Holinka did nothing wrong! ☹

Community General Discussion
1

I know many have made fun of him, I am not without exception

But since he’s gone, I’m realizing more and more that he was one of the few Devs who was truly interested in this game and the mode.

and to give Ashran the reason to blame him for multiple years was just cringe

he also made podcasts for us pvp players, and was trying to engage with the whole community, while the current devs do none of this

with the exception of ion and the 0.1 % biased elitism mdi player talk

i wish we could get him back, or atleast someone, what talks to the pvp community and cares for us, this mode is since Shadowlands completely abandoned

and the current pvp devs are completely Radio Silent, and are doing questionable Changes.

i miss you Holinka

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The fact that they fired him and now have nobody and it made absolutely no difference either way shows how misguided his efforts were.

Holinka was not the man PvP needed.

The man PvP needs is the man who can go toe-to-toe with the class designers and tell them to stop being a chaotic natural disaster for 5 minutes and talk to them very deliberately about how classes should interact with each other and read visually by other players (and honestly the player itself, but that’s a different WeakAura topic)

That is step number one, and nothing else matters before step number one. It has to be fun to take a couple of characters and have them fight one another. It’s that simple.

And it’s not.

Once they’ve fixed that, and I’m already dreaming, whoever this guy is needs to charge headlong into the terrains and landscaping teams and ask them why in the bloody hells this game’s content release pace keeps going down somehow. The zones are shrinking, the expansions have 4 zones, 1 raid, 8-9 dungeons, and a BG. And delves this time?

Okay, where’s the rest of the effort going? Player housing or something? Well, whatever it is it’s causing very severe boredom for PvP’ers. Not releasing a single battleground for half a decade and meanwhile demanding $900 from all the players playing it is bloody inexcusable.

But PvP’ers can entertain themselves pretty well as long as it’s fun to play their classes against one another, so we start there.

Now, inevitably, some PvE’ers are going to tell me: “Omg you’re just gonna ruin my class for PvE it’ll be all boring and wrinkly and mistuned and~”

No. Your class will be fine. In fact, you might find a much greater degree of control over your actions, more autonomy, and more aggressive and fun bosses. Stop QQ.

7 Likes
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Companies like Activision-Blizzard only care about their stockholders. No matter how much money they make, the following shareholders meeting they need to make more Ad Infinitum.

This game will just keep getting progressively worse when the only metric is “how much profit did the shareholders make?” They need to make exponential gains each year so they do as little as possible and recycle as much as possible to make it so.

Fire QA. Remove GMs etc the list goes on in further attempts to squeeze even more profit.

Once upon a time the Blizzard was a bunch of nerds that decided to make a game, because they love games… The soul is gone. That idea is gone. Replaced by money grubbing pencil-pushers chasing that financial dragon

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He said on an interview once to have never played caster nor have any idea of casters in general. When I were looking caster designs and class designs in general for all these years after hearing that said on an interview I thought to myself “Obviously”. And for those that dont know what his job title were this is what reads in wowpedia.

Brian Holinka was Lead Combat Designer on World of Warcraft at Blizzard Entertainment. He was involved in all combat related systems including class design and PvP content. He left the company in May 2023

Who has some idea of the game in general

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Holinka is the lesser devil if we talk about now, but back then many people hated him.
They don’t know how wrong they were.

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Activision havent owned them for 2 years + now

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Pretty sure decision to remove deep freeze from mages and make mobile design it had turned into standing still casting 5x frostbolt and 1x glacial bolt while stanting on rune of power is why people hated these class designs. And to think this were “pvp guy”. But looking you I can see you have not played pvp much or played through these changes. Im sorry if I dont take your word calling others being “wrong” with any value.

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Its ok.
Started retail in wod when i started a job. Before i was playing on private servers.

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I mean I dont see you having mages or warlocks (which designs were ruined). And I see total 4 seasons of 1.6 and not from the expansions which this guy were in charge of designing pvp combat and involved in class designs.

Absolute zero value on this context nor any way to verify. Again sorry if I dont take your word of calling others “They don’t know how wrong they were.” with any value.

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I honestly wish I shared as rose tinted glasses and it is possibility this might even be true to some degree but still I believe just like any other video game out there wow were made to make money.

Thats the ultimate goal and purpose of any starting business unless its clear from the start that they are not planning to make any profit of it and the game would be free.

Having passionate people working for your company while the product is making money is not mutually exclusive however so. (Even if the purpose is to make money, people with passion towards the project can still work with it)

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did they though?

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He left to join other projects, I thought that were common knowledge.

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Of course it did. But there is making money, then there is soulless money making while chewing up and spitting out everything and everyone around you.

Compare a mum and dad ran family store and Amazon. Modern day slavery. Lol

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Yeah the panda is known for not knowing facts that well :wink:

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Well, its not mutually exclusive anyway, its still possible to have people with passion towards the project working on it even if the goal is to make money, I just pointed it out that wow did not began just to provide sweet game for us gamers, it were made from the same desire to make money as almost everything else in this world.

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Oh ofc, otherwise they would have given it away for free. But i think you know what i meant lol

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The company was started to make money thats for sure, but I guess if you meant that the people with passion are gone then thats opinionated matter, maybe or maybe not. But I dont see enough related devs or what they do to the game to make any opinion of it, I see some errors in pvp being neglected though.

I see pvp has turn worse since dragonflight and situation with shuffles 6 round design flaws and the outdated mmr system on top of that and having heals and dps mmrs separated on top of everything else, healers gain less rating and climb several times worse compared to dps and its been neglected entirely since df, to a point that we are even losing healers from pvp as they began reroll dps for soloqs and now the ques are only going longer varying from 20-50min ques, which I think is not reasonable for any game at all.

I think they likely have no people anymore with passion towards pvp and its likely monetized reason they dont care either but thats just a guess.

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It was partly to join up with Greg Street again and, if my memory is right, he was also one of the people who had moved away from the city during covid and was stuffed when Activision banned home working a few months after normal work was possible. I know there were several Blizz people on Twitter who were caught by that.

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Activision blizzard is still the parent company which is now owned by Microsoft

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No wonder PvP was in bad shape under his command