World of Warcraft: Current Year

Neranja said:

Interestingly, Mark Kern said something similar. Like there are a lot of people in game dev nowadays that treat is as a 9 to 5 job. Asmongold remarked that he never sees the developers at Blizzard tweet about game design or development, only about other things.

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I don't need to pretend that people treat this as a 9-5 job. I live it, daily. The last 6 years of professional game dev have taught me as such.
And it doesn't hurt any less.

My experience is that there's people of all age groups that share the same passion. I still have friends in industry that share that passion.

I make games professionally for two reasons:
1) I like making games and am willing to sacrifice my quality of life and amount of income to make games I think people will enjoy.
2) I want to break the status quo and 'beat the formula' of AAA game studios with a fraction of people. I don't like that companies like Blizz, SOE, EA, etc will fill a studio with warm bodies to solve a problem, instead of hiring one or two of the 'right people'.

Indies, small startups, or 'rescue teams' (ie; original team abandoned product, goes into bankruptcy, other company swoops it up) are my preferred styles of games to work on.

And in every company, I've seen those 9-5'ers who will refuse to monitor a product after the weekend. It's hard to gauge if they're a problem or not because even internally, these companies are stupidly guarded about how internal conflict will 'damage their image...'

...it's like, dude; if you don't want your image to be destroyed, don't do shitty actions your players hate?

Secrets said:

It was believable up until the point where the younger generation was the one pushing heavy monetization.

Younger (basically anyone who isn't principal level) Blizzard employees don't get paid enough to give a fuck.

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I feel like my younger employees are pretty damn cynical about “consume, consume, consume” particularly about populations they see as beneath them such as working class white people. So game devs trying to suck money out of gamers they hate like those gamers are cash batteries from the Matrix seems believable enough. Particularly if it’s a “job” and not a passion.

Asmon said he's going to ask Mark Kern to join them on his Allcraft show. I bet he says yes.

Araxen said:

Asmon said he's going to ask Mark Kern to join them on his Allcraft show. I bet he says yes.

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Mark Kern is pretty self aware. I'd enjoy having him, Steve Sharif, Asmongold, and Mark Jacobs on the same podcast. I think they're all kindred spirits with slightly different ways of doing things.

Another part of me would love to see that because of the collective shitshow that would be putting those 4 personalities on the same podcast. The room would explode.

Caeden said:

I feel like my younger employees are pretty damn cynical about “consume, consume, consume” particularly about populations they see as beneath them such as working class white people. So game devs trying to suck money out of gamers they hate like those gamers are cash batteries from the Matrix seems believable enough. Particularly if it’s a “job” and not a passion.

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See, that's the thing: Why the fuck does race come into question when it comes to talent? I've met all sorts of people that are simply just that; people who work on games.

If you're good at making games, and your game is good, you could be anyone of any sexuality, appearance, race, gender, whatever the fuck, and I wouldn't give a fuck as long as you speak the language that players want to hear about, and then follow it up with actions that show your words aren't just empty promises.

Video games are part of the entertainment business and it's crazy how we forget that we're not herding cattle, we're making a source of entertainment, like how television, movies, or amusement parks are made.

It's inane how obsessively focused we are on ourselves - as in, the self-absorbed Id part of our psychoanalytical complex that drives us to be better than everyone else and the effects that has on everyone around us.

That feeling of superiority over others breeds hatred, much in the same way that looking down at folks of other races does. I don't think it's a far stretch to compare the worst parts of the greater IT industry with other forms of discrimination over the years the human race existed on the planet.

It's not racism, but it's damn close.

Secrets said:

See, that's the thing: Why the fuck does race come into question when it comes to talent? I've met all sorts of people that are simply just that; people who work on games.

If you're good at making games, and your game is good, you could be anyone of any sexuality, appearance, race, gender, whatever the fuck, and I wouldn't give a fuck as long as you speak the language that players want to hear about, and then follow it up with actions that show your words aren't just empty promises.

Video games are part of the entertainment business and it's crazy how we forget that we're not herding cattle, we're making a source of entertainment, like how television, movies, or amusement parks are made.

It's inane how obsessively focused we are on ourselves - as in, the self-absorbed Id part of our psychoanalytical complex that drives us to be better than everyone else and the effects that has on everyone around us.

That feeling of superiority over others breeds hatred, much in the same way that looking down at folks of other races does. I don't think it's a far stretch to compare the worst parts of the greater IT industry with other forms of discrimination over the years the human race existed on the planet.

It's not racism, but it's damn close.

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Well one SJW who writes for Blizzard reveals something about this.

She wanted to fix how Warcraft codes non white cultures as beastial races (Tauren-Red Indians, Trolls-Africans/Aztecs, Goblins-Jews)

If they had some Red Indians on the team, maybe they wouldn't have done that!

Secrets said:

See, that's the thing: Why the fuck does race come into question when it comes to talent? I've met all sorts of people that are simply just that; people who work on games.

If you're good at making games, and your game is good, you could be anyone of any sexuality, appearance, race, gender, whatever the fuck, and I wouldn't give a fuck as long as you speak the language that players want to hear about, and then follow it up with actions that show your words aren't just empty promises.

Video games are part of the entertainment business and it's crazy how we forget that we're not herding cattle, we're making a source of entertainment, like how television, movies, or amusement parks are made.

It's inane how obsessively focused we are on ourselves - as in, the self-absorbed Id part of our psychoanalytical complex that drives us to be better than everyone else and the effects that has on everyone around us.

That feeling of superiority over others breeds hatred, much in the same way that looking down at folks of other races does. I don't think it's a far stretch to compare the worst parts of the greater IT industry with other forms of discrimination over the years the human race existed on the planet.

It's not racism, but it's damn close.

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Dude. I make fucking plastics, and for a while all I heard was race and contempt for certain customers of the end product (lower to middle class white people). Fuck, there was even some snickering about possibly pricing “those people” out of the market so that we didn’t have a problematic customer base.

only thing is the rubber me the road recently and shits getting walked back hard Including their diversity efforts when all they got was shitty apps.

Chris said:

Well one SJW who writes for Blizzard reveals something about this.

She wanted to fix how Warcraft codes non white cultures as beastial races (Tauren-Red Indians, Trolls-Africans/Aztecs, Goblins-Jews)

If they had some Red Indians on the team, maybe they wouldn't have done that!

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I love how Goblins are still one of the biggest stereotypes and one they don't dare address.

Like, they've completely forgotten they added them as a race in Cata. I don't think they even have interesting or updated racials anymore.

They've never addressed the fact that Gallywix is basically Bobby Kotick, and they're the people that work below him.

Neranja said:

The Limit world first stream has 81k viewers on Twitch, while Asmongold solving Gold Saucer jump puzzles, doing chocobo racing and EX primals has 100k. That has to sting a bit.

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9.1 is an abomination

To be fair, that Limit stream sucked dick. I thought they'd put on a show, but it felt like it was their first run ever and they were theorycrafting. I guess maybe it was? But I thought those nerds did everything on the PTR first. I watched the world first race 9.0 and thought it was really fun, but this one sucked dick. Tried to watch it about 6x and every time I tuned in for 10 minutes, it was mind numbingly boring. Asmon's normal raid of the zone was about 1000x better.

Edit: Limit first 4/10, but Echo did it much cleaner 10 minutes after. Limit's first kill had 3-4 people alive. Edit 2: But Echo isn't on the standings? I have no idea, barely watching. Maybe they were in heroic still.

They only have a hour or two per boss to test on mythic PTR and the bosses usually change afterwards. Blizzard also turned the difficulty dial up to 11 because they design mythic raids for Limit and Echo now instead of their player base.

Morrow said:

To be fair, that Limit stream sucked dick. I thought they'd put on a show, but it felt like it was their first run ever and they were theorycrafting. I guess maybe it was? But I thought those nerds did everything on the PTR first. I watched the world first race 9.0 and thought it was really fun, but this one sucked dick. Tried to watch it about 6x and every time I tuned in for 10 minutes, it was mind numbingly boring. Asmon's normal raid of the zone was about 1000x better.

Edit: Limit first 4/10, but Echo did it much cleaner 10 minutes after. Limit's first kill had 3-4 people alive. Edit 2: But Echo isn't on the standings? I have no idea, barely watching. Maybe they were in heroic still.

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Echo killed Remnant 15 hours after Limit.

Whose wife is this big lady on the Limit stream? She's a wife of one of the org members, right? has to be.

Neranja said:

The Limit world first stream has 81k viewers on Twitch, while Asmongold solving Gold Saucer jump puzzles, doing chocobo racing and EX primals has 100k. That has to sting a bit.

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To be fair, the jump puzzles, chocobo racing, and EX primals are infinitely times more fun content than anything you can do in patch 9.1.

Neranja said:

This is an industry that thinks of itself as being built on creativity and innovation, but it seems to make sure to stifle any of it. Especially in the lower levels. Only the top level people get the praise and the bonus, while the people at the bottom are underpayed, have to crunch a lot of hours pre-release, are often hated on by players for things they are not responsible for, and then finally laid off when the studio mismanages and closes down.

After you've done that a few times you move on, either externally or internally.

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Maybe I am insane more than most, but I kind of like working in the industry, in hopes that someday I will find like-minded individuals 5-10 years down the road that have also farmed enough currency to retire ten times over... and then make a game that flies in the face of the status quo which is exactly what you are describing, on the principle that you don't need 200-400 person teams to make games and that mass hiring is akin to throwing 'hardware at a software issue' in IT terms.