through those giant pain in the ass experiences as a community. Its like hazing.
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I keyed tons of people. It wasn't hard in the sense of difficult but it was a long, time consuming process and a huge pain in the ass.
I played Everquest, so I thought it wasn't long at all really. Different perspective, admittedly. The process also rewarded people who did it intelligently and worked with their guildmates.
That and Burning Crusade was worse, so vanilla felt easy honestly. Vanilla is how the keying should be done, imo, BC was too far.
Everything about WoW Vanilla was super convenient and friendly compared to it's contemporaries at the time. Just goes to show how much player expectations have evolved since then.
Everything about WoW Vanilla was super convenient and friendly compared to it's contemporaries at the time. Just goes to show how much player expectations have evolved since then.
Very true. To players detriment, honestly. There was always a joke in gaming that one should never listen to players, we don't know what we want.
I don't 100% agree with it, but I do feel there's a kernel of truth there. 100% listening got Bungie to make Destiny 2.
Yay.
Battlefield V, for example, is a fun game. It's a good game. It's not the best game. It has issues and bugs. So now it's the worst game ever. And you can point at a number of games this has happened to (Street Fighter V, MvC:I etc.).
Over the past few years, I find myself firmly believing the biggest problem with games these days....are us, the players (as a whole).
But it's off-topic, I'll shut up.
XBL: Bizazedo
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
edit because that isn't helpful towards a conversation: Phones are a terrible way to play games. They are simply not built to play anything more taxing than candy crush. They practically burst into flames after 20 minutes of use, and in some cases do. Their battery life is basically limited to about an hour of playing and then you must be tethered to a wall. And both of those problems just compound on each other. Not to mention there are painfully few mobile games that arent just gotcha gambling simulators with anime boobs everywhere. They are a platform people are doing things on, but i certainly am not validating that pile of horseshit.
Funny thing I discovered last year. The original Master of Orion game can be run without much problems on my android phone using a DOSBox emulator (so can MoO2). Master of Orion has a UI that was built assuming a laggy and imprecise mouse, which means that the buttons are all pretty large. This means that the turn-based low-CPU/GPU demanding game plays really well on my phone and does not drain the battery. MoO2 is also playable, but since it assumes more precise mouse movement and use of right clicks you have to work at things a bit more and use more auto-combat to make it work.
Sadly, most phone games that are being made seem to be gatcha or other predatory freemium games or graphically intense games that drain your battery.
The nature of getting people keyed means guilds were always more interested in poaching already ready people. Why spend all that time getting someone keyed and then sending gear their way to get them up to snuff and teaching them all the encounters and all that when you could just grab someone who's already ready to raid.
Well....I mean, we keyed people pretty easily. You could take 40 people into 5 man dungeons.
The major barrier was impatience. Our Horde side server first LUCIFRON KILL (yeah baby!) was two guilds working together.
Keying was never hard in vanilla for organized people / people who gave a damn.
I keyed tons of people. It wasn't hard in the sense of difficult but it was a long, time consuming process and a huge pain in the ass.
I think the point of Classic is going back through those giant pain in the ass experiences as a community. Its like hazing.
I think the point is nostalgia. People remember their first time and want to recapture that magic and think it was the way the game worked back then rather then it being a confluence of new experiences.
The parts of the keying process where a guild can actively contribute and assist were not a problem, in my experience. Getting people to run someone through UBRS or whatever, that was easy.
The real difficulty was in motivating people to do all the solo stuff that leads up to it. Those quest chains were massive, and it was a big undertaking to even get a person ready for the guild stuff. And that's where the real bottleneck was. As a former guildleader during the Vanilla period, it was a huge pain in the ass having to micro manage people through all the early steps and forcing them to do solo content just to get them to the place where the guild was able to help them.
The real difficulty was in motivating people to do all the solo stuff that leads up to it. Those quest chains were massive, and it was a big undertaking to even get a person ready for the guild stuff. And that's where the real bottleneck was. As a former guildleader during the Vanilla period, it was a huge pain in the ass having to micro manage people through all the early steps and forcing them to do solo content just to get them to the place where the guild was able to help them.
I was GM of a 70 person PvP guild, so hazing / derision / mocking was enough to get people off their ass . That and the world pvp encouraged people to work together, anyways.
In other words, I believe you, just different experience / didn't seem bad on this end.
XBL: Bizazedo
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
WoW Classic is going to be akin to going camping, but with no outside electronic devices. You probably remember having a blast doing that as a kid. You most likely will enjoy yourself doing it over the weekend. Come Monday morning though you will be foaming at the mouth for your cell phone.
And just to put it into perspective and keep the analogy going, camping with WoW involved a fire pit, a lighter, and various "camping" food you got at the local grocery store. The likes of Everquest gave you a bow and arrow, and you better know how to start a fire via sticks.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
Everything about WoW Vanilla was super convenient and friendly compared to it's contemporaries at the time. Just goes to show how much player expectations have evolved since then.
Very true. To players detriment, honestly. There was always a joke in gaming that one should never listen to players, we don't know what we want.
I don't 100% agree with it, but I do feel there's a kernel of truth there. 100% listening got Bungie to make Destiny 2.
Yay.
Battlefield V, for example, is a fun game. It's a good game. It's not the best game. It has issues and bugs. So now it's the worst game ever. And you can point at a number of games this has happened to (Street Fighter V, MvC:I etc.).
Over the past few years, I find myself firmly believing the biggest problem with games these days....are us, the players (as a whole).
But it's off-topic, I'll shut up.
I think the truth is that a certain amount of friction, of time wasting, in your system fosters a sense of investment and community and a feeling of worth in what you are doing. That as you streamline your systems to be more convenient for the player you end up exposing so many of the game's systems to the light that the whole thing can start to feel artificial and like you are jumping through random hoops just to get your next hit on the old skinner box. And it's not like the alternative is actually functionally different but it feels different.
I think a good example of this is WoW's old system of flight paths and boats and maybe the occasional mage portal as compared to other MMOs or the like with fast travel points and all that. Yeah, fast travel systems make the game waste less of your time with non-interactive bullshit. But they also make the game world actually feel less like a world. Things feel legitimately far apart when you have to travel around them via direct fly-over-all-this-stuff means. Heading down to Silithus to get some shit done back in Vanilla felt like a goddamn trek to the middle of nowhere, which is how you want that zone to feel.
shryke on
+1
Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
The nature of getting people keyed means guilds were always more interested in poaching already ready people. Why spend all that time getting someone keyed and then sending gear their way to get them up to snuff and teaching them all the encounters and all that when you could just grab someone who's already ready to raid.
Well....I mean, we keyed people pretty easily. You could take 40 people into 5 man dungeons.
The major barrier was impatience. Our Horde side server first LUCIFRON KILL (yeah baby!) was two guilds working together.
Keying was never hard in vanilla for organized people / people who gave a damn.
I keyed tons of people. It wasn't hard in the sense of difficult but it was a long, time consuming process and a huge pain in the ass.
I helped sooo many people with Jailbreak. Some people would even pay to have a reasonably geared healer go with them. And the plus side was, if i helped get unguilded people keyed, they would ask to join the guild, which always meant more people for zg,mc, and ony. And later aq20/silithus bosses too.
Lol i was thinking along the same lines as the comic. But theres no way activision cuts blizzard loose, their only other revenue stream would be like call of duty. Their shares would be down to penny stocks.
I just hope that wow classic and wc3 are huge successes and they can readjust how they are approaching everything. And get the eff away from all things mobile... overwatch has already peaked, theyre going to need something new/big soon to take the heat off their recent dumpster fires.
blizzard and activision have been together for over a decade. its over. there is no "cutting loose" they are the same company. half of Blizzards executives are either retired or fully commandeered into the Activision corporate apparatus
if Blizzard became its own company, it wouldn't be a company
Jasconius on
0
AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
No way are they going to give up on mobile - they should have gotten into it years ago.
Getting in to mobile is what killed their stock in the first place!
They screwed up the Blizzcon announcement big time, but a Diablo mobile game is still a good idea, and it makes a lot of sense for the business moving forward to keep making more mobile exclusives. The fans will get over it soon enough.
Zek on
+3
AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
No way are they going to give up on mobile - they should have gotten into it years ago.
Getting in to mobile is what killed their stock in the first place!
They screwed up the Blizzcon announcement big time, but a Diablo mobile game is still a good idea, and it makes a lot of sense for the business moving forward to keep making more mobile exclusives. The fans will get over it soon enough.
Diablo Immortal will have to be an actually good game with fair monetization for them to recover.
With NetEase developing I can't see either happening. Especially fair monetization. I mean at its core Diablo's gameplay loop is pretty simple; kill monsters, get loot. What are they going to monetize that wont kill that gameplay loop?
Their stocks nosedived at the announcement of a Diablo mobile game, if people's fears are even proven partially true then that game is done.
edit- I'm not saying it isn't impossible. Just that they have to put in some real effort here and I don't really see them doing that.
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
I still think Diablo Immortal is "not for us". It's Blizzard's attempt to dip it's money-sucker into the chinese market. Any money it makes elsewhere is a bonus.
The problem with Blizzard's reveal is that they didn't lead it with "We're working on the next, great, entry in the Diablo franchise and we can't wait to eventually show you what we're working on. In the meantime, we have a little side project we've been working in with our partners at NetEase"
Instead they disappointed a bunch of people who reacted poorly, causing Blizzard's people to get defensive and respond poorly.
Undead Scottsman on
+8
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
"Do you guys not have phones" is one of the worst ways to handle a poor crowd reaction that I've ever seen.
+19
AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
Their choice of venue to announce Diablo Immortal aside the idea of a free to play, fairly monetized Diablo mobile isn't a bad one. Path of Exile (while not a mobile game) proves that you can do a free to play, fairly monetized ARPG and be rather successful about it. It's just that with NetEase and Activision involved I cannot foresee them pulling it off. Activision in particular would really have to heel-turn on their monetization philosophy.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
I still think Diablo Immortal is "not for us". It's Blizzard's attempt to dip it's money-sucker into the chinese market. Any money it makes elsewhere is a bonus.
Sure, it's most likely "Not For Us", and had Blizzard found any other time or place to announce it, any place that wasn't a Gamer Convention specifically targeted at "Us"; even if it was at the convention, but then followed up with an actual announcement that was "For Us", then their fanbase would not have lost its collective shit like it did. I can't say shit wouldn't have been lost, but if this was followed up with "...and we're working on Diablo IV, roll the clip..."
We would have seen a vastly different fan reaction.
I still think Diablo Immortal is "not for us". It's Blizzard's attempt to dip it's money-sucker into the chinese market. Any money it makes elsewhere is a bonus.
Sure, it's most likely "Not For Us", and had Blizzard found any other time or place to announce it, any place that wasn't a Gamer Convention specifically targeted at "Us"; even if it was at the convention, but then followed up with an actual announcement that was "For Us", then their fanbase would not have lost its collective shit like it did. I can't say shit wouldn't have been lost, but if this was followed up with "...and we're working on Diablo IV, roll the clip..."
We would have seen a vastly different fan reaction.
Yeah, this whole thing strikes me as someone in charge of organizing Blizzcon or at least with a hand in the process forgot this fact when they panicked and realised there was nothing else to announce at Blizzcon this year.
PoE is not a good comparison considering it gets more updates in a year than like Diablo 3 ever got in the life of its development. And I seriously doubt Immortal will get much beyond "here's more shit to buy".
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
"Do you guys not have phones" is one of the worst ways to handle a poor crowd reaction that I've ever seen.
It is.
Also "is this an out of season April Fools joke" is a super shitty thing to say. Fans are the worst.
Well like said before, it is a convention for largely pc focused games, and their big reveal was a phone game. That would be like hyping up a trailer for the next avengers movie but instead showing off a new comic book about spiderman. Like yeah there is some overlap in those fandoms, but when you are expecting A and all signs point to A but you get F, people are going to be pissed. Like go have blizzcon-mobile in china, leave the main blizzcon to real games.
"Do you guys not have phones" is one of the worst ways to handle a poor crowd reaction that I've ever seen.
It is.
Also "is this an out of season April Fools joke" is a super shitty thing to say. Fans are the worst.
That was a rock solid burn on that guy's part.
Truly a voice of a generation.
I mean seriously, how much fucking bullshit nonsense have these companies been spewing at us for years now and for like the first time ever someone got to say what we were all thinking right to their face? Fucking glorious.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
The situation was poorly handled, sure. Companies spew corporate nonsense, sure. But I think also that maybe frequenting Penny Arcade, a relatively sheltered environment, gives folks an incomplete understanding of how fucking atrocious video game fans can be these days. I 'liked' PCGamer on facebook ages ago; I don't really read it too often, but it popping up in my feed is handy to keep up with headlines sometimes, at least. The comments threads on those posts are grotesque. Folks are still posting "DoN'T yOu GuYS hAve PHoneS?" on every Blizzard related snippet. The response to the Soldier 76 backstory news is vile. And it never stops.
And I know, I know "don't read the comments," but the comments don't come from nowhere. People are making them. Incessantly. It's a nightmare to think that these are human beings whom I have stuff in common with. So when someone goes "Blizzard owns some of the fan backlash, at least in part, because corporations are bullshit anyway" I can't help but grimace at the state of things.
Eh you can't put trolls on comments with the whole fandom. Its like vocal fans on comment threads are like a small % of a small %.
Blizzard 100% owns the fan backlash, as they had previous to that announcement been doing bare min work with Diablo 3, while PoE got quality update after quality update. And then when they announce something its a mobile game made my an infamous company for micros.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
I still dont get why people keep praising PoE though. Every time ive tried it, it’s been super slow and unresponsive. Like click the fireball or wand button wait 1-2s then the animation starts. And thats connecting to a server with 30ms. Blizzard might handle a lot of things like shit, but at least things are snappy. Ive never liked PoE though.
Also even though there are a lot of a-holes voicing their opinions, sometimes that stuff is absolutely needed to make companies listen. It used to be all publicity is good publicity and nothing matters. Now we’re in the age where if a developer/publisher does some shit with their $500m investment, people call them out and burn it to the ground (see battlefront 2, and mass effect andromeda). I think the vitriol is a necessary evil, though often it persists longer than it needs to.
Eh you can't put trolls on comments with the whole fandom. Its like vocal fans on comment threads are like a small % of a small %.
Blizzard 100% owns the fan backlash, as they had previous to that announcement been doing bare min work with Diablo 3, while PoE got quality update after quality update. And then when they announce something its a mobile game made my an infamous company for micros.
It's the timing that was wrong really. A Diablo mobile game should have already happened so we shouldn't be surprised it did. Even announcing it at Blizzcon was fine. But making it the "one last thing" of their keynote was a bad call. Throw it in the middle and make Warcraft Remastered the last thing and at least the blow is cushioned a bit.
I still dont get why people keep praising PoE though. Every time ive tried it, it’s been super slow and unresponsive. Like click the fireball or wand button wait 1-2s then the animation starts. And thats connecting to a server with 30ms. Blizzard might handle a lot of things like shit, but at least things are snappy. Ive never liked PoE though.
PoE aint for me either, but it is undeniably successful. And the Devs do put out a lot of quality content on a regular basis and never charge a penny for it. Much like Warframe, which I do love.
I bet somewhere within the Legion of Doom Activision HQ there is some exec in an office with strings running this way and that trying to piece together how those games are profitable if they don't sell content piecemeal and don't make the basic game loop intolerable without buying boosters.
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
I still dont get why people keep praising PoE though. Every time ive tried it, it’s been super slow and unresponsive. Like click the fireball or wand button wait 1-2s then the animation starts. And thats connecting to a server with 30ms. Blizzard might handle a lot of things like shit, but at least things are snappy. Ive never liked PoE though.
PoE aint for me either, but it is undeniably successful. And the Devs do put out a lot of quality content on a regular basis and never charge a penny for it. Much like Warframe, which I do love.
I bet somewhere within the Legion of Doom Activision HQ there is some exec in an office with strings running this way and that trying to piece together how those games are profitable if they don't sell content piecemeal and don't make the basic game loop intolerable without buying boosters.
Activision is too busy giving out $15 million dollar incentives to executives while telling the proles they need to find ways to cut costs.
Warframe is like perfect. You can trade for the digital currency with other players for regular farmable items. They dangle those sweet 50% and rarely 75% off the price of digital currency prices. And then you can also just pay for the new stuff for a short while if you got the phat stacks, but the new stuff doesnt just make you god mode, its largely cosmetic with some quality of life stuff. So nobody cares if you farm a new frame or bought it.
And currently there are probably execs shitting themselves because they just lost bungie, cod was kinda meh, and blizzard is just kinda coasting downhill for the moment. I hope they have some new shit to announce soon or theyre gonna be in a world of hurt.
Posts
That and Burning Crusade was worse, so vanilla felt easy honestly. Vanilla is how the keying should be done, imo, BC was too far.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
I think the point of Classic is going back through those giant pain in the ass experiences as a community. Its like hazing.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Everything about WoW Vanilla was super convenient and friendly compared to it's contemporaries at the time. Just goes to show how much player expectations have evolved since then.
I don't 100% agree with it, but I do feel there's a kernel of truth there. 100% listening got Bungie to make Destiny 2.
Yay.
Battlefield V, for example, is a fun game. It's a good game. It's not the best game. It has issues and bugs. So now it's the worst game ever. And you can point at a number of games this has happened to (Street Fighter V, MvC:I etc.).
Over the past few years, I find myself firmly believing the biggest problem with games these days....are us, the players (as a whole).
But it's off-topic, I'll shut up.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
Funny thing I discovered last year. The original Master of Orion game can be run without much problems on my android phone using a DOSBox emulator (so can MoO2). Master of Orion has a UI that was built assuming a laggy and imprecise mouse, which means that the buttons are all pretty large. This means that the turn-based low-CPU/GPU demanding game plays really well on my phone and does not drain the battery. MoO2 is also playable, but since it assumes more precise mouse movement and use of right clicks you have to work at things a bit more and use more auto-combat to make it work.
Sadly, most phone games that are being made seem to be gatcha or other predatory freemium games or graphically intense games that drain your battery.
I think the point is nostalgia. People remember their first time and want to recapture that magic and think it was the way the game worked back then rather then it being a confluence of new experiences.
The real difficulty was in motivating people to do all the solo stuff that leads up to it. Those quest chains were massive, and it was a big undertaking to even get a person ready for the guild stuff. And that's where the real bottleneck was. As a former guildleader during the Vanilla period, it was a huge pain in the ass having to micro manage people through all the early steps and forcing them to do solo content just to get them to the place where the guild was able to help them.
In other words, I believe you, just different experience / didn't seem bad on this end.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
And just to put it into perspective and keep the analogy going, camping with WoW involved a fire pit, a lighter, and various "camping" food you got at the local grocery store. The likes of Everquest gave you a bow and arrow, and you better know how to start a fire via sticks.
I think the truth is that a certain amount of friction, of time wasting, in your system fosters a sense of investment and community and a feeling of worth in what you are doing. That as you streamline your systems to be more convenient for the player you end up exposing so many of the game's systems to the light that the whole thing can start to feel artificial and like you are jumping through random hoops just to get your next hit on the old skinner box. And it's not like the alternative is actually functionally different but it feels different.
I think a good example of this is WoW's old system of flight paths and boats and maybe the occasional mage portal as compared to other MMOs or the like with fast travel points and all that. Yeah, fast travel systems make the game waste less of your time with non-interactive bullshit. But they also make the game world actually feel less like a world. Things feel legitimately far apart when you have to travel around them via direct fly-over-all-this-stuff means. Heading down to Silithus to get some shit done back in Vanilla felt like a goddamn trek to the middle of nowhere, which is how you want that zone to feel.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
I just hope that wow classic and wc3 are huge successes and they can readjust how they are approaching everything. And get the eff away from all things mobile... overwatch has already peaked, theyre going to need something new/big soon to take the heat off their recent dumpster fires.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
if Blizzard became its own company, it wouldn't be a company
Getting in to mobile is what killed their stock in the first place!
They screwed up the Blizzcon announcement big time, but a Diablo mobile game is still a good idea, and it makes a lot of sense for the business moving forward to keep making more mobile exclusives. The fans will get over it soon enough.
Diablo Immortal will have to be an actually good game with fair monetization for them to recover.
With NetEase developing I can't see either happening. Especially fair monetization. I mean at its core Diablo's gameplay loop is pretty simple; kill monsters, get loot. What are they going to monetize that wont kill that gameplay loop?
Their stocks nosedived at the announcement of a Diablo mobile game, if people's fears are even proven partially true then that game is done.
edit- I'm not saying it isn't impossible. Just that they have to put in some real effort here and I don't really see them doing that.
Instead they disappointed a bunch of people who reacted poorly, causing Blizzard's people to get defensive and respond poorly.
Sure, it's most likely "Not For Us", and had Blizzard found any other time or place to announce it, any place that wasn't a Gamer Convention specifically targeted at "Us"; even if it was at the convention, but then followed up with an actual announcement that was "For Us", then their fanbase would not have lost its collective shit like it did. I can't say shit wouldn't have been lost, but if this was followed up with "...and we're working on Diablo IV, roll the clip..."
We would have seen a vastly different fan reaction.
Yeah, this whole thing strikes me as someone in charge of organizing Blizzcon or at least with a hand in the process forgot this fact when they panicked and realised there was nothing else to announce at Blizzcon this year.
pleasepaypreacher.net
It is.
Also "is this an out of season April Fools joke" is a super shitty thing to say. Fans are the worst.
That was a rock solid burn on that guy's part.
Especially since it had literally previously been an april fools day joke.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Well like said before, it is a convention for largely pc focused games, and their big reveal was a phone game. That would be like hyping up a trailer for the next avengers movie but instead showing off a new comic book about spiderman. Like yeah there is some overlap in those fandoms, but when you are expecting A and all signs point to A but you get F, people are going to be pissed. Like go have blizzcon-mobile in china, leave the main blizzcon to real games.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
Truly a voice of a generation.
I mean seriously, how much fucking bullshit nonsense have these companies been spewing at us for years now and for like the first time ever someone got to say what we were all thinking right to their face? Fucking glorious.
And I know, I know "don't read the comments," but the comments don't come from nowhere. People are making them. Incessantly. It's a nightmare to think that these are human beings whom I have stuff in common with. So when someone goes "Blizzard owns some of the fan backlash, at least in part, because corporations are bullshit anyway" I can't help but grimace at the state of things.
Blizzard 100% owns the fan backlash, as they had previous to that announcement been doing bare min work with Diablo 3, while PoE got quality update after quality update. And then when they announce something its a mobile game made my an infamous company for micros.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Also even though there are a lot of a-holes voicing their opinions, sometimes that stuff is absolutely needed to make companies listen. It used to be all publicity is good publicity and nothing matters. Now we’re in the age where if a developer/publisher does some shit with their $500m investment, people call them out and burn it to the ground (see battlefront 2, and mass effect andromeda). I think the vitriol is a necessary evil, though often it persists longer than it needs to.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
It's the timing that was wrong really. A Diablo mobile game should have already happened so we shouldn't be surprised it did. Even announcing it at Blizzcon was fine. But making it the "one last thing" of their keynote was a bad call. Throw it in the middle and make Warcraft Remastered the last thing and at least the blow is cushioned a bit.
PoE aint for me either, but it is undeniably successful. And the Devs do put out a lot of quality content on a regular basis and never charge a penny for it. Much like Warframe, which I do love.
I bet somewhere within the Legion of Doom Activision HQ there is some exec in an office with strings running this way and that trying to piece together how those games are profitable if they don't sell content piecemeal and don't make the basic game loop intolerable without buying boosters.
Activision is too busy giving out $15 million dollar incentives to executives while telling the proles they need to find ways to cut costs.
Satoru Iwata they are not.
pleasepaypreacher.net
And currently there are probably execs shitting themselves because they just lost bungie, cod was kinda meh, and blizzard is just kinda coasting downhill for the moment. I hope they have some new shit to announce soon or theyre gonna be in a world of hurt.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595