What's going on at Blizzard?

It took me about 9-10 weeks to reach 60 on my first toon (sometime in early February 2005). I was virtually new to MMO's beyond a 6x GM in UO or two, and scamming people out of house deeds. I was also playing a mage on a pvp server. I was lunch meat in STV, so I stayed very far away from that area, even though it had the best quest XP. I also got a three day ban on launch weekend for calling someone a racial slur in public chat. When you played in beta, there was no policing. I ended up being several levels behind everyone else and couldn't participate in guild dungeon runs. Also, I, like many have mentioned, ground out my last 3'ish levels in Winterspring. No one ever fucking went there, and you could chain frost novas on the giant ice monsters in the crevice. I was also one of the first with the agility enchant.

This is the day we gathered enough attuned assholes to attempt Onyxia, the instance bugged out on us and it wouldn't let us in. The GM said we had to come back tomorrow, so we initially missed out on killing it. Went in the next day and smoked her. 4/7 and 4/8/2005, so five months after launch. I don't believe she was actually available until patch 1.1.0, but the instance was there and attunement was available on day 1. Can't really find info on that, but I didn't look very hard. I just remember people being very afraid to even attempt her, when in reality it just took everyone fucking forever to get half decent blues, and getting attuned by killing the 40 man UBRS boss, with only one person getting attuned at a time.



This is when we got server first on the original Kazzak (4/6/2005). He was released on 4/5/2005, and didn't spawn on our server for the first day. Blizzard's first venture into world bosses was terrible. If more than 40 players attacked Kazzak he rampaged and murdered everyone. That meant it was a good way to harass the opposite faction (or even the same faction). If that 41st person attacks while you're halfway through the fight, he would spit out shadowbolts that would kill everyone. Initially we had some horde do this to us, and we had to spawn camp them until they left. He would only spawn once per week, too, so you were trading off with the top horde guild, or parking an alt to check uptime. How the fuck we managed to pull 40 players out of our ass at 3AM back then for this fight was amazing. Also, 'member when items had % modifiers and cloth had agility?



This is the first time we killed Ragnaros without the UBRS Fire Resist buff. I wish I had the date on this one, but it was after the first raid frames addon was released. I was also a little rebellious in that I was only running ~125 FR. But it proved effective since I was vastly undergeared compared to the other mages in our raid (I wasn't in the "clique", and didn't hold 4 million DKP). Fucking Mooncloth dress. God damn was it ever a nightmare to even get into Molten Core, before they quickly added shortcuts, never mind the wasn't time it took sending 15 people into UBRS at a time to get the buff. This had to be after BWL was released, since we downed the first three bosses in BWL fairly quickly around the same time period.



I loved my time in vanilla. Certainly some of my most memorable times playing the game, but I'm so glad a lot of that shit we had to deal with is missing or vastly improved now. I mean, hell, I was on Leeroy Jenkins' server and was buddies with most of the Pals 4 Life crew. Pretty sure he sold his account, but I have a specific memory where we brought his character with us to attempt the green dragons long after the UBRS incident. Many fond memories, but as mesmerizing as it was to farm 40 man Stratholme and BRS with 1-2 blue drops per boss, and how fun it was to have 20 minute death marches back to instances...

Lastly, anyone saying WOW is easy mode right now, haven't been running Mythic + dungeons (higher than +5) or Mythic raids. Besides extra mechanics, they're also insane gear checks. Additionally, materials for alchemy are currently making it as annoying as it was in BC. You can run around for hours and only be able to make a flask or two. Fortunately craftables have ranks, so at rank 3 you have a chance of creating more than one flask per mats requirement, though getting ranked 3's can be pretty annoying. Shoot, Heroic (original Mythic)/Mythic raid bosses have been fairly challenging since Mists. If one person even barely squeaks out of line, wipe. Though certain bosses have also had stupid RNG mechanics where you'd end up throwing your corpses at a boss until you had lucky rolls where no one was randomly one-shot, even long after you've outgeared the encounter. This doesn't happen as much as it used to, especially since Mists.

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Blizzard, as a company, isn't going anywhere anytime soon. To be honest, some of those folks should have moved on a long time ago. But... $$$. Though I am concerned with where Blizzard is going as far as it pertains to new IP's. If they announce a new game at BlizzCon this year, I will be absolutely blown away. I'm going to guess that they'll be announcing another expansion for Diablo 3. I just hope it's not more gimmicky shit like the Twitch integration.

Dandai said:

I'd say the recent departures has more to do with career advancement than culture change over at Blizzard. Since Metzen has (allegedly) completely ruled out working again, I wouldn't be surprised if he's very ill and doesn't want to discuss it publicly.

As for everyone else, it looks like they're going to other companies where they'll (seemingly) have more creative freedom and work on new projects (as opposed to developing expansions and content updates for live games).

A quick look at Blizzard's releases over the last 12 months is very instructive for determining why these departures occurred at roughly the same time. All the development teams in the company have shipped their projects, and it will likely be two more years until another major game release (the next major release will almost certainly be the next WoW expansion). Nobody works for the same company for their whole lives any more, and even a modestly ambitious person will look for opportunities outside of their current situation when they feel like they've peaked.

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Interestingly, both David Brevik and Bill Roper, of old Blizzard North, tweeted about visiting Blizzard a couple days ago. So there's most likely a new project in the works, but it might be the only project they have, and a lot of positions might be already filled, leading to people leaving since there's no hope for them to work on anything new for a while. Blizzard is probably going to focus on only one project at a time while they also maintain Hearthstone, WoW, Overwatch and HotS. Diablo developement seems entirely dead, so a new game in the franchise to replace it seems a likely candidate, plus the various teasing about Diablo news at Blizzcon and such. Seeing how PoE does pretty well for itself and how Marvel Heroes also probably does/did, I'd expect a more microtransactions oriented system though, similar to what they did with D3 in China.

My personal hopes are with Hazzikostas having more power now. That guy always seemed genuine passionate und super determined when it came to WOW and MMOs in general. Also he always delivered when it came to dngeons and raiding content, well let's forget Cata. I can understand that Chilton wants to participate in something different, maybe a new genre or a new challenge after this long time with WOW. He has been on it since 2004 according to him.