Blizzard dies and Bobby rides

Shit even the Furor accusations touched on Titan. He was vehemently screaming about its development during Blizzon in private suites breaking the NDA while boozed up while talking to other executives at Blizzard. it was cited by the witness as "a heated argument about Titan"

He aint scream loud enough to save it.

The steak was lodged in his throat from earlier that evening. If he had gotten that drink of water, Titan would have shipped.

jayrebb said:

HOTS is universally rejected by every single MOBA player ever.

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I really hated the gimmick objectives on each map.

So in MOBAs I like focusing on my lane, pushing the creeps, last hitting, poking the enemy, looking for opportunities to score a kill or destroy a tower.

I'm not the most skilled so I try to put down wards, watch other lanes for missing enemies/gank opportunities and hit static objectives like dragon or baron - but I often miss some of these.

My point is that there are things I have my attention on and since I'm not a pro there's slightly too much going on for me already.

But in HOTS every so often a timer goes off and I need to forget all the stuff I've been focused on and go into a mineshaft or some shit to now do a bonus objective which is often total chaos.

Why? It's like you are playing Chess then an alarm goes off and you need to smash open a pinyata blindfolded and whoever does it first gets an extra queen.

I'd love for the exact quote Furor was screaming about Titan-- he definitely knew something was going wrong with the project. The timeline puts it near the demise of the project.

To be a fly on the wall that night...

Everything points to it going the way EQ did, Go FTP while a skeleton crew keeps pumping out live expansions, while most of the income stream in the next few years is going to come from classic and TLPs. It's why they hired Holly for her experience in running them presumably. Maybe these boards aren't the most representative, but between here and the EQ subreddit the TLPs seem to gather way more interest than live EQ does and I wouldn't be surprised if TLPs have been the main moneymaker for the last few years.

WoW peaked long ago. That lightning in a bottle was caught once but it's obvious its best times are long behind it. But that doesn't mean you can't keep making money off people reliving (or dare I say it, enjoying) those golden years. Many musicians do (and some are equally grumpy that one song they made 30 years ago is still their main source of fame and income, while no one cares about their more recent stuff)

Chris said:

I really hated the gimmick objectives on each map.

So in MOBAs I like focusing on my lane, pushing the creeps, last hitting, poking the enemy, looking for opportunities to score a kill or destroy a tower.

I'm not the most skilled so I try to put down wards, watch other lanes for missing enemies/gank opportunities and hit static objectives like dragon or baron - but I often miss some of these.

My point is that there are things I have my attention on and since I'm not a pro there's slightly too much going on for me already.

But in HOTS every so often a timer goes off and I need to forget all the stuff I've been focused on and go into a mineshaft or some shit to now do a bonus objective which is often total chaos.

Why? It's like you are playing Chess then an alarm goes off and you need to smash open a pinyata blindfolded and whoever does it first gets an extra queen.

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It's a waste because the heroes are mostly well-designed and several are decent fun. The combat is servicable enough.

There was a lack of dopamine from beating a team, finishing a nexus. You didn't get the same rush from ending a game you get from Leagues or DOTA 2.

We tried to make it work with the objectives, but the lack of dopamine hits and meaningful victory just left us feeling empty compared to their competitors in the marketplace. We didn't feel like we had achieved anything. Something rang hollow with HOTS. Whether it was a symptom of the communist design philosophy, I can't say for sure. I just know accomplishments, specifically the final phase of a match, lacked the feeling of reward on par with DOTA 2 or League of Legends.

Man, I wish they would have just made lots of sc2 content and expansions rather than trying to circle jerk an esport into existence.

Blizzard isn't the only publicly traded company being pillaged for everything its worth. We won't see anything of quality coming out of a big company for the foreseeable future. Activist investors are looting everything while the monetary system is in its death spiral. Private companies are the last hope for quality content in any arena, but especially gaming

Chukzombi said:

i dunno, WoW always felt like carebear Everquest to me, but a lot of people liked that kind of gameplay and it wasnt time intensive, when i quit EQ i could play a few hours of WoW and feel like i was making progress, where in EQ it took you a few hours just to learn how to do stuff and venture outside of your home city. they should have been able to keep innovating and making the game more fun and interesting.

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A lot of people that haven't played a lot of MMOs since the early 2000s often repeat the claim about WoW being carebear EQ, but it doesn't really hold up to any serious scrutiny. EQ was carebear EQ when WoW launched. There were basically three (design) things that made early EQ brutal: big penalties for dying, huge time sinks to advance your character, and open world raid targets meaning you could be called on to raid anytime 24/7/365. There were additionally a few other things that made early EQ hard that weren't really intentional--frequently broken encounter design, poor gameplay bugs, long load times, etc.

By the time WoW launched EQ had basically scaled down all of those big three things that made it brutal. WoW launched end of 2004, when Omens of War was in swing. In Omens of War like 90% of the relevant raid content (and 100% of the top end raid content) was in private instances. You'd never need to run them at 3am on a work night. As for time sinks, those were still around but things like base leveling had been increased in speed quite a bit by level 70. There had been some exp revamps, and most importantly is the playerbase was mature and the known "best leveling paths" were second nature, everyone had PL toons etc. Finally the death penalty had been significantly mitigated, they introduced Shadowrest in early 2004, a zone off of Plane of Knowledge where you could go and hail an NPC and it would summon your corpses--from anywhere in the game world, and let you rez them. No more corpse runs, anywhere.

In terms of actual difficulty, the first tier of WoW raiding (Molten Core) was mechanically more difficult than any content EQ had ever released to that point (and MC was a joke). The second tier of WoW raiding (BWL) had more complex mechanics than you saw in EQ until probably TSS or later. By BC the curve was even more extreme, there's BC fights that are harder than the hardest EQ fights that have ever been done (i.e. Mearatas, Triune God, some of the VoA Sepulcher fights, some of the Tier 2 TBL fights etc.) EQ hit a certain wall with its engine and what the game can actually do, that limits its technical complexity to a difficult level somewhere between Normal and Heroic mode raids in modern WoW.

WoW wasn't carebear EQ - it was a less shitty EQ, which is why the vast majority of us abandoned EQ for WoW. "Carebear" was just a term to mask insecurity about continuing to play a shit game