Activision?

#0 - Nov. 17, 2010, 4:21 a.m.
Blizzard Post
I don't really delve much into news and business affairs and like to stay in my own little world. Recently I just found out that you guys merged with Activision a few months ago. Every single problem you guys have created in the game since then makes so much more sense now. The ignored bugs, the content rushing, the absence of proper levels of customer service (as in blue posts being rare sightings rather than a caring person responding to at least the legitimate threads), these are all signs that you guys are either too busy butt-rubbing with your Activision pals in some office party somewhere, or the failures of Activision have been allowed to "help" with your company's processes. I've had a grudge with Activision and it's sub-par products for years, and you guys, being the awesome solid company I've known and loved ever since I bought Warcraft III, lower yourselves to the pit of the gaming industry. And for what? Better sales? More money? Your billions of dollars come from this game and if you don't clean up your act, you'll start losing many people, if you haven't noticed you already had. I'll give the next patch a chance, especially since it's the big one before Cata, but if that one either fails to fix current issues, or brings every bug in from the PTR (which has been a normal occurrence now) then I've had it. I've already digitally pre-ordered Cata, so I'll take my loses and just let my account run out if it comes to that extreme.

Don't fail me anymore Blizzard.
#4 - Nov. 17, 2010, 4:44 a.m.
Blizzard Post
While we currently have a business partnership with Activision, Palagasi, there is a mutual understanding between the two companies and neither supervises over the other. I, personally, work for Blizzard Entertainment - not Activision-Blizzard.

I don't know whether that will provide you comfort, as you seem wont to believe your own information, but I'd prefer to set the record straight. While many of our goals do logically include business goals, which include better sales which consequently means more money, our main objective is to provide you an [Epic] experience. We have always and continue to focus on quality and game play first.

MMO's are tricky beasts in that some bugs are simply unavoidable until we can get a larger test bed of examples to resolve the issue. Sometimes there are things we cannot reproduce internally, and observing them on live servers is necessary to hammer things out. Some things don't become prevalent until a number of people run into it, or our Quality Assurance folks may have missed it. That is all simply inevitable in a huge game like World of Warcraft.

I can understand the frustrations you're having - all of us who post here are also players, so we're right there with you, experiencing bugs or waiting on hotfixes. But threatening to quit does not resolve the issue at hand, nor does it provide us with valuable feedback to send to our developers or QA guys for investigation.

The next patch may not fix every issue you are experiencing. It may require a larger patch to do so, or we may not have found the right solution yet. New issues may arise too, and some of those may be easier to resolve than others. We have no intention of "failing" you, Palagasi, but it seems to me as though you are providing a very narrow window of what qualifies as "success," as perfection is not necessarily always attainable.