I don't blame Activision or whomever, we have been sliding towards this mess ever since they introduced Arenas. When the tournament type was introduced was when the PvE game started to suffer greatly. Cata is just the damn it all to hell we will make Arenas work fix. They could never introduce the number of changes required to make Arena Tournaments work except through an expansion. Their cover has been "challenge" but it is all a ruse. Some group in Bliz got hooked on Arenas and we are stuck with it.

I figure that worse changes to healing will have to come down as gear advances. The system only works when they can control both ends of the equation, burst damage and healing, and each tier of gear exaggerates the problem.

 

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Weren't Arenas introduced in late 2007, around the same time as the Actiblizzard merger?

Arenas came with BC, which was released in Jan 2007.

The Activision-Blizzard merger, according to wikipedia, "Activision Blizzard, Inc., formerly Activision, Inc. (NASDAQ: ATVI) is the American holding company for Activision and Blizzard Entertainment. The company is majority owned by French conglomerate Vivendi SA and was created through the merger of Activision and Vivendi Games, announced on December 2, 2007,[3] in a deal worth USD$18.8 billion.[4] The deal closed July 9, 2008."

So at least a year later.


I just chalk up arenas to typical Blizzard innovation. Blizzard is amazing at taking proven concepts/ideas and polishing them to their full potential. Their innovation, on the other hand, is generally lukewarm in its success. This is one of the reasons WoW is stagnating IMO - they've polished all they can out of the EQ model, and now to really keep the game going they need to innovate... and they just keep failing.

 

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The addition of the damned arenas is the worst thing that happened to WoW since its release in 2004.
The full moron at "Bliztard" who thought that "PvP in a bowl" would be fantastic for a MMORPG should be fired.

 

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I had no initial problem with arena's per se, but the problems started when they started to balance around them.

 

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I'm not convinced that the arena was an original idea on the part of Blizzard either. The arena is basically a direct ripoff from Guild Wars. It was an attempt by Blizzard to capitalize on the popularity of "e-sports" like fps and turn based strategy game competitions.

Unfortunately, Blizzard won't acknowledge the fact that at best arena is an interesting little mini game and at worst it undermines all their attempts to balance the game and is a colossal waste of resources.

And those have been CLASSIC Harvard Business Review taught-warnings to companies for over 30+ years. (see: GM) Those examples are used to teach companies what NOT to do. Learn, apply, watch/guard and succeed.


I've said for over 5 years, that Blizz will be the one that kills its own product. What my hubsand and I have been arguing over for years is: will they kill the goose that laid the golden egg or not understand what the egg is?


The problem is that after letting go some of the original devs after vanilla release, Kaplan took to the NYT to tell everybody how to play his game. So, for Blizzard, this sense of arrogance of "we are creating what we want" is nothing new. What is, however, is the level of incompetence in doing so.

 

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Well, really, I think we've probably mislabeled things with the whole "B Team" reference. At least partially. Let me clarify. This is the product model I'd expect for something like WoW:


WoW 1.0 release = success. Continues succeeding wildly for two years.


BC release = more success.


WotLK release = more success. New products at company require the primary talent. So,


Primary talent moves on to new products. Sustaining team picks up responsibility for WoW.


So, you have 14 million or so people playing the most popular MMO. It works. People love it. The tiny minority of hardcores are whining about "too easy" and such, but the other 95% love the game as is. More people than ever are experiencing end-game content (if not hardmode stuff). Life is good.

When the sustaining team moves in, their one and only job is to sustain the profitability of the game for as long as possible. If everyone and their dog is playing the current game, you think _VERY_ hard before making any fundamental design changes whatsoever. Your job is to _continue_ keeping WoW firmly in the black, not using it as an experiment to see if you can attract new players or "fix" bugs that 14 million people don't think are significant enough to unsubscribe.

So, as a sustaining dev, what do you do? You keep all major systems firmly on the rails of what has _proven_ successful. You add content that follows or very carefully tweaks the current, successful design. Buff a little bit here and nerf a little bit there to fix new/inventive stacking issues you didn't really imagine or didn't have time to fix in previous releases. Add some new bosses with some new combinations of abilities but that use the same base mechanics as the rest of the game does today. Fix cosmetic issues and long-standing bugs that haven't bubbled up to the top half of the priority queue. Add artwork.

As a sustaining dev, you do NOT fundamentally redesign the entire premise of the talent system, even if you think it will ease balancing things (which it won't). You do NOT attempt to "rebalance" the entire game via massive changes in scaling and heal-vs-damage-vs-health profiles. You do NOT add or remove mechanics that have been fundamental to how classes played over the very successful history of the game.

Where the "B Team" epithet might hit the mark is if you have the sustaining guys thinking they're all that and a bag of potato chips instead of the graveyard maintainers. Nobody wants excitement in the graveyard. It's been working fine. Don't f**k with it. You're here to make sure the game's decline is a fairly flat, predictable model -- not exponential because you jumped the shark repeatedly.

At least, that's my take on things. We'll revisit things this coming Christmas and see how the current model is holding up.

 

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WoW and DAoC - Too many alts to count
Charter Member - Altaholics Anonymous

^

 

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