Actually, yes. Blizzard had an unbelievable amount of goodwill and reputation built up over the years and in any case, these kinds of changes do not happen overnight.
For me, the first understanding that things are rolling downhill was how they killed the social aspect with the removal of battle.net without any replacement and completely messed up the concept of playing custom maps when StarCraft 2 launched. Longer thread from 2010 about custom maps: https://tl.net/forum/sc2-maps/139745-the-real-problem-with-s...
Probably 11, When the first third of Starcraft II released without LAN support, borked custom games, and with that mess of a story. But that was just an aberration surely. Then 2012 was the real money auction house in Diablo 3 with an even worse excuse for a story and I gave up on the company.
They got a few brownie points back for coming up with the successor to TF2 in Overwatch, but by that point that was the aberration. Everything else has been nostalgia or momentum.
You just reminded me that SC2 was split up into 3 parts. I'd completely forgotten. I can't remember how they justified it at the time, but through the lens of history and their other actions it certainly looks like they thought it'd just be easy to make us pay 3 times.
Either way, I enjoyed SC2 for a while but it just felt like it was missing something compared to Brood War. I never did buy the other 2 parts.
The campaign took a different focus on each parts of SC2. I personally enjoyed this, and thought it was much better than a much shorter storyline crammed into one game (or alternatively a delay of several years before release).
IMO SC2 was a great success, but it feels like they are no longer giving it much love because it’s not a recurring revenue driver for them :(
Pretty sure they hated KeSPA piggybacking off their game and they hated the entire idea of eSports. They took an extremely hands-off approach on that side of things and intentionally or not did a lot to try and cripple it for SC2.
This was possibly my first exposure to the situation where a major new software release looks prettier but loses so many useful features. I have fond memories of playing SC1 on custom servers, and even downloading custom chat clients to talk to friends in channels but without the game open. Bnet 2.0 completely destroyed a lot of the culture around the game, just like peer to peer matchmaking did when it replaced servers for some FPS games. The game itself was solid and despite all that did have some legs as an eSport, but it was the first time I really felt that Blizzard was changing, which was solidified with Diablo 3 and then Hearthstone. Both those games were designed with a recurring revenue stream, and I'm thinking SC2 got a little less attention because it didn't have that.
Until 2013, Blizzard was at least partially shielded from Kotick by specific terms in the corporate bylaws that gave the board (read: Vivendi, which had a controlling interest) power over Kotick on such things as the Blizzard budget, firing of Blizzard executives, and go/no-go decisions on Blizzard games.
All that went away when Kotick engineered the buyout of Vivendi's shares. This also led to considerable corporate debt, which Activision-Blizzard has been servicing and paying down since.
It was a slow death, one by a thousand papercuts, you can see the changes in Wow as an example.
Classic Wow and BC were not convenient, to enter a dungeon you had to travel to it, often you had to finish the quests in an area to unlock it, if someone wanted to come who hadn't done this yet you were compelled to help them, often these were quests that were beyond what one person could do. It was built around teamwork and collaboration, but at the cost of convenience.
Starting with WoTLK the story got better, animation and art got better but also a lot of odd convenience things started making their way into the game, and often at the expense of community. Most people at the time realized this but it wasn't strong enough at the time to erode the other things they liked. This was right after Activision merged/bought them and I would say they still had 80-90% of their core staff then.
After that was Cataclysm, which most players do not look fondly on. Though I would say that again they did well with storytelling and Art, but made poor gameplay choices. Most long time players quit playing then. Some really important leadership left during this time or right before it was released, often due to conflicting opinions about direction. I want to say microtransactions for vanity items were introduced at this time.
Then it was Mists of Pandaria, which I think they restructured their leadership quite a bit and put some of the right people in charge again. I think they were down to 60% of their core staff by this point. This one was mostly considered a success and is looked on as mostly good. It was around this point that Blizzard got really involved with the Chinese market or at least more involved. I want to say this was when they introduced services like buying a level boost and race change.
Warlord of Draenor - most players see this as one that had a ton of potential but never really grasped it, most new features were considered not fun, even more convenience things appeared again lowering camaraderie and need to work together. Eventually it was abandoned halfway, the story never finished and so it was scrapped for the next one that they hoped would be a more compelling theme/setting. The art got very good though, but it felt like we were getting less bang for the buck somehow. It was around this point that the game shifted focus to just help everyone level up to endgame content, making the old content barely matter anymore, which is a shame in a lot of ways.
Legion - was mostly considered good, they implemented an artifact system that acted a lot like a re-balance patch on the mechanics of play, this was where most of the praise came from. But even with that there were a lot of complaints, world quests felt like a chore, and so when people developed ways to get through it quickly they patched it to slow it down. The region Suramar got a lot of praise since it was a region that would change based on what quests you've done and I think going forward they should learn from that, but so far it hasn't felt that they've learned much.
Battle for Azeroth - This was a failure of an expansion, people didn't like the characters, the story direction or any of the new features introduced, the game balance was poor and the new artifact system didn't act like a patch like the previous expansion and instead was just unbalanced. It feels like they skipped to the next one fairly quicly. Probably 25% of core staff still remains at this point.
Bonus - Warcraf 3 Reforged - for those who are warcraft fans they like the lore, many grew up with the RTS and they were looking forward to this game. Blizzard failed to recognize the importance of branding here and instead looked at RTS as a dying genre. They overpromised, got pre-orders and then when it was time to bump it back to keep those promises they instead opted to not refund pre-orders and instead release a known inferior product that was different that what was promised and in fact different from what was pre-ordered. Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if more lawsuits came because of it. This was a final nail as a breach of trust for many fans who have felt continuously betrayed up to this point.
Shadowlands - it had good ideas but never lived up to any of them, people came back to try it out for a few months but it's mostly abandoned by players now. probably 10% of core staff still remains, it's a sinking ship.
So yeah it's been a failure 13 years in the making, that's just been exploding all at once the last couple of years. Blizzard has failed at branding, especially since joining activision. Blizzard used to be a company that made high quality computer games with an ethos of "it's done when it's done" and would go so far as to not release a game (starcraft ghost) because it wasn't good enough. That's not who they are anymore, they release things that aren't finished, that are outside of expectations or that are at a disconnect between what their fans want(like game balance over flashy story, community over convenience, or feeling like a part of the world instead of you being the center of it). I think they have some great developers who get it and have advised management many times about this kind of stuff, but a decade of not being listened to has made those with any clout to go off to other companies, often founding their own.
Convenience features are not the issue. Sure, there are people that don't like them but there are even more that would never bother playing without them.
It's a convergence of multiple factors that's destroying WoW, and not all off them is entirely in Activision Blizzards control. I cannot remember playing any games in recent history that had a community as toxic as WoWs to non veteran players.
Their effectively P2W Cashshop didn't help either, as it created the situation where people basically cannot find normal content groups anymore. Everything pushes you too buy gold and then get carried through relevant content for gear.
> not all off them is entirely in Activision Blizzards control. I cannot remember playing any games in recent history that had a community as toxic as WoWs to non veteran players.
I think community toxicity is very much Activision Blizzards's fault. There are no community guidelines anywhere, griefing is explicitly allowed (almost encouraged) in World PvP, game masters are few and far between. The report system is more often abused for griefing than used for actual community management.
It's very easy to look at FF14 to see that this needs to all start from the top. They have a very active community management team, and enforce very strict guidelines that go way beyond 'don't sexually harass other players'. They have a new player's guild where the guidelines are often discussed, with players taking on the roles as mentors who are supposed to drill these values into people. They have a very strict policy of never attacking someone for how they play the game, unless they are completely griefing (like a healer who never heals their party). Discussing damage or other performance numbers is grounds for a time out (outside dedicated groups for the hardest content).
Additionally, the relationship between the development team and the player base is much less confrontational. The development team is relatively candid on the games direction, they often explain choices they've made in satisfying ways, and seem to actively listen to player feedback. There is a famous example of a player asking about a quality of life feature in a Q&A, and the dev lead saying something along the lines of 'you know what? That makes sense', and delivering the feature in-game a few months later.
These are all things that require some serious investment in community management, and they pay off immensely in long-term good will and loyalty. Instead, Blizzard fired a few hundred people from QA and community management positions shortly before Battle for Azeroth.
That's a convincing argument, I never looked it like that but it does ring true.
The community still shouldn't be considered entirely on Activision Blizzard, but they haven't tried to really address the issue from their side either, so I can definitely see your point.
But the introduction of that LFG tool (more specifically the raid finder) also coincides with the start of wow bleeding subscribers, and they haven't recovered since and instead just kept bleeding.
I don't think there is any evidence that there would be less players in wow if they never introduced that feature, on the contrary there are plenty of things pointing in the opposite direction.
But other games that have a Raid Finder are doing well and rapidly increasing their player numbers: Final Fantasy 14 has had the exact same system since the beginning, and it's definitely not hurting their growth. I think that, despite the hate it gets, LFR was far from WoW's main cause of downfall.
For me, the first understanding that things are rolling downhill was how they killed the social aspect with the removal of battle.net without any replacement and completely messed up the concept of playing custom maps when StarCraft 2 launched. Longer thread from 2010 about custom maps: https://tl.net/forum/sc2-maps/139745-the-real-problem-with-s...