I really do detest Blizzard sometimes.


Q: Is there any chance we could have caster weapons involved in casting animations? It would look cool to be holding a staff and casting a spell through it, at least as a customization option. - Dromanthis (NA/ANZ)

A: This is something we would dearly love to do. We agree that melee specs get to see their weapons a lot more often in combat while it's easy for casters to forget about them. It's definitely on the list, but understand that we have so many races now (and two sexes for all existing races) that the animations get expensive to produce.

Really? That is such a BS copout for them to write I can't even believe they did it. The hundreds of millions of dollars they take in every month is CLEARLY not enough to produce new animations.

it could be expensive in terms of time, for all you know...

 

-----signature-----

Which, of course, is not rectified by hiring another animator. God no. That would only make sense.

They act as if they are a skeleton crew working on a deathbed MMO sometimes and it genuinely irks me. Here's another gem from that collection of posts:

Q: Do you have plans to make is so that the tabards don't suddenly cut off whenever we wear long vestments? - Hôwl (Latin America)

A: This is a technical issue that’s fairly nasty to fix and ultimately trimming the tabard ended up looking better, at least as a short-term solution.

A short term solution that has been there since launch and still, to this day, looks retarded. Again, something else that simply reinvesting into their title with more talent could fix

in principle i agree with you, im just throwing out there that the time expense could actually be derived from the hundreds of meetings that the upper staff would have to have in order to agree on what it should look like and the such.

 

-----signature-----

At first I was thinking the same thing. Sort of saying we make millions and millions and could probably pay 2 programmers 40k a year to develop this animation and they wouldn't take them more than a couple months to do it (my assumptions) yet that's too expensive.

Although being business minded it's a ROE issue(return on investment) is it really worth spending any money on something that won't bring new players in or help keep players? let's face it this is afeature that would be nice but we've done without for 7 years. and when it comes to business you try to make as much money as possible and while 100k or less seems like a drop in a bucket it makes a difference to your bottom line and a business won't make that kind of investment. If it was proven they'd make more money by making the change they'd do it so it seems to me they have looked it and decided it isn't worth their time and money for that feature.

No one is quitting the game over the issue of caster animations and making it probably won't retain anyone either as it's not content only fluff. so in the end expensive is relative to what you're looking at even when you have a billion dollar company trying to save what amounts to a few bucks for us.

 

-----signature-----

Yes, we as players tend to look at these issues as a craftsmen would; lovingly wanting to make our creation as perfect as humanly possible.

Companies ask "Is it going to make me more money?" And if the answer is no, they move along.

They aren't wrong or evil for that.

 

-----signature-----

Actually yes, yes they are

 

-----signature-----

If you consider that WoW is in sustaining mode for the most part, then yes, it IS clearly too expensive to be doing animations. Changing stats (flipping bits) and reskinning models is cheap compared to all the tools required to do animations.

 

-----signature-----

Expensive may also mean the amount of processor cycles in the GPU or CPU. WoW has never been a game that is CPU or graphics bound and they likely want to keep it that way.

 

-----signature-----

Definitely possible, but I don't buy it.