I might actually be happy about this, and unhappy.
I can’t help people and make the community a little less awful for new/returning and old players.
But if everybody leaves I can get cheap T3 from BMAH, transmog is +10 to all stats.
- Subscription includes levels 1-60 in World of Warcraft®, 1-60 in World of Warcraft® Classic, and 1-70 in World of Warcraft®: Burning Crusade Classic™
No where does it say it includes active development. It clearly states what you get for paying a sub.
It can for a time, as any programmer will know, it takes time going from one company to another, as often the programming is very different. So if you have a lot of new devs, it takes some focus away from the experienced ones who has to teach the new guys how to work in this new setup.
In addition to this, having double the amount of devs never results in double the work done.
once upon a time if you unsubbed blizz would give you another month free to temp you back not now they dont
I will say it to you too. I pay for a service. If i don’t get it then it is on the company to give a compensation. It doesn’t matter what is the reason the service has been halted. Blizzard have been payed for something. If they can’t do that for what ever reason then they are obliged to return my investment.
If the workers are on a strike then that is on the company. If they throw the expense on the player then they will lose it as a customer. If the work on the game is halted then I want a compensation for the money i have payed.
… or stop paying for the game?
You aren’t paying for the content they create as part of your subscription you know - Blizzard made no promise of any content delivery as part of the user licence agreement, you are essentially a whale that only pays for the right to access the characters you play as part of ‘your’ account (you don’t even own your own account actually).
If what you say is true i am not surprised Blizzard are losing subscribers in droves. This is just unacceptable. And yes i followed your advice and canceled my subscribtion. I don’t plan to pay for a product which who know when will be released.
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Even the skins, mounts and other stuff you ‘buy’ in the store is owned by Blizzard. You just pay for the right to get them associated to ‘your’ account:
Article 2A:
Blizzard’s Ownership
- With the sole exception of the Licensors’ Games, Blizzard is the owner or licensee of all right, title, and interest in and to the Platform, including the Games that are produced and developed by Blizzard (“Blizzard Games”), Custom Games derived from a Blizzard Game, Accounts, and all of the features and components thereof.
- All Accounts, including the name of the Account and any Battle Tags associated with an Account. All use of an Account shall inure to Blizzard’s benefit. Blizzard does not recognize the transfer of Accounts. You may not purchase, sell, gift or trade any Account, or offer to purchase, sell, gift, or trade any Account, and any such attempt shall be null and void and may result in the forfeiture of the Account;
People are really misunderstanding that tweet, and doing so really undermines the fact the community wants more frequent and “free-form, non corporate BS” communication from the developers.
What he likely meant to say was that everyone is taking a couple days off to process this information and go on strike for a few days. Similar to how you might take a couple days off your job when getting bad news from the family. This will delay 9.2 by a week at most. What he didn’t mean was that development was halted entirely, nor that 9.2 is delayed, nor that they weren’t working on WoW or 9.2 to begin with.
This kind of emotionally based misunderstanding will be used as further proof why openly communicating with the community is a bad idea, and the PR damage this causes as perceived by Activision regardless of whether it is true will be used as a reason to restrict what developers are allowed to say about development and future content even further.
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It’s only a bad idea if you are a bad company with a bad attitude towards your employees and customers though…
No offense, but your response sounds a bit “Karen” like.
Blizzard aren’t losing subscribers because the players have done a full review of the terms and conditions and have finally realised that their subscription entitles them to access to the servers only.
And if you have cancelled your subscription then good for you. Hopefully you stick by your decision and find a game that suits your personal needs much better. Best of luck!
Do you think that matters at all to Activision…?
Are you saying you think Activision is a bad company?
No, I’m perfectly sure Activision is a saint of a company!
The point is that they will point to this post, the PR damage it has already caused, and they will make it a forefront case of why developers won’t be allowed to share anything about the game’s processes or development on their private Twitters anymore.
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In which case they will stay a bad company with an inferior product portfolio. Good innovative companies engage their customer base and use them as product ambassadors.
In which case they will stay a bad company with an inferior product portfolio.
I’m not a huge fan of CoD and KING games either, but they are among the biggest western game developers - if not the biggest - for a reason. Point is it doesn’t matter to them.
And what about it then? No doubt Activision is a huge company with a massive revenue - but that doesn’t make them invulnerable, rather this sort of thing happens all the time. Activision will either go into a slow decline from now on if this lawsuit doesn’t radically change their work culture - or they will pivot and use that revenue to radically change… in either case disengaging with customers is bad business.
I don’t care if my next game is made by Activision or some other company - as long as it’s entertaining. Right now, Activision hasn’t made any good content in any game and are mostly living at the mercy of the failures of other companies.
I never said anything of the sort. You’re just misconstructing it because you want to get in a fight. I said they will point to this tweet and make a case why their developers aren’t allowed to talk about games on their private Twitters anymore. That is neither a statement of vulnerability, accountability nor financial performance. Stop putting words in my mouth.
Activision hasn’t made any good content in any game and are mostly living at the mercy of the failures of other companies.
I agree about the content, but one absolutely cannot ignore that CoD is doing incredibly well for them ATM.
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At no point did I say you claimed any of that so in fact you are putting words into my mouth. I’m asking you to justify why you are even talking about this in the first place, why does it matter?
Do you want Activision to succeed?
Are you on a mission to engage developers more?
What is it?
Frankly I don’t care. I gave up on Activision. I lost all faith that they can turn their work culture around in any meaningful timeframe - and even the most recent tweet where a WoW developer were telling customers they were the problem if they dared to ask for content any time soon also reveals a massive disrespect for paying customers…
This is just an example, idk exactly how Blizz structured themselves.
Let’s say you have pushed for efficiency with your current organisation.
You made sure creative people get their voice heard, that the decision making is quick and efficient, that the artists are working on schedule etc.
Then suddenly you throw a large amount of people with similar jobs but different work ethics, habits and responsibilities to the mix.
Who answer to who ? How long wil it take to train the new people in your work ? How will you share the work now that you’re suddenly adding them to the well oiled machine that was your previous planning ? What happens if the work produced by the new people isn’t up to standard ? There’s a lot of issues that could and seemingly did pop up.
Scalability is an important factor for companies, but there’s a lot of issues that you can’t simply fix with more people.
There’s the usual counter example : If a mother can give birth to a child in 9 months, could 9 women give birth to a child in 1 ?
According to Blizzard all these issues prevented them from delivering content at the expected rate, they barely had anything in time for 6.1 then they had to remake their entire plan for 6.2 as they knew they couldn’t catch-up.
So they released WoD’s 2nd tier in 6.2, closed the story and skipped some storylines altogether (there was supposed to be a shattrath raid for instance)
There were a lot of hirings recently.
- +20% devs after the lay-offs of 2018 where hundreds of QA, marketing, finance & esport people were fired from actiblizz (800 across all 3 companies, so most likely 200+ from blizz)
- After the Q1 quarterly report iirc Bobby claimed they would hire thousands more Devs across all their IPs
All I’m saying is that this could be part of the problem, as this seemingly already happened.