Blizzard Is Worse Than You Thought | Asmongold Reacts

[@ha-itsme]

In modern gaming, OFFLINE MODE is a frickin feature when it should be a base requirement for non competitive games.

[@MimiMimi-yj4kl]

The problem is piracy. Just what happened to last epoch and wolcen. They have offline mode and easily got pirated

[@afos88]

@@MimiMimi-yj4kl If the game is good then majority of people are still going to buy it I do pirate single player/offline games to try them out and if theyre good I do buy them later every time

[@0AThijs]

@@afos88 This, I only buy games when they are worth it, I have pirated many games and let's be real, many games are just...

[@eliasnilsson6604]

@@MimiMimi-yj4kl Piracy in combination with downloadable games. When you needed the disc to play the game it was much simplier.

[@zhongliimpact6220]

@@MimiMimi-yj4kl Which is not an issue when games are great

[@AussieRonkey]

The thing people may not know. The Original DOTA Dev approached blizzard and said lets make this a standalone and they said "We are not interested". They should have learned this lesson from when they approached Games Workshop wanting to take Warhammer to the PC RTS world and was told "We are not interested", resulting in the spawn of Warcraft and later StarCraft. Warhammer did push a likeness rights legal claim against, that they lost. Much like what blizzard did with the DOTA creator. The little guy was put down, became the big guy and put the little guy down.

[@CPPpotkustartti]

Was it Eul, Guinsoo or Icefrog? I don't remember at all. My money is on Eul, but DotA had a lot of versions over time, most of them died out while popular one, DotA Allstars stayed. To those who don't know and are curious: -Eul made Defense of the Ancients on Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos but didn't move to The Frozen Throne. -Guinsoo during TFT took over DotA Allstars that duo of creators stopped updating (if my memory servers right) and improved over it. -Icefrog took over Dota Allstars after Guinsoo decided not to do this anymore and year or two later it's announced that Guinsoo made deal to assist with League of Legends. Icefrog is current head of DotA and Dota 2, although i do wonder how DotA Allstars community is doing...in Warcraft 3 Reforged 😖

[@AussieRonkey]

​@@CPPpotkustartti EUL was the original makers of DOTA. They based it off Aeon of Strife (AoS) from SC1. But it was Steve Freak with Icefrog who approached Blizzard and was nocked back.

[@SpaNkeee]

@@CPPpotkustartti IceFrog really is the GOAT. You also have to name Neichus when talking about DotA. Played an important role in the early days.

[@nasgorenak]

to be fair they mustve had a alot of offers. like shart tanks for game

[@CPPpotkustartti]

@@SpaNkeee Thank you, i had not read about Neichus so this came out as surprise. I need to pay attention to him in future.

[@drec2072]

The vibe in the games from 1996 - 2005 was something special..

[@RBFR01]

Halo 3 will forever be in my heart.

[@phyxion123]

Yeah this video just depressed me a bit. Life was so awesome pre 2010 before social media blew up to its current form and the socio and political culture wars started. People with dyed hair were punkrock who rebelled the system and not mentally ill lunatics who are pro government and pro big pharma. Get this, the news, actually reported the news and wasnt propaganda. I know right?

[@graeme3827]

Even mmo's. I had so much fun in Ultima Online from 1998-2004

[@scoper7897]

because it was the first games. The times when companys wanted to make what PEOPLE WANTED. Now is all about MONEY. They make games only around money now and 80% of planning is how to make most money off the games skins battlepasses micro transactions and so on

[@miroslavraven1413]

yes!

[@ateela15]

That was a legit rug pull for overwatch 2 lol

[@VoidStar.]

I bought Reforged, saw how they'd lied about everything, and immediately started trying to get a refund. I had to fight Blizzard on it for weeks because I had pre-ordered the game one drunken night about a year prior to it coming out. They claimed they could only give me a refund back to the card I had used when purchasing it but I'd literally changed banks since then. Finally, I talked to customer service over the phone and got someone who worked out a refund for me. Of course, when they gave me the refund, they also took away my ownership of the original WC3 games. So they basically stole from me after giving my money back. 🙃

[@SA-rb5xq]

You sure you don't have the old CD-key on your Blizzard account? It won't be accessible straight through the Bnet launcher, but if you go to their website ?

[@VoidStar.]

@@SA-rb5xq Wow! Thank you for this reply! I actually did find that I still had the CD-Keys attached to the account at the bottom of my Games & Subscriptions tab under "Classic Games". It let me download the WC3 installer after going through a Support page. Never realized that it was just buried deep in my account. If only it really did just install the old game and not just give me the "downgraded" version of Reforged when I installed it! But, hey, beats losing the game entirely! Thanks again!

[@somethingclever4563]

Wow that's fd up bro

[@Quaarlos]

it happened to one of my friend too.

[@Tilt_TM]

Piracy of the original game at that point would be 100% justified

[@konaqua122]

What also made Warcraft 3 good is that they allowed players to technically mod their games by map. Up to this day, there are uploaded maps for Warcraft 3 that you can play on the original one, not the reworked version.

[@bass7100]

Literally, the best thing was jumping on battle net and playing custom maps.

[@Texansfan59]

Custom wow maps sounds fun

[@Revkor]

when EA does a remaster better

[@XardasD]

Warcraft 1 was eppic i did need 20 flop discs to install it but on time when it was out it was epic 😂 i remember when friends was cooming to me to look how i play 😂😂😂

[@mrmonokel2335]

@@bass7100 I am still playing Legion TD up to this day from time to time...

[@EnzordG]

I remember being 11 years old, seeing people at an internet cafe playing WoW. Damn i will never forget how badly i wanted to play.

[@clivezilla05]

And now internet cafes dont exist

[@tombush]

Bro, me too - I shared a character on a friends account for like 2 months before I got my own and then a further 2 months before we got a pc good enough to play!

[@KaplaBen]

I remember moving to a new city for studies. My parents wouldn't allow me to buy a PC because they knew I would play nonstop. So I had to go to internet cafes. I was supposed to study hard, but all I wanted to do was play wow. I would withdraw cash & pay the cafe cash to try to hide it. Halfway through the first year, my parents agreed to the decision that I would switch studies to computer science in a different school. So it didn't matter anymore that I got good grades, and my time spent in the cybercafe shot up. It was called the Milk cybercafe in Strasburg. The toilet downstairs didn't work, so i had to be strategic. I would use the toilet of the Kebab place nearby systematically when buying food there. There would be other weird persons too, broke musicians, dropouts... Best fucking time of my life

[@Thrall966]

@@KaplaBenlovely story !

[@aaronhepker3594]

Dude, my local library. Some dude 12 years ago playing WoW, I was wanting to play it but my christian parents said no lol. After how the company has turned out I swear they knew the future

[@215Daniel]

My friends dad was some network engineer in the 90's, and in his basement had like 5 pc's, as kids would pile in there, playing orcs and humans, wc2, starcraft and diablo together, downloading a ton of shit on Kazaa, playing magic the gathering, n64 and eating endless Dominos pizza and drinking Mountain Dew. What a great childhood it was.

[@BuckScrotumn]

Dude that sounds like every kid's dream.

[@Don_74]

I wish life was that simple still

[@morganseppy5180]

We loved LAN parties. 😢

[@cralted]

This guy lived the dream

[@diffusewings4937]

That sounds beautiful

[@spacejunk2186]

Listening to what ex-Blizzard devs have to say about the company gives me the impression that Blizzard is a studio run by middle management bullies and petty high school cliqes.

[@MrJzplastic]

Corporate America

[@barahng]

Cue that one Steve Jobs quote

[@blakegallegos1064]

You just described all corporations in general.

[@spacejunk2186]

@@blakegallegos1064 Blizzard is particularly bad in this.

[@svenswizzle8271]

I always thought middle management bullies are the adult version of insufferable petty high school cliques.

[@theviewer1423]

"don't you guys have phones" no we don't have phones we use pigeons with little notes and smoke signals if we have to

[@vida2559]

Right? Why would we need phones. We can just send messages in game if needed. Or discord

[@dustysmoke4996]

I may be old school, but i'll never play any kind of game on an effing phone. That's what a mouse, keyboard, and 32", 4K 144Hz monitor is for. smh

[@Brabant076]

@@dustysmoke4996 Vampire Survivors is pretty fun on mobile.

[@TheBathrobeWizard]

​@dustysmoke4996 Honestly for me I played hungry shark and hungry dragon. But don't anymore. I miss the control of all those lovely peripherals

[@jaroskidarksoulski3932]

This made me laugh so hard 😂

[@Knowbody42]

One of the things people hated about Diablo 3 was that drop rates were balanced around Chinese bot farmers. Then eventually they removed the AH, and changed drop rates so that normal people could actually find their own gear.

[@Draekrio]

The thing I hated about Diablo 3 was that it showed me very early on how shitty online service models could be and how questionable blizzard's security was. I bought the game and within 3 days my account was hacked by some asian gold farmer. Blizzard required photographic ID to be able to recover the account. Then within another 3 days with a changed password and email it was hacked again. I basically havn't touched anything Blizzard in over a decade because of it.

[@sotvrno93]

@@Draekrio didn't miss a thing tbh.

[@Macronaso]

Asmongold is way off base on how much the AH affected the game. We literally played for gold drop for months because picking items off the ground was completely pointless. all that mattered was gold so you could buy the items you needed, it was the worst ARPG experience you could have. No thinking no exitement over drops just amass gold.

[@Thorne1982]

@@Macronaso I had a completely different experience with it. I played about 4ish hours a day back then and I love the RMAH setup. I never bought anything off of it but I did sell several things. Sure I wish I had got better drops but unless godly things are dropping every 20 minutes theres always going to be people saying that. Now that said I havent played blizzard games in about 4 years now just grew out of them. I dont do much gaming these days.

[@moonkinx]

D3 was imo the definitive game of toxic culture. Majority of gaming friends fell for the RMAH craze and if you play for fun you are frowned upon for not playing to "making money" instead.

[@ChrisWeiner]

When I was working in the electronics section at Walmart back in 2020, I found a Diablo II box in our back room as well as Windows Vista and 2011 antivirus software lol

[@ryanlaffan1397]

Dude u shoulda bought it or asked ur boss to buy it, that sorta stuff would be out of use for them but still probably in system (Would be in the UK) and probably super cheap / resellable. If they were boxed and sealed u missed a steal there.

[@blindenergy6694]

diablo 2 was my favorite game i still play it time to time. i played hardcore uswest for 10 years

[@hotdog5927]

icefrog wanted to work with blizzard to make dota 2 and they kept ignoring him, this was long before valve scooped him up. they have no one to blame but themselves

[@psynque]

I'm not sure if this is just a meme but I heard Blizz offered Icefrog like a Warcraft t-shirt or something to hand over the rights of DOTA.

[@greenfroggood2392]

And remember dota was huge in sea/china and russia, not so much in NA. Blizzard only cared about the money from wow, the dota community was always treated wrong by blizz.

[@mr.nobody2244]

Today Icefrog is making bank with Valve. Good for him.

[@cypher7523]

Bet hes glad they didn't take him on now.

[@DavidGlendaleArdenaso]

damn TIL@@psynque

[@cerealbox7872]

Real ID was the last time Blizzard said: "Sorry, we screwed up. we will fix this."

[@Yasviele]

From then on, fans of their games who had valid concerns and criticism were labeled as haters, trolls, and no lifes who didn't understand their extraordinary vision

[@greenwing90]

"Don't you guys have phones"- from that point they said.. "our way or the highway".. and most left.

[@zergtoss1]

Yea I had ownership of EventHorizon on bnet when I go invited to the 1st wave of the closed sc2 beta… then they did that shit.

[@aaronslack7292]

It was the last of the original blizzard execs calling the shots then

[@TheFunnyEagle]

Wth you talking about,son? They say sorry we screwed up at the end of every expansion after not listening to beta feedback. Then they fix it and screw it up in the next expansion 😂

[@SaltySparrow]

Warcraft 3 Custom Maps were INCREDIBLE. I played some jank LOTR custom map at a friend's house and I was Gandalf blasting people. I was hooked.

[@ChrisZukowski88]

footmen frenzy was the shit too. The official balanced map I mean, because too many frenzy maps with unbalanced madness. Battleships and tanks was great too! Dota was top dog though.

[@razean22]

Dont forget that DotA once was a custom WC3 map!

[@Thebearsalad]

DOTA and all the TD maps.... DBZ RPG, LOTR maps, there were some absolute gems in the custom maps

[@IndianTelephone]

Pudge Wars baby! Also Uther Party! That map was our Mario Party! Uther Party was incredible, also Run Kitty Run, And some of the pvp brawler maps with custom characters! Not to forget all the tower defense maps

[@roundblackbear6586]

the anime pvp maps were so good, Pudge wars and mirana wars were my childhood

[@Jerichoswa11]

The auction house was broken from the get go, it was causing the player base to play the auction house with an arpg side game. People were talking openly about selling gear for cash then, instead of the private whispers or teamspeak.

[@nathanpapp432]

The auction house was never the issue. It was the absurdly low drop rates.

[@Steinmetal4]

The auction house was a helpful addition. D2 alway had a heavy trading element, the AH just made it streamlined and more fun. The actual act of trading in D2 was a slog... all the gameplay as a direct result of the trading was the best part. The devs haven't understood that since D3. The auction house just made tedious part easier.

[@hawkshot867]

What fucking blows my mind about the Warcraft 3 Reforged is it wasn't just bad... It also destroyed the classic Warcraft 3. It's genuinely insane how anyone allowed that to happen. D2R and Starcraft Remastered are both incredible though... Wtf happened with Warcraft dude.

[@zerohbeat]

Blizzard made huge mistakes like outsourcing the development to the wrong studio.... :(

[@Kain_Xavier]

Blizzard didn't make D2R, so they don't get any credit for that. Vicarious Visions made it. They were bought out by Blizzard and are now known as "Blizzard Albany".

[@Alzarath]

StarCraft Remastered is a much better experience compared to Reforged, but it's not without flaws. Like Reforged, it's much clunkier. It used to take me 1-3 seconds to get into Brood War, now I have to wait 5 times as long and then it tries to log me into the Blizzard services before allowing me to interact with the game. I remember starting the game and spamming "ME" on the keyboard to instantly get into the online portion of the game. Also like Reforged, they've made every effort against preserving the ability to play the original game version from before the remaster was released. A small list of other downsides: - Backwards compatibility with existing maps is not guaranteed. - They apparently abandoned the idea of adding unit skins out of the gate. - Any new interfaces added to the game clashes with the existing interfaces. - If you're not playing with the HD version of the game, there is a reduction in visual fidelity.

[@dennisrkb]

Sry I'm ootl, could you elaborate how it destroyed classic WC3?

[@hawkshot867]

@@dennisrkb they overwrote the servers, so you can't download the old version of the game anymore. You have to have a disc and never connect to the internet to play the old version of the game, and you can't play any of the pre reforged patches on official Blizzard servers. So they quite literally deleted original Warcraft 3 when they pushed Reforge live.

[@Clockwork0nions]

55:38 Riot didn’t do the exact same thing. They left people who preferred working hybrid or remote with management approval on those work schedules. Blizzard and Activision rescinded all of those and forced everyone to come back into one of the most expensive places to live in Cali or get fired.

[@madpostman]

That's good to know.

[@crisarkiscee]

I remember back in 2000, I was in middle school, I wanted to work for Blizzard to make games. I also still have a very old post in Facebook back in college that working at Blizzard is one of my dreams. I miss the old Blizzard, its values, and what it represented back then.

[@Bellicose]

You can choose to work for Dreamhaven, the OGs behind Blizzard including one of its founder founded that company

[@forsakenseraphim]

@@Bellicose I was going to mention this. Lol. I am waiting to see what they put out, and hope it's as good as the original Blizzard games.

[@Professor.Farnsworth]

Blizzard was never one to work for. They've always treated their employees like shit - from the very get go. We just didn't know, because no one dared speak out for a long time. If you did, your career was over. Permanently. Thankfully, we have Indie Devs today.

[@Asara-k7e]

There were other smaller game studios in the 90's. With some interesting games. One was called Crusader: No Remorse.

[@Neoicecreaman]

As soon as Activision bought Blizzard everyone started to see shit going downhill... I remember during cataclysm seeing the first bits of Activisions direction... I had no idea how bad it'd get cuz I had such rose tinted glasses.

[@Halvesoul]

14 years ago it started, blizzard and i broke up since then. It still hurts.

[@kopicat2429]

Same. Though in my case it didn't hurt. I was just done with mmo's in general. I kinda quit playing at the end of Burning Crusade. Only playing the next couple expansions a few months at the time before quitting until the next expansion arrived. The funny thing though, is that people keep buying whatever shit Blizzard puts out. They buy the shit, complain about it being shit, then buy the next shit anyway. I see the same thing with Bethesda as well. I don't get why people keep buying their games at this point.

[@barahng]

pfp checks out

[@RiggedandReady]

Same. D3 never did it for me (although I would later mess around on hard-core D3 solo on my switch). I never really played any of the games with the same enjoyment after D2. I enjoyed D2R for a bit, though.

[@12345Yeah]

Cry

[@AmbitiousPanda]

Cringe

[@thechosenone729]

I don't understand how nothing happens to companies like this when they clearly false advertise something and never deliver.

[@leskobrandon7516]

Lots of money sure helps, are you the average joe going to sue? no? ok so nothing happens.

[@leskobrandon7516]

@@MrHocotateFreight I agree.

[@RandommBoyo]

More people enjoying the games = more casuals = more brainrot = more lacking standards

[@l3ete1geuse]

@@RandommBoyo Wait, why are you attacking casuals? Cause I guarantee they aren't any part of the problem with corporate greed and mediocre games.

[@h3iberg456]

it sort of becoming new standard. Starfield, Cyberpunk, d4 and so, so many other titles... yes, its the money. There were a time where ppl who love codes would group up in a room to create and deliver an experience for the consumer, carved by love (of codes and fantasy worlds). But since the first report of gaming industry being bigger than movie e music combined, many non-gamer figures started to show up, aswell as known names being corrupted. Of course a company must profit, problem is that the love is gone. Also workflow logistics for some big companies are so horrible it should be illegal. There are modders doing huge changes in less time that its actually embarrassing. If you think of it, to vision something over an existing product, take your time and deliver it for free, the only reason is love, which strengthens the argument.

[@JonathanLukeAvery]

Games released in 2004: Half Life 2 World of Warcraft Doom 3 Halo 2 GTA: San Andreas Metal Gear Solid 3 NFS Underground 2 Spider-Man 2 Star Wars Battlefront Star Wars KOTOR Prince of Persia The Incredibles Burnout 3 Takedown Pikmin 2 Metroid Prime 2 Fable Far Cry Unreal Tournament 2004 X-Men Legends Killzone The list goes on… What a year for video games

[@musicdamar583]

You got me at Half-Life 2 😭

[@PedroLucas-ir8mi]

Just nostalgia'ed hard... damn, man

[@TheCraydee]

Got goosebumps reading that list. Especially Fable.

[@garywinchester2531]

That's just the PC list too. GBA had some of their best evers during that time; like Fire Red and Leaf Green

[@HAL-9OOO]

Does Doom 3 really deserve to be on that list? I'd heard from a lot of Doom fans that it was crap.

[@jphanks]

In 2000, Everquest was released. We had several Blizzard devs in our guild. Their job at the time was to play EQ. Literally 8 hour shifts. It was insane.

[@tombane5950]

I went to the patretta center last January and went down their bullet slide. I had just bought new swimming trunks which were VERY slick. When I made it to the bottom of the slide the life guard told me that it was the fastest he had seen anyone go. he said my time was 7.43 seconds which was the second fastest time on record. My cousin Lucas told me that he didn't believe me though which was really frustrating because I know he was just jealous.

[@nTrylo]

Orcs & Humans was life changing for my 9 year old existence. Then World of Warcraft drops in my senior year of high school on my birthday and ruins two 3+ year relationships I had with absolute smoke shows of girlfriends who went on to be insanely successful and wealthy and didn't want to date a guy whose entire life revolved around pixels. No regrets.

[@Bdavis2475]

You were dating 2 hot girls at the same time? 😂🎉

[@Warhammer1981]

And I found my wife of 17 years on WoW. Some lost, some gained

[@nTrylo]

@@Bdavis2475 High School and College were good to me. Very, very good.

[@arakasi1033]

Heroes of the Storm was the only MOBA that I genuinely liked to play every now and then. It was the only moba, where people haven't wished cancer on me or my family. Low standard I know, but still, it was very nice and fun game. I wish it would come back.

[@NeFjuS]

You can still play it bro, its just no updated anymore :)

[@BlobBlobkins]

I still play time to time

[@sirskyrage]

even tho lol was my main game during the time I enjoyed Heroes of the Storm way more. a chill experience. shame almost noone played it

[@withoutrhythm4009]

I actually really like HoTs, I know most people don’t but it’s not a bad game and has a good leveling system

[@lukaslange4666]

It is very underrated. Especially if you play it with a couple of friends. Very refreshing MoBa with lots of cool character interaction/skin crossovers between Blizzard titles

[@deenaxic9134]

Stop calling it Blizzard. They died long time ago.

[@Hirotoro4692]

I mean... They ARE called Blizzard.

[@jacobsteele1178]

They called sleet now

[@Luckypanther]

@@Hirotoro4692yep technically they still have the rights to the name but pretty much all the previous workers that put out the good stuff quit or got fired years ago and the company has been bought out many times

[@NonRenderedBush]

​@@Hirotoro4692 more like trash dump, twisting anything and everything for profit while give less substance than ever. Blizzard was my childhood. New leadership is sinking that mother funker fast.

[@bankz724]

@@jacobsteele1178the blizzard came, hit hard, slowed down, settled, now the suns out and it’s all melting

[@olemortensen3354]

16:56 they technically never lost any "money" they never made, what they DID Lose were an "Opportunity" to make a boat load of cash and because They didn't ever write a more strict legal document enforcing the rights to the user mod they couldn't stop the competition to beat 'em to making their own and making it legally their ip.😂

[@toxic_tomb1238]

Blizzard? Worse than I thought?! Not possible, I already hate blizzard more than anything, the only thing they made that I liked, they ruined. Edit: not more than anything, I was being hyperbolic, I do hate blizzard the most in the gaming industry, but I obviously hate other things more, it's very obvious what I meant, no need to take it too seriously

[@gadrielvanorion9872]

even more then disney?

[@justmeowth9697]

even more than EA?

[@cubiss1273]

​@@justmeowth9697 It's the things you used to love that you can hate the most.

[@KaitoverMoon]

Everyone says they hate Blizzard but it was Activision that made them like this.

[@toxic_tomb1238]

@@gadrielvanorion9872 disney at least has some things I like, like I can still go watch Disney when it was good, and the rare new era disney movie thats good, but I can't play overwatch 1 tho, I used to play every day but now it's like once every few months, and even that is a stretch, the only way they could've redeemed it, was by delivering on their promise of the pve, but they fucked that up, now the only way I would consider coming back would be if they brought back lootboxes and the weekly arcade boxes, but they'd never do that.

[@damil5721]

Blizzard was forced to refund by the way, over 350+ chargebacks alone when I worked at Key Bank over a few days and I'm in some podunk backwater state. I actually knew what was going on and had to explain to the manager that it wasn't some huge scam by fake names. What's funny is it's quite a process to do an actual chargeback and isn't as simple as just calling your bank, the disputes were unanimous though and we started going through with it all, thankfully it was almost all handed off to a senior manager.

[@Hppyhppy2]

kind of amazing isn't it? When Bill Gates wants to buy a company; magically that company starts having massive problems. First women in the workforce complaining about certain issues, then middle managers just making bad calls. It's almost as if Bill Gates sabotaged Activision Blizzard and forced their stock price down within a range he could afford. I bet it had nothing to do with Bill gates owning microsoft and activision blizzard starting to support Linux gaming. Totally unrelated. How many key insiders do you think it takes to take down a multi billion dollar company? 1, 2, 3, 20? I'm sure Bill Gates could easily afford to send 20 people to the best schools in the world and get them into key positions within the company. HearthStone was going strong, Hero's of the Storm wasn't bad considering it was still new and growing, WoW was going strong, Overwatch was a huge success. Right when it seemed Blizzard was stronger than ever; it all fell apart.... label me crazy, but i don't believe it was just a series of bad luck

[@Hppyhppy2]

@@PreachJesusName These days there's more coulda, woulda, shoulda , then ability to get er done. Blizzard should have opened up a professional stripper studio in the middle of the business to keep those engineers happy instead they hired a bunch of talentless roasty karens. Their biggest downfall is they should have been more based.

[@rooh5825]

@@Hppyhppy2 Yep, karens who had no problem being hired for no other reason than their looks, now suing the company claiming harassment, when in fact it's regret ex s.

[@6789uiop]

@@rooh5825 I had no idea but can see it. Maybe I should search that bit out ...

[@barahng]

The crazy thing about the dota fumble is they KNEW how massive Dota was becoming from 2004-2010, they had years to buy it and do the same thing Valve did. Dota players back then always assumed something like was eventually going to happen, but it never did. There was a giant vacuum in the market for a non-casualized moba successor to Dota that Blizzard could have capitalized on. It's not like this is just hindsight either, everyone who played dota knew this back then, it's why HoN was briefly popular.

[@R3v0kt]

If I could go back to one moment in gaming it would be these days of WC3. Best time to be a gamer!

[@virgilioreneau1862]

Dude, I'm still dreaming of a Dota 2 Custom that brings in the HoN heroes. HoN was great, and did many things better than Dota does. like the taunts and Humiliations! But yeah, thank god Valve picked up Dota, Blizzard would have ruined that shit. Gaben was like "Here, do this on our platform, and stuff. have fun!" And until that last few years, things ran pretty solid. I'll never give Blizzard another dime of my money. Modern Blizzard can eat a popsicle shaped body part.

[@chickenpwned]

HoN was goated Still up and running to this day

[@suprbeat]

There'S their changing point, from company which liked new ideas like MMO, Diablo buyout and now they just said, no we are done beign awesome and finding new inovation in gaming.

[@hellowill]

Yup. They basically had it handed to them like how Valve got counterstrike. They could have made it big enough so Riot never bothered making LoL.

[@angelicus-9307]

Reminds me of when i went to a game programming class/school whatever its called in english. And the teacher told us a story about the game he and his friends were making and the blood and tears they put into it. long story short, They were at a game show, showing up their game and it was a shooter type of game. Among the most popular on the floor (according to him at least). Some other person from another company came and looked at it and found it very good. Had a meeting with my teacher something in the lines of "We like what you have done in this game for the company you are working for. We would like for you to quit that and join making our game instead" Then he got to see an early preview of an rts game. He didnt see it going well and didnt think it was interesting enough so he said no thank you. That game was Warcraft 1. And not only that, when they got closer to the game finally being ready to be released they were running out of money and the company that was paying them to develop it were pretty much gangsters and in the end the funding stopped, the ownership of the game was those gangsters who put the game on a shelf forever and closed down a year later. Find it interesting to think about how someones life could have been completly different (better or worse) with just one decision done differently in their life.

[@Steinmetal4]

You notice that kind of thing, just the luck of the draw, more and more the older you get.

[@angelicus-9307]

@@Steinmetal4 Yeah. When i think back on my life. The number of options that could have made my life completely different with just one choice. Is staggering to think about. All i can do now is push my kids to not make the same mistakes. Which really is all we can do. Give our experience to anyone who wants to listen. Until the day we pass. And hope that our experience has helped at least one other person in their life

[@jnxius]

The Dota creator approached Blizzard first. Blizzard turned him down. He went to Valve and....well, its in the video.

[@Kagezava]

I think they did this so as not to share the profit with a stranger. This company would really rather not give money than make 100 times more money. And the result of this can be seen in the Warcraft 3 refound: according to the game’s policy, the rights to any maps that PLAYERS create belong to the company. It sounds like “I sell you paints, but whatever you paint with them will belong to me.”

[@jimlarimore6074]

Blizzard definitely got what they deserved there. The problem with being a company that is great at refining other peoples' ideas, but lack any actual creative thoughts of their own, is that you don't realize new game design potential, even when it's built by your own tools, in full view of you, spoon fed to you, until it's far too late.

[@Kagezava]

@@jimlarimore6074 “why should we agree and make this guy’s game? Let him go and make his own indie games in our editor. Otherwise he’ll start asking for money.” © Blizzard probably

[@Vyle_One]

Blizzard is the litteral the embodiment of : "you either die a hero or live long enough to become the vilan (of your story)."

[@kyuzo26]

What js a vilan? I love vilan fruit

[@tomtube1012]

Wokeness helped destroy the company. Look at what was done to the characters in Diablo 2 Resurrected.

[@forsakenseraphim]

@@tomtube1012What was done to them?

[@Mir0222]

@@forsakenseraphimthere was censorship on both the models and scenario honestly not a big deal to me but ppl did not like it at all

[@forsakenseraphim]

@@Mir0222 Except D2R was only co developed by Blizzard. Vicarious Visions are the ones that started the project, granted they are a sister company to Blizzard, owned by Activision. Regardless, it wasn't Blizzard that made those artistic decisions. People are stupid though, so.

[@joryvuylsteke6900]

“You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” - Blizzard probably

[@mr.nobody2244]

My exact thoughts. Get ouf of my head!

[@lastfirst3512]

@@mr.nobody2244but theres so much unused space in here !

[@Magnum_Express]

you have to ask what changed over the years? My theory is new employees, hired into the marketing and accounting departments of these businesses are being taught garbage economics in college. The level of quality of programmer that's coming out of these tech schools must be abysmal. And toss in the current mindset/attitude/politics of young people these days and you get woke crap thrown into the products as the icing on the shit tier cake they call games.

[@mr.nobody2244]

@@lastfirst3512 Pay rent if you wanna stay.

[@admiralpepper6933]

​@@lastfirst3512 This is MY space, GET YOUR OWN AND OFF MY BRAIN LAWN

[@deegeeooh]

@ 19:40 No. The RMA in D3 WAS actually a big factor in damaging the game though, as the itemization was built around it, which lead to all sorts of patchwork to try to fix this later on.

[@XSFlanger]

I remember first firing up warcraft III and get dumbfounded how superb water looked like. We used to say "water looks so cool, you're instantly feeling thirsty" :)

[@Rubycheckers]

Water being the benchmark of the graphics of a game was a thing for so long, these days you never think about it. Water was really hard back in the day.

[@Lobos222]

"Mercury" water in Morrowind was kinda good as well.

[@XSFlanger]

True. If I remember correctly it was the first game to use pixel shaders. My friend bought Ti4200 that supported it and game CD came with it. There was night and day difference of water quality between my MX card and his :)

[@Alargator]

StarCraft Remastered came out before WC3 Reforged and was great, barely any problems. Getting rid of the classic team was a bad decision, because if you look into it, they only planned tons of features because they were told they'd have more resources and manpower, which management yanked out from underneath them, forcing them to do stuff like outsourcing the art and cutting a million features.

[@DarkLeviathan8]

This. The amount of work put into remastering Starcraft Broodwar is ABSOLUTELY insane. They had to redraw thousands of individual tiles for the terrain alone. That's without talking of the units, the doodads, the special effects, etc. And nearly everything looks perfect and cohesive. Truly looks like they treated this like a passion project.

[@electricalsociety5593]

I remember playing Ultima Online and my guildmaster went MIA for whole week. He went missing from the game, from icq from everywhere. When he turns back up he says he bought Warcraft 3 and has been binging it for 12 hours a day all week. We all started playing. Awhile later WOW came out and the rest was history.

[@PoYi-fi1zt]

Ultima online is Still the best game ever

[@OptiMystism]

NGL, the shout out to TotalBiscuit after all these years... nice to see him remembered. Right in the feels there man.

[@ArchGeek]

WoW’s cinematic graphics were great for the time, but the in-game graphics were so-so. I worked at Best Buy when it launched, and people were slow to pick it up at launch (at least in my area). I remember we had a lot of the collectors editions in stock warming shelves, and then suddenly when it caught on, we couldn’t keep anything, even time cards, in-stock.

[@hugedeal8611]

Stop calling it Blizzard, that company is long dead.

[@arzos2603]

its still called blizzard?

[@damiklawsom3314]

But you keep pre-buying his stuff 😉 do not hide yourself 🤭

[@TheAero16]

It's Sleet now

[@heistingcrusader_ad3223]

Then wtf do I call this abomination of a game company, Gizzard?!

[@deltor5849]

Dude 6 million sales for wow in its 1st year and assuming they go the full year in subs. Thats 6,000,000 players x $15 x 12 months, that's a billion dollar in 1 year. How fucking far blizzard has fallen man, what a god damn shame

[@Mr91Jmay]

They make more on Wow now by far than they did then then. MTX + token

[@bitharne]

Thanks Bobby and Co 🤷🏼‍♂️ Of course they would have fallen no matter the cause: all companies that become successful poison themselves.

[@BotLaneTaken]

@@Mr91Jmay Was about to say MTX make them a few billion in a month lol.

[@PnPride]

@@BotLaneTaken i believe someone from Blizz said that they made more money on MTX from one mount in wow then from Starcraft 2 as a whole ... let that sink in

[@webeechamin1167]

Ive always said this: Blizzard was straight downhill after they closed Blizzard North. BN wanted to make a quality game and take their time with everything like D2, not a stupid real money auction house. As soon as they did that it was dogshit.

[@OldMFer]

You know one thing that aided wow in getting huge was Everquest Fatigue. EQ players were tired of the every 3 months expansions for $60.00 plus the monthly fees. On top of the monthly sub. SoE had horrendous customer service too.

[@aintnunya8058]

Xpacs every three months that were almost always buggy as hell. And hardly any ever resolved unless it was really, really game breaking. There was a LoS issue with archery (broke mezz if an arrow passed through a MOb) for THREE years before they patched it. As if playing a ranger wasn't already sh**ty enough.

[@davetorrey8303]

War3 Cinematics were really insane. People forget though that a lot of the most popular War 3 custom maps were ports from the custom maps from Starcraft which also had a ridiculously good map editor. War2 and Starcraft were my games as a kid

[@johnMa7869]

The Pandas were part of warcraft lore way before mop. idk why ppl always complain that it didnt fit the theme of warcraft, when they were always part of it from the beginning.

[@garegos7184]

where did they show up the first time? never heared of em being in the warcraft games.

[@johnMa7869]

@@garegos7184 Warcraft |||: the Frozen Throne, you were able to play a pandaren hero called the brewmaster (which was in fact Chen stormstout)

[@garegos7184]

@@johnMa7869 ah damn thats cool ty for letting me know

[@Naetheras]

Reforged hurt me the most. Its what made blizzard what it is. Its just as if Mclaren was like "ok, we're gonna reproduce the F1 again. The car that made Lamborghini and Ferarri go WTF IS THAT" Then tells Nissan to make it... And Nissan doesnt even give a shit about Mclaren so they put in faulty shit all over it, because they dont get paid to do it. WONDER IF THAT IS GONNA HURT THEIR REPUTATION?!

[@RicHSAD2]

The auction house was really bad for D3. For starters, the drop rates were balanced around the AH being a thing and so items found just really sucked in general. Pretty much every item upgrade I had at the time was purchased off of the auction house.

[@bitharne]

This. Asmon just has MASSIVE bias due to making bank in the RM AH

[@deathwrow9652]

Massive bias because he was decent and played a lot. That's HOW he made bank.

[@Sweetguy1821]

Back at launch after 100+ hours of play I found a grand total of 3 unique items. I got to act 3 inferno as a SSF and gave up 😂

[@zerooskil7161]

I can see asmon is massive bias because in this case he is kind of like the nft monkey bros, support what is bas but had profit for him lol His diablo immortal take was also pretty damn immoral

[@Helmutlozzi]

The auction house was the only good thing about D3. It ensured I got all my money back x2 from botting and then I abandoned this dead garbage company afterwards. Shame what happened to them, but D3 was unacceptable on all levels and marked the death for Blizzard.

[@Jeagan2002]

I actually really enjoy HotS. They made the characters really interesting, and had a bunch of neat map mechanics.

[@ReptilianLaserbeam]

what I liked the most is that it didn't matter who killed a minion or got a kill, the exp was equally distributed. I think that could have been a game changer compared to games like lol

[@benjaminberglund8250]

Hots was fantastic, it only dissapeared because Blizzard pulled the plug on the tournement funding

[@xClyptox]

I loved it until 2.0 - havent touched it since.

[@balazsfenyes3880]

Dota 1>>League of Legends>>HoTS. Dota1 was epic but unbalanced, LoL was balanced but with a salty kid community and Hots was just braindead lie of a real Moba

[@Jeagan2002]

@@balazsfenyes3880 HotS is a hell of a lot more fun, IMO. And none of them are balanced, do you really buy the lie? Rebalancing is done to change which heroes sell, not to make the game fair.

[@mattbryant8320]

The problem with the real money auction house in d3 was that initially the drop rate of items was little to none. They basically forced you to to buy the items you want in the auction house with almost 0 chance of actually finding the item playing the game. I remember my friends and I were in the top 1% of people who made it first to inferno. Not only was it unplayable, between the 6 or so of us not a single legendary dropped that whole time. From normal all the way to inferno.

[@JonathonTheAsshole]

I'm sorry you didn't get a legendary in what was only about 20 hours to get to the 4th full playthrough of the game. You could play through D2 a dozen times and not complete a single set of gear much less one you wanted. The problem with D3 was 90% of the player base never played a ARPG before and were bandwagon gamer casuals who just wanted their instant gratification and didn't know the game was designed to be played for years and that drops were balanced to be rare for a reason. Everyone just had an autistic meltdown over the RMAH though out of sheer spite for not getting their way.

[@ImperatorZed]

I got an important legendary to drop so made it a bit into inferno. But then I hit a wall because really I needed a lot more. I sold it on the auction house for 20 bucks and quit the game, because now my character was useless.

[@furkancetinkya]

yeah i remember legendary and stuff actaully being rare but doesnt that make it more fun when you get a drop like that u go nuts or not ?

[@ImperatorZed]

@@furkancetinkya Except my character was still shit. Needed to be like all decked out. The balancing was broken. And I think I had to like farm pots in heaven for it. Pots! In a Diablo game! Just run past all enemies, smash pots, log out, repeat.

[@djandrewification]

Legendarys were super rare but you could still sell plenty of decently rolled yellows for $5-$7 a pop. I had fun playing all night with a friend and making like $20 that night plus the chance for a legendary.

[@s1os2s3]

WoD has one of the best, if not best leveling experience. It was the only expansion that I leveled alts just to level them because that is how much I enjoyed leveling in WoD. Since then I kept having all classes to max level. In WoD I leveled 21 additional characters: 10 Horde, 11 Alliance. My main being Horde. I dont think I could've pulled off these many characters to level in Legion because Stormheim and Highmountain were annoying to be done more than a few times. BFA adopted GoT season 8 narrative and applied it to Zuldazar quest campaign inserting the "man bad, girl boss" treatment to Rastakhan. Coupled with an attrocious Azerite armour and the Island expedition. Island expeditions only in theory being great, in practice it sucked. N'zoth has been done dirty. In spite of me doing mythic raiding and being the closest I've ever been to CE in BFA, it is my 2nd most hated expansion I have played. Shadowlands being the worst.

[@Dewabarasunderan]

I whole heartedly hate the ranking system of Overwatch 2. Loosing SR for being in a 5v5 teamshooter, because one of your random teammates decides to leave the game, really? The fact that you know you most likely will loose the game, once your tank leaves the match and you still have to finish playing the game and yet you’re loosing SR for this? What in the hell are the blizzard devs doing to this game? They must be too busy creating the next 20 dollar skin or something…

[@gubb73485]

Don't play the game. Don't buy in store stuff. Its the only way they will listen to our complaints. Rob them of there money and they will stop trying to steal it from you.

[@SuckF-uo2io]

​@@gubb73485"their money" nah it's my money and I'm not giving them shit

[@VargVinter]

One thing i like to mention with the "dota situation" - By Blizzard changing the Terms that even Player created custom maps are their property, they instantly, completly killed the custom maps/modding community. They already did this with Starcraft 2. In my case it was the sole reason to buy the game. I was hoping the community will bring back all the amazing custom maps - tower defense, swarm survivials, aso.. After i read about that Terms stuff i didn't buy the game. And i was correct to do so, the custom map community was dead from the start

[@guicaraciolo]

I wasnt expecting to hear @TotalBiscuit (as 31:35). That was right in my feelings. I loved his channel. I still miss him, his voice, accent and reviews. God bless him.

[@drviagrin3798]

Me and my best friend were addicted to Warcraft II. We played one as well, but with the second one's map editor, we would design bases in class when we were done with our work. I liked the editor better in the second one because you could build stone castle walls. I have played all of Blizzard games except Overwatch. I played a ton of Diablo 2 online as well. My favorite was the druid.

[@QenaitheCustodianGuard]

It's also crazy how brood war hasn't had a patch since like 2001 and the meta has developed ever since. Wicked game and one of the best ever made.

[@danludvigsen1974]

just want to point out blizzard didnt invent rts. dune 2 was released on amiga in 1992. and warcraft came 2 years later in 1994.

[@garyleebrinks6452]

Yes Dune was first. Played it on the PlayStation 1 myself.

[@WRINKLE5646]

Yes but Dune 2 wasn't better then warcraft sorry to say. There is a reason why Blizzard games became popular from the 1990's to the early 2000's the games were fucking good. The reason why they say warcraft was the first RTS because it was the first GOOD rts. There isn't many game companies that you can look at from 1990's to early 2000's and say oh wow every single one of their games were good most game companies made games that were hit or miss.

[@cyber_crypto]

Lol the video points this out at 2:25, “just wanted to point this out.”

[@Star.Chaser]

Dune is shit

[@damienblock6998]

Actually that was Herzog Zwei.

[@Aerisot]

One thing to add, They actually renamed Dota to Blizzard All-stars, which then later got named Heroes of the Storm.

[@juncture231]

At 33 minutes, he talks about how someone within 2 years went from brown hair to grey. That's how aging works, at age 44 and 60 your body rapidly changes. Aging isn't a slow progression, there are points in your life where your body literally transforms. Look it up :)

[@N2Flashy]

Blizzard is the new EA tbh

[@om_ikis]

No, they are the upgrade

[@recaster1165]

EA is still EA. pumping out copy paste games.

[@MesterWilliam-ny9nq]

nah they are actually worse

[@foxskyful]

Funny, everyone complaining about Activision, Ubisoft almost every company. Rockstar and Valve milking same game over 10 years without new releases no Half Life no L4D, CS 2 same shit with min changes Gta5 and 6 12 years difference

[@lilramennoodle8056]

The thing is they havent made it predatory or terrible changes. Also they do upgrade for better mostly, its all based on whether the customer likes it, you cant force people to not like or buy certain products numnuts ​@foxskyful

[@thephatcrew]

D3 RM auction house was connected to the in-game loot table which means all the good loot was up for cash.

[@PaulLyonVerse]

I have played Blizz games all my life and was a diehard WoW nerd, but honestly. I just can't anymore and the recent massive success of Indie titles has been very heartwarming. I just play games for fun now instead of getting so invested. But unfortunately I am still just an MMO addict with no home :(

[@rolandheinze7182]

BG3, Elden Ring are godly

[@ThePotatoWaveOfficial]

I don't understand. You have a PC and internet connection but you don't have a home?

[@calmwaves111]

@@ThePotatoWaveOfficial Plays out of his mother's trailer which is parked in his grandmother's back yard, and steals internet from his grandmother.

[@angus3963]

$15 is $24 today, which tracks pretty well for what some games are costing for 'premium' access.

[@ozzcoremidmx8287]

I have fond memories of games like Starcraft and Diablo thanks to the LAN parties. Nights and nights of playing Diablo, Starcraft, Unreal Tournament, Quake... Man... Those were good times.

[@jettymoon]

the day blizzard died was doing tol barad dailies in cataclysm every day along side logging into diablo 3 and then reading that it wasn't made by the same people who made diablo 2 because blizzard fired them.

[@XSaberUruz]

Kinda crazy to remember how many cool games they use to make

[@pavma7]

And with Diablo 3 they started to drop the ball real low.

[@BossButch187]

My all time favorite Blizzard game is Diablo 2 with Lord of Destruction, obviously playing a hardcore battle net char was so epic when you killed baal on hell and you survived entirely, Diablo 3 kinda had an issue for me being modernized but I'm ok with Diablo 4.

[@derekmartin7097]

you can tell asmon only played blizz games as a kid because how hyped he is about the graphics. blizz was always gameplay first back then, graphics weren't as good as other games because they wanted to be accessible and playable on any and all computers

[@Elora445]

Yeah, the graphics were never WoW's selling point. The fact that it was more casual than many other MMOs at the time was the major selling point. It was called "EverQuest for casuals" for a reason.

[@jubjuba1982]

@@Elora445100% it had so many players because they it held your hand and was easy compared to the others. The masses love easy.

[@sofakingdom3076]

@@jubjuba1982 You set yourself up for this. Is that how you were born, you know, cause the masses love easy?

[@DarvonMitsumura]

Who here remembers when Starcraft Ghost was announced and years later canned? Surprised that wasn't talked about like Titan. It could have been a lot of fun had they worked on finishing it. Such missed potential.

[@onegonearm]

Not only announced, it was one of the games pictured on the first version of the PS2 or PS3 ( I forgot which ) box art lol.

[@zerohbeat]

There were screenshots in magazines too. It felt like the game was quite far in development...

[@yig_501]

i was in 5th grade when we heard about Ghost was so stoked

[@kriss1_]

Only problem with the RMAH was the horrible droprates on stuff, so you felt you had to go buy upgrades to get any

[@kittenisageek]

Warcraft 1 was tons of fun. We networked a bunch of computers in my dorm and played for hours on end. Eventually the dean made us clean up the wiring because "if the fire alarm goes off, everyone's gonna get tangled." So we routed wires up the walls into the false ceiling over a long weekend and went back to playing. If a door on our floor was open, you could walk in and watch whatever game was in progress. It was 24/7 for most of that year.

[@fixer187]

Rock'n Roll racing was the shit back in the days

[@MatthewNewton-w4d]

Nah FFX tricky

[@Texansfan59]

Nah burger king pocket bike racer

[@iller3]

...right up until you got to the Hover craft mandated tracks... but everything before them felt amazing and well balanced

[@twoswords4318]

I played the hell out of this game split screen with my cousin. Good memories.

[@TrairFrair]

Olaf scores a first place knockout! Jake finishes second. Rage scores a weak third. Rash is in another time zone!

[@NekoinValhalla]

Blizzard will never emotionally heal from having missed the moba turn.

[@dallanc5199]

Interesting over view. I was involved with the production of Broodwar back in the day, it was contracted out to a company in Utah named Saffire Corp. All development under Bizzards direction, but we had Bob Fitch, Jeff Strain and Frank Pearce all come out to go over systems along with of course Bill Roper and Shane Dabiri. Good times

[@kittenisageek]

23:41 "Mists" was all about trying to get the Chinese monies. I liked the monk class, but yeah, the whole panda thing turned everyone I knew away from the game.

[@aarontallant4644]

I remember the day I started playing wow, I was against it hard. I was a diehard Diablo fan, and went to play Diablo 2 with my then gf and one of my best friends (who I met through d2). I flipped my shit and left when I saw them playing WoW at the lab cafe as if they were both cheating on me in front of everyone there. It was just after the launch of BC. My GF told me she already bought me the game and xpac and they said to come back and play with them. I played that game so damn much I wish they had just introduced me to crack instead. I loved it. I was into the raiding scene as a healer and loved the hell out of it. I was in a hardcore raiding guild for a bit as well until about 5.5 yrs ago when my daughter was born, and I have only had time to play WoW classic when the bc portion came out to lvl my old druid again to relive the feel. I wish I could have raided again then too, but, sadly, dad life won't allow for it. I still miss WoW and all the fun times and friendships that game has started and ended. I just wish I had the free time to play the shadowlands because of how much praise it has gotten. I'd have to raid with the Aussies instead of having Aussies raid with us haha

[@tsuna111]

world of warcraft : west ragnarok online : asia

[@GenerusWeebius]

I had been a diehard Overwatch fan since back in Season 1 in 2016, currently having around 3000 hours in the game. It's a hard thing to explain, but the original game, lore and the Overwatch team back then did an amazing job at keeping the soul of Overwatch alive for such a long run. Even with the boring meta and content stagnation at the end, the feeling of what made Overwatch special to me never really left. I supported the idea of Overwatch 2 since it was fair to assume they were going to update the game and expand the world even further, but with the cancellation of the promised PVE, it was like a reality check that the current team has different priorities and vision for the game. That, along with multiple other features of the original game that were sadly cut, and the only "update" that really stood out was the monetization system, started the acceptance phase for me personally.

[@Bohdisattva326]

I loved overwatch. I quit and uninstalled after the first week and moved onto other stuff.

[@Neoicecreaman]

Ooof, HoTS was a game all my friends liked. We literally didn't stop playing it until they announced they were dropping support for it.

[@dmwalker24]

Yeah, the RMAH in D3 was mostly just supporting evidence of Blizz having their priorities a bit screwed up. Itemization, drop-rates, stat-weighting, and all the other misc design bullshit was still mostly unresolved.

[@Zach-cc4ft]

It was broken as hell. I remember getting to max level before ever trying the RMAH, thought why not and sold a gem for some real money, then bought a generic white weapon that did way more DPS than any weapon I'd ever seen drop, suddenly I was just slaughtering everything. Was fun for about 3 more days then quit cause of how ridiculous the whole thing was

[@dmwalker24]

@@Zach-cc4ft I played D3 for quite a while. Was younger, and had more patience for their nonsense. Quit D4 at the drop of Season 1. Honestly, just the soundtrack in PoE is still more entertaining than the slog they made D4 into.

[@dazedhavoc]

Activision killed Blizzard.

[@marvingonzalez926]

Blizzard killed Activision/Blizzard.

[@92pkg]

Did you even listen? 😂

[@NoHope-WhatSoEver]

New blizzard killed old blizzard.

[@wm1573]

Yeah it killed it so bad. Wow only has 7.6m subs now. Poor blizzard

[@gR22401]

@@wm1573where are the quality games? There was a time where everyone in the game industry wanted to work there. Now they are a joke.

[@vexxftw]

What the video fails to tell is that WOW wasn't their initial plan. The game was named Warcraft Adventures (if my memory is right), and it was a point an click adventure game with the main protagonist being Thrall. They had art and some footage as well. The abandoned the project 1 year later and WOW was born.

[@BigDickMcFlick]

This. My best friend was addicted to WC2 and WC3 and when he heard about this project, he was so damn excited. Wouldn't stop talking about it. When he realized they scrapped it and it was going to become WoW instead... He did a 180 on the WC series. Sure, he loved the previous games... but he was so bitter about it.. he had absolutely no intentions of playing WoW out of spite. I don't think that man touched his WC games again after that.

[@joshuaferguson1200]

Warcraft adventures was the precursor to wc3

[@d0nj03]

I think that's why I checked out when I saw early hints about it in gaming magazines. I never cared about WoW, never accepted it as a successor to WarCraft, the craft of war, a strategy game by definition, or at the very least a mass-numbers battle game by definition. I may have had more massive pvp battles in the Shaiya MMO than most people have had in WoW, unless I'm missing some of WoW's history. (Someone tried to introduce me to it in 2015-ish and what I saw was very small-scale play, no crafting of war to be found anywhere, so totally undeserving of its name. This is also why I'm beyond annoyed to hear WoW-ists daring to comment negatively on the WarCraft movie as if it was primarily targeted at them.)

[@Moonboy-wt5ns]

in 2004~ average salary in my country was around 25 $ ( am from east europe), my parrents were earning around that each, so imagine being able to pay for wow these days. Thanks god private servers existed from early time.

[@googledoxxdmebruh6283]

I remember folks screaming so loud that Blizzard was still their own company and Activision had no control over them. Idiots.

[@shippyshop]

It wasn't the real money auction house that ruined d3, but the integration of an auction house period. When trading is made that accessible in an arpg style game like that, it means you have to tune the drop rates around highly accessible trading. Otherwise the auction house would be flooded with good items, driving the prices down to the floor and making it easy to just buy the best gear with *gold* right away. So now you have abysmal drop rates in a game where the main gameplay/addiction loop relies on finding item drops. This means instead of playing the game to find cool loot drops, the best way to play the game is to farm whatever route gives the highest gold per hour so you can buy what you want on the auction house (no real money required to ruin the game). Now all your playtime becomes "farm X route for Y hours to buy item Z from the auction house." Rinse and repeat (because the drop rates are so low there's no reasonable hope/expectation of you finding anything good). Path of exile (and even diablo 2 with player adopted runes as currency) gets around this by having the main trading currency itself be rare and exciting to find, while also making that currency be intrinsically valuable on its own. For path of exile, that's in the form of crafting with the currency, which also removes it from circulation. And for diablo 2, that comes from runes/rune words making powerful items while also removing the currency from circulation. It's still exciting to find a regal orb, or divine orb, or a high rune (d2). You still get that slot machine/dopamine hit. It's not exciting to get 500k gold per hour, and calculate that in 8 hours of grinding the same thing you can go click a button on the auction house and get an upgrade.

[@Stavroization]

Auction houses work just not how it was implemented. What hurt was everyone having their own loot. If it was assigned like in PoE or other games, then you wouldn't have literally 4x more items dropping per monster. This would naturally lower the inflation in the AH. This way they could increase the drops rates and still maintain a healthy AH. Gold isn't the best currency either but being able to purchase it with real money kinda broke it even worse.

[@pcaristot]

I agree. In order to include the Auction House they made compromises on the design in other parts of the game. This happens in P2W mobile games as well, where the game needs to be unbalanced and inconvenient so that people are pushed toward spending money.

[@ambushbob5383]

My sister and i stayed up for D3 launch and it was her first launch night and we were going to play all night. Both of us had work that day and i asked her if she was going to be able to stay up for it and go to work she said yes, but she didnt and went to sleep and didnt get up for work.

[@haphapablap9273]

And the servers were down for the entire week anyways

[@ReptilianLaserbeam]

I remember staying up with my best friend both on his computer waiting for the servers to open lol

[@kiloneie]

@@haphapablap9273 Not all of them, i was able to play for 2 hours straight day 1 in Slovenia(European servers), but the next day... besides the fact that my blower GPU was shitting itself add 400-600 ping and it was lovely... for a week+.

[@kevinsanders4835]

The Auction House in Diablo 3 was killed due to taxes. In 2011, the tax law changed to require companies with in-state affiliates to begin collecting sales tax. There was an amendment to the law in 2012 over Real Money Transactions gained/loss in Diablo 3. It required Blizzard to do extra tax forms and Blizzard would have to offer tax forms for customers who were making a notable amount. There was a bunch of other rules and regulations, so the simple thing to do was to rework the auction house. It was cheaper to do this then deal with paperwork, tax discrepancies, and trying to work with the player base on this. If it wasn't an American Company or based in America then they wouldn't have to worry about this and it would be fully on the backs of the players.

[@cameronmactavish6501]

For me, the real money auction house alone wasn't the issue. It was what it represented. The devs now had a real incentive to skew the balance of their game to get people to buy and sell, rather than balance the game around players earning their gear. This has been proven by the live services market in large today. Every live service is crafted to keep you on the game, chasing some stupidly long goal of a grind, while selling "solutions" to that grind. The auction house was just a canary in the coal mine for what would come down the line.

[@astarothmarduk3720]

WoW: subscription + expansion/DLC + paid services and incentives for that (unfixed issues of the game), Elden Ring: full price game + expansion/DLC, no shop at all. I do not care for physical merchandise, but digital products/services are a no go. How can a player calculate the expenses if they are not limited?

[@MonsPubis7]

Im just waiting for blizzard to end up going under, same with every other company like them. Its high tide we saw some new developers emerge

[@zenswxrld]

Waiting for EAs turn too. Lmao

[@nanonano2595]

its not going under, theyre literally wholly owned by microsoft. worst they might shut down the blizzard studios and ship off their IPs to other studios...i guess that counts? but more likely ms is just gonna replace a bunch of people with halfway competent ones. they've already done the mass layoffs bit.

[@shadownova7056]

They are making tons of money though…

[@FreqstyleRedux]

You're waiting for a studio to go under that still reports annual increases in profit and was part of a package deal worth $69 billion dollars to Microsoft? Love them or hate them, this beaten horse is far from dead. Not like Rare Limited.

[@txsnowman]

Theyre currently too big to fail. As long they have massive cash cow IPs like WoW and Diablo someone will always be willing to keep blizzard alive. Blizzard is also damn good at convincing you theyre game is gonna be good this time. They almost got me to buy Diablo 4 and i actually played Season of Discovery for like a month.

[@boburanus69]

It's that the gear dropping was never as good as even the cheapest garbage you could buy for gold at level. It was always faster to just buy it with real money, even for just a few $$.

[@Zach-cc4ft]

Easy way to make the game not enjoyable at all. The fun part for a lot of people is finding and earning the good gear, if everything you find is mostly junk and you have to spend real money for the actual reward, it starts to become pointless.

[@mNag]

I think what harmed D3 was the lack of depth. People wanted D2 with more, instead they got a babified and facelifted Diablo. RMAH was whatever IMO... I could take it or leave it, but the game was just really thin start to finish. You had to run the campaign over and over and over on harder difficulty, so the maps got super boring super quick. So 100% it had a lack of endgame content. And even when they corrected that, it continued to lack the complexity that a game like POE destroys it with.

[@Blargy2inch]

I remember when blizzard won the award for being a gaming god... Now the god has fallen

[@JordanSugarman]

Uh... WoW graphics were far from what I would call "groundbreaking" at the time it was released. In fact, they drew a lot of early criticism for being low-poly, stylized, and cartoony. But that was a development choice to make it run well on average hardware. To give you an idea of what it was being compared to, here are some other titles that released that year: Doom 3, Half Life 2, Far Cry, GTA San Andreas, NFS Underground 2, Gran Turismo 4. Those are games that were all pushing the envelope of what was possible in graphics that year. But it was fine because WoW was an MMORPG and graphics weren't the most important feature.

[@leftifornian2066]

IT WUZ GOOD MANG

[@AnonymousChannel512]

It was 2004, "low-poly" would be a prism

[@thecursed01]

blizzard still exists?

[@MemeFnatic]

I'm scared for valve when Gabe passes or retires completely.

[@Jymbo6511]

Hearthstone was NOT genre pioneering. It's just Magic: The Gathering on video game format. A game that was released in 1993.

[@veraha4706]

Plus there was also wow tcg which imo is far better than hearthstone

[@stankobarabata2406]

It kind of was because it basically opened up the industry to those types of games. You can't tell me you haven't noticed the slew of later card games that came after Hearthstone hit it big. Including MtG. And look I dislike Hearthstone but it is undoubtedly one of their most successful titles just by profit alone.

[@Jymbo6511]

@@stankobarabata2406 MTG was out in the 90's. Hearthstone came FAR later.

[@stankobarabata2406]

@@Jymbo6511 but hearthstone was the one that popularized the genre

[@Jymbo6511]

@@stankobarabata2406 MTG Was a HUGE money maket for years.That's why Wizards of the Coast aquirred it. Also, Pokeman was far earlier and much more influencial in the digital market than Hearthstone. HEarthstone may have brought the Genre to a small portion on the WoW base but I would argue that many WoW players were in to MtG and Pokeman long before Hearthstone.

[@nakenfaan]

asmons delusions are starting to get scary. He was the only one who said this, he was the only one who defended that. Boy got some sort of messias complex for sure.

[@mtuktuk9627]

Asmongold is worse than you thoght, farming views on other peoples work all the time while having half bake excuses and a bunch of brainless followers defending him because two people he watched actually got something out of it

[@DrEtzor]

Tbh the Blitzchung thing, i could understand the ban for breaking the rules (bringing politics to the tournament) because well, you broke the rules that you agreed to, but taking away the money they won i'm pretty sure was just outright illegal. You can't promise a prize, have someone win it and then just not pay it.