The New "WoW Token" Lets You Buy Gold With Cash, Game Time With Gold
- Thread starter Steven Bogos
- Start date
Umm... I read your entire thing trying to defend Blizzard, but I think you failed to read my post and instantly said, "Oh, this guy is attacking Blizzard, a company that I will hold the line against all nay-sayers."GarouxBloodline said:
A. I wasn't completely saying that Blizzard has lost it. Hearthstone was an interesting change from their "copy everything from even themselves." Which was nice...but its failing to pick up, and hold people in like their games used to. I acknowledged that Hearthstone was a new concept.
B. Trying to replicate anything that is popular to gain a little bit of that market is running scared, when they *used* to make original games. Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft.
C. I understand that DoTA was basically the "original." However, DoTA was created by Mod-Makers for Warcraft III, not by Blizzard. LoL revived that Genre relatively well. DoTA 2 said "oh, that idea...maybe we should revisit it, because Riot made so much." DoTA 2 is making a lot of money, and everyone still knows that its a blatant copy of a copy. Now, we're getting to Heroes of the Storm, which does nothing new on the table. Seriously, if games had a "blind taste test," I'm wondering how people would tell the difference between DoTA 2, LoL and HotS.
D. I'm not saying that copying is bad. I'm saying that blatant "Xeroxing" is bad. I don't like LoL they have at least brought some newness to the atmosphere. However, I played for a few hours on Heroes of the Storm...and I felt like I was playing League of Legends. At least in the past, Blizzard has dropped some new ideas into the gaming-sphere, even though they were copying another game, or another game's feature. I mean, heck, half of World of Warcraft features have been blatant copies of other games features, and this one is no different, its just their twist brings up the issue that they could screw up the already fragile market.
I'm making speculation, that Blizzard is running scared. You would think that Blizzard wouldn't need to make Heroes of the Storm. You would think that they wouldn't rush Starcraft 2 into production without the full campaign, split the campaign into three separate games, or prevent offline LAN play. You would think that Diablo 3 would allow for an offline mode (separate from online mode). You would think that they wouldn't need to copy Team Fortress 2 with Overwatch. You would think they would be making ground breaking games with the budget that they have, but Hearthstone is the only thing that we've seen from them in a while that hasn't been a copy of an already successful franchise, and, even then, it seems kind of lackluster, with little engagement, and it feels more like a game I could play on my Android when I'm pooping, rather than a game I could sit down for 8 hours at a time.
Like I said, I'm used to Blizzard games absorbing me into the game. I spent thousands of hours on World of Warcraft. A little over a hundred on Diablo 1, and hundreds on Diablo 2. I even completed the SC1 campaigns 3-4 times. Heck, all of the campaigns for WC1-3 I've completed 2-6 times, and played numerous LAN games. Nowadays, I'm playing the campaign/offline mode once...and wondering why I'm continuing to play. It might just be because I'm older, but if that were true, I wouldn't have logged 850 hours on Skyrim.
You may have your opinions that Blizzard will never do wrong, but, I have to fault companies that no longer are their former selves. I won't convince you, I know that, but, at least I can enlighten other people.
That is not how uploading custom games to BNet has ever worked, in which the mod-makers, who are using Blizzard map-making tools and resources, do not own any of the content that they create - plus, that is conveniently ignoring the fact that the original mod-makers were hired by Blizzard, and were receiving official support.Grumman said:
Do not get me wrong - Blizzard does a lot of questionable things, and I have lost count of how many times they have screwed me over in Microsoft-esque ways. So I am not going to defend them for the sake of defending them. However, there is a huge difference between making objective criticism, and being a sensationalist. And you cannot argue with the sensationalist observation, as your last sentence just about sums it up, by replacing logic with emotion: "Blizzard, I miss you."Imper1um said:Umm... I read your entire thing trying to defend Blizzard, but I think you failed to read my post and instantly said, "Oh, this guy is attacking Blizzard, a company that I will hold the line against all nay-sayers."GarouxBloodline said:
A. I wasn't completely saying that Blizzard has lost it. Hearthstone was an interesting change from their "copy everything from even themselves." Which was nice...but its failing to pick up, and hold people in like their games used to. I acknowledged that Hearthstone was a new concept.
B. Trying to replicate anything that is popular to gain a little bit of that market is running scared, when they *used* to make original games. Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft.
C. I understand that DoTA was basically the "original." However, DoTA was created by Mod-Makers for Warcraft III, not by Blizzard. LoL revived that Genre relatively well. DoTA 2 said "oh, that idea...maybe we should revisit it, because Riot made so much." DoTA 2 is making a lot of money, and everyone still knows that its a blatant copy of a copy. Now, we're getting to Heroes of the Storm, which does nothing new on the table. Seriously, if games had a "blind taste test," I'm wondering how people would tell the difference between DoTA 2, LoL and HotS.
D. I'm not saying that copying is bad. I'm saying that blatant "Xeroxing" is bad. I don't like LoL they have at least brought some newness to the atmosphere. However, I played for a few hours on Heroes of the Storm...and I felt like I was playing League of Legends. At least in the past, Blizzard has dropped some new ideas into the gaming-sphere, even though they were copying another game, or another game's feature. I mean, heck, half of World of Warcraft features have been blatant copies of other games features, and this one is no different, its just their twist brings up the issue that they could screw up the already fragile market.
I'm making speculation, that Blizzard is running scared. You would think that Blizzard wouldn't need to make Heroes of the Storm. You would think that they wouldn't rush Starcraft 2 into production without the full campaign, split the campaign into three separate games, or prevent offline LAN play. You would think that Diablo 3 would allow for an offline mode (separate from online mode). You would think that they wouldn't need to copy Team Fortress 2 with Overwatch. You would think they would be making ground breaking games with the budget that they have, but Hearthstone is the only thing that we've seen from them in a while that hasn't been a copy of an already successful franchise, and, even then, it seems kind of lackluster, with little engagement, and it feels more like a game I could play on my Android when I'm pooping, rather than a game I could sit down for 8 hours at a time.
Like I said, I'm used to Blizzard games absorbing me into the game. I spent thousands of hours on World of Warcraft. A little over a hundred on Diablo 1, and hundreds on Diablo 2. I even completed the SC1 campaigns 3-4 times. Heck, all of the campaigns for WC1-3 I've completed 2-6 times, and played numerous LAN games. Nowadays, I'm playing the campaign/offline mode once...and wondering why I'm continuing to play. It might just be because I'm older, but if that were true, I wouldn't have logged 850 hours on Skyrim.
You may have your opinions that Blizzard will never do wrong, but, I have to fault companies that no longer are their former selves. I won't convince you, I know that, but, at least I can enlighten other people.
As for Blizzard never owning DotA, you are entirely wrong there - the mod-makers used Blizzard's map-making tools and resources, which belong to Blizzard, and the original mod-maker himself, was hired on by Blizzard and was receiving official support for quite some time. I honestly have no idea how Valve managed to wrestle the IP away from them.
I will digress with LAN-play - I will never understand why Blizzard removed that option, as it is what made Starcraft 1 so popular to play, and brought together much of Blizzard's original community.
As for the rest, it is either conjecture, still, or I run into the risk of argumentum ad nauseam. The entire point of my response to you, is to focus on the facts, instead of making blanket statements, emotionally-charged statements, and stating pure conjecture as reality.
Via lawsuit, mostly. You are *vastly* overstating Blizzard's level of involvement with DotA, which was basically nothing. They didn't design it, it was messily hacked together by custom game modders, most of whom didn't get hired or paid whatsoever, and Blizzard did nearly nothing to/for it for basically an entire decade. They didn't realize how popular it was, and did nothing to capitalize on the huge market they were, quite literally, sitting on already.GarouxBloodline said:
Blizzard's entire defense in the lawsuit was "hurr durr they're using our models and intellectual property1!!!111!!11!" which is technically true, but that's where it ends. It was painfully obvious that the vast majority of the effort, basically everything that made DotA a massive hit and a separate genre, had nothing whatsoever to do with Blizzard. It just happened to be in a Blizzard game. But people logging into wc3 to play DotA weren't "playing wc3," they were playing DotA. Everything about it was different. The actual game client might have been the same, but the rest of it differed so heavily from the base Warcraft 3 experience that Blizzard had no rightful claim over that product, and the court saw it that way.
Blizzard was trying to hop on the MOBA train years after it left the station, and in the process they were trying to hamstring Valve's attempt. Both were a little late to the party, but Blizzard figured it'd fare better if they could stop Valve early on. But the devs that Valve picked up were very familiar with the genre (obviously) and knew how to make it good, and that plus the backing of, yknow, Valve, ended up making Dota 2 a massive success. Blizzard, who never had anything to do with the original, had no idea what made the genre successful, so they made a baby's first league of legends clone. They obviously had experience at esports in general (starcraft hooo) but their total ignorance of this genre showed through something fierce. HotS just feels like a mediocre, dumbed-down version of LoL, whereas Dota 2 feels like its own game.
The courts were right to give the game/name to Valve.
No, they didn't design it. They just designed all the models, sounds & graphics it runs on. You know, the ones Valve is still using whole-sale (or are we going to pretend Morphling's/Enchantress's models are original concepts now that Valve made them a different colour? Or that Pudge is different to an Abomination because they put a wig on him?) But hey, who cares about all the time and effort they put into designing those?AuronFtw said:
Makes me wonder when we'll see Valve release "WoW2" on the grounds that it was the playerbase who made the experience and that all Blizzard did was design the models, sounds & graphics (and "that's where it ends.")
Well if you're bringing in a lot without going out of your way to farm gold, then I bet many others are and WoW tokens will not be cheap at all...Charli said:
You'd be shocked just how many WoW players are too busy to generate gold. And there's quite a few considerable gold sinks I haven't bought into this expansion as well. I know a few fellow guild members that'll be buying the token merely for that.Alfador_VII said:
Raiders repair costs are astronomical right now, as well as heirlooms, mounts, gear, enchants, potions. The economy is really quite dry at the moment besides those few things on the auction house, I make my money through craftables and buying out/resells. To some thats going out of the way.
I reckon it'll be crazy for a few weeks, probably in the millions then stabilize itself.
And if they had changed his model I would agree with you, but as is Morphling's literally a palette swap of his Warcraft III model (I'm not even sure if they bothered to do THAT, given how I remember TFT having "tropical Water Elementals" that were the same greenish-blue as DOTA2 Morphling)Grumman said:
It'd be like me copy-pasting the Heavy Weapons guy from TF2 and then going "well it's not like 'big guy with minigun' is an original concept."
Many works have used the concept of Water Elementals yes, but those Elementals have always looked different to one another.
