Do NOT Hire ANY Blizzard rejects....especially Class Design.

*********Just want to point out I made this post a while ago and look how it has aged. I was spot on. Look at Blizzard now. Shadowlands is a epic failure and Blizzard is in a lawsuit.*******

If you dont want your game to die from the inside.. If ANY Blizzard devs, particularly WoW devs who were in the upper decision making such as, PvP or Class design or had any final say in game development. DO NOT HIRE THEM OR THIS GAME WILL ROT FROM THE INSIDE. Just dont do it. Dont. They have created a TEDIOUS game, not a FUN game. They are hell bent on time gating rather than making fun content. Classes are the worst they have ever been right now with people in PvP dying inside a single stun or interupt. Classes like Druids and Paladins are represented in the top 15 in Arena BUT....IT'S ALL 3 SPECS~! Retribution, Protection AND Holy Paladins, ALL in the top 15. Druids too. There are classes where not even ONE spec is in the top 15. Not ONE.

Classes that are S Tier damage are also hard as hell to kill AND have top tier mobility and CC. Its completely absurd and any sign of balance is LONG GONE. Dev bias and incompetence is at an all time high right now. Yo have Tank specs like Prot Paladin that are out healing full spec'ed healers in PvP and still doing stupid damage. You have WW monks that have ALL the tools for damage but also self heal and have some of the best mobility in the game on top of constantly stunning, slowing and CCing anything you throw at them. Ret Paladins are constantly healing to full with little cost to mana at all and bursting people to death inside one of the longest stuns in the game. You have druids that are convoking people into oblivion in seconds and full mooning people to 0% health in one spell. Its so absolutely disgusting right now.

You cannot by definition, have balance when you have Tanks, healing OTHER PLAYERS better than a dedicated healer. You cannot have balance if you have damage dealers with self heals, high mobility AND near constant slows and CC, making it impossible for you to react to their damage. You cannot have healers, able to tank 5 to 6 players at once...they never die. Please do not hire any of these people. Let them destroy their own game, but dont let these Activision cooperate baffoons come to AoC and destroy it as well.

Don't do it. DO NOT HIRE ANY WoW upper devs for ANYTHING. Not Class design, not rewards and gearing, not scaling, not quest design, and DAMN SURE NOT PROFESSIONS. Dont do it.

The upper leadership is ego maniacal, doesnt listen to the player base at all and does what ever the hell they want, regardless of the repercussions.. In short, they know whats best for you, you dont know what you want, they will tell you. For over 5 years, an inflation of secondary systems, over bloated amounts of currencies and borrowed power has killed the game. They put in crap alpha and beta testers tell them wont work and dont address it until after 6 months in the game when people are leaving. Then to recover the loss of player revenue, they sell a mount in the store. Pathetic.

*****So after the AWC this past week, no one should be doubting me. Paladino in every match and the overwhelming predominant healer. In several matches, they accounted for 3 out of the 6 players in a signal match. Mages were healing better than any Warlock and were only behind Ret Panadins....The singles highest burst class in game, with STier CC and Mobility, was healing. For ridiculous amounts. PASSIVELY.

Nope. No Blizzard rejects. EVER.

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Comments

Cathartidae

Class balance and class design are usually two different fields. In any case, I don't think WoW is really a PvP game at this point - it's more of a legacy thing/afterthought.

I felt like, after Legion significantly tightened up spec identity, WoW does a pretty good job delivering 36 different playstyles. They are not all balanced in terms of difficulty (and indeed, playing a more difficult class does not mean your numbers are better) but, numbers aside, the few dozen I have played have fun rotations/priority systems. And in the traditional blizzard way, eventually every spec has its turn on top of the DPS pile - and for the majority of casuals, numeric difference between the specs is imperceptible anyway (Feral druid #1 to upper middle of the pack DPS for the first time in an age, who could have seen it coming).

Maybe issues with respect to utility? My mage has a lot of personal defensive tricks, my druid and paladin partners can shape entire encounters by themselves, but my warrior is mostly just along for the ride. Mobility is pretty good, but not a lot of tricks I can pull on to shape encounters.

In short I suppose I'm pretty happy with the 'feel' of Warcraft - the animations, as mentioned, and clean and evocative, the rotations/priorities are rewarding to learn, most classes have enough utility for me to feel like I can make interesting decisions as events unfold, and eventually every class/spec gets its turn to be 'top dps' for what that is worth.

Can anyone else share their thoughts on combat 'feel' from other games? I am admittedly a casual with respect to PvP but I'm interested in learning.

DaRougaroux

daveywavey wrote: »

The Keymaker wrote: »

Posts like this are still important guys... I feel that any frustrations this game brings to the table is warranted. Like Steven says, we are all beat dogs...ect. Let us not critize each other for stating our frustrations or rants. The OP has a reason for ranting, let him rant, and in turn let the devs take what they can from these discussions. Something here is bound to be useful.

Oh man, you're an optimistic person! Please don't let us taint you!

Bro. Your avatar. I'm crazy jealous. Freaking Danger Mouse! What a champ. You win the internet bro. /kowtow

Maezriel

The Keymaker wrote: »

Posts like this are still important guys... I feel that any frustrations this game brings to the table is warranted. Like Steven says, we are all beat dogs...ect. Let us not critize each other for stating our frustrations or rants. The OP has a reason for ranting, let him rant, and in turn let the devs take what they can from these discussions. Something here is bound to be useful.

I disagree. OP might as well say that b/c I worked at a Burger King I should be disqualified from working at a proper restaurant.

More times than not post like these just start a "WoW Sucks" echo chamber that brings little conversation that's actually relevant to AoC and creates an us vs them mentality, I've actually had people try to use the fact that I play WoW as a basis for dismissing my opinions and it's utterly ridiculous.

WoW has it's issues but by and large they are bred from the fact that it's a purely profit driven publicly traded company first and foremost, which has nothing to do w/ the developers themselves as they very likely have little to no say of anything as big picture as class design.

RocketFarmer

Is the OP's issue about the people or game balance.

For AoE, I though they had no desire to have character to character game balance (or at least not do the constant Nerfing to try to create a perfect balance), and instead are focused on group balance where there isn't a dominant strategy.

Their archetype/class set up appears to allow for combinations of character classes, where there is bound to be one or more that's considered OP from an individual character perspective, while others may be viewed as trash. However, in a group setting it appears that the so-called trash character could play a greater role in the success or failure of the group than what the individual character is perceived to have. I believe that's an intentional design decision. So I think you'll see less of these "can do everything better than the specialist classes" that you see in WoW.

As for personnel. Pretty harsh declaration to make. I think it really comes down to the individual and whether or not they buy into the overall design of this game. You're going to do the same thing regardless of where they used to work.

Shootersa

i kinda find it narrowminded to just automatically think that every single dev from blizzard is bad or doesn't have the right skillset for ashes.

Most of the time developers are also just people who do their job and follow orders from the people who decide to implement something. I think as long as the person is capable and shows that it can follow the design and mindset of ashes, it will be fine.

akabear

LXIX wrote: »

i kinda find it narrowminded to just automatically think that every single dev from blizzard is bad or doesn't have the right skillset for ashes.

Most of the time developers are also just people who do their job and follow orders from the people who decide to implement something. I think as long as the person is capable and shows that it can follow the design and mindset of ashes, it will be fine.

I thought the same but was stuck for words to put as politely. All the better to have a pool of talent from a range of complementary backgrounds to enrich the project.

DaRougaroux

akabear wrote: »

LXIX wrote: »

i kinda find it narrowminded to just automatically think that every single dev from blizzard is bad or doesn't have the right skillset for ashes.

Most of the time developers are also just people who do their job and follow orders from the people who decide to implement something. I think as long as the person is capable and shows that it can follow the design and mindset of ashes, it will be fine.

I thought the same but was stuck for words to put as politely. All the better to have a pool of talent from a range of complementary backgrounds to enrich the project.

Your not enriching your project when hire people that have proven themselves incompetent at their job at another company. You dont hire people who in the face of Classic WoW being monumentally successful, say when asked if Vanilla servers would ever be considered, "you dont want that...you think you do but you dont" proving how out of touch he is. Most upper echelon employees would have been fired for making such a disaster of a statement but no they made that fool the freaking President of the company!! Classic WoW saved Blizzrds WoW IP, period. You dont hire people when at Blizzcon, when faced with boos from the greatest of WoW fanboiz over diablo going mobile, state with absolute arrogance, "you guys dont have phones?"

Most of Blizzards lead devs are ALL of this mindset. They dont make games for the fans. They are corporate yes men that are only interested in money. Ask yourself why, when at the lowest point of BFA, instead of making the game better, instead of listening to the players, they threw together some pixels are started selling mounts at record pace, for 6 month subs?!

Nah, what you guys are saying sounds like sober reasoning, but in the face of the facts, it's just platitudes that have no substance in reality.

NO BLIZZARD REJECTS.

Noaani

DaRougaroux wrote: »

Your not enriching your project when hire people that have proven themselves incompetent at their job at another company.

A few points.

First, you can't blame anything in regards to a project the size of WoW on any one single developer.

Second, even if a developer was proven incompetent in one scenario, that doesn't mean they didn't learn from what happened.

Third, WoW is an undoubted success, financially. Any company in the world making any product would love to see their product have the success WoW had.

Fourth, even the people making the top level decisions for WoW are not necessarily people to avoid. The decisions they made were made for reasons that were specific to that project. Activision has shareholders that need to make a profit - that is the most important thing for that company. The decisions the people in charge of WoW made were made in order to facilitate that prime directive (if you will), and clearly, they succeeded in that.

Should those same people that made those specific decisions then end up working at Intrepid, where the prime directive is the game, not the shareholders, then those same people would make different decisions. Since they did such a good job with the previous game, clearly making decisions that provided the desired outcome, there is no reason at all to think they would not make decisions for Ashes that gave Intrepids desired outcome for this game.

no substance in reality.

This applies to what you are saying.

You are speaking from a purely emotional perspective. You dislike WoW (as do I), and don't want Ashes to have anything to do with it (nor do I). The thing is, you are failing to understand how a project like this operates, and that most of the high level decisions are made to facilitate a specific goal.

If you change that goal, you change what decisions get made.

Since Ashes has a different goal to WoW, if those same people were making the same decisions, the result would be different.

Atama

If you say a developer is incompetent solely because they once worked on a game you dislike, you’re a bigot and should be ashamed of yourself.

BobzUrUncle

Considering you have only joined in July 2020, you have a very one sided opinion. With titles like "Do NOT...", "...Not Allow...", "...Do Not...", "...bad for the game...", it looks like you are not a fan of many things.

Instead of being so negative, how about being positive? It is a lot more fun!
Or, this may not be the game for you.

Hitties

I would of joined earlier then 2020 but the packages were lack luster after the original kickstarters/summer backer plans.. They don't want my 1k for Leader of Men

Maciej

I'm surprised this hasn't been locked yet. OP has an obvious issue with Blizzard and wants to vent, which is understandable, but this is only tangentially related to Ashes of Creation, and I fail to see how any further discussion here would be constructive.

Noaani

Maciej wrote: »

I'm surprised this hasn't been locked yet. OP has an obvious issue with Blizzard and wants to vent, which is understandable, but this is only tangentially related to Ashes of Creation, and I fail to see how any further discussion here would be constructive.

They tend to generally only close threads that are actively anti-productive, rather than just unproductive.

This forum here does have a number of posters that have a habit of taking a thread that is somewhat unproductive, running in a different direction with it and turning it in to something either entertaining or productive.

maouw

It helps when the mods give us space to do it

Wandering Mist

Noaani wrote: »

Maciej wrote: »

I'm surprised this hasn't been locked yet. OP has an obvious issue with Blizzard and wants to vent, which is understandable, but this is only tangentially related to Ashes of Creation, and I fail to see how any further discussion here would be constructive.

They tend to generally only close threads that are actively anti-productive, rather than just unproductive.

This forum here does have a number of posters that have a habit of taking a thread that is somewhat unproductive, running in a different direction with it and turning it in to something either entertaining or productive.

Even a thread like this can bring about worthwhile discussion, so as long as it's not against the rules, it won't be closed.

consultant

Well was giving more thought to the Orignal post and......

Well hiring a Prior Blizzard Employee might be tabboo for the company might cause some concern which is sad to say about such a great game.

Another thing I want to mention is most of what the Original post had to say is about PvP game balance..... which have posted a lotabout. First let me say that PvE in WoW is not so bad it is PvP game balance that is an issue.

In my experience after many hours of play and studying classes found out that classes were unbalanced and figured out how to balance them but....as it turns out that process would take all the fun factor out of class so classes would have to be kind of remade not just nerfed. Maybe Blizzard not willing to take such drastic measures.

Really think that class PvP balance is very difficult for MMOs because of wide array of builds and choices plus players find way to use abilities that work not as intended. Right now Im playing league of legends and find that in some cases you end up winning cause your champions just happens to have one ability. Some champions are placed in the category of just broken. People make videos of it and sometimes they do get nerfed but all Riot can do is the best they can. But what I am trying to say is In a Pure pvp game you have more game balance but still have issues so even more problematic for MMO with so many items and builds and abilities.

But would have to agree that Blizzard could improve much in this particular area.

LieutenantToast

Maezriel wrote: »

If Intrepid feels someone has the passion, skills, and mindset to follow the vision of the game then previously working at one of the most successful game companies on the planet shouldn't be considered an immediate disqualifier.

Khronus wrote: »

I would imagine it would be no different than any other job. "Oh so you worked on all those things!? That's great, now here is what we are working on here and how you can help".

BobzUrUncle wrote: »

If a developer is good at what they do, why would you not hire them? Who cares where they worked before? They will be following the Intrepid design philosophy, so how are they different from the other Intrepid developers?

LXIX wrote: »

Most of the time developers are also just people who do their job and follow orders from the people who decide to implement something. I think as long as the person is capable and shows that it can follow the design and mindset of ashes, it will be fine.

All of these lovely folks above have shared some great feedback on this matter that I totally echo - Intrepid is comprised of a team of developers who bring their expertise and background from a variety of MMOs, some of which you may have loved and others of which you may have strong feelings about

Some of the most important things to our team are your previous game development experience, and your passion for what Ashes of Creation can be - and sometimes you can learn even more from perceived "failure" in your career than you can from success. Every experience is a learning opportunity waiting to happen!

As others have noted, when we're all working towards the common goal of bringing Ashes of Creation to life with the vision that has already been formed, we've definitely got our journey laid out for us!

palabana

Cool story bro but you never know, they might be very talented, only shackled by a game that is limited by design, designed by the designers before them. Something that they cannot do anything about even if they are really good at game design.

Sathrago

I think it's a safer bet just not to hire from blizzards class design team specifically after seeing them spend two months completely ignoring the state of pvp It has been extremely frustrating to deal with and one of two things is happening to cause it. One, the bigwigs are making a tiny skeleton man crew keep all of wow afloat giving them little to no time to spend on actual substance for class design or to even play their own game. Or two, the designers are so incompetently ignorant that they really believe everything's fine and would declare that they are "proud" of shadowlands pvp balance.

The issue is that we cannot tell which of these is going on due to NDA. Meaning you are absolutely taking a risk when hiring them. So my vote is dont hire them, but yeah like people have said before this is all intrepids decision at the end of the day.

consultant

LieutenantToast wrote: »

Maezriel wrote: »

If Intrepid feels someone has the passion, skills, and mindset to follow the vision of the game then previously working at one of the most successful game companies on the planet shouldn't be considered an immediate disqualifier.

Khronus wrote: »

I would imagine it would be no different than any other job. "Oh so you worked on all those things!? That's great, now here is what we are working on here and how you can help".

BobzUrUncle wrote: »

If a developer is good at what they do, why would you not hire them? Who cares where they worked before? They will be following the Intrepid design philosophy, so how are they different from the other Intrepid developers?

LXIX wrote: »

Most of the time developers are also just people who do their job and follow orders from the people who decide to implement something. I think as long as the person is capable and shows that it can follow the design and mindset of ashes, it will be fine.

All of these lovely folks above have shared some great feedback on this matter that I totally echo - Intrepid is comprised of a team of developers who bring their expertise and background from a variety of MMOs, some of which you may have loved and others of which you may have strong feelings about

Some of the most important things to our team are your previous game development experience, and your passion for what Ashes of Creation can be - and sometimes you can learn even more from perceived "failure" in your career than you can from success. Every experience is a learning opportunity waiting to happen!

As others have noted, when we're all working towards the common goal of bringing Ashes of Creation to life with the vision that has already been formed, we've definitely got our journey laid out for us!

Well I get what you are saying but lets look at what WoW Devs Actually DID[b][/b] And you can decide if WoW Devs are smart or not.

Hunter Class WoW Mist of Pandaria. There was a problem with hunters landing traps. Because it had a travel time. Trap did not actaully proc until it landed and after it landed it took a while for it to proc. There was a 2 second arming time and later changed one second arming time. so it could be dodged easily since every one could see the a very fine arch that denoted the travel path of the trap so you could actually tell were the trap was cast.

So what the devs did is increase the area of effect of the trap so if you take a persons that has long arms and happens to be tall and have them spread out there arm sso that they are parallel to the deck then you have your new trap radias. Actually little bigger than that. First of all I do not think I could even get any of the devs at Ashes of Creation to do this. Because I am sure the devs at Ashes recognize traps as a skill shot and if you increase the radius of the trap it defeats the purpose. You really do not even have to Aim any more and becomes a boring skill.

I want to make a very interesting point it was not a person a it was the Dev Team at Blizz.

Now as a Game Designers you have to be aware of ratios. dps ot health ratios and up and down time ratios.
Really simple thing actually. An up time ratio for example is if you have a buff that last ten seconds and cool down is thirty seconds, that is a 10 to 30 ratio or 1/3 or buff can be kept up 33 percent of the time. This also applis to CC Real simple stuff here. Super simple.....

This is what WoW did. Base cool down for traps was 30 seconds but Survival hunters had 24 second trap it was a passive ability. But WoW Devs never bother to update thier tool tip and the tool tip said Survival hunters get a 50 percent cooldown reduction on there traps. No biggy just change tool tip. But this is not what WoW did.
There were lots of hunters tha compained about it and WoW listened. The tool tip did say that Survival hunters get 50% cool down reduction.

So this is what happened Survival hunter trap was already at 24 cd not 30 so they cut that in half to 12 seconds(by the way this happened at the same time trap radius increased). Now hunters at that time had a Freezing trap that puts you in block of ice for 8 seconds. Now lets look at that ratio you have a 8 to 12 ratio between cool down and up time of cc. 8/12 or 2/3 or 66%. Now 12 times five is 60 so you could cast this abilty five times in one minute. Or cc one player for 40 seconds per minute. And if you were smart and started of with a trap right of the bat at second 1 then cast a trap at seconds 12, 24, 36, 48, and 60 that is actual yep six traps in one min. So for first min of an arena you could CC a player 48 seconds out of 60.
Notice that that 12 minus 8 is 4 which is also the amount of time the enemy player had in betwenn traps to play. So if you are playing againts a hunter In MOP you get ccced for 8 seconds play for 4 seconds then get CCed for another 8 seconds. I mean hunters are going to be hitting those traps all the time with the increased radius.

Now rest of post is more opinion. But if you are Working for the most successful MMO in the world and you have a Dev Team that does not understand Ratios as they relate to class design .....Should they not get Fired

Let me share my personal experience with this. My class was Over Powered. All I had to do is spam one abiltiy with a huge raidius that did ont even have to aim. Really it was all i had to do so I just went aruond spamming one ability winning Arenas just because I could spam on ability. Sad thing is I beat teams that were actually more skilled than me (after pvping so much you can just gage other palyers skill pretty easily) cause I know how to spam.

Now at first I was like well It is my turn be OP class was kind of broken last Expansion. But after a while like ten months (amount of time it Took WoW to Fix this). It got kind of old and I wasnot using my full array of abilities cause just spaming one button So my game play actually got worst but because game mechanics were broken I was winning more. Lost a lot of the fun factor.

Now the the hunter in Cata was a little broken had blind spot .. no self heal and not to well suited for arenas to the point that PvPers would in general not want to play with hunters in arenas. But lets just say Cata hunter was slightly challenged in PvP which made things a little more challenging. So in that Era of WoW ( in Cata) I would actually beat Warriors and Dks which was exteremely difficult to do but could be done if you were willing to put the time in to get the skills. The feeling of beating a Warrior or Dk in PvP an icredible experience cause I Knew I had just accomplished something not to many hunters could do. So my ego was a little big. I was beating the odds so to speak. Went from that to spaming one ability and getting wins that I knew I did not deserve.

I could easily make tem more posts like this some of them about mage and pally cause those are the classes that I played. I was a multiclasser and say that this was a classwide problem. I want to Emphasize it is the Dev team at Blizz that does things like this. The guys in charge of Class Design and PvP game balnce. This does not include the blunders that they make in other areas. I just do not see how a game design professional TEAM could make this type of mistakes.

I do not want to be a troll so I will just sugar coat it. The dev team at WoW that is in charge of class design and game balance is very unimpressive might as well go with someone that is impressive or at least acceptable.

Plus there are other things like nerfing classes behind the scenes thinking no one will notice but I will just leave it with this one example of not less than 10 examples. Never ends too. I do not even play that game any more but sometimes I go and look at the patch notes and sure enough still making class design mistakes. So still umimpressive.

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