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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsIs WoW being run by its B-team? Is that bad?
by Eliah Hecht 
Jul 14th 2009 at 8:00PM
This post by Eric Heimburg on the excellent MMO design blog Elder Game, alleging that WoW is currently run by Blizzard's B-team, has ignited a fair amount of controversy around the blogosphere. The general argument appears to be that the people previously in charge of WoW, like Jeff Kaplan, have moved on to other projects. As a consequence knee-jerk changes are being pushed through very fast, without being sufficiently tested first. "Back in the day," claims the article, "QA held the game to a higher standard."
My reaction to these claims are mixed. Kaplan may not be in charge of WoW anymore, but I don't think that "the steady hand has left the rudder," or if it has, maybe a less straight-ahead course is a good thing. Changes may be getting pushed through very quickly - Ghostcrawler routinely refers to players getting whiplash from the frequency of balance changes - but in many cases, I think this is for the best.
Throughout the BC era, WoW followed a model of punctuated equilibrium: relatively large changes in major patches, and very little in-between. This did mean a lot of testing could be done for most changes, but the downside is that it regularly took months for problems to be fixed.
Nowadays, we appear to have a faster cycle of minor (two-decimal-point) patches, as well as copious hotfixes. Sure, it causes some cruft to accumlate - like leatherworkers being able to craft now-worthless quivers, in Heimburg's example - but I think a faster problem/solution turnaround time is well worth a few rough edges. Rapid iteration has been a principle of web design for a while now. Maybe it's time it came to MMOs, which are conceptually similar to web apps.
Overall, I think the game is continually improving. It's in a better state now than it ever has been, and it will be better still in 3.2, if what I'm seeing from the PTR is any indication. (Caveat: No more jousting, please. It is simply not fun.) So if there are indeed new people in charge of WoW, I for one welcome our change-happy overlords.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard
Reader Comments (Page 4 of 5)
Falcom Jul 14th 2009 9:50PM
well, apparently the hardware stability team for retaliation battlegroup is a bunch of retarded high school drop outs. Its back in fail mode. again. no eta. no explaination. nothing. blizzard sucks.
snarkygoldfish Jul 14th 2009 9:52PM
All this mention of A teams and B teams and not even a passing nod to the ubiquitous Night Elf Mohawk? For shame!
Wulftracker Jul 14th 2009 10:20PM
Posi makes a very good point.. When did WoW become un entertaining?
It hasn't.
How many of the players that have joined since Wrath went live have even ran Magister's Terrace, The Black Temple, Zul'Amon, or any of the major BC instance. Other than Pally's who has even run Scholomance?
Not many.
Everyone wants to skip to the new content and not work their gear up by progression.
As far as the main subject of the "B-Team" running things, thats the way business goes folks. Someone who is an assistant manager at a local sub shop , excels at their job, makes the store money, Do they stay at that store? Nope they go on to the new store or move up to a regional position.
It happens.
My only personal, WoW QQ is the fact that GM's take forever to respond and bots and spammers seldom get caught or banned. If anything they need more Gm's to police the game.
Anaughtybear Jul 14th 2009 10:01PM
They are doing a better job than the old crew for certain. At least there are activities for all types of players now. Instead of waiting two years for a single new activity, we have frequent events and various ways to collect gear. I realize that jousting AI is pretty awful and lagtastic, but it's still something to do. After hitting 70 in BC you had your choice of quitting, leveling an alt or getting ninja'd in some raid. I don't know how badly the Argent NPCs would lose if they weren't allowed to cheat by charging from one foot away immediately after a shield break, but I suppose it would be pretty sad. If it's wrong to actually listen to what players want, I hope Blizzard never goes back to being right.
Erinnaszun Jul 14th 2009 10:15PM
B-team's fine, Blizz has WoW on farm status now
ashraith Jul 14th 2009 10:23PM
The "one class review per patch" pace during classic was annoying. The current changes per week are worse and difficult to keep up with. I don't know, the whole thing lost its flavor by now. WoW has gotten pretty stale and annoying. I hold out for Blizzcon to see if they announce the next expansion, what it'll be and if there are going to be new races/classes. If that falls short I guess I'll finally lose interest and hope that their new mmo isn't too far off. Or that some competitor finally gets its act together and releases a decent game.
kalidav Jul 14th 2009 10:34PM
I wrote a lot about similar issues with the game currently:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=18326618924&sid=1&pageNo=1
maniraptor Jul 14th 2009 11:37PM
"Most of the people I've seen excited about 3.2, are only excited about the gear."
Really?
Everyone I know who is excited about 3.2 looks forward to: new druid forms; travel changes; turning off XP (and its corollary, voluntary twink/non-twink BG segregation) .
Gear is pretty low on the list.
havitech Jul 15th 2009 12:44AM
Sorry, I should have specified the raid.
"Most of the people I've seen excited about the 3.2 raid, are only excited about the gear." - That makes more sense.
And as excited as I am over the other changes, they hardly make up for the terrible Argent Coliseum raid. What good is it if my druid form looks awesome while I'm bored to tears?
Sl0th Jul 15th 2009 12:04AM
I see nothing wrong with the so-called 'B' team being in charge of World of Warcraft. They might not be the 'A' team (Incidentally, we really don't really have enough information to differentiate the quality of the two teams other than someone has arbitrarily labeled one of them with a 'B,') but they're still part of Blizzard. For all World of Warcraft's faults - and believe me, I could spend all day making a list of what I consider faults in the game - it is still one of the most polished, well-presented MMO on the market today.
MMOs will always have bugs and imbalances. It's the nature of the beast. But when it comes down to it, WoW is a genuinely good game. It has rough edges, but they're a lot less rough than the competition. And whatever letter designation you slap on to the team running WoW right now, they're doing as good of a job supporting and building the game as I've seen in any MMO I've played.
If nothing else, World of Warcraft is the only level-based MMO that has held my attention for longer than a couple months.
jay Jul 15th 2009 12:08AM
Who cares if it really is "The B-Team" that is running WoW, the only reason why some people bellyache over such things is because they can't see past the original people involved, there will always be problems, there will always be bugs, there will always be maintenance, Q&A are still the putting out some quality and to be honest more feature packed content. I honestly don't get why some people get all up in arms about it, just wish people would stop making mountains out of mole hills about crap that's been around since Wow's inception.
For all we know the so called "B-team" has been there since day 1.
Calantus Jul 15th 2009 12:15AM
i had more fun playing vanilla, but if the game was what wotlk is now, it would have been 100% better experience. I've just been 'meh' with wow after clearing kara in BC, nothing to do with the content, just the game itself. I still enjoy it, but not nearly as much as i used to.
twh Jul 15th 2009 12:48AM
The fact that my paladin is now tanking and DPSing proves this is much, much, much better than vanilla.
Mognet T Jul 15th 2009 12:51AM
I submit the two sets of gear with varying shades of blackish gray available to every character leveling through Northrend, the vast majority of Northrend PVP sets, the lack of unique gear/weapons from Wrath raid bosses (even Algalon's badass 1H Sword comes in Phys DPS version and Spell DPS version...why couldnt they look different!?), and above all; the abomination that is Tier 9. Blizzard once stated that the Season 4 Arena gear looked bad because the artists had moved on to Wrath gear. Well, it looks like those same guys made Putress a nice set of armor, repainted Tier 3, and then promptly sat back and farted out few few designs and went home for the night. I would rather gouge my own eyes out with a spoon than look at the horrendous monstrosities they call Tier 9, or the spew they call Shaman Arena Gear. I bet you all can't wait until you get
your generic item drops from the Colosseum (both in Tiers sets and every item being a clone item that drops for every other class in the raid). WoW on a B team? More like Z Team.
p.s. NERD RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE!
Mognet T Jul 15th 2009 6:32PM
I disagree. Tier 8 is bad. Pull up Mage and Paladin gear, try to guess which one is plate and which one is cloth (and if you have the intestinal fortitude look at that stupid mage hat), also while you are at it, pull up Hunter and Death Knight. How many differences can you spot? First time I compared the two I hurt my head in a fit of rage.
Okay, maybe I need help, but so does whoever is making this armor. They should be committed.
uncaringbear Jul 15th 2009 1:26AM
QA is an expensive part of development. It's not surprising that QA often gets the hammer when a lot of developers choose to cut corners. In this age of 'beta culture', constant bug fixes are wrapped in friendly terms like 'rapid development' to rationalize the end effect of cost cutting.
Blizzard is certainly not the only company who could be accused of this. But let's not try to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear: the general level of quality and stability is arguably in a poorer state in Wrath compared to previous iterations of WoW.
SamLowry Jul 15th 2009 2:07AM
B-team is definitely in charge of customer support.
I can't believe how many times I've recently heard "Is Blizz hiring everyone away from SOE?" It takes hours to get ahold of anyone, tickets disappear without being responded to, those who do show up don't seem to be the sharpest tools in the shed, and "unstick" is simply hearthing? That's great, I suppose, as long as you haven't hearthed recently, and you haven't died, either. So what happens, then, when you die on the waterfalls southeast of WG and you rez in Dragonblight, completely unable to reach your corpse? Wait a few hours for a GM to show up, that's what.
Kesely Jul 15th 2009 3:30AM
I've only been playing WoW since the middle of Burning Crusade, but what I've seen and felt coincides with Eliah's opinion. Tha game has never been better, and I feel it's going in the right direction.
Challenge? I myself hate challenge and try to avoid it at all costs, but if one follows the news about the top guilds, it must be clear that hardcore players get all the challenge they want (and even more).
Copy and paste? Naxxramas was reused, I concede to that, though I never saw the old version, and I am not alone with that. As far as I know, it was ridiculously overtuned, so few players got to see it, thus making it available in the new expansion in a revamped form was a perfectly logical decision. More so that it fit the atmosphere perfectly. Apart from this, look at the 5-person instances: Azjol-Nerub, Old Kingdom -- beautiful, not resembing anything I've seen; Nexus -- again an atmosphere and look specific to Wrath, and I could go on with that endlessly. Copy and paste boss mechanics? Please remind me of anything similar to, say, Flame Leviathian or Kologran mechanics in the past.
Single-player experience? That's where I am at home, and most pleased: gripping atmosphere, fun dailies (Alchemist's Apprentice, if that's not a new mechanics, then what is?), quest-emblems-for-recipes system, yummy.
Balance? I don't EVER PvP (except when holidays force me into it), so no opinion on that. All that I know is I have been playing a Protection Warrior from the very beginning (levelled in Protection up to 80, feel free to laugh), and Protection has never been more fun. And that's what matters to me, I don't care if death knights tank better or whatnot.
Matt Jul 15th 2009 5:49AM
I actually think content development and game design are far better than they were in the Kaplan era. It seems as though every patch another door opens to make content accessible for a larger percentage of the population, and that's great. Not to mention, development hours seem to be more evenly spread across the various play styles and interests people have with the game.
Where things have really fallen apart? Stability. I don't understand how Blizzard has allowed things to get as bad as they have, and that they are reluctant to express the exact reasons behind the problems and why they haven't been able to resolve them yet. You couldn't convince me that WoW has taken a backseat at Blizzard based on content or design...but it would be hard to argue that they are devoting the appropriate resources to server health. It's embarrassing, and it will remain a huge stain on Blizzard's record, even if they ever do change course and turn things around.
I simply cannot comprehend why the servers have been so much worse this expansion cycle than Burning Crusade. In ways it sometimes seems even worse than launch, especially because the drive to change has apparently stagnated.
Daz Jul 15th 2009 10:16AM
"Rapid iteration has been a principle of web design for a while now. Maybe it's time it came to MMOs, which are conceptually similar to web apps."
What does web design, conceptually or otherwise have in common with the complex software architecture of an MMO?