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Blizzard has evolved, they're an enormous company now with various different requirements for making a game. Historically, Blizzard has shown it's willingness to change things with their games if the features turn out to be broke, stupid, or otherwise unneeded. Take WoW for example, vanilla was ok, was far more difficult than any subsequent iteration, and Blizzard heard just how much that annoyed people (classes being mono-builds, raids being unwieldy and annoying, UI needing updates, etc) and they fixed all of those with one expansion (TBC basically). However, the game has gotten to be so...easy, that I think they might've taken it too far, I mean c'mon, what's difficult to get now? Some 1 in 148034980324802934 drop off of a Heroic raid boss that only 10% of the player base has ever seen? They fix things, but, I think they've forgotten to STOP fixing things every now and then.

Look at D3, started out terrible, they blamed users for disconnects and account hacks, took no responsibility. But over a couple of months (which is what it takes to make the sort of changes people demand for) things got far better. Network stability became a common thing (HC players rejoice!), patches resolved common bugs, and they finally broke the neck of the RMA (which, let's face it was BEYOND stupid.). RoS might annoy people because of the price tag for what appears is essentially DLC, but if you actually played the game from the start you can see the MASSIVE steps taken to turn it into a really fun game. Granted Blizzard still does the whole 'we're going to help you, even though you didn't ask for it or need it' thing; such as the most recent update for Kadala (basically a gambling npc that took only specific currency obtainable in specific dungeons called 'rifts'), initially her prices were pretty fair given the rate in which someone could get her specific currency. Now the prices have been increased 400% and the rate in which your gambled piece of gear could turn into a legendary has also been increased, but the problem is that you can only hold 500 pieces of the required currency, that takes at least an hour or two to fill up fully. Blizzards reason for this? "We saw that people spent a lot of time running back and forth between Kadala and the Blacksmith in order to salvage the numerous magical and rare items people would get when gambling. We wanted to reduce the players need to do that."

lolwut? They made something worse because they thought people clicking a few times was too much work. THAT's the kind of gak that annoys people and gives Blizzard the bad reputation.

Overall, Blizzard is awesome. And no I'm not calling them Activision because Activision is the anti-christ. Just like EA. I hope, I really hope that Blizzard continues to retain some autonomy when creating their future titles, because if I get a Call of Warcraft: Fantasy Warfare, I'm going to scream.

Op point: Who cares about WoW2, like someone posted earlier, WoW is going to make money for the next 50 years. Why change something that they constantly update already anyway?

 pretre wrote:

 Platuan4th wrote:

 Bromsy wrote:
For me, Blizzard peaked with Diablo-Starcraft(I'll give 'em Broodwars)-Warcraft II.

Blizzard didn't make Diablo.

Blizzard North did which is/was a division of blizzard, right?

The game was created by an independent company named Condor. They were bought and renamed to Blizzard North 9 months before release.

So Diablo was made by Condor, who was purchased by Blizzard as a subsidiary company and renamed, and then it was released by Blizzard North.

Feels like splitting hairs...

 pretre wrote:
Feels like splitting hairs...

They buy a company that was making a game in the last 9 months of development (out of three years of work) so they can slap their name on it. That's not really splitting hairs. They didn't actually make the first game (no 'Blizzard' employees were even involved in the development of D2 either, it was all former Condor staff*). That's just what happened. Same reason Microsoft bought Bungie (so they could have Halo), what Activision bought Infinity Ward (Call of Duty), and why EA bought Bioware (RPG's). They bought a company to secure one of its IPs it happens all the time. Probably would have been a Diablo 3 ages ago (maybe?) if everyone in Blizzard North hadn't up and quit.

*A cynical man, like myself, might also point out that Blizzard's greatest achievements, WC3, and SC were all made with former Condor staff as lead developers

To be fair, if you want to judge a company's current reputation - which the context implies - then for all intents and purposes Condor became Blizzard the moment it was absorbed, for (as you yourself have pointed out) its members became involved with quite a few of the studio's new projects.

Comparing a studio absorbing another team to a publisher buying one is also quite different, as publishers do not make games themselves. So you cannot really say something like "EA made Mass Effect", for example, whereas "Blizzard made WoW" would be quite correct.

LordofHats wrote:Probably would have been a Diablo 3 ages ago (maybe?) if everyone in Blizzard North hadn't up and quit.

Not everyone.

And the reason for D3 taking so long would seem to be the popularity of D2 LoD, coupled with the company having chosen to focus its assets on expanding their surprise-hit WoW. It's the same thing with StarCraft. And part of the reason why Ghost was mothballed. :(

Platuan4th wrote:Doesn't WoW already ignore itself for story purposes?

Pretty much.

pretre wrote:And they are very separate from Blizzard in all but the corporate hierarchy. Blizzard is basically an independent game company under Activision's umbrella.

Not even that. Both Blizzard as well as Activision are two companies united under the Activision-Blizzard holding company, each of them doing their own thing with separate offices, teams, budgets, CEOs, etc.

 Frankenberry wrote:
Take WoW for example, vanilla was ok, was far more difficult than any subsequent iteration, and Blizzard heard just how much that annoyed people (classes being mono-builds, raids being unwieldy and annoying, UI needing updates, etc) and they fixed all of those with one expansion (TBC basically).

Blizzard's shown some flexibility with WoW. On the other hand, the game developers have also sometimes shown a frustratingly stupid inability to do the simple thing in favor of an overly complicated mechanism of their own devising.

Case in point, party finding in the game.

During beta, the game had a manually-driven party finder that would allow you to find people who were looking for the same sort of activities that you were so that you could group up with them. But when the game launched, the party finder was removed. No, Blizzard was going to do it *better*. So when Dire Maul was finally released (a month or two after the game went live, iirc), the giant stones outside the entrances of the dungeons were added. You could click on one of the stones, and the game would automatically build a party for you. The problem was, it quickly became apparent that the parties were not well constructed, and everyone stopped using the stones. That meant that if you did actually try and sign up for a dungeon instance using the stones, you were in for a very long wait (possibly hours) before you got a group. And if you were looking for a group for anything other than instances, then you were just plain out of luck. Blizzard eventually realized that no one was using the stones, and added the "summon your fellow party members to the instance entrance" function to the stones to justify their continued presence in the game.

Putting the simple and easy to use manually-driven party finder back into the game was, of course, out of the question. After all, what did those silly players who were asking for it know about how games really ought to operate? They were probably the same players who thought that paladins should be able to effectively do more than just heal.

Blizzard's next stab at a party finding function was to reintroduce a manually driven party-finding function. This one allowed you to either start a party and list it in the party-finder, or state that you were looking for a party. And you could do more than just build dungeon instance groups with it. But Blizzard couldn't leave well enough alone, and put in a simple and practical party-finder. No, the developers had to put their own spin on it. What the players got was a party-finder panel that allowed them to choose a total of three things that they were interested in. The problem was that each of these things was *very* specific. You could choose *a* dungeon as one of the three options. Or you could choose *a* quest as one of the three options. If no one was looking for the exact same dungeon or quest that you were looking for, then you literally could not see them in the party finder. So two players who were looking for help completing group quests in the same zone, but who were doing different quests, could not see each other in the party finder. Similarly, if you were looking for a party for one of the less popular dungeons, you weren't going to be seen. Or if you just wanted to run a dungeon and didn't specifically care which one, well, too bad. You *had* to pick specific dungeons.

At some point after this, though I don't remember when (I think it was early in the Northrend expansion), Blizzard finally made an LFG chat channel available. Unfortunately, it quickly became filled up with useless spam.

And then, late in Northrend's release cycle (when the final set of dungeons and the last raid were released), Blizzard released the current dungeon finder. It did basically the same thing as the stones that Blizzard had tried to force on the players back in Vanilla, but with some fixes to make it actually functional. Unfortunately, if you're looking for a group for anything other than a dungeon or a raid these days, then you're once again out of luck.

Back in my day, when you needed a party, you stood outside the dungeon and shouted "LFG" until you found your holy trinity (and then filled the ranks with hybrids) and rolled in.

 Psienesis wrote:
Back in my day, when you needed a party, you stood outside the dungeon and shouted "LFG" until you found your holy trinity (and then filled the ranks with hybrids) and rolled in.

That's never the way my parties worked...

They all seemed to work something like this -

1.) Someone organizes the party using /shouts, friends, etc...
2.) I go to the dungeon entrance
3.) I wait for a bit.
4.) I remind the rest of the party that I need two more party members to cast my summon spell, so they'd better figure out which two lazy bums are going to make the trip out and join me at the dungeon entrance.

Yes, I played a warlock.

Yes, I played a warlock

WoW wasn't even a gleam in Blizzard's eye when I was standing in the EC tunnel, LFG for Deathfist Camps.

 Psienesis wrote:

Yes, I played a warlock

WoW wasn't even a gleam in Blizzard's eye when I was standing in the EC tunnel, LFG for Deathfist Camps.

Represent.

Also, somethingsomething DAoC raids somethingsomething before WoW.

Shut up, I'm too tired to think on an actual example to use.

 Psienesis wrote:

Yes, I played a warlock

WoW wasn't even a gleam in Blizzard's eye when I was standing in the EC tunnel, LFG for Deathfist Camps.

Not sure how that's relevant to my snark about lazy players waiting around for the Warlock to summon them to the instance entrance in WoW.

And I played EQ as well, though I was dealing with Kobolds and Gnolls over on the other side of the world.

Not sure how that's relevant to my snark about lazy players waiting around for the Warlock to summon them to the instance entrance in WoW

Mainly because I have no actual idea what you're talking about. I've never played WoW so I have no idea what the Warlock does... or why you would need 2 additional group-members to cast a spell.

 Psienesis wrote:

Not sure how that's relevant to my snark about lazy players waiting around for the Warlock to summon them to the instance entrance in WoW

Mainly because I have no actual idea what you're talking about. I've never played WoW so I have no idea what the Warlock does... or why you would need 2 additional group-members to cast a spell.

All you had to do was ask, instead of snarking into a topic that you apparently know little about...

Think a spell that summoned party members like the "Call of Heroes" spell that was added to EQ for Magicians, but it required two additional party members present.

... did you miss the "Back in my day..." part? The whole thread about LFG in old games started snarky and just went from there...

By God, back in my day, when you needed to replenish your mana, we didn't have any of these new-fangledy blue potions! No! We sat down and opened our spellbooks! And they covered the whole screen! So you'd never notice the respawning mobs all around you until you suddenly got hit with an axe and stood up! And now you aggro'd the whole camp, and you'd try to cast a spell, but you had all the aggro and so your spell would fizzle and waste mana, and you were a Wizard so you didn't have any healing spells, and then you fell down, all LOADING... PLEASE WAIT and reappeared at your Bind Point which was on the other continent, a 40 minute boat-ride away. That's the way it was and we liked it!

Yes, and as I noted, I played that game too.


Why you're hijacking a Blizzard thread to brag about how you had to walk uphill both ways while in a snowstorm in Everfrost is beyond me.

I remember farming Aqua Goblins for plat...

Lost Dungeons of Norrath. Thats all I will say. Trying to hunt down a party in north freeport or the plane of knowledge.