Blizzard – Page 3

AggroChat #123 – Purposeful Piddling

May 21, 2019September 11, 2016 by AggroChat

This week Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Tam talk Pax West 2016, Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns, and World of Warcraft Legion

This week we have a bizarre show that somehow covers a lot of content without us actually realizing it. Since Tam and Kodra attended Pax West last week we went into a discussion about all of the stuff they saw there. From there we branch out into a discussion about Guild Wars 2 and Tam recently picking the game up after talking to a friend about it. We largely discuss how the game has improved since launch and that Tam, Ash and Kodra are enjoying in it. Finally we wrap up the evening talking about World of Warcraft Legion and some of the experiences Grace and Belghast have after hitting the new level cap and experiencing World Quests.

Things We Discussed – Pax West 2016 – Dishonored 2 – Prey – 20XX – Open Sorcery – Thornwatch – Star Wars Destiny CCG – Hacknet – Elder Scrolls: Legends – Raging River Card – Elder Scrolls as MTG Colors – Duelyst – Speedrunners – Ultimate Chicken Horse – Pax Dev – Pax Panels – Guild Wars 2 – Heart of Thorns – World of Warcraft – Legion – World Quests

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

AggroChat #122 – Glimmers of Hope

May 21, 2019September 4, 2016 by AggroChat

Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Thalen talk about a bunch of stuff… with a significant emphasis on the launch of World of Warcraf Legion

Tonight we are down a Tam thanks to Pax West Shenanigans, and in theory at least we will be talking soon about those experiences. However for the time being… we talk a bunch of stuff but mostly World of Warcraft Legion. Right now Ashgar, Belghast and Grace are playing… and talk about their experiences with the launch, and the revisions to the game. The long story short is that we all seem to be enjoying ourselves. The main story is still frustrating, but the sub stories are amazing. We also talk a little bit about the game of the month Tales of Maj’Eyal, largely related to a few tips for getting started and things that players should really avoid getting bogged down in. Finally Kodra talks about his experiences with Deus Ex and Necropolis in recent play sessions for both.

Things Discussed – World of Warcraft – Legion – Class Halls – Spec Fantasy – Leveling Content – Tales of Maj’Eyal – Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – Necropolis

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Instant Relevance

November 4, 2015 by Belghast

King of Match Three

Yesterday morning was the Activision Blizzard earnings call for investors, and much of the focus has been on one particular tidbit of information. They announced that they are acquiring Candy Crush maker King Digital for the sum of $5.9 Billion dollars. The reaction to this announcement has been pretty varied, because in truth… many “core” gamers loath the concept of games like Candy Crush. First off there is some confusion to clear up. Activision Blizzard is not the same thing as Blizzard Entertainment, so early reports I saw talked about Blizzard buying King Digital… which caused some outrage. Activision Blizzard is the big parent company that pulls all the strings of the various products from Call of Duty to Skylanders to of course the Blizzard franchises. At first I have to admit I was taken by surprise by the announcement but that pretty much went away immediately when I thought about it. In doing this deal ActiBlizz is essentially buying instant relevance in the traditional mobile gaming market.

Now you might be saying to yourself… But Bel, Activision and Blizzard already doing mobile gaming. Sure they do… but they do it in a way that attempts to appeal to “core” gamers that are wanting something on their phone to play when they don’t have access to their normal gaming platforms. This is a vastly different market than the one that King Digital generally focuses on which are for lack of a better term “casual” and “mobile exclusive” users that would never in a million years… consider themselves gamers. Essentially King Digital targets people like my wife, that spends plenty of time playing games on her iPad but does not in any fashion think of herself as a gamer. So in essence with this one… albeit expensive acquisition, they now cover a market that they did not serve in any fashion. Sure Hearthstone is a great mobile game… but it really only draws in people who already are in the fold of “gamers”. The big thing is all of these “non-gamers” have prove time and time again that they are in fact willing to spend money on micro-transactions.

What This Means

In truth I doubt for the short term it really means anything. Activision will continue releasing big budget shooters like Call of Duty and Destiny… and Blizzard will continue flirting with e-sports while still not quite certain what to do with World of Warcraft. Another big chunk of this earnings report was a note that the WoW subscription numbers have more or less stabilized from their post Warlords of Draenor free fall. I feel like there is some fuzzy math at work here, but according to the official figures they have dropped from 5.6 Million to 5.5 Million. There was a strange little definition that was released to explain what they determined a subscriber.

Subscriber Definition: World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees’ territories are defined along the same rules.

This makes me think that these subscription numbers are in fact counting WoW Token players… seeing as how that would count as “prepaid” access. So the actual month to month subscription numbers would be a bit lower. To some extent I wish they would have broken those numbers out separately… since a monthly sub is semi-guaranteed income, and a token is a one time purchase. The other big news however is that they plan on this being the last month they actually announce subscription numbers. Instead they have a new sort of engagement number formula that they are working on to determine the health of the game.

At first glance this sounds a bit odd… and maybe like they are trying to hide losses within the cloak of mathematics. However… we are just days away from Blizzcon and it makes me wonder. Will this finally be the year that they announce World of Warcraft going to a free to play model? Cutting the ties of relying on subscriptions to convey the health of the game… would at least be one step in that direction. If I were Blizzard I would be seriously considering it… because honestly Free to Play seems to work. With the recent high publicity relaunch of Wildstar… that game is doing significantly better now than it was, and the same was essentially true with Star Wars the Old Republic went to the model. Free to Play has been the salvation of otherwise dying games… and even though World of Warcraft is far from dying… I still think they would benefit from the switch. It would be a massive shift in methodology and would probably change the way content is delivered, but it would also bring back a bunch of players that want to dip their toes in the game every now and then… but not feel like they are chained to a subscription. Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone are both wildly success as Free to Play experiences… and with Overwatch starting to ramp up and following that same model… it just seems like Blizzard has wrestled with how to make it work.

What I Hope Happens

So while I don’t think anything will change for a bit… my hope is that through this deal there is some cross pollination of skillsets. I would love to see better integration of mobile platforms and traditional games. As you know I have been playing a lot of Destiny… and quite honestly the way that game works is just not as clean as it should. There are a lot of things that you can do through the website… slightly different things that you can do through the mobile app… and even a different set of things through the game itself. The entire process feels cludgy as hell… but an attempt to move in the direction of giving players access to tools outside of the game. Now if you take that basic desire and match it with a company that has proven that they can spin the same old match three schlock into infectious gold… you can maybe create really interesting experiences that span traditional platforms and mobile gaming ones.

What I would love to see is a better mobile app for World of Warcraft. Why can’t we fish on our mobile phones and have it grant skill-ups and materials for our characters in game? Why can’t we do the normally tedious action of Archaeology in a mobile mini-game? Garrisons themselves were essentially the same sort of thing as a tiny tower like mobile game… why didn’t exist on mobile platforms allowing people to do the upkeep and maintenance activities when they couldn’t otherwise play the game? Why can’t we have a significantly better auction house integration system? Essentially… give players a reason to stay in the game by making them feel more connected to it.. on their own terms. A big part of my frustration with Garrisons is that I knew I had a one to two hour ritual waiting on me every time I logged into the game, before I could feel like I was free to do interesting things… like slay internet dragons. If I could do Garrisons while walking to my car at night, or on my lunch break… it would take some of that burden away so that I knew once I got home… I could do the fun stuff without having to worry about the “paperwork”. Essentially we live our lives on our phones… and the games that integrate better with how we live our lives are going to feel more “real” to us.

Overwatch Frustrations

October 29, 2015 by Belghast

Overwatch Hype

On Tuesday October 27th Blizzard opened the doors of Closed Beta for it’s highly anticipated shooter called Overwatch. As you might expect, the internet as a whole quickly lost their shit and reverted to a state of chain refreshing the battle.net account page to see if they were among the lucky few to get granted access. What I did not expect however was all of the infighting this process called as folks essentially called down a pox on the house of those who did manage to get in. It is one thing to be frustrated that you did not get into whatever the hot new Beta happens to be, but it is an entirely different to wish harm upon those who did. There were even a few folks who decided to flail about declaring that their not getting into Beta shows how little Blizzard cares. Others talk about how they should have earned access with this or that deed. At first I thought to myself… are we really this entitled? Because seriously… there have been some serious entitlement issues going on over the last few days.

Then I noticed something else happening that disturbs me even more. For those mere mortals like myself that do not make a living off gaming… then absolutely it would be entitlement. However for the folks that make a living through creating content related to Blizzard games… I started to read this impotently lashing out… as cold hard fear. When you make your money by presenting the freshest content on your Stream or your YouTube channel… you are in essence relying on being able to play whatever everyone else is playing. Not having access means you are missing out on all of these eyeballs that are now suddenly flocking to the internet to gaze into the window at those chosen few who get to play whatever game they want to play. Right or wrong… Blizzard is essentially saying who is really important to the future of their product and who is not.

The Hunt for Eyeballs

I am a shitty Streamer and an even worse YouTuber… but the most eyeballs I have ever had on my collective “stuff” is when I happened to get into the first wave of Alpha invites to Trove. I got to be one of a handful of people playing around with that game, and broadcasting it to the world and it was really noticeable. It is 6:30 in the morning right now… and one of the Overwatch streamers has over 10,000 viewers at this hour. During prime time… Overwatch has consistently been the highest watched game on the network. When you tune into one of these streams, especially the ones going on during the day… you will see a who’s who of internet celebrities fighting each other. Whether or not they intended it… Blizzard did essentially judge who was important to them and who was not by determining who got into that first wave of invites. That can be a pretty harsh reality check, especially if you have essentially devoted your career to supporting Blizzard products.

What worries me more however is what this says about the current state of video games in general. I remember how I felt the first time I got into a Friends and Family Alpha program… or FFA. I remember the excitement, and the desire to tell the entire world… but the reality that was I was bound behind a very serious Non Disclosure Agreement. I remember for one of these FFA programs I had to fax in a signed copy of a thirty page document back to the studio before being granted access. What made this work is that the company could literally focus on testing the game… rather than having to showcase it to the public 24/7. Sure it is frustrating to be in a thing that you cannot share… and sure it sucks for streamers especially to need to play something that they cannot show off to their viewers. However I think the model worked pretty damned well because up until these last few years it has been the model that almost all of the games you can think about nostalgically have been released under. It lets testing happen beyond the prying eyes of the public and bugs get fixed before it is ready for people to see it. The problem is… we the gamers have started to feel that there is something dishonest about this process… and that if a company isn’t completely transparent in every single minute action that they take… that it must be the sign of something horrible going on behind the scenes.

Marketing Cycle

The big problem is… we bore of games before they are released. There are games out there that seem to have permanent alpha and beta cycles, and as we go through seeing them displayed on our screens for two years… then the final release just seems lacking. There have been numerous times on AggroChat for example when someone brings up a title… and I have to ask “wait that actually released?”. There is this constant battle to control the hype cycle about a game, and make sure that your product is getting enough spin among the social media influencers. So when a game like Overwatch goes into one of these lengthy beta cycles… the company needs these streamers just as much as the streamers need the game to showcase to their viewers. They need those all important eyeballs peeping their wares… and getting excited enough to plunk down their hard earned money to purchase goods in it. The frustrating thing about it… is it feels like we are always in a hype cycle for something. It becomes much like the American Political system… where the candidates… or games in this case are always running for the next election. The market at this point is simply saturated with new titles that all sound interchangeable. MOBA with FPS roots… FPS with MOBA Character Styling… FPS gameplay MOBA spirit… the marketing spin that gets applied to games just seems meaningless after awhile.

Where I really start to get frustrated however is when this hype machine starts hurting people. Sure watching someone have an internet meltdown is entertaining while it goes on… but behind the screen is someone obviously in pain. I am not coming out to support those tantrums… but I am coming out to say that for all that is good and right in the world… lets stop hurting each other over a game. I have been just like you among those people frantically checking my battle.net account each time a new wave of invites comes out. So I get it… I get the desire to play that new shiny game. I’ve done this cycle over and over, and will continue doing this cycle until the games industry changes the way it works. Even if I want something really badly… I make it a goal in life to be excited for the people who are having good things happen to them… rather than being that selfish person who is lashing out at others because they got left out. I get the frustration and fear especially if you make your living from this sort of thing…. but having a meltdown in front of your followers isn’t going to help either. The truth is… we are eventually all going to get in… and the additional truth is… most of us will play a handful of games and then move on to the next shiny thing. This is not as important as we happen to be making it out right now… and within a years time… this will feel like another silly incident in the gaming community. What will stick around however… is how people feel about you and the way you have treated them. So lets just be awesome to each other while we wait for the next hype cycle to spin up.