Have I missed some memo about this bandwagon and where should I have jumped on?
Over the course of the last week or so there appears to have been a huge explosion in the number of threads blaming activision for all the woes of the world (or warcraft) and I just don’t get why this is happening now considering that the merger of Vivendi and Activision happened over 10 years ago now.
I think the issue is that for years, Blizzard was able to operate independently somewhat from Activision. Now that sales and profits are down, Activision is actually involving itself more with Blizzard.
In all honesty, I am surprised that this did not occur much sooner as usually companies that merge, they cut redundant positions to save money and streamline business processes. The merger between Blizzard and Activision is unique in that for 10 years they have both functioned as two separate companies.
It’s called Blizzard fanatics who simply cannot accept any culpability on Blizzard’s end, hence they portray them as the victim under the heel of the evil Activision.
What they fail to understand is this is a result of a company becoming so big it attracts investors who care nothing about games, and as such see nothing in understanding apart from money.
The funny thing is Activision actually used to be the big saviour of gaming as they were formed from developers who felt like slaves to big companies.
That company became to big and turned into a faceless corporation; the same is true for modern Blizzard.
Indeed you make a very good point that this transition is hardly new-- it is simply part of the backlash to BfA. It is odd that people weren’t crying this ‘argument’ from the rooftops during WoD (which was actually far worse with almost no patch content to speak of).
Most of the hate aimed at BfA I STRONGLY suspect is simply because Legion was so good after 2 mixed reception expansions and 1 awful one. People are very, very bad at objectively reviewing things.
Conversely though I do actually hope part of the backlash is simply people becoming fed up of the same grind that’s being going on for years now (and as such not a problem of this expansion but universally the game itself). The utter loss of community; of meaningful progression and of immersion. Take away these things and it becomes less of a game and more a task simulator.
I think you might have hit the nail on the head here. It simply cannot be that our ever glorious Blizzard have dropped the ball and it must be the evil, faceless entity that is now controlling Blizzard which made them fumble.
It’s not as if I’m suggesting there’s no influence. It just seems hilarious that people seem to phrase things as if it’s the poor little David Blizzard that just can’t defend itself against the evil Goliath Activision.
yeah but bad games = few customers = less money.
And investors result losing money than make profit.
Either that or they just make their big money before that happens, and simply move to something else.
People are angry because the game hasn’t remained exactly the same way as they liked it. They blame Activision for this because they all know, in great detail, how much involvement Activision has in WoW.
Ignore the negative posts and threads, you don’t need that in your life. ![:slight_smile:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
I’ve been anti-activision ever since the merger happened. Many others too. Not something new.
It’s just that the true effects are starting to show up nowadays, of a very slow and creeping influence from the higher ups.
To be fair I don’t mind a few bad years, as long as the IPs get saved and not damaged beyond repair. (like Diablo getting really close to the franchise being dumpstered.)
Sudden anti-Activision? People have disliked Activision for years now. It’s just coming into the forum now that Activision seems to be getting more involved in the Blizzard stuff.
Honestly, it’s probably less Activision and more Blizzard’s finance people telling devs how to make games. Now who gave said finance people that authority is anyone’s guess, but what we do know is that Amrita Ahuja came from Activision Blizzard and became Blizzard Entertainments CFO in early 2018, so an increased Activision influence or an attempt thereof is definitely there. Since we know that Activision is the scum of the earth, it’s definitely not a good sign.
Now, obviously, she couldn’t have caused the mess that is BFA and Diablo Immortal, since she came in way too late, so who’s to blame for that is unclear. All other CFOs were listed under Activision Blizzard, while Amrita Ahuja was the only CFO listed specifically under Blizzard Entertainment. She has left Blizzard recently after getting poached by another company.
The only remaining CFO of Activision Blizzard is Dennis Durkin, who has been with Activision since before the merger. Thus we can conclude that if finance is actually actively influencing development decisions it is more than likely getting its ideas from Activision’s side of the company instead of Blizzard’s.
Years have passed since Activision and Blizzard banded together and stood united against the might of the Wow Playerbase…
No really, it’s years now. Sometimes i get where they are coming from, but it’s too late now.
Pretty sure people hated Activision long before the Blizzard merger.
I mean, these people stole Call of Duty just because the creators didn’t want to pump out a Call of Duty game every year.
pretty much this.
i disliked changes starting with battlenet.
and what people are probably “waking up to” is that blizzard is not a sole entity anymore, it is under the thumb of activision, and to say blizzard this or blizzard that, means nothing, as actually its activision this, or activision that.
so, in light of all the bad decisions and pr activision are gaining through their actions since bfa, people are beginning to get quite annoyed, and aim their frustration at the source: activision.
maybe this is true also, with the results of cata, pandaland and Wod being quite poor, blizzard activision probably pulled out all the stops with legion to regain some of the presence that TBC WotLK and vanilla had. hence, legion was very good in quite a few things, and better than most of what we had gotten over the previous 6 years~. maybe all the effort to make legion great has burned out the WoW team, and we might not be able to get something as good again for another 2-4 years?
and obviously some things are great in BfA, but they quickly get blocked out be the mundane: azerite grind, WQ grind, etc etc grind.
It’s not just activison, it is all the companies that are trying to hard-monetise gaming.
Ah anathor thing where I just follow the bandwagon, weird my anti-EA, anti-Konami and anti-Activion views come my own conclusion and observations. These 3 didn’t make games anymore, they were activly hindering them. Profit but not enough? We ruin the IP (Death Space)! Studios who made brilliant games? Let’s force them to make yearly releases, get otu every penny then take the IPs and dump the studio. Not saying Ubisoft is complety in the clear but considering what EA and Activion have become since they are mainly the 2 publishers only concerned with their shareholders they are a saint. They never talk about the fun. People quit and instead of wondering why they reassure the sharehodlers they will start putting even more lootboxes and microtransactions to keep the profit margin up…
Let’s not start a list which IPs Activion actively bought and either horribly mismanaged (and thus died) or nickle and dimed with yearly releases dragging the quality down (CoD).
Patrick Beja (appears on various Podcasts like The Instance) threw out a nice “analysis” on it on twitter, which echoes how I feel about it:
https://twitter.com/NotPatrick/status/1081636547949150211?s=19
A lot of the reactions people have seem to be emotional. They might not like BfA, and then they invent a big-baddie like Activision as the culprit of all their problems.
But if you look more soberly at it, there’s not a lot of evil Activision to be seen.
Would Activision not have pushed Diablo 4 out the door years ago, rather than letting Blizzard re-boot the project? Probably.
Would Activision not have started firing developers to cut cost, as opposed to hiring a bunch more as Blizzard are currently doing? Probably.
And is it really evil Activision to cut costs from customer service because your games are less popular and thus require less customer support? Probably not.
And is it evil Activision to cut eSport and reduce development on a game that has failed to gain popularity despite years of trying? Probably not.
And is it evil Activision to reduce spending on advertisement and events for games that are years old in a market where everyone is already aware of those games? Probably not.
But some players like the idea of evil Activision, because the blame game is easy and not very complicated. It’s a simple narrative, and anger is popular on YouTube, twitch, forums, and so on. So that’s how the cookie crumbles.
of course they wouldn’t they’d turn diablo into a stupid phone game or something, tho im sure that would never happen.
But why do you think that’s Activision and not just Blizzard?
What’s Blizzard known for?
They take something that exists, and then they elevate it to the highest level.
The RTS genre existed before Warcraft and StarCraft.
The MMORPG genre was there before WoW.
The TCG genre was there before HS.
There was TF2 before there was OW.
LoL and DOTA2 were around before HotS.
Even Diablo itself, for all its originality was just Blizzard wanting in on the RPG genre, and then there was this company called Condor who were making a promising RPG, so Blizzard just bought Condor outright and turned their Claymation-RPG into an Action-RPG! And boom, Diablo was born!
And mobile gaming is the same. It’s something that exists and something that has potential. It’s tailor-made for Blizzard. This is what they do. They don’t innovate, they iterate. They take something that exists, and then they make it better.
All those grinds were horrible in Legion. To be honest I thought the AP grind was worse in Legion.
Personally I hated the ‘Don’t have that right legendary you feel awful’ and then you get it and suddenly you feel great. Azerite Armour went too far the other way where you always have it but they feel meaningless for the most part; it’s also bad, but I think it has more potential.
If ALL the traits were things that actually changed how you play in some way, meaning the player has to make a choice of two (or more soon) on each piece of armour, that is actually not a bad thing.
It’s not that Azerite is broken at the core in the basic concept of essentially having a mini talent tree on armour. Rather it’s just the progression linked with the HoA (which is rubbish), compounded by the boring traits they chose.
Honestly I hate all the grind and this incremental reward system every 5 minutes with a minor upgrade. Thing is though that was very much in Legion, and in fact to a lesser extent in expansions since MoP or so.
WoW is increasingly distancing itself from being an actual MMO and RPG. Both of which depend on community and character progression (which should be meaningful not 5 minutes work for 3 more item levels).
Also it’s time people stopped blaming the companies for this as well, because they are providing the product believe-it-or-not a lot of people asked for.
“Levelling takes too long” and possibly the most destructive “I’ve not much time to play, make it so I can do something that feels cool in the 10 minutes I have to play a day.”