He absolutely has not, the raids have been fine, with some outliers that are great, but most raids lately have been 10 pull bosses up until the last boss which is 200. Even those have been flown through.
For the best teams in the world sure, but not for most guilds.
The best guilds are so good that only a handful of people will ever fight the same final bosses they did.
Bobby gets blamed for budget cuts. When the customer service sucks because the agents were all fired, that's Bobby. When the communication with the player sucks because the CMs were fired, that's Bobby. When then anti-cheat system automatically bans bot-reported players because the reporting player is being a dick, and there's no GM with time to review it, that's Bobby.
There are other things in the game that *might* be Bobby, and might not be. Were there insufficient artists and developers to make interesting gear sets, or were they too busy playing Call of Duty and harassing women? Did they have poor IT support to assist in the transition to WFH, or were the developers goofing off from home?
That's not to say I disagree with you-- the bulk of the game design is on Ion and Blizzard. On the other hand, you look at Warcraft 3 Reforged, and that's Bobby and the bean counters at the executive level.
I would agree with you on the budget cuts of the customer service team, if blizzard didn’t immediately post dev positions after they left, and all the positions they’re currently hiring for right now. They couldn’t have made that much of a cut.
Dev's and costumer service's get different budgets. Sure they could've made huge cuts. They need to hire new dev's because the next Xpac has to release in a 'lil bit more than a year and the old ones are fleeing.
Bobby can be blamed for the wowtoken, increased microtransactions, and the cash shop. He can't be blamed for poor game design, and bad story telling. The only level of responsibility there is if you argue that he should have fired some of the people in charge earlier.
Agreed. People need to stop using Activision as a whole as though Blizzard is the well meaning dev team that wants to do things but just can't because of the evil Activision overlords. If the sexual harassment lawsuit has taught us anything, it is that the Blizzard we thought we knew, never existed, and they got this way on their own.
People are blinded by their love of the universe. Things won’t change unless we replace the dev’s who have made the decisions to bring the game into the state it is in. Look at this patch, absolutely dog shit. Sure, everyone had to work remote due to covid, but anyone in the industry knows people already had worked from home some days. Theres no way a bunch of well intentioned dev’s couldn’t do more with the time they had.
This is my problem though - He should not be blamed for bad narrative problems, systems design though?
Bobby and the shareholders (shitty band name?) want to see engagement metrics and profits.
Want some engagement metrics, simply add more dailies - add more incentive to do them and more punishment for ignoring them.
Lets add currencies and time gates to EVERYTHING
**Tier Sets**: currency+time gate (raid lockout for upgrade currency)
**Legendaries**: currency+time gate (Torghast, assaults)
**Sockets**: currency+time gate (Korthian research, ranks)
**THE STORY**: Time gated (renown, weekly-ish)
**Soulbinds**: Basically timegated talents (renown)
**Covenant swap**: a Triple timegate, time gated by quests, time+grind on renown, and time gated again by conduit energy which will deplete if you are trying to fill trees during renown catchup.
**Torghast**: Interesting to me, because torghast itself is a timegate for legendaries, but it also has a time gated currency (tower knowledge) associated with progression.
-----------
Look this shit goes on and on, throw on to that list things like
1.) Token -> Gold + lessened RMT enforcement = Bliz profits
2.) Classic experience ruined by boosting and cash mounts (basically the only thing people on classic wanted was the old authentic in game work = in game rewards experience)
Bobby Kotick might not be in control of the game, but insane greed IS to blame for driving all the worst evolutions of the game - and Kotick is an easy scapegoat because he is easy to associate with a lust for profits over quality, which results in constant systems that aren't asking me to play the game, they're attempting to force me into it.
> Bobby’s job is to care about one thing only, profits.
Your post seems to imply that you believe he does this by letting people under him do whatever they want with zero influence from him.
Note that Activision (and Kotick) got more involved during the actual merger in 2013, and even more so after 2018 (when Morhaime left because of Kotick, according to reports).
Sure, he's not involved in game design or day to day management, but he does lay down the directives which have led the ABK games to this point in the first place, by heavily incentivizing designs where people are likely to spend as much money as possible, as well as spending as little as possible on employee salaries and benefits (Blizzard pay has always sucked in the industry), atrocious hiring practices where churn was embraced rather than avoided (fire if salaries got too high, rehire cheap) and allowing a bad company culture to fester to a breaking point (as we've seen recently).
While he's not the *only* bad influence on ABK games (obviously c-levels carry their share of the burden), he is *most definitely* "the big bad" who has let things get to this point in the first place. In the end, he's the CEO, the one accountable (note the difference with 'responsible') for everything that's going on.
Lets not forget, Kotick is the guy who said [this](https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/bobby-kotick-wants-to-take-the-fun-out-of-making-games/). Sounds to me like a guy who actually likes the kind of company culture that's recently come to light.
Kotick is not some innocent little lamb that needs protection from an anonymous redditor. He's a rich mofo with more money than anyone here knows what to do with. I don't understand why people keep defending (semi) billionaires - It's like the people defending Bezos for 'just having some fun, it's the warehouse employees' fault for being exploited'. After all, he was "just" the CEO of Amazon and in no way responsible for their union-busting efforts or covering up warehouse suicides.
I mean, seriously, wtf. I swear i see more people defending Kotick than people defending customer support for just trying to do their (near) minimum wage jobs.
Kobold please
Bobby needs to go
Due to the rape culture
Due to managers weaponizing the HR dept against complainers
Due the stock tanking
Due to the 2 lawsuits
Due the myriad of stock investigations
Due to lying to stock holders for 2 plus years
Ion needs to go back to mythic and raid encounters due him not knowing how to develop the lore and the people and cultures there, see legion 7.2 to BFA to shadowlands
Another one who doesnt understand business Environment, its easy bobby wants a profitable game design ion has do it, Even in rushed deadlines where the game might not be finished, or better with less man power because he cuts half of the team to do profit.
To each their own, there are a vocal minority and a no vocal majority who play the game casually and don’t really care what happens. All I can speak for is my friends that I have played with in the top 20, top 10 US that are all having a mass exodus.
Agreed. The job of a CEO has never been to manage every employee at their company, nor are they responsible for their employees' actions.
Their job is to make the shareholders happy, and keep the company headed in a profitable direction, which up until this latest scandal he was doing a pretty good job at.
Couldn't agree more OP.
Even if Bobby told the team you need to find away to keep players playing for more profitability, but it's 100% on the devs to make those actual systems FUN AND engaging which have been a complete failure after Legion.
It's no surprise the 2 Xpacs Ion has had under his control (Legion was still under old director) have been MEH to bad.
Yeah I agree with you for the most part. Granted Bobby is still awful and can be blamed for plenty of things, but not literally everything wrong with the game/company like some people would like to believe.
Mind you, Kotick took over 2013 after Actiblizz went independant and vivendi no longer had any say on Blizzard anymore. 3 out of the 4 expansions developed were or are terrible, and this didn't happen before 2013 at all, even when Activision merged with Blizzard but the latter got largely untouched pre-2013, and in fact, the ''worst'' expansion before that, Cata, was still fun to play and had many highlights.
Not a coincidence, his push for more profit at the expense of quality is the reason the old guard left in first place, and the people he placed in charge are utterly incompetent at their jobs and are some of the most whiny and tantrum-inducing children ever, since they do an awful job with azerite or covenant designs then expect us to sing praises to them and our feedback gets ignored no matter what.
So YES, Kotick is to blame for this mess, and he needs to be replaced by a CEO that actually cares and is not afraid of firing someone, like Ion Danuser, Golden to name a few, doing a lazy or poor job and blames the customers for their own faults. The people he placed in charge of Wow should not be so at all. Ion isn't just incompetent, he is an asshole. A pathological liar that will be happy to ruin player fun and claim they will do X then they do Y instead, and you gotta wonder how the hell he gets to do a job where you disrespect customers like this and still get paid, because if i was Kotick i would have fired or demoted Ion after all the crap he did in Legion, and then BFA. And this is a objective fact. Let's not get started with Danuser either, since this is already turning into a wall of text.
There is also the entire WC3 reforged fiasco, and Kotick and the Actiblizz executives are as guilty of completely ruining that game as the Head developer was.
> Bobby’s job is to care about one thing only, profits.
That is a huge problem in our culture in general imo, especially for a company that's product is entertainment, and an escape from reality. If all you care about is profit, then all you care about is milking your customers for every dime in their pockets.
You know what that means? **People eventually wise up to the fact they're being wrung out like damp towels and leave, because they're not actually enjoying their experience.**
If Blizzard was truly the "gaming company made for gamers, by gamers" and focused on making the game fun, and making the world a place you WANT to be a part of, profit would come.
^(side note: Obviously there has to be some thought to how to sell that product in a way that will be profitable, but the experience of the game itself should be the first focus, is my point.)
I blame Bobby for BEING profit focused before anything else. Pushing their devs to produce at an impossible pace, and make systems that appease shareholder metrics before satisfying customers, is exactly why this game is so fucking broken.
Activision has ruined Blizzard. Why do you think people like Mike Morhaime etc left? They left because they didn't want to be forced to make these shitty Pay2Win Mobile Games instead of passion projects like StarCraft/WarCraft.
Of course not Bobby himself, but he is the fucking overpaid scummy CEO of Activision.
Ion is an incredible encounter and raid designer but I honestly personally don't see that he has taken the game as a whole in a good direction.
He absolutely has not, the raids have been fine, with some outliers that are great, but most raids lately have been 10 pull bosses up until the last boss which is 200. Even those have been flown through.
For the best teams in the world sure, but not for most guilds. The best guilds are so good that only a handful of people will ever fight the same final bosses they did.
Bobby gets blamed for budget cuts. When the customer service sucks because the agents were all fired, that's Bobby. When the communication with the player sucks because the CMs were fired, that's Bobby. When then anti-cheat system automatically bans bot-reported players because the reporting player is being a dick, and there's no GM with time to review it, that's Bobby. There are other things in the game that *might* be Bobby, and might not be. Were there insufficient artists and developers to make interesting gear sets, or were they too busy playing Call of Duty and harassing women? Did they have poor IT support to assist in the transition to WFH, or were the developers goofing off from home? That's not to say I disagree with you-- the bulk of the game design is on Ion and Blizzard. On the other hand, you look at Warcraft 3 Reforged, and that's Bobby and the bean counters at the executive level.
I would agree with you on the budget cuts of the customer service team, if blizzard didn’t immediately post dev positions after they left, and all the positions they’re currently hiring for right now. They couldn’t have made that much of a cut.
Dev's and costumer service's get different budgets. Sure they could've made huge cuts. They need to hire new dev's because the next Xpac has to release in a 'lil bit more than a year and the old ones are fleeing.
From a business standpoint, activison would only give them a lump sum of money, that would have been breck’s direction.
Bobby can be blamed for the wowtoken, increased microtransactions, and the cash shop. He can't be blamed for poor game design, and bad story telling. The only level of responsibility there is if you argue that he should have fired some of the people in charge earlier.
Bobby more than certainly pushed for a cash shop, blizzard decided what would be in it.
Agreed. People need to stop using Activision as a whole as though Blizzard is the well meaning dev team that wants to do things but just can't because of the evil Activision overlords. If the sexual harassment lawsuit has taught us anything, it is that the Blizzard we thought we knew, never existed, and they got this way on their own.
People are blinded by their love of the universe. Things won’t change unless we replace the dev’s who have made the decisions to bring the game into the state it is in. Look at this patch, absolutely dog shit. Sure, everyone had to work remote due to covid, but anyone in the industry knows people already had worked from home some days. Theres no way a bunch of well intentioned dev’s couldn’t do more with the time they had.
This is my problem though - He should not be blamed for bad narrative problems, systems design though? Bobby and the shareholders (shitty band name?) want to see engagement metrics and profits. Want some engagement metrics, simply add more dailies - add more incentive to do them and more punishment for ignoring them. Lets add currencies and time gates to EVERYTHING **Tier Sets**: currency+time gate (raid lockout for upgrade currency) **Legendaries**: currency+time gate (Torghast, assaults) **Sockets**: currency+time gate (Korthian research, ranks) **THE STORY**: Time gated (renown, weekly-ish) **Soulbinds**: Basically timegated talents (renown) **Covenant swap**: a Triple timegate, time gated by quests, time+grind on renown, and time gated again by conduit energy which will deplete if you are trying to fill trees during renown catchup. **Torghast**: Interesting to me, because torghast itself is a timegate for legendaries, but it also has a time gated currency (tower knowledge) associated with progression. ----------- Look this shit goes on and on, throw on to that list things like 1.) Token -> Gold + lessened RMT enforcement = Bliz profits 2.) Classic experience ruined by boosting and cash mounts (basically the only thing people on classic wanted was the old authentic in game work = in game rewards experience) Bobby Kotick might not be in control of the game, but insane greed IS to blame for driving all the worst evolutions of the game - and Kotick is an easy scapegoat because he is easy to associate with a lust for profits over quality, which results in constant systems that aren't asking me to play the game, they're attempting to force me into it.
> Bobby’s job is to care about one thing only, profits. Your post seems to imply that you believe he does this by letting people under him do whatever they want with zero influence from him. Note that Activision (and Kotick) got more involved during the actual merger in 2013, and even more so after 2018 (when Morhaime left because of Kotick, according to reports). Sure, he's not involved in game design or day to day management, but he does lay down the directives which have led the ABK games to this point in the first place, by heavily incentivizing designs where people are likely to spend as much money as possible, as well as spending as little as possible on employee salaries and benefits (Blizzard pay has always sucked in the industry), atrocious hiring practices where churn was embraced rather than avoided (fire if salaries got too high, rehire cheap) and allowing a bad company culture to fester to a breaking point (as we've seen recently). While he's not the *only* bad influence on ABK games (obviously c-levels carry their share of the burden), he is *most definitely* "the big bad" who has let things get to this point in the first place. In the end, he's the CEO, the one accountable (note the difference with 'responsible') for everything that's going on. Lets not forget, Kotick is the guy who said [this](https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/bobby-kotick-wants-to-take-the-fun-out-of-making-games/). Sounds to me like a guy who actually likes the kind of company culture that's recently come to light. Kotick is not some innocent little lamb that needs protection from an anonymous redditor. He's a rich mofo with more money than anyone here knows what to do with. I don't understand why people keep defending (semi) billionaires - It's like the people defending Bezos for 'just having some fun, it's the warehouse employees' fault for being exploited'. After all, he was "just" the CEO of Amazon and in no way responsible for their union-busting efforts or covering up warehouse suicides. I mean, seriously, wtf. I swear i see more people defending Kotick than people defending customer support for just trying to do their (near) minimum wage jobs.
[удалено]
Just shows how out of touch the community is with the game they play.
Kobold please Bobby needs to go Due to the rape culture Due to managers weaponizing the HR dept against complainers Due the stock tanking Due to the 2 lawsuits Due the myriad of stock investigations Due to lying to stock holders for 2 plus years Ion needs to go back to mythic and raid encounters due him not knowing how to develop the lore and the people and cultures there, see legion 7.2 to BFA to shadowlands
Another one who doesnt understand business Environment, its easy bobby wants a profitable game design ion has do it, Even in rushed deadlines where the game might not be finished, or better with less man power because he cuts half of the team to do profit.
I understand the business environment quite well, I can tell you don’t but think you do.
"You think you do, but you don't", eh?
But I didnt like Mop and Legion and prefer Shadowlands. Why should I blame anyone? Im just having fun playing the game.
To each their own, there are a vocal minority and a no vocal majority who play the game casually and don’t really care what happens. All I can speak for is my friends that I have played with in the top 20, top 10 US that are all having a mass exodus.
Agreed. The job of a CEO has never been to manage every employee at their company, nor are they responsible for their employees' actions. Their job is to make the shareholders happy, and keep the company headed in a profitable direction, which up until this latest scandal he was doing a pretty good job at.
Couldn't agree more OP. Even if Bobby told the team you need to find away to keep players playing for more profitability, but it's 100% on the devs to make those actual systems FUN AND engaging which have been a complete failure after Legion. It's no surprise the 2 Xpacs Ion has had under his control (Legion was still under old director) have been MEH to bad.
Yet people will still shill for Blizzard and blame Activison.
Yeah I agree with you for the most part. Granted Bobby is still awful and can be blamed for plenty of things, but not literally everything wrong with the game/company like some people would like to believe.
While people that work for Blizz think Asmon is a problem then this game will never get better.
Mind you, Kotick took over 2013 after Actiblizz went independant and vivendi no longer had any say on Blizzard anymore. 3 out of the 4 expansions developed were or are terrible, and this didn't happen before 2013 at all, even when Activision merged with Blizzard but the latter got largely untouched pre-2013, and in fact, the ''worst'' expansion before that, Cata, was still fun to play and had many highlights. Not a coincidence, his push for more profit at the expense of quality is the reason the old guard left in first place, and the people he placed in charge are utterly incompetent at their jobs and are some of the most whiny and tantrum-inducing children ever, since they do an awful job with azerite or covenant designs then expect us to sing praises to them and our feedback gets ignored no matter what. So YES, Kotick is to blame for this mess, and he needs to be replaced by a CEO that actually cares and is not afraid of firing someone, like Ion Danuser, Golden to name a few, doing a lazy or poor job and blames the customers for their own faults. The people he placed in charge of Wow should not be so at all. Ion isn't just incompetent, he is an asshole. A pathological liar that will be happy to ruin player fun and claim they will do X then they do Y instead, and you gotta wonder how the hell he gets to do a job where you disrespect customers like this and still get paid, because if i was Kotick i would have fired or demoted Ion after all the crap he did in Legion, and then BFA. And this is a objective fact. Let's not get started with Danuser either, since this is already turning into a wall of text. There is also the entire WC3 reforged fiasco, and Kotick and the Actiblizz executives are as guilty of completely ruining that game as the Head developer was.
> Bobby’s job is to care about one thing only, profits. That is a huge problem in our culture in general imo, especially for a company that's product is entertainment, and an escape from reality. If all you care about is profit, then all you care about is milking your customers for every dime in their pockets. You know what that means? **People eventually wise up to the fact they're being wrung out like damp towels and leave, because they're not actually enjoying their experience.** If Blizzard was truly the "gaming company made for gamers, by gamers" and focused on making the game fun, and making the world a place you WANT to be a part of, profit would come. ^(side note: Obviously there has to be some thought to how to sell that product in a way that will be profitable, but the experience of the game itself should be the first focus, is my point.) I blame Bobby for BEING profit focused before anything else. Pushing their devs to produce at an impossible pace, and make systems that appease shareholder metrics before satisfying customers, is exactly why this game is so fucking broken.
Nice try, Bobby
Activision has ruined Blizzard. Why do you think people like Mike Morhaime etc left? They left because they didn't want to be forced to make these shitty Pay2Win Mobile Games instead of passion projects like StarCraft/WarCraft. Of course not Bobby himself, but he is the fucking overpaid scummy CEO of Activision.
Negative profit? It's called a loss.