How are you this tone deaf? The Blizzard that we know and love is gone, most likely forever. We've known this for years and constantly bitched about it but this is a massive nail in the coffin.
WoW probably has enough passive subs from people that long ago forgot to cancel that it would remain the #2 MMO or so on the market for years just on that momentum alone. I do think the poor quality of 9.1 (much more than any of the nonsense being discussed here) which was kind of a final straw for many players after a solid 4 years of bad content releases in a row, might be seeing enough of an active player exodus that it causes Blizzard to rethink some of their design decisions. That could frankly be a good thing, but they've also painted themselves into so many corners design wise I'm not sure it can be easily fixed. If a bunch of people quit the company over the lawsuit shit it could be good because they'll at least be getting fresh blood in to look at the problem.
For a long time the perception was Activision was undermining what made Blizzard "special." I think one thing that has come out of all this is maybe the realization Blizzard itself has internal problems that really can't be pinned on Activision, if anything it's like a company that just did too well in the 90s and early 2000s and had a culture of resting on their laurels. With that being the case maybe Activision might feel empowered to cut through the BS of the Blizzard "mystique" and largely integrate Blizz into Activision itself and make it just a "brand" and not a subsidiary company. With their quasi-independence gone maybe Activision actually gets better quality out of them. They aren't necessarily my kind of games, but Activision's other big money makers that don't involve Blizzard come out to huge sales numbers every year or so, so it's not like Activision doesn't know how to make money in the video game industry.
It's just part of the typical kit for the type of guy who tells you very loudly he won't watch the NFL anymore, and that he REALLY supports our troops. Reading from left to right the "wraparounds" are at position #1, #4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12
EQ did the same thing around GoD and never really "recovered" design wise until TSS. But, by then it was too late. WoW will probably endure, but EQ didn't have a massive PR shitstorm on their hands, nor was the Twitter mob as well-armed then as they are now.
kotaku.com
EQ also had some core design issues + a lot of its team got cannibalized over to work on SWG and executives decided to launch GoD completely unfinished which were major blunders worse than anything Blizz has done. Blizzard's biggest sin is it's just made the game tedious and boring, 2004-2007 era EQ they were actively delivering content almost like they wanted to phsyically harm their customers. One thing that I think people often leave out in the EQ story is you had expansion content that wasn't very appealing to non-raiders, and the % of their subscribers who didn't raid was really big. WoW was a better game for non-raiders from day 1. Raiders generate hype and a lot of the community around a game, but lots and lots of casuals delivers the $. Expansions like GoD an OoW back to back really turned their back on the ~90% of the player base that never touched raiding. LDoN and DoN both seemed like they attempted to throw bones to casuals, but both expansions kinda missed the mark in the game play experience they delivered--although I actually think a lot of casuals enjoyed running LDoN dungeons at one point in time, that was the era when I was fully transitioned to college life and only logging in very occasionally though.
They're far more likely to gut the place and send it or sell it all to China, that's bad.Is this where the union derail started? I lost track.
Activision Blizzard Hires Union-Busting Firm As Workers Start To Come Together
WilmerHale will 'review' Activision Blizzard HR policies
Come on Bobby, gut the place and sell the ip to a company that's competently run. One that might actually like mmorpgs/arpgs and the people who play them. Well, minus all the degenerates.
They won't get rid of Blizzard, nobody will buy it with all the negative PR and it's still making sub money.
Blizzard rebrands under Activision to signal a corporate change.
One of my random jobs in my early 20s I interacted with FedEx/UPS/USPS drivers a lot who came on site to deliver shit. There was also a big UPS hub nearby that a lot of people I went to college with would work at over Christmas break and shit. I never really knew anyone associated with UPS who didn't hate working there. The regular FedEx guy who I'd chat with sometimes always seemed pretty happy, and the postman was chill as fuck. It's always funny the perception is USPS micromanages its people but that guy gave like 0 fucks.
You dont know shit. The unionized auto companies did nothing but produce shit products with with shit work ethic while holding the big three hostage...And then they all went belly up and had to be rescued by government in the 2Ks. And guess what, after the restructure, all new employees are making same wages with same bennies and no retirement like the Jap auto companies in Tennessee and ohio. Maybe that shit worked in the 50s and 60s when they were the only players in town selling autos, but guess what 70-80s came around and they were not anymore. You had honda, toyota and others stepping into the market with better product at a better price. Yet we were still paying line workers $30+/hr, some making excess of $100K per year because of OT, and thats not even counting the bennies and retirement which jacked up that hourly figure into the $70-$80/hr mark, it was unsustainable. All for that mindless drone work with a union work ethic to boot (we would not want to work too hard) basically work any mouthbreather that had IQ of 85+ could do.
