Is Blizzard cutting costs?
by Daniel Whitcomb 
Jan 27th 2009 at 11:00AM
So with all the hubbub about 3.0.8's problems, a lot of people are wondering who to blame. Activision seems to be a popular target, with people blaming them for nerfing Blizzard's famed "it's-ready-when-it's-ready" game design cycle and rushing things out the door while they're still buggy and imbalanced.
Popular MMORPG blogger Tobold is in that camp himself. In one of his latest blog posts, he theorizes that Blizzard has been cutting spending for some time now, be it because of falling stock prices or the need to move WoW team members to Diablo 3 or Starcraft 2 or simply because of the economic downturn in general.
As proof, he offers the wildly imbalanced classes, crowded, laggy servers with no signs of relief, and the lack of a new original multi-boss raid instance in Wrath. All of this, he says, are signs of a reduced staff or other cost cutting measures that are preventing Blizzard from fixing the problems that have plagued the game.
Like Mike Schramm, I shy away from simply heaping all the blame on Activision, but Tobold is a pretty respected old school member of the MMORPGing community, so it's tough to dismiss him out of hand. Certainly, in this economy, very few companies can avoid tightening their belts to some degree, and as Tobold has pointed out, Activision Blizzard's overall stock price has dropped significantly.
However, it's probably worth pointing out is that Blizzard is responding to the problems to some degree. They've been transferring characters between servers pretty regularly, and have even opened a few new servers, and we're getting some bug fixes today. It may seem like things are slowing down at Blizzard, but isn't that what we've always expected from them? They take things nice and slow. Usually that ends up being to their advantage. It's just lately that that's become somewhat of a liability.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, Economy, Rumors
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 7)
Pyornthe Jan 27th 2009 11:03AM
Meh.
People are too quick to point fingers nowadays.
Alizar Jan 27th 2009 11:06AM
Comments like yours are too negative
/point
firant Jan 27th 2009 11:32AM
dude -- almost every piece of equipment in WotLK has the same artwork. Many of the areas and zone reuse chunks of older content. Go run RFC and then take a look at the black dragon shrine, run MC and then go do OS.
They've moved staff over to their other games, and they've been giving us the cold shoulder right along.
The game is fun -- the mechanics of the underlying system are neat -- but Blizzard has pretty obviously moved on to the next cash cow.
Azradesh Jan 27th 2009 12:13PM
Sigh, they used the same armor skins so that armor matched. Why? Because BC we all complained that it didn't, so now we have a few well designed "sets" for each armor type that fit into the viking/norse/cold theme and don't all look like clowns.
Also BC only had 3 raids on release as well, did it not? Maybe one more :/
Lemons Jan 27th 2009 12:48PM
I think at realease BC had 6 raids: Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, Magtheridon's Lair, Tempest Keep, and Coilfang Reservoir, and Hyjal.
By contrast Wotlk has only 4: Naxxramas, Wintergrasp, Malygos, and Obsidian Sanctum. Athough there is normal/heroic versions of each, that's really just upping the boss's HP and throwing on a few more abilities.
Kadamon Jan 27th 2009 2:44PM
@ Lemons
You couldn't acceess Hyjal nor Tempest Keep when BC first opened up...and I don't think Mag's was available rightaway either. I could totally be mistaken though.
negativegirl Mar 25th 2009 8:57AM
/agree
People could also learn a little *patience*.
I laughed hearing "omg i'm quitting wow if this doesn't stop!1!11!!" Those people are still playing and had no intention to quit. Empty threats don't get you what you want, they just make you look like a 5 year old idiot. :)
rejkenolg02 Jan 27th 2009 11:07AM
It's hard to say the lack of a new raid is because of anything besides Blizzard's timetable. It's only been 3 months since Wrath came out. Unfortunately the raids that were available were easy to blow through.
Let's hope Ulduar is a challenge and has a good number of bosses in it to keep people occupied.
Morcego Jan 27th 2009 11:08AM
I have to disagree with this to a point.
The "when it is ready" methodology is when the development team is calling the shots. But once something becomes a success, everyone wants to get credit for it. So we have other people (marketing etc) wanting to "control" the process".
Enter Activision, and it is very easy to have an enterprising marketing manager from Blizzard convincing Activision that he (or his department) should have control over WoW development, so they can maximize profits and all that.
If you already have a winning team, changing how it works mid-season is a very bad idea, but unfortunately something that happens all the time on corporate environment.
Ozymandias Jan 27th 2009 11:14AM
I don't seem to think that everything that blizzard has done to this point was perfect, although the past couple of weeks have seen me lag out of Dalaran more often than not. While we all have been yelling and posting about "when is 3.08 coming out?" I just don't think that we were the reason that the patch came out as flawed as it did.
My thinking on this has to do with the PTR, and the lack of people testing this patch. I mean, why would anyone want to test a patch when there is so much to do in-game? My Death Knight just 80, and although I know most have hit 80 already, there are still heroics and rep to grind, and holiday achievements to collect. So my question is this, why would anyone take time to test this patch if there is no reason to do it?
Bloodchills Jan 27th 2009 11:19AM
Flawed logic is to state that the audience craving a FIX to problems, in the form of the patch could be to blame for a bad product being shipped.
The dev team let us down by failing to test what they rolled out properly.
It's not however as bad as everyone says. 3.0.8 is better than 3.0.3 was for MANY reasons.
Today's patch likely addresses many of the issues in 3.0.8 so let's just wait and see.
However, we need 3.1 to be bug free or at least we need to strive for it. We all know that Bliz has a history of producing bug-ridden work. You can't get around it because of the way they develop, and the sheer complexity of the game environment.
But logical bugs are the root of the cause. Game balancing is overcomplicated for them and as a result of continually complicating the experience through new content and features, the result is a convoluted mess that can't be tidied up without painstaking care.
edward Jan 27th 2009 11:11AM
I just want to know how the Ritual Of Summoning got screwed so badly, how did this problem not show in the PTR?
rosencratz Jan 27th 2009 11:15AM
Because they cut out the new summoning "stone" aspect where the spell was to create something everyone could use to summon due, that was going to be super useful, due to an undisclosed exploit but left the new cooldown that was to go along with it.
it was a last minute change i believe and thus not seen on the PTR .
Paggos Jan 27th 2009 11:16AM
GAMEBREAKING BUG
Vyle Jan 27th 2009 11:23AM
Undisclosed exploit?
Just think about how easy it would be to win WSG. Have your FC get the flag, then the warlock and his buddy drop the stone to summon the guy back. They didn't tweak the spell for BG's.
edward Jan 27th 2009 11:55AM
lets say you are the only lock in a 10 man naxx run, 3 ppl died while running the gauntlet to Gluth (those nubs), to summon all 3 takes 6 minutes and 15 secs. While people continuously ask if you are afk.
Murky Jan 27th 2009 12:39PM
@Vyle
Nice theory, but battleground summoning has been disabled for, oh, about a year.
rosencratz Jan 27th 2009 11:13AM
I've not seen any of this 3.08 hysteria anywhere but on WoWinsider tbh and i play a raiding warlock attempting to do summons.
This patch is nothing compared to some patches of the past, at least the majority of issues with this one was fixed so swiftly.
The orc shoulder patch, now THAT was hysteria.
Sedition Jan 27th 2009 3:44PM
You know, I was thinking exactly the same thing.
I wonder if it has to do with the fact that when it was "only" Blizzard it was ok that they made occasional mistakes.
But now we have a group that people dislike possibly involved. So it's much easier to bring the hate.
I can think of 100 things that have happened over the years that were 10 times worse than this.
sephirah Jan 27th 2009 11:13AM
Cutting costs? Nah!
Only because one raid in WotLK is an old raid and the others have 1 boss each? Because the tier sets are reskinning of old sets?
Because a lot of bug reports or imbalance issues posted on the beta forum were never addressed?
Because I can't move in Dalaran due to lag and when I flee from there it takes minutes before I can enter an instance that has only slightly less lag than Dalaran?
Why anybody should think so!