Alright.
The OP is proposing to change the narrative story as it is being told, because he perceives it as flawed.
I’m saying that Blizzard should tell the story they intend to tell, and not change things on the fly in a feeble attempt to cater to the whims of players.
And then I’m simply reasoning that a story is an artistic product at its core and the quality of it is not improved by chasing approval from every random individual.
Blizzard isn’t a person, though. So you already lost me at that point. There are no intentions without persons. And the persons are constantly changing. As are their intentions. There is nothing sacrosanct about the intentions of the current iteration of the writing staff, and I have the same claim to introduce and reject ideas as they do.
And they still decide what ideas they will take into official canon. If they decided to do everything I’m telling them they should do, that would still be them following a vision. Just as if they picked and chose the best ideas from thousands of players. The ideas don’t have to stem from them, to create their product. And the quality of their decision-making is still what makes and breaks the story, not the source of their ideas.
I consider Blizzard’s Creative Development team and the WoW team as a whole to be a collective of people within Blizzard who ultimately work together on an agreed-upon story and game design.
That process doesn’t require consultancy from random people on the internet, in my opinion.
Sure, I’m not stopping you. I obviously don’t have any authority on the matter. I’m just giving my opinion on it - how I ideally would like it to be (well-knowing that it’s not)
That’s just repeating the point, not explaining it. Why shouldn’t they consult us? Your argument seemed to be that it’s better to follow one consistent vision than to cater to others. Well, I argued that there is no consistent vision, because the vision is dependent on the people who have it, and the people are changing regularly. So what’s the argument? Why is the idea that their commitee comes up with preferable to them consulting random people on the internet, in principle? If it was about the quality of the idea, we shouldn’t look at the source, we should look at the idea itself, shouldn’t we?
Forgive me, for my ability to convey my thoughts is not always as good as I would like it to be.
No. I am not suggesting that Blizzard’s writers necessarily follow a set-in-stone vision, or that they should. I don’t particularly care if they change their mind half-way through a process or if the new guy Joe makes a lot of changes on his first day at Blizzard.
I’m just saying that the flow of creativity (makes more sense?) should come from within Blizzard’s own walls. That’s my preference.
When I bought StarCraft way back in the day, that product felt (and still feels) like the collective creativity of the Blizzard company in 1998, put on a CD-ROM.
That is what I want. The Blizzard logo in the corner means that the product is made by Blizzard – and it should be so to the highest degree possible.
I realize that in today’s modern world with a big game like WoW it is blue-eyed to believe that outside influence doesn’t affect the development process directly and indirectly. But ideally speaking, I would advocate for the older approach to game development where it was more isolated and contained.
Makes sense?
…what is Blizzard, if we’re not talking about the people behind it, though? Wherever the vision is coming from now, it certainly isn’t coming from the team of 1998. Other people with other visions were let in, and most of the old ones were let out. This isn’t a point about outside influences, this is a point about the inside you’re referring to not being the same. If you are okay with them changing the team and the vision, why is it relevant to you that the ideas originate from “Blizzard”? They’d have the logo either way, and they wouldn’t have the old devs either way.
Well like I said, then I’m not blue-eyed to the fact that the days of Blizzard being a dozen nerds sitting in a rented office space in California trying to make a cool game based on their own whacky ideas is a thing of the past.
But at the end of the day, then that’s the goal to aim for I think – even as they scale up to a multi-national company with thousands of employees.
Because that’s the one thing that makes them…them.
And that’s what I am interested in and pay for – something made by them.
Would it take away from your enjoyment of Blizzard’s products, if you learned that the original Blizzard team in 1998 took most of their ideas from comics, Warhammer and other stuff that others wrote? I don’t know one way or another, but it seems quite likely. Especially if it was a group of nerds writing this stuff. Is that different? How?
I see, that internet is full of memes about things in 90-s, 00-s in comparrison to what they became now.
So I descided to propose such meme for loyalists to force it:
Sylvanas in 2001: “Oh boy, there is a great army of undead attacking my homeland to use the lifesource of my people to rise an archlich. The army is leaded by fallen prince, who mercilessly killed almost all his subjects and raised them as undead abominations. Should I ambush and kill him, so that his army will disband without guide? Of course not! It`s dishonorable! I will meet him face to face and warn not to invade our kingdom. He will surely listen to my arguments and turn back”.
Sylvanas in 2021: “I will never serve!”
*shoots into the face of one of the most powerful creatures in the universe.
If it works for Blizzard, then I approve of whatever it wants to do, how it does it, and however way it goes about doing it.
If it doesn’t work for Blizzard, then what the hell is it doing inside the production area?! Can’t it see the sign that says:
Restricted Area. Do Not Enter. Authorized Personnel Only.
So if it works for “Blizzard” (whatever that is) to look up the good ideas on the forums, they should. Good thing we talked about that. 
Funny, but no.
I will refer back to me saying that I am not as good at conveying my thoughts as I would like to be, and whilst I realize your game is to try and trick me into a gotcha! moment, then I’ll elaborate once again for the sake of clarity.
I don’t want Blizzard to listen to players on what they should do.
I want Blizzard to do their own thing.
If the thing Blizzard wants to do is to listen to the players, then that is obviously something I don’t want them to do, because that’s not their own thing.
BuT JitO yoU juST sAId ThAt…
Yes it’s a conundrum and my ability to convey my thoughts is clearly coming up short in the forum game of gotcha!
But I believe you get the point now.
Sorry, I don’t. I didn’t especially aim for a gotcha… But reading that post I have to think that I got one. shrug
Okay, that’s fair enough. You asked and I have tried to explain. If my explanation comes up short, then I apologize for that, but I am seemingly not able to adequately convey my thoughts in a manner that works for you.
(but let’s be real, you’re just posing argumentative questions to my explanation. You’re not looking for understanding, you’re looking for dispute. And whilst I appreciate the occasional forum feud to establish intellectual superiority, the dishonesty is rather unbecoming)
Edit:
Nah, I’ll take the quote out, to give you the opportunity to delete that part.
This is not something worth squabbling over.
But Wimbert, my point of view is not complicated.
I have simply said that I think Blizzard should pursue their own ideas over the ideas of others.
Then you drill into that opinion like a woodpecker drills into a tree.
And that is not because you don’t plainly understand what I said or need a carefully-constructed explanation in order to understand. It’s because you take opposition, so you argue through interrogation. And I answer you, again and again and again. And we both know you understand perfectly what I’m saying, you’re just looking to expose flaws in what I’m saying – as you so adequately demonstrated above.
And that’s fine. I’m not saying that my opinion is superior or flawless. But don’t keep telling me that you don’t understand what I’m saying as if I am somehow oh-so-terrible at explaining something oh-so-simple. You’re not that thickheaded.
That we think something is simple and self-explaining often just means that we haven’t bothered to actually think about it. Pretty much nothing is. I have some philosophical training, so yeah, that’s how I tend to approach things that I don’t understand. The point of disagreement usually isn’t the place where the disagreement first comes up, but in the premises, or the premises of the premises, and to get some understanding of the other position you have to dig as deep as you need to. That’s not specific to poorly reasoned positions, but goes for pretty much all disagreement.
It’s just that in your case we came to the point where you yourself didn’t try to justify the contradictions I was pointing at, and just expected me to accept it as valid anyways. I don’t. And yeah, that’s what I mean when I said that I wasn’t looking for a gotcha, but feel like I got one. I saw a position I basically disagreed with, examined the argument, and found it to be invalid. It could have been a valid argument based on other premises, but it just wasn’t. That’s not my fault. And if you find that humiliating… well, you can stop responding at any point. It might be a good idea by now.
I certainly might bow out soon, if your last posts are the direction that this discussion is heading to.
Right, but then we do disagree with the premise of the conversation. I have answered you with the intent to explain to someone who doesn’t understand, and you have asked as someone who sought to dispute – not someone who didn’t understand.
No, I explained it to you and made no secret about the fact that it is merely my opinion and I recognize that it is an ideal and does not reflect reality and that it is neither flawless or superior to the opinions of others. I provided that bulk of a disclaimer to focus on what the content of my opinion was – not whether it was infallible.
I do not find it humiliating. I find it infuriating that you’re not forthcoming with your intent. That’s why I say you’re pursuing a gotcha-moment, because you don’t present your position as wanting an argument. You present it as wanting an explanation. And clearly your motivation is not to understand but to take opposition. And like I said, then I don’t mind the occasional forum feud to establish intellectual superiority. But the dishonesty is unbecoming.
But we are done now I think. It was nice to unwrap this in a more clear light.
But I didn’t understand. Or didn’t want to assume I understood, because that would be assuming that your reasoning was flawed, which would be very uncharitable. So I worked under the assumption that there was more to your argument, which I hadn’t understood yet. That’s how these kinds of discussions usually work. Not to decieve you, but to grant you respect as an equal that surely isn’t as stupid as my first interpretation of their words seemed.
So yeah, I certainly opposed your position, as I understood it at first. But that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t genuinely hoping to understand it better. Because I assumed that I might be wrong in my understanding.
Being opinion doesn’t mean it can’t or shouldn’t be measured by reason. And I didn’t argue about the harsh reality, I argued about the principle of following a corporation’s vision and what that might mean. Assuming that the corportation was fully commited to the best writing possible and not influenced by any fiscal and political realities wouldn’t have changed my arguments in the slightest.
Ok, since you insist on repeating it, I’ll just call you what you are: A sore loser.
I certainly feel like your intellectual superior now, so… thanks, I guess?
You’re welcome.