Never thought I will say this - But WoW is so far ahead of any other imaginable MMO right now

Lobotomist

I just read random article , some tidbit about what Blizzard learned from last WoW expansion. And one thought blew my mind.

300 developers actively working on WoW. Even now 12 years after.

So its 16 years of continuous content development with team that is 300 people at its smallest - and its all Blizzard quality people.

LOL , how can anything compete ?

( disclaimer , i dont play WoW , neither did I play it since Vanilla )

therdre

300 Developers and they still can't figure out how to make their game work, beyond sad.  

CrazKanuk

Legion is definitely the best expansion since Wrath. The pacing is nearly perfect. The story is strong. You're still very much on a guided tour, though. It becomes overly evident at points where you finish up a piece of new content and it doesn't give you a follow-up question, so you're left wondering whether you forgot something, lol.

deniter

300 developers or not, they lost me almost 7 years ago and i've never looked back. For such a big and wealthy company they are doing terrible job if you ask me.

danwest58

WOW in is current form is nothing more than a Massive Single Player game with no community and what there is in the community is so toxic the game is not fun.  

When WOW was a social game where it required you to make friends or screw off the game was the best.  You didnt have a game losing subs left and right because the Core pillar of an MMO was there.  Today people play it for 3 maybe 6 months out of the entire expansion and then leave.  

Why do you think there is a push for classic servers?  Its not nostalgia or rose tinted classes.  Its because the MMO Community not the community that just came to play an MMO because it was the thing to do, is changing.  Look at what the MMO community is asking for in games like Pantheon or, COE, or SOTA, they all want the same thing, players forced to play together at some level and a social aspect to the game.  Why?  Because that is what built the MMO Industry.  WOW Didn't built the industry but it did have an impact, both good and bad.  The Good Impact was making MMOs PRE WOTLK casual but still requiring team work, and social skills.  After that the games became nothing more than lobby based games and while it was popular at first people got board of it now.

Hell I am in Grievance and just the other day people were complaining that use to love the Automated group finder tools that today these group finder tools is what is keeping them from having fun because of all the drama with these thrown together groups.  They also cannot find friends anymore in these games and are tired of the treadmill these tools create.  These people are now trying not to use these tools at all because its become something they no longer like.  While yes there are countless non MMORPG gamers trying to play MMORPGs that want these tools you can see MMORPG gamers not wanting anymore to do with these tools and developers are responding to it.  


WOW could fix their entire problem by having vanilla servers and YES these servers will have large communities and yes they could make retail look like a pile of crap that it is.  The funny thing is you see on the WOW forums people voting down anyone who does not like LFD/LFR yet they are the vocal minority because the large percentage of the player base will never vote on the forums they will be like my wife who just unsubs.  

danwest58

ikcin said:

WoW is probably the first MSO - massive singleplayer online game. Well there are many MSO games on the market right now, from WoW to BDO. But very few MMORPGs in fact. Look at the NCSoft data - the people play Lineage, because it is still a MMO. To call the actual WoW or any MSO game - the best MMO - is simply delusional.

You should at least give WOW credit for being a MMORPG in the first 4 years of WOW because it was.  I will always say Vanilla WOW and TBC WOW was a great MMORPG.  Yes it had its problems with finding groups BUT that is the point of an MMORPG.  You could help people find groups the game's primary site having guild and group finders.  So people can list their group and info on it.  

Wizardry

Well first of all i would say Square Enix is likely bigger and spends more money on their products.
Blizzard spends a boatload on lawyers and i guess a good thing,also on support to handle accounts/banned etc etc.So a lot of employees and money are not related to actual game development.

Also as a matter of fact just yesterday was reading a former Wow employee  faq who worked in the testing feedback/GM sections of Blizzard.The one question that caught my eye was the one asking about feedback,OUR feedback.BTW he said he loved Mr.Morhaime ,said he is a very nice person,so he is not a disgruntled ex employee,i don't even know why he left or is not there anymore.

The employee said that HIS team does listen and does test and do post their findings and recommendations to the leads,however they do NOT listen to their teams.He said the leads are very arrogant and consider themselves above everybody else so don't need to listen to underhand employees.Basically NONE of your feedback /testing or their recommendations ever get looked at by anyone that matters.
BTW he was also asked about what happened to Titan but said he cannot comment because Blizzard likes to sue people.

I am not here to argue about Wow but i will ask this one question since the OP is so confident in this large team/$$$ and giant operation.What is OP's take on why Blizzard has not after all these years given the players housing?300 not enough to pull it off,not enough money/profits?What possible excuse?I know i have my assumptions but i want to hear the OP's.

ConstantineMerus

Reminds me of a joke when a dude could fight against 50 people at the same time. Then 51 people came and beat the crap out of him.

xpsync

300 developers and in all that time compared to all mmo's they scarcely produced any content, sad. Wow was fun for a few months at launch.

danwest58

Wizardry said:

Well first of all i would say Square Enix is likely bigger and spends more money on their products.
Blizzard spends a boatload on lawyers and i guess a good thing,also on support to handle accounts/banned etc etc.So a lot of employees and money are not related to actual game development.

Also as a matter of fact just yesterday was reading a former Wow employee  faq who worked in the testing feedback/GM sections of Blizzard.The one question that caught my eye was the one asking about feedback,OUR feedback.BTW he said he loved Mr.Morhaime ,said he is a very nice person,so he is not a disgruntled ex employee,i don't even know why he left or is not there anymore.

The employee said that HIS team does listen and does test and do post their findings and recommendations to the leads,however they do NOT listen to their teams.He said the leads are very arrogant and consider themselves above everybody else so don't need to listen to underhand employees.Basically NONE of your feedback /testing or their recommendations ever get looked at by anyone that matters.
BTW he was also asked about what happened to Titan but said he cannot comment because Blizzard likes to sue people.

I am not here to argue about Wow but i will ask this one question since the OP is so confident in this large team/$$$ and giant operation.What is OP's take on why Blizzard has not after all these years given the players housing?300 not enough to pull it off,not enough money/profits?What possible excuse?I know i have my assumptions but i want to hear the OP's.

It's obvious that blizzard does not listen to any feedback.  They stopped listening to feedback since Stockholders became more important than the customer.  There is a large group of people who would play Vanilla WOW right now if there were official servers.  The problem is Morhaime and stock holders done want to look like fucking morons and having 10+ Million people playing on vanilla/tbc servers and only 2 or 3 million on current.  

Xatsh

I would say it is sad they are not doing more with that large of a staff.

How many ppl burn through all the content in game way before they release more. WoW is sorta known for being extremely slow for releasing major patches.

Example.... FFXIV releases about the same amount of content WoW does with a smaller staff in about 1/2 the time.

WoW has a large staff but its just really slow at producing more content and the content they produce is extremly short lived.

WoW is popular, but with the size of their staff is sorta sad they are not better at getting content out to players.

I really question if that 300 person staff is all developers, that just seems unlikly. Or is it also the community relation staff, tech staff, ect as well.

gervaise1

xpsync said:

300 developers and in all that time compared to all mmo's they scarcely produced any content, sad. Wow was fun for a few months at launch.

300 now but when they were making WoD they made a big song and dance about how they had doubled the team to 250. The implication being that they had been running at 125.  Presumably why they were always saying "we don't have the devs". How did they produce 12 content patches in the first 2 years and BC? Answer: more staff.

Presumably they have now found a link between "lack of content patches" and "loss of subscribers" and this is the result. 

I hope for WoW players that this is seen as a "long term" project though. The usual assumption is that once people have gone it is harder to get people back. And harder to keep them even if you do - having left once they no longer have the same emotional attachment. 

CrazKanuk

Wizardry said:

Well first of all i would say Square Enix is likely bigger and spends more money on their products.
Blizzard spends a boatload on lawyers and i guess a good thing,also on support to handle accounts/banned etc etc.So a lot of employees and money are not related to actual game development.

Also as a matter of fact just yesterday was reading a former Wow employee  faq who worked in the testing feedback/GM sections of Blizzard.The one question that caught my eye was the one asking about feedback,OUR feedback.BTW he said he loved Mr.Morhaime ,said he is a very nice person,so he is not a disgruntled ex employee,i don't even know why he left or is not there anymore.

The employee said that HIS team does listen and does test and do post their findings and recommendations to the leads,however they do NOT listen to their teams.He said the leads are very arrogant and consider themselves above everybody else so don't need to listen to underhand employees.Basically NONE of your feedback /testing or their recommendations ever get looked at by anyone that matters.
BTW he was also asked about what happened to Titan but said he cannot comment because Blizzard likes to sue people.

I am not here to argue about Wow but i will ask this one question since the OP is so confident in this large team/$$$ and giant operation.What is OP's take on why Blizzard has not after all these years given the players housing?300 not enough to pull it off,not enough money/profits?What possible excuse?I know i have my assumptions but i want to hear the OP's.

That does sound like something that you'd say, that being something that's completely unsubstantiated. AB is like double the size of SE, more than double actually. Their revenues are, also, less than half that of AB. However, I'd say that the revenue per employee is very similar (SE @ $487k per employee, AB @ $518k per employee). 

As far as the tester story goes, this sounds like a very junior tester. Unfortunately, that's sort of the state of the position, and always has been. The average age of a game tester is generally low (18-25) which means that their industry experience is also low. The turnover rate is high, which means keeping talent is difficult. The problem with this is that testers are never trained, because why? So they don't understand things like bug advocacy or even how to write well enough to be able to communicate their issues properly. Compounding this issue is the fact that video games are heavily schedule-driven, so defects are directly impacting their schedule. So, again, we come back to being able to effectively communicate and advocate for the issues which are ACTUALLY important. 

As far as housing goes, they brought in garrisons and people bitched and whined about it. That's not really an excuse, that actually happened. In fact, when they did bring it in, people called it WoW Farmville, lol. So I'd imagine if they brought in housing (including decoration) that people would start calling it WoW Polly Pocket or WoW Barbie (dream house!!). In the end, the VALUE of housing isn't worthwhile. Housing might, actually, be an act of desperation. This is almost always added to games much later, after being in trouble, and it hasn't shown any impact on their bottom line *cough* Wildstar *cough*

bentrim

"don't play it...have not played it" Yet you make a post title like that??? That is Stupidity at its finest!!

Lobotomist

Aori said:

Doesn't matter how many people work on your product, at the end of the day the ship is still guided by a select few.

Not entirely true.

Few people may guide the ship. But 300 people making content , hell beat 30 people making content. Its not even funny.

Alas, I didnt play WoW since vanilla. And if people say that 300 people there are not actually making but load of content. Thats shame

CrazKanuk

Lobotomist said:

Aori said:

Doesn't matter how many people work on your product, at the end of the day the ship is still guided by a select few.

Not entirely true.

Few people may guide the ship. But 300 people making content , hell beat 30 people making content. Its not even funny.

Alas, I didnt play WoW since vanilla. And if people say that 300 people there are not actually making but load of content. Thats shame

The problem is that team size offers diminishing returns as it grows. Obviously the complexity of communications, etc. increases, and since we suck at communicating as it is, so as your team size increases, the units of work per person actually decreases.

However, it's important to note that it's unlikely that 300 people are being dedicated solely to maintaining the production version of WoW, there are probably people working on the next expansion right now as well, because their release cycle is usually every 2-3 years or so. 

tawess

the blind Blizzard hate in this thread is fucking hilarious.... So much "Blizzard does not do what I and I alone want.. so they do not listen anymore. " while ignoring that most changes over the years have been things that players (casual as they might be) have been asking for. 

As for quality... Well... I do admit that they fall far from sticking every landing but all in all content and art/sound quality has gone up solidly. And on average i´d say quest design have improved a lot. 

With that being said.... I guess the fact that the game has enough content these days to not HAVE to slow the pace down to a crawl by artificial means can create (and in some have  created) a sense of a smaller world. What ever little sandbox feel WoW ever had is by all accounts gone. That i give. 

But yeah... Blizzard is still a solid powerhouse in the biz, on the level of EA for workplace satisfaction and pretty much untouched as far as realeses goes.

Also Mike is adorable. 

But that is just my opinion. 

Elsabolts

Sorry you are Wrong there is no way Wow is ahead of Star Citizen, As per weekly promotional sales, hair style changes along with clothing. Star Marines are queen right now. Soon crafting well show off, how to bake bread and show your dresses. " Man Life is Good"

IceAge

therdre said:

300 Developers and they still can't figure out how to make their game work, beyond sad.  

Says who ?! You , or the millions and millions who played WoW and are still playing ?

...right!

DMKano said:

Because not everyone likes WoW.

example LoL

Hey! How are you ? Hope all its well friend .. 

Are we talking about MMO's ? 

Kunai_Vax

ikcin said:

WoW is a trap for the MMORPG industry and the Blizzard themselves. It became so big, due to many reasons, most of them was not related to the quality of the gameplay. Now Blizzard is like Nokia before the iPhone - a huge company, with many great products in the past, and without any clue what to do in the future. The Titan project made that obvious.

I kind of understand what you're trying to say.. but Overwatch.. its huge right now. Have you played it? Its really great and amazing in quality. 
And then there's Hearthstone, another massive success. I might be salty with Hearthstone sometimes but its still a quality product with huge HUGE revenue.
I dont agree with where they have taken WoW, and i agree with you that WoW has become a trap for the industry but MMORPG's aside, they really know how to make great games. 

Forgrimm

ikcin said:

WoW is a trap for the MMORPG industry and the Blizzard themselves. It became so big, due to many reasons, most of them was not related to the quality of the gameplay. Now Blizzard is like Nokia before the iPhone - a huge company, with many great products in the past, and without any clue what to do in the future. The Titan project made that obvious.

Their great products from the past are doing just fine in the present. They've had massive success with recent releases as well, Overwatch is huge. The cancellation of one project isn't exactly an indication that they have no clue what to do in the future. I'd say they have a pretty good handle on the formula for success.

WarEnsemble

I would venture to say that Blizzard employs 300 developers company wide, not 300 on WoW alone. The state of Blizzard games are an absolute joke and I refuse to play any of their titles.

Forgrimm

ikcin said:

Well, I still keep an old Nokia phone somewhere around, and I think it is working fine As for the Overwatch, it is just an average FPS.

Yup, an average FPS with 25 million registered players..

CrazKanuk

WarEnsemble said:

I would venture to say that Blizzard employs 300 developers company wide, not 300 on WoW alone. The state of Blizzard games are an absolute joke and I refuse to play any of their titles.

You can venture all you like, but you don't have to since this information is quite readily available since they are a public company. Currently Blizz sits around 2500 employees. 

Forgrimm

ikcin said:

Forgrimm said:

ikcin said:

Well, I still keep an old Nokia phone somewhere around, and I think it is working fine As for the Overwatch, it is just an average FPS.

Yup, an average FPS with 25 million registered players..

As a quality of gameplay it is an average FPS. But it is a product with very good advertising and marketing. Blizzard has a proven and successful marketing models. They just do not make great games anymore.

Bad games don't get 25 million players in less than a year, regardless of marketing. Your claim was that they have no idea what to do in the future, but recent releases indicate that they're still doing fine and will likely continue to do so. Your opinion on the quality of their games is irrelevant to their massive success.

Kunai_Vax

ikcin said:

Forgrimm said:

ikcin said:

Well, I still keep an old Nokia phone somewhere around, and I think it is working fine As for the Overwatch, it is just an average FPS.

Yup, an average FPS with 25 million registered players..

As a quality of gameplay it is an average FPS. But it is a product with very good advertising and marketing. Blizzard has a proven and successful marketing models. They just do not make great games anymore.

Its people like you that give Blizzard defenders their ammo. 
If you're going to bash Blizzard at least be consistent in your argument.