Blizzard dies and Bobby rides

And yet I loved it. FunCom is probably the company I most love their ideas and yet lament their utter lack of competence to actually implement those ideas functionally. Maxing out a keeper may have driven me insane via boredom.

For me Blizzard died with Diablo3. I was so hyped for that game which completely destroyed my expecations. Poor replayability, real money Auction house, etc it was clear it wasn't the same company it once was. Never even tried overwatch or the card game.

Fucker said:

Anarchy Online had a brutal leveling curve when they pushed the cap to level 220. Level 1-200 itself was a massive grind, and 200-220 took just as long as 1-200 did. AO also had the most absurd gear equipping system on the planet. You needed certain stats at a certain level in order to equip things. You could buff those up with other classes and other gear. We all carried around gear that we used only to equip other gear.

AO's leveling curve made all the others look like hyperspeed in comparison.

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Yeah but hitting max level in AO wasn't nearly as meaningful in most other MMOs, AO is honestly like a left turn or some shit of the MMO family, I probably shouldn't have mentioned it because it's almost like its own weird niche that's even smaller than EQ1 is.

Flight said:

I still have my notebook I used throughout the WoW betas making notes about the game. Every day I used to note down how many people in beta were playing each class.

Back then Alliance had twice the players Horde did. The number of folk playing each class was between 20 and around 60.

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Doesn't shock me at all, I saw WoW beta at a friends house probably 10-15 times in the year before WoW launched (I actually was a weird early naysayer of WoW, and I quit playing it after a month of release due to not liking it, I gave it another go like 4.5 months later and in that short time they'd improved a lot of the problems I had with the game and I played it through til Cataclysm after.) The fact that there was only one beta server into mid/late 2004 is how you know the number of people in the beta was not huge at all. Before sharding and other things a single WoW server didn't easily support more than 5,000 concurrent players, just in terms of having mobs to kill and level up on etc. I remember when the realm I was on got force-split and then was given two free offers later in vanilla to go to a new split server (those weren't forced), we had supposedly 20,000 "active accounts" with characters on the server, but no more than like 3-4000 at the time. I think Ion or someone even confirmed that WoW Classic servers can easily support much bigger populations and cited a figure in the 3-4,000 range as the most the game can easily support pre-sharding etc in a single game world of classic. And I don't mean like EQ TLP "the server starts crashing" (although that did happen in early WoW on my high pop server), so much as I just mean there's finite shit to level up on and farm in open world and it would be crazy packed above 4-5k.

Meanwhile the times I was playing around in beta the population in Alliance cities was like 1/4th or less what I'd see when WoW launched, it was just clearly not that packed.

nisser said:

For me Blizzard died with Diablo3. I was so hyped for that game which completely destroyed my expecations. Poor replayability, real money Auction house, etc it was clear it wasn't the same company it once was. Never even tried overwatch or the card game.

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To me I think the real watershed was WC3 remastered being a fail. That's the sort of project that should be free $ and acclaim for Blizzard. Why? Because WC3 is a classic, iconic game, massively well received when it launched. Remastering it to look good on modern high-res displays should be both a technical layup and a financial slam dunk. The much less popular Age of Empires series did a remaster some years ago that was super well received, and it's almost like free money to do it.

The fact they managed to shit the bed on that to me was a sign the ship was too far gone to be righted. I fully suspect the D2 remaster is going to be a shit show as well.

Araxen said:

Their real money auction house set the genre back a few years. It has left such a bad taste in people's mouths that people scream that any type of AH in these games are bad.

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So much this. I'm fully convinced that this is the primary reason PoE doesn't have an "AH-esque" system in place and why many of its players recoil at the idea.

Mist said:

PoE at least has a player economy

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LOL sure it does. You only have to access it via an API on a 3rd-party website. But, yeah..."player driven!".

jayrebb said:

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.

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Hots definitely died. The best hots player now plays for some korean LoL team.

Sieger said:

To me I think the real watershed was WC3 remastered being a fail. That's the sort of project that should be free $ and acclaim for Blizzard. Why? Because WC3 is a classic, iconic game, massively well received when it launched. Remastering it to look good on modern high-res displays should be both a technical layup and a financial slam dunk. The much less popular Age of Empires series did a remaster some years ago that was super well received, and it's almost like free money to do it.

The fact they managed to shit the bed on that to me was a sign the ship was too far gone to be righted. I fully suspect the D2 remaster is going to be a shit show as well.

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Yeah but like Bobby Kotick says, it's not the sort of billion dollar project Blizzard should be concentrating on in order to buy his next Yacht.

*looks at Tower Defence, Auto Chess and MOBA genres*

Kiki said:

Hots definitely died. The best hots player now plays for some korean LoL team.

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Pride got in the way. The game needed to be treated like beta and gutted to mimic competitors more. Including copying pacing, carrying, and individual contributions to a fight if you're fed.

Blizzard trying to make it their own the Blizzard Way was it's biggest problem. The victories in HOTS are evermore bitter.

I'll play HOTS right now if they swallowed pride and 180'd the design direction back to just a MOBA clone....welll not really, there's no saving that wreck. They had their chance. Years of dev time wasted instead of perfecting a traditional MOBA.