This of course comes on the heels of the 1900 layoffs that took place back on January 25th.  I do understand that the FTC hasn’t dropped its previous objections to the deal either (the acquisition was completed back in October 2023).

I really don’t want to expend any more energy on this either (because it just tends to suck the life energy out of you).  Generally speaking, this is sort of like the tail end of 2022 when my entire interest in gaming nosedived where I was looking at wrapping up this personal gaming blog (and moving to writing about other things that interest me).  Like everything else, am just going to see where the wind takes things.

The actual group that seems to be targeted is most of Blizzard’s customer service team (arguably one of the best parts of the company).  The article notes that Microsoft plans to outsource this to third parties (oh great) and that this currently has most all of Activision Blizzard (and possibly King) live service games, without any current moderation, in-game game masters, or customer service representatives available (talk about a shitshow in the making).  As speculated, I also believe this will eventually ripple through to community management roles (remember, Microsoft is fully behind AI and will use that to replace a lot of human roles).

Community management has long become an oxymoron because that role has been made to have to wear many different hats where they can barely engage with the community.  I can see Microsoft Gaming moving to AI to parse and collate feedback from the community while utilizing AI to do all the social media posting.  As I noted recently in my thoughts about Palworld, my feelings regarding AI is that it needs to be utilized in moderation; that the human aspect cannot be eliminated completely.  While AI can be a useful tool in this area, I still believe such feedback needs to be reviewed by an actual human because people can relate to the issues that are being conveyed.  An algorithm doesn’t care by comparison and has no concept of priorities except what it is programmed to parse.  I guess we will see.  Anyone advocating for fully adapting to and embracing AI (without considering the ramifications), needs to look in the mirror though because it could be their own personal livelihood and well being that is at play in the future.

Did this occur faster than I expected?  Oh yes.  Normally the corporate inertia is so massive, that it takes a while for leadership to determine what and where they want to reduce.  Reduction in force (RIF) is pretty much a given in these larger M&A’s and is more of a matter of when, not if.  1900 rank and file employees being sacrificial lambs however is a troll though considering Microsoft as a whole (I know that Microsoft Gaming is a division of Microsoft that is expected to operate independently, but it still factors in to the overall balance sheets regardless).  Why?  Their market capitalization as of this writing is THREE TRILLION USD.  That is 3,000,000 million.  Even if you take all of those salaries/wages/benefits packages for every one of those 1900, it would be a rounding error in the greater scheme of things.  How about providing alternative opportunities within the company where their experience and knowledge can be re-utilized?

Again, corporate bean counting executives care only one iota about saving every penny no matter how huge their revenue intake is and how profitable they are.  As a shareholder myself in many companies (including MSFT which I am now looking to divest myself of sooner rather than later), I’ve advocated for a more socially responsible shareholder approach that is not solely about shareholder value at all costs; corporations need to also take care of their rank-and-file employees along with the communities they operate in.  This job slashing by such a well-off company, illustrates again how your livelihood doesn’t matter to the executive “leadership”.

Activision Blizzard executives (well off people who have long been the source the issues and the ones who I believe should be canned first) themselves have been reporting to Matt Booty (who was promoted to president of Game Content and Studio back in October 2023 as part of a reorganization move during the acquisition).  In simple english, Booty oversees all of the different studios (Activision, Blizzard Entertainment, Bethesda, ZeniMax, King, etc).  As it relates to Blizzard Entertainment, this pretty much spells the end of their independent structure (though that significantly eroded anyway once Mike Morhaime stepped down as CEO back in 2018).  While the Irvine campus and associated Blizzard Entertainment brand name will continue to exist, most of the executive roles that were part of it will end up being depreciated.  Whether or not Activision Blizzard itself retains its existing organization structure remains to be seen (I highly doubt it will since there are going to be redundancies there as well).

Blizzard Entertainment’s last remaining co-founder Allen Adham has also decided to depart (which signals the above loss of Blizzard long being largely independent through all of its prior acquisitions; this was something Morhaime negotiated in prior M&A’s).  Additionally, Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Ybarra, is also departing (at least this part, I see as good riddance).  While the brief PR seems to be making it sound like this was a voluntarily move, it contradicts Ybarra’s own words back at BlizzCon where he told people that he (paraphrasing) “wanted to stay at Blizzard for the long haul… that someone would have to drag him out of Blizzard.”

Considering Ybarra’s roots as a Microsoft alumnus (who also worked closely with current Microsoft Gaming head Phil Spencer), there must have been more than enough red flags/feedback regarding his leadership style while Blizzard president for him to get the boot.  I did also state before that the entirety of Blizzard Entertainment’s leadership needed to be overhauled.  Well, I believe that is going to happen and I expect there to be fallout lower in the existing org chart as time goes on.  I do believe the company needs new blood at the designer level after all of the internal scandals/drama.  It’s not like that didn’t have an impact on their franchises though (Diablo IV’s messed up development is a small symbol of that dysfunction).

Another casualty is the survival game (Project Odyssey) that was in development by Blizzard which according to the article (and a later Bloomberg report), was largely in part due to technical issues with the in-house engine (Synapse) they were planning to use.  All of this should serve as warning to anyone considering a career in the gaming industry.  It’s probably one of the least desirable given how the industry is run (along with the unrealistic expectations of the customer base), how it is far more unstable in an already unstable environment of corporate executives expecting more with less.  I don’t expect this to get any better with generative AI (all I see is more rank and file bloodletting as executives look to eek out every penny from every possible avenue).

For season 2, I felt that it was a step up from season 1.  Thus my expectation for season 3 was that it would build on season 2.  It became clear that this wasn’t going to be the case as I played through the seasonal quest and engaged in the seasonal mechanic.  It honestly felt worse than season 1 because the construct pet (and its enhancements), felt mostly inconsequential (like at least in both the first two seasons, you immediately saw benefits from their respective mechanics).  Yes, there is that progress stopping bug with the brazier (it took me around 15 tries of relogging to get placed into a server shard that had a working brazier) that Blizzard acknowledged and plans to have fixed by next week (it is clear there is no longer the sort of QA testing that used to exist when server/client bugs like this go live) that has detracted from the experience for many.  I thought it was humorous but not surprising considering the state of the company.

Once I completed the seasonal quest and did my first vault (part of the main seasonal mechanic), my first thought was this felt even worse than the malignant tunnels in season 1 while being a bigger regression from the season 2 mechanic where it at least felt rewarding (and tied into Tree of Whispers + leveling).  The vaults are dungeons with annoying trap mechanics (you need to avoid taking damage from these in order to not lose your stacks of Zoltun’s Warding which allows you to open the other chest at the end of the dungeon).  The thing is that even during the questing, the vault dungeons you had to do also felt unfun (the last one required retrieving 4 different objects to place in the pedestals to gain access to the boss room).

I managed to make it only to level 26 (around 3-4 hours of playing) before I logged off and calling this done because the entire thing felt unfun and unrewarding; a complete game play regression from season 2.  I definitely wasn’t going to force myself to try to at least get to WT3 like I did with season 1 to see if maybe it got better (with the revised Helltide setup).  I didn’t even bother trying to reconfigure for WASD to test it out.

It’s really clear now this team (starting at the top with the franchise head) doesn’t have a clue when it comes to Diablo IV’s end game when there is this seasonal disconnect (of it being this regressive).  I then decided to check out the livestream and promo videos where I came away feeling like these people, spend very little time in the seasonal game play loop.  I mean I do get it; they are actively dealing with the game and its issues where they end up being able to spend only a cursory amount of time playing it (or choose to take time away from the project they are working on).  It’s a stark contrast where the hype they are espousing, comes across as out of touch gaslighting.  But this is what one has to expect going forward until the first expansion (even there, I don’t expect a lot of the issues to be addressed because the root problem is a design team that doesn’t really have a clue about what makes ARPG’s addictive/fun).

I am on the verge of giving my friend their money back (for gifting me this game).  Even though Diablo III was as bad as it was at launch and leading all the way to patch 2.0 and Reaper of Souls, I still got over a thousand hours of play time pre-RoS (I still enjoyed playing wizard in Inferno, leveling each class, and also sinking a lot of time into hardcore).  There’s just something intrinsically missing in D4’s game play loop that I cannot even get that sort of entertainment (and that is saying a lot given D3’s lack of adventure mode where you needed to resort to that dysfunctional play style of loading the appropriate part of the story quest chain to farm bosses).

To put it simply, the design decisions aren’t even selling me on the notion that the expansion(s) will be any better (the graphics will be good because the artists are pretty much the sole remaining bright spot in the company).  Since I wasn’t even going to buy the game to begin with (and only played it due to this gift), I just don’t see myself wanting to play this in future seasons let alone, the expansion.  Basically, this highlights just how much of the talent that Blizzard Entertainment used to have, has indeed been ravaged by all of the internal drama/scandals and the resulting fallout (where those who weren’t directly involved in all that, decided to leave what was a toxic environment).

Like season 1, I decided to play Necromancer (even though I’ve been a Sorcerer main and could not avoid hearing about how good ball lightning was, I still felt burnt out from how so-so the class originally was post-launch).  Instead of playing a bone build (bone spear focused in season 1), I went blood this time (blood surge).  As many reviews made note of, the Blood Harvest event is how Helltides should be.  Blood Harvest runs continuously (changing zones) and you don’t lose your Blood Lure currency.  You can also often times, kill two birds with one stone since Tree of Whispers objectives are usually active in that zone when the Blood Harvest is running.  With Helltides, if you login closer to when it is ending, there is usually no sense running it since you may not have enough time to get enough cinders (and you lose whatever cinders you have once it ends).  Then you have to wait until the next Helltide (this downtime is not conducive for players who have limited time to play).

Tree of Whisper caches also had a huge bump up in the amount of gold awarded.  In WT4, I usually got around 8 million gold during a turn-in (higher if there was a legendary cache and you redeemed for that one).  Sure, you can still burn through this increased gold with re-rolling (even at the lower revised costs).  The take away is that the changes to Tree of Whispers rewards, feels a lot more rewarding (the operative word being reward) where it is nice to complete them while doing the Blood Harvest zone.

Another thing with the Blood Harvest event is the high mob density (Helltides still have areas that have abysmally low density).  Slaying hordes of mobs is what is expected in this genre.  And then there is the loot explosion when you summon the main Blood Harvest ritual (the one where the three altars need to be filled with Blood Lure).  Basically, Blood Harvests are done right (it actually feels fun/rewarding) while Helltides have been mostly lackluster.

As for the seasonal mechanic (Vampiric Powers), that is also much better executed compared to the Malignant Hearts in the first season.  By just playing (Blood Harvests), you eventually unlock all the powers, and level them up (it’s random which three powers you are shown to level, but that narrows as you level them up to the max; level 3).  IMHO, how you level them, is how paragon glyphs should also be leveled (just being able to run open world content like this versus the existing nightmare dungeon setup).  Even with the changes made to nightmare dungeons, I’m still not a fan of running them.

Leveling up was non-eventful (mainly running Blood Harvest events); I ran the first capstone dungeon at around level 48 (with some vampiric powers, it was a simple tank and spank process).  For the second capstone, I ran it at level 68.  Yes, most folks tend to run it closer to level 60, but since you don’t even get Ancestral gear until 70, I found there was no need to rush (or be 10+ levels under the mobs in WT4).  Yes, the Elias fight was trivial at this point with the vampiric powers (I quit season 1 before I hit world tier 4 so I never did do the fight on my necromancer to compare the seasonal powers).  The only time I grouped up was when I got a random party invite during a Blood Harvest (and after entering WT3 and 4, whenever I got a party invite during a Helltide or Legion Gathering event).  Yes, the XP gain over solo is that much better.

I saved most of my keys from Blood Harvests pre-WT3, so that I could open up those chests in WT3 and then WT4 for my starter Sacred/Ancestral gear in those respective tiers once I was in them.  I still stand by my previous opinion that they shouldn’t even have this capstone dungeon step in progressing the base difficulties because the design is a boring/basic gear check.  While Diablo III (post patch 2.0 where the original Normal-Inferno system was revamped) went overboard with the amount of difficulty levels you could set your game to especially at end game Torment difficulty (a necessity due to the power creep from infinite Paragon and legendary gems), the nice part of about that is you had that option of granularity when it came to the level scaling aspect pre-level 60, and then post-level 60 when you could also try playing at Torment difficulties.

For this season, I played casual potato style, sometimes for only 30 minutes a day.  One of the things they noted in their pre-BlizzCon chat, was that leveling to 100 takes 40% less (time).  Play testing at a far less casual pace from launch through the first month, took me to level 83-85 on my eternal realm sorceress (I then played more casually, and hit 89 over the course of the next two weeks before I stopped playing the character).  Season 1, it took me around 5 days to hit level 54 playing at a semi-casual pace (basically more than the casual potato pace this season that took me to level 80 in much less time).  And besides those occasional random party invites, most of this was solo (continuous party play would’ve probably gotten me to 100).  Nonetheless, I stopped playing after hitting level 86 (getting just one paragon glyph to 15) as this end game loop was still this boring grind for the materials in order to do ubers including Duriel.  I mean I understand as someone who used to be heavily into ARPG’s, that grinding for better gear was part of the goal.  There’s just a point in Diablo IV though, where there is no dopamine fix in that grind (again, the biggest dopamine hit I’ve gotten in this game was the loot explosion doing those Blood Harvest summoning rituals; but that doesn’t yield the highest item power [925] gear).

As for inventory, the stash search addition was welcome and making gem drops as craftable material, also freed up a lot of space.  However, that extra space was consumed by new consumables introduced with this season (pacts that take up space in equipment tab and summoning materials that take up space in the consumables tab); basically two steps forward, and a step backwards.

I will acknowledge they are making progress with improving the game (in terms of the missing QoL and the seasonal mechanic).  The game loses its steam for me though once you’ve at least filled out your gear in WT4 for the non-aspirational content.  The “chase” items (the uber uniques) aren’t worth the chase to me; I know a lot of that feeling is driven by the sheer meh-itemization.  I know (after latently watching the BlizzCon videos), that itemization is something they are looking at addressing.  But I think it is going to be like loot 2.0 in Reapers of Soul; a GIGO bandaid fix that works around the existing design.

I guess they have time to at least make it more interesting within that existing framework though since we know the first expansion “Vessel of Hatred” is aways off (more details to come during the summer of 2024 with a late-2024 release), which means the next 10 months should see significant updates to the existing game systems and missing QoL features not being gated behind that expansion.

Finally, speaking of MAU (which I noted up top), releasing on Steam (and requiring a new license for it) AND two free trials (up to level 20) now within a few weeks of each other (as of this writing), are “juice the numbers” tactics.  Considering this was already Blizzard’s fastest selling game, most of the core demographic already bought into the Battle.net launcher version.  The Steam version is just additional icing for the financial reports.  I believe it would be healthier for them to grow the game more organically, but that clearly was never the case from the start given the marketing (especially the KFC promotionals in the west).

It’s why I see Season 2 as being nothing more than a bunch of bandaid fixes (since it doesn’t solve the core issues with the design of the game play loop, or bad itemization).  The “they are trying” doesn’t excuse the poor state of the game past the campaign because they didn’t take most of the lessons learned from Diablo III, and tried not to repeat them.  Just because there was yet another new team (though that team does have members who worked on Reaper of Souls) along with a revolving “leadership” door (as a result of the companies own internal dramas), does not serve as a good enough excuse when it was clear to regular employees that the crunch they were being presented with, was likely going to result in a product that was only “good enough”.

The earliest part of this blog (after Diablo III’s launch in May 2012) until November 2015, highlighted my descent as a once loyal customer of Blizzard Entertainment titles (where I bought most of the games without question), to one who stopped playing/buying them.  As I’ve noted, Diablo IV was gifted (which is why I ended up playing it for a bit, but stopped back in July).  So even though I did feel the base game (playing through the campaign) and base end game (which borrowed heavily from Diablo III) was in a much better shape compared to Diablo III when it launched, the end game play loop of Diablo IV has been generally unfun (not helped by the designed time sinks that includes these town layouts, which they are semi-addressing in the update leading into Season 2).

But the above tells a deeper underlying story of why the game is the way it is (the marketing team that put that together, couldn’t even get the BASIC math correct for the before/after with the XP), and why the designers currently tasked with addressing all of its deficiencies, will have a difficult time actually fixing the core problems (because like D3, the core issues are right down to the core design – meaning it will be a bandaid fix just like Loot 2.0 was with Reaper of Souls).  Blizzard Entertainment has a “brain drain” problem with experienced/talented personnel across all of its functions, having left the company.

There was obviously no one to review the trailer prior to posting (where they had to quickly take it down).  Them promoting this as a live service game also puts additional pressure to constantly deliver content that is meaningful (and not problem filled), and not always constantly locked behind an expansion paywall (*).  Previously, Blizzard was never known for having an agile/quick design/development process.  And that was with a much deeper bench of experience/talent to draw on; one that has been whittled away over the past few years by its own internal issues.  The company couldn’t even QA a basic trailer.  While I also laughed, it was AT Blizzard Entertainment’s expense since they haven’t been able to get out of their own way ever since BlizzCon 2019’s “do you guys not have phones” remark with Diablo Immortal (everything I had to say about this is under this label/tag).

(*) – Blizzard has already telegraphed this “yearly” expansion release cadence for Diablo IV which again highlights how the GM (Rod Fergusson) in charge of all things Diablo, is not the right person (and ought to step down IMHO) since it “lacks reading the room” regarding the state of the existing game.  All this “clout chasing” bozo confirmed is how Blizzard intended to monetize D4 (with paid yearly expansions that IMHO, would be underwhelming given how Blizzard in general during “better” times when they had way more experienced personnel, took a long time to deliver expansion content).

Is Season 2 going to be better than Season 1?  This one is fairly obvious; of course it will be (since some of the QoL changes is what should’ve been in the game from the start).  But that is only some of the QoL stuff; we’re not even talking about the core game play loops/systems which need significant changes.  In that department, I don’t believe this next patch will rectify that part of the game (except highlight its bandaid fix nature).  I’ll be surprised if after a month of Season 2, that players are raving about how great the end game grind is with the changes that were introduced.  Myself, I just see no reason to resume playing D4 until the stash design (one that was borrowed from D3 where it worked ok in a limited co-op setting, but would obviously fail in the MMO-lite design of its server shard design) is overhauled, and they address the deficiencies with itemization (since that is core to the entire loot hunt aspect of the game).  I don’t expect them to figure out the ARPG angle (since that ship has long sailed with the company lacking that sort of design experience when most of the Blizzard North team left decades ago).

I noted my brief thoughts on this back in January of 2022; I had previously divested myself of Activision Blizzard (ATVI) in July 2021, and was not enthused that Bobby Kotick would remain in his position IF the deal finally closed (since I also happen to own Microsoft shares).  I personally feel that Kotick should’ve been terminated for cause, but him being kept on by Phil Spencer at Microsoft Gaming until the end of this year to aide in the transition, speaks volumes that this isn’t happening (and he will thus walk away with his huge bonus).  As far as the acquisition amount ($69 billion US), I do believe Microsoft overpaid given the baggage they are also acquiring (but then again, it’s not like Microsoft the total corporation, doesn’t have baggage of its own; though it’s own corporate culture has slowly changed since Nadella became CEO).

No, I do not expect this acquisition to dramatically make over Activision Blizzard and it’s various units (we’re talking about one huge company, acquiring another one; anyone who has been part of these M&A’s know how long it realistically takes to integrate the larger divisions, or even smaller ones where their functions seem duplicative).  Blizzard Entertainment itself is a relatively large subsidiary within Activision Blizzard that will more than likely be largely left alone except the Battle.net unit will likely be pulled into Microsoft Gaming’s equivalent group (so as to better integrate with Xbox online/social functionality).  My preference would be to see Blizzard Entertainment’s “leadership” completely replaced, but know this realistically is not going to happen.

From Microsoft Gaming’s perspective, their primary focus is getting all of the franchise titles they are getting with this acquisition, to work well with the Xbox Game Pass.  I don’t believe the baggage that some of the studios are bringing into the mix, is going to be a top level priority for Microsoft Gaming.  Yes, there will eventually be the reorganizations and shufflings that take place in such acquisitions, but that sort of corporate inertia is really slow going (and is stuff that most usually don’t follow anyway unless they care about corporate responsibility/decency; something which is sadly lacking and is magnified in the gaming industry).

Just like Diablo III, Diablo IV was designed by mostly designers that lack in-depth ARPG experience.  And it is clear the brain drain from the internal turmoil, has impacted everything at Blizzard Entertainment including the programmers who write the server/client code (the fact that it even went as far as where you could get seasonal and eternal realm characters together due to the lack of proper validation in specific network disconnect conditions, is flabbergasting for a game that was intentionally designed to be online).  Obviously, QA has taken a backseat (where this sort of stuff would be caught when you start testing for these out of the normal conditions).  Sure, there has been gold duping in the game as well (but that seems par for the course with every Diablo game), but not having client/server validation checks for making sure different realm characters remain in their proper realms, is pretty astounding in 2023 with a AAA studio.

A lot of the QoL stuff should’ve been in from the start (no excuse for that in 2023).  We know they acknowledged the technical limitations of inventory management (stash space) in D4 (since they probably just borrowed most of that code from D3).  But that is also inexcusable to have shipped a loot hunt based game with such a braindead stash implementation (and Fergusson obviously didn’t take issue with allowing the game to ship this way).  The problems start at the top when it comes to franchise related things, and it is clear that Fergusson didn’t help put the game at a better place for its launch (and initial season).

UPDATE: a later interview has Fergusson (in really tone deaf fashion) confirming that expansions will be an annual thing.  This would be great news IF the base game wasn’t so lacking/requiring a lot of fixes/an overhaul of its itemization.  And it is becoming clear that a lot of this will be walled behind those expansions (besides new classes and new story lines/areas).  The reason this is tone deaf because of all the backlash with season 1 with the nerfs (and then having to walk a lot of those changes back).  As the title says, the problem starts at the top.

In short, it’s still the same unfun game play loop to where after trying it out for an hour, I logged out (and haven’t played since).  Thus I’m done with season 1 (haven’t completed the battle pass yet either, but am not going to force myself to play just to complete it) with my necromancer at level 64 (haven’t done the T4 capstone yet) while on the eternal realm, my sorc is still at level 89.  I don’t foresee myself logging in for awhile (except to collect my seasonal stash after the season ends if it has a time limit) until a lot of significant changes are made.

We now return to our regular programming…

I said what I needed to say previously.  Talk is one thing (we’ve seen this song and dance before with words that sounded good, but the actual action being anything but the opposite).  The proof of how much more fun the game will be, will reside in the deployment of that update on August 8th.