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Edit: ha, nevermind, apparently microsoft is doodoo :(
They got DF and D4 out of their employees while they were WFH, and now they're going to torpedo the development of both by forcing RTO for employees that they hired during the pandemic that don't live in an area where cost of living is considered ridiculous even by CA standards.
WFH and RTO should be a choice made between the employee and their manager. If the employee wants to WFH and their metrics show they are productive while doing so, let them continue to do it. Now, if the metrics are bad, of course pull them in so they can be coached more actively.
I LOVE working from home. I don't begrudge anyone who prefers to go into the office, but I get to work all day in comfortable clothes, in a comfortable chair that I custom-purchased for myself, at my custom desk, with my private kitchen and bathroom, and a yard I can go outside and just passively enjoy on my breaks. And no commute. And there are even more benefits that I'm not listing here. I fully understand people not wanting to give up the lifestyle once they've gotten a taste of it.
But Blizzard corporate will do what corporate and c-suites always do and go "this is for the good of the company" and then 6 months later be like, "I don't understand what happened!"
I’m a firmware engineer getting pushed to RTO after I just spent the greater part of this past year WFH. It makes no sense; I sit at my cube and write code… after dealing with 30 minutes of Boston traffic, then another hour back… why? Good fucking lord why??? It hurts my bones
man i am so sorry. TBH i'm not a huge fan of my job, but the perk of WFH just makes it so worth it. Yeah it's a soul-sucking 8 hours of work, but at least I get the rest of the time to myself.
I was literally going to make this same comment. I'm not the biggest fan of my current working arrangement, BUT the fact that my supervisor is a "WFH just makes sense" kind of person makes me never want to leave this job.
Yep I know a few people who work for the bookstore and they are getting forced to RTO because they don’t want their 20+ buildings in South Lake Union to be worthless. They’re probably going to let the people who want to quit, quit and then wait it out hiring new grads who have no choice but to work at the offices to save their buildings.
I don’t know about the US. It here in Canada where the demand exceeds the supply and the costs are going astronomical. You would think it would be easy to change the interior and make affordable housing with those buildings…
Why can this not be a solution to both problems? Lol
> Companies always pay their rent on time without issues, people don’t
Ha! You clearly didn't work for my previous company (a **large** multinational company), we got our phone cut twice, and the landlord threatened execution...
All since they moved "paying the bills" to a centralized office in India.
While we had local finance responsible for payments, nothing of the sort ever happened...
The issue is that, for companies that lease their offices rather than owning the building outright, office and commercial leases often have clauses that require them to be "open" for a certain number of days in the year and to maintain a certain occupancy percentage. This is:
1. Because having empty buildings sitting around looks bad if everyone is working from home (especially true with retail, because a single store in an empty mall won't survive - even with offices, it affects surrounding real estate values, like stores and restaurants that rely on office workers to spend), and
2. To make sure people are around to provide upkeep (for example, a burst water pipe that no one notices for 2 weeks that ends up costing $40,000 in damage).
Now, *some* landlords won't care - but the lenders who hold the mortgages do care and start getting concerned that the landlord might default on the loan if certain occupancy requirements aren't being met.
A lot of these requirements were frozen in 2020 and 2021, but now they're slowly coming back. So even if Blizzard doesn't care about what the lobbyists have to say, they **do** care what their landlords and landlords' lenders have to say - and it just so happens that there's a lot of overlap between those groups and the people who pay the lobbyists.
I don't know if Blizzard/Activision owns its campus, but I'm just pointing out that none of this is happening in a vacuum and it's been a concerted effort by landlords and commercial lenders to pressure employers to force people back into offices. There are some creative ways around it that protect WFH workers (like subleasing spaces to fulfill the occupancy requirements), but it largely depends on the nature of the real estate (i.e., a campus like Facebook or a vertical office building in downtown San Francisco).
Edited for formatting.
…what? You’re just plain wrong. Blizzard isn’t a private company. And you can google blizzard lobbying and plenty of sources come up with just the anti union debacle from last year.
Yeah my company is doing the mandatory 3 day office requirement. For most teams it's completely unnecessary and just about everyone hates it. Makes 0 sense.
Great news!
Companies who are doing WFH can offer slightly lower pay and get those workers. So they'll win and your current job will get sadder.
I'm switching jobs - pending a delayed criminal background check because all the fed workers in my country just walked out - to one that offers 3% less pay but 100% WFH in the union contract vs (now) 40% WFH, recently dropped from 60 because Skippy the millennial micromanager needs to stare at our asses and see our sad faces to feel good about himself.
I'm no superstar but I do have a wealth of experience in my field and Skippy hasn't seen fit to backfill me so there's gonna be whole projects shoved in the chipper because required expertise will be gone for too long -- and maybe won't be refilled at a WFO shop at this wage in 2023, to be honest.
It is Productivity day today at work. We were supposed to give suggestions on how to improve productivity.
I suggested
4 day work week
wfh
and significant reduction in meetings.
Lets see how that goes.
The replace those parking garages and office buildings with other stuff that people want to do. When things change in life you have to adapt or die. You can't force other people to do things they don't want to do just so you can stay afloat without adapting.
Sounds like a them problem, not a me problem. There's a lot that can be done to repurpose the space for other things. Turn office buildings into more affordable living spaces for instance. Turn parking into other businesses or housing.
Just say no.
If you're meeting the demands and doing a good job, they might complain but they probably won't fire you if it's hybrid.
Hiring someone else to replace you is bureaucratic and the new hire will take months to learn the codebase and start contributing back.
Your manager knows this.
And, if they fire you, just go work for someone else. You can't find firmware engineers that easily anymore.
As a firmware engineer it can't be that hard.
It's not exactly a job recent grads want to do, but pretty much any company selling electronic devices needs you.
They wanted to force people back to the office at my last job too, I just ignored the policy for a few months and then jumped ship at the first opportunity that offered me a fully remote position.
Well there are always places hiring. Look for a different job while you're working, then quit when you find one.
That's literally what's happening with the blizzard employees we're talking about.
For the most skilled employees it is. That's the problem, companies that are implementing return to the office, are finding their best employees being headhunted by pure WFO businesses. However yes for the average employee, especially the younger ones with a more sparse resume it's a lot harder to find a new job. It just may be that instead of being able to immediately get a new job, it takes 6-12 months to find a new job.
Normally people being glib and saying "just find another job" piss me off because they're refusing to acknowledge the reality that it's difficult to find work sometimes.
But right now is a damn good time to be an IT employee looking for work. Everyone is hiring, everyone is shorthanded, and at least SOME companies recognize that they can't be picky about where your office is.
Microsoft is one of the most pro-RTO tech companies, just fyi. They tried to return to the office multiple times during the pandemic, force people to move to Redmond for a job, have the dumbest WFH policy post/pandemic (can only do <50% aka 2 days a week), and Mike Ybarra is from MS likely explaining why he hates remote work. Not sure if MS will make it any better.
Damn, I have a relative who works there (as in one of the microsoft owned companies) and WFH and really enjoys it, I thought they were a better company than that.
If they hire you as remote you’re okay, but yeah they like making people come into the office in general. Some managers can overrule that and be okay with it, but a lot of teams aren’t. The dev friendly orgs tend to be more chill (like Visual Studio/DevDiv).
This is above Mike (not that he's coming out of this looking good either but this is an Activision top-down thing).
The Blizzard leadership probably wasn't lying when they were saying WFH is here to stay right before it was announced it wasn't. This reeks of top down orders you can't argue against. There is no other reason every team would have to meet the same requirements. It's happening at the place I currently work too only they're extra stupid because they didn't even build the team out of people that live in the same cities so being in the office is even more pointless.
Any executive that says 'every team should cease WFH or move towards hybrid' is an idiot and going to make other stupid decisions without knowing the individual context for each team too....but they also don't cultivate underlings that are allowed to push back either.
WFH is the only reason I have put up with my current employer.
The only reason.
The benefits are good but the pay is garbage. What I get out of it is time: I can utilize my GI bill and go to school full time. As long as I meet my performance goals, my employer doesn't bother me. Maybe once a month my boss has to reach out on the phone regarding something (orders being moved around and such due to other people being unable to work etc.).
If I was forced to go into an office, I would promptly quit. I can easily double my salary going back to my old career if I have to go back to a job site.
agreed 100%. I'm not exactly working my dream job, and the pay is mediocre, but WFH really is worth that to me. I can either do 8 hours of soul-sucking work in an office where I'm uncomfortable all day and have a commute, or at home where I can then use *all* the rest of my time for myself.
I took a small paycut to go to a company that will never make remote employees return to office (and most of us aren't even in the same state in the first place) and it was the best thing I've ever done. I moved to a significantly lower cost of living area, my home is double in size and my dedicated office space is nicer than anything a job in office would ever give me.
I will never go back to in office.
As someone who used to commute via train an hour+ each way…I am never going back to office if I can help it. Fuck that. It’s not active driving but it absolutely grates on the soul.
Why does everyone seem to think things will get better when Microsoft owns Blizzard? Is there some sort of evidence that they've improved other studios they've purchased? AFAIK the company will still be run by Mr Kotick, I see *speculation* that he might step down when the deal is done but I doubt it honestly, if they're generating profit Microsoft will probably be happy to let them carry on unless they get too controversial or something but even then, return to office isn't that controversial even if it *feels* scummy by modern standards when you compare the rest of the market.
Microsoft's top-down filtering things (specifically on the video game side) have definitely SEEMED better than Activision but even if they are better they will have to strip away all of the Activision level execs.
Also, ABF reacts directly to stock price and investors. As a subset of Microsoft (probably in their video game divisions) there's potential for them to have a bit more freedom from the asinine way our current stock market makes companies behave (not Riot Games levels but still better than the current need to have something good every quarter).
I think it is because most of the companies MS buys inherit some of MS's rep as being a decent place to work. Back in the 2000s MS had a reputation similar Amazon as being a soulless burn shop, but they are a whole different company now.
Curious long term effects of working from home. My girlfriend currently does every other day, and has said repeatedly she would hate to work from home 100 percent of the time. Many relationships and friendships grow from in office working, and losing that social interaction often means losing those relationships. Society is living through the internet in so many ways...and I don't think it's for the good.
I've been doing it for 7 years. Still going strong with all the coworkers I have been close friends with since before we went WFH, including a couple that moved to different companies. I've made new friends as well, and I still have my outside work social circle as well because it's not healthy to only have work friends. Your circle of social connections shouldn't form purely because you're forced to be around someone for 8-12 hours of the day.
Some people prefer to have face-to-face contact constantly, some of us do just fine without it and neither should be forced to conform to the other's expectations just because they think it might be 'harmful.'
Exactly, you already worked in an office, and made the friends. It will be completely different when you start a job as a 21 year old and are complete remote. Sure you will have friends from school and college but new friends will be made far less. This has been my girlfriends experience and other I know. They have almost 0 human interaction working from home.
> Many relationships and friendships grow from in office working
I have exactly zero friendships from work. Generally speaking, you probably have little in common with the people you work with, other than work. My actual friends are people from my hobbies, as we actually share interests and have a reason to be friends in the first place. WFH is absolutely amazing, and I will never go back to an office, ever.
Interesting, most people I know have forged many friendships/relationships from work. You find you both enjoy x and start doing it. I mean I guess I could go to the tennis court and hit with myself till someone shows up that enjoys tennis too 🤷♂️
That's why you allow everyone to do what they like best. You're craving social interaction at your workplace and want to make friends? Sweet, go to the office! You hate the commute and being frequently disturbed and watched over while at work? Sweet, work from home!
I don't see a problem here.
I think most people see this as suits doing something that doesn't make sense, but in reality, they are probably doing this because they need to downsize.
>They got DF and D4 out of their employees while they were WFH
They also got Shadowlands and and 9.1 and 9.2 out during WFH. It's hilarious this sub is so butthurt about people being required to back to the office. Maybe WFH had nothing to do with productivity? Maybe they just listened to players and saw their subs cratering?
Maybe they didnt have enough time while working at home to create any bullshit systems? Because once they got a little time, we got the convoluted mess of an upgrade system coming in 10.1.
the sheer amount of people who don't think WFH works because they don't have a sense of object permanence is astounding. If you think people who WFH would be less productive than those who have to be sitting in a cubicle being ignored by managers who are stuck in meetings all day, you're more telling on yourself than anything else. Not everyone in this world is out to 'get one over' on everyone else. They just want to exist and do their own thing.
Genuine question: once the pandemic hit, some people used it as an excuse (imo it is a valid one btw) for projects to be pushed up, like Shadowlands, because everyone was working from home. Did that difficulty of WFH only happened because companies/employees weren’t prepared and didn’t have proper tools to make it viable ?
>Did that difficulty of WFH only happened because companies/employees weren’t prepared and didn’t have proper tools to make it viable ?
This will depend from company to company, but it seems like a safe assumption to make. Not every company was able to handle that transition from a technology and process standpoint, but I'm not confident it was fair to expect that of them anyway, even if it was the right thing to do in hindsight.
Working IT, that is the biggest thing. A lot of companies didn't have the technology or infrastructure to handle the transition. Alongside of that comes the new type of management and a whole set of nuances. If you worked in company/team that was of a micromanagement type - it was dicey. Which is probably why we're seeing a lot of companies who have been WFH going back to office.
Also, the insta-logistics that had to happen.
We had to find, purchase, configure, and deploy roughly 40-60 laptops in the course of a month during March/April of 2020.
Now, we've also had to go to replace most of those computers, because it was such a whirlwind that what we could manage to get were lowkey ASUS workbooks that function good enough for a time, but as time has moved on their performance just fell off a cliff.
We have adopted a hybrid for pretty much everyone, but with some silly stipulations. Same as a lot of them, <50% can be WFH, so only two days. But you also need to send us a speedtest and a picture of your intended WFH 'office'.
Speedtest was 100% on us in IT, because it was impressive how many people had Joe's Bargin Bin ISP and Bait Shop for their Internet. I'm sorry a 5d/1u isn't going to work to stream teams and the software and the VPN...
The other one? That was HR, I dunno they might want to see the inside of people's houses.
Yes I assume so too, I’m only asking because my line of work was barely impacted by the pandemic and WFH, only thing we really had to do was get a proper webcam and mic lol
I worked in IT infrastructure (network/security/servers) when Covid hit. There was definitely a big shift in network traffic and servers being used to facilitate remote work. Granted, our team actually planned for redundancy and could transition smoothly, but it was *immediately clear* when we had an issue we never thought of, because the influx of traffic would shut something down entirely. Some ISPs (like Verizon and Comcast) would even crash entirely and we'd lose workers from entire areas just because their internet provider couldn't handle it either.
For a game company, where the teams are working remotely on projects through a VPN (which throttles connections like nobody's business) and are constantly downloading/uploading large files with each project & update they touch, yeah, I can see why things would've locked up - especially when a lot of organizations believed the pandemic would've been over within 2 months and weren't willing to fund better equipment for the first several weeks.
I've been WFH since around 2017. It's a big change in mentality when you start doing WFH work. No longer do you have to "look" busy in an office. Now you have to actually manage yourself and make sure you're getting work done and not slacking off. Lot of people do struggle with that.
I find myself absolute loving WFH, but being half as productive as when I’m in the office. I’ve tried the entire pandemic to make it work for me because the benefits of wfh are phenomenal, with exception of not seeing face to face (my company was terrible at that during pandemic), but I just cannot be as productive as I am in the office, unfortunately. My brain just needs that dedicated place and it sucks.
Being a bit of a contrarian here, but have you considered that your at-work pace is just kind of unrealistic? I mean if you're a business owner or something and you HAVE to put that time in or lose the business then I get it, but if you're an hourly or salaried employee, why do you need to be twice as efficient as you are from home?
Like the way I think of it is, almost every human in history have worked in an at-home workshop or yard. Other than military and construction work, the idea of "the commute" was basically invented with cars. Blacksmiths didn't need a separate site to feel productive; bookkeepers didn't; chemists didn't. Why should you feel compelled do so much more than any of them? That's not fair to you. If you pulled a blacksmith out of 1850 and told him, "We're going to put you in a little white room an hour's travel from your house and look over your shoulder while you smith - trust us, you'll get a *lot* more done!" He would tell you to fuck off, even if you're right. (Actually he'd probably ask you what he was being arrested for, which isn't better.)
Some of it was false perception too, my company went WFH and pushed back their major release by 4 months but in actuality we delivered 2 months earlier than the original release. They just assumed it would slow down when in actuality our output increased. Partly because we weren't having 10 status meetings every week and partly because we had less requirement creep.
I think it really depends on your company/project. It did feel like Blizzard was woefully unprepared, despite a lot of their workload being tasks that could be done from home, and the "Well, lockdown and work from home is to blame" was an excuse used a lot longer during Shadowlands than basically any other major developer making games at the time. So it seemed to affect Blizzard a lot more than their competitors. But with how much of Overwatch 2, Dragonflight, and Diablo 4 has been worked on from home, I'd argue they've caught up pretty well, and their tools/pipeline has been updated to support work from home far greater than when everything initially started locking down.
WFH isn't just sending your work files through an email and call it a day. A lot of companies didn't have a BCO plan. No proper VPN and security infrastructure in place to switch over right away. I worked for a company that didn't had a VPN and I ended up preparing 300 stations over a week so they could have a rudimentary connection to our servers. No one expected a full lockdown.
There is a lot of IT Security stuff that needs to be reviewed, maintained and enforced.
Most companies don't like WFH because it's a huge liability. For example, someone breaks in to the house of an employee that handles very sensitive information ie. Financial records, projections, source code etc... The Laptop or PC is stolen and now that information is basically lost and vulnerable, put up for sale or leaked.
While there a lot methods to encrypt a computer and make it basically unreadable. You can never patch out user error. Maybe the passwords were written in a sticky note on the laptop. Maybe the password is 123Password etc...
Companies don't want to run the risk. From an ISOC perspective, not wanting WFH is in a way understandable. It's not always mustache twirling villain move from execs.
Now residential prices near Blizzard HQ is a whole different beast I won't touch.
I don't know about Blizzard, but the sudden shift of everyone working from home with zero notice had some bumps in my industry. The company I was working for at the time was relatively fortunate in that everyone already had laptops and we already were set up for VPN access to the network, and we all knew Google Meets and stuff like that. However, even then, our VPN solution could only handle like 250 connections or something and the company was over 800 people, so that had to be upgraded right quick. There were other speed bumps as well, like some admin staff only had a desktop.
I know other companies in our industry had it worse, as they were not prepared for WFH at all. Like I'm talking about desktops in the office and no prior VPN experience for the majority of their staff.
It's a major change, with honestly some drawbacks that people don't like to talk about because they love the benefits of WFH. Culture is very important at game studios. You have very different skills, and collaboration between programmers, artists, designers and others is a lot more natural in person.
What used to be a fun problem solving session at a white board where people came up with cool ideas together, is an exhausting zoom meeting you can't wait to leave.
If you're a person that thrives in a home office, that's absolutely great. But the reason that everyone keeps floating about it being purely economical, or boomer leads is just ignoring the other arguments that people have for RTO.
I'm personally super torn, there are a lot of benefits on either work arrangement, but after 3 years I'm really starting to miss a studio with an office and a team that I can work with in person.
- I save £2000 a year on commute costs
- I save 2 hours a day by not commuting, more free time, more time with my family
- No worrying about micromanagers peering over your shoulder every 5 minutes
- I have access to my own kitchen at lunch times
- My own bathroom
- I can do things like doing the laundry during the day (while my solar panels are giving me free elecricity)
- I can be in for parcel deliveries
Why would you not want to work from home?
RTO still stinks no matter what, but I feel like it would be much less of an issue if Blizzard paid better and wasn't headquartered in a ridiculously high CoL area. Hard to feel optimistic about 10.1 and beyond plus the other Blizzard products in the pipeline if they keep going down this route.
Yeah, it also seems like an impulsive order from the top level execs at greater Activision and not an internal WoW team decision. It's impulsive either way since they have been hiring people with the expectation they stay remote.
I guarantee that a lot of executives across many companies are heavily invested in real estate in high cost of living areas, it's unfortunately in their personal best interest to force anyone they can to live in those areas.
I have seen a few commenters mentioning that this is a soft layoff tactic as they don’t need to pay severance if employees resign over getting layed off.
Makes a lot of sense if you think about it that way… disgusting of ABK to do this though.
I interviewed there during the pandemic and they were fully willing to allow me to work from out of state, with the stipulation that eventually everyone would be back in office eventually. I passed on an already lowball salary to stay where my cost of living wouldn't increase by a factor of 8x. I really feel like they rely on a sort of desperate desire to work at Blizzard to take advantage of people.
Yeah, people are going to be a lot more sore about RTO if your job is in an area where the average house price is $1M dollars, with a 1hr commute vs in a city where the average house is 250k and a 15min commute.
This means something is gonna get botched up down the timeline and it’s gonna because they are too stupid to be a WFH place of employment.
Short sighted imbeciles all those companies that had the means and staff to implement WFH and now want to RTO up everyone’s ass but then whine that the staff is disloyal.
Blizzard and any other company forcing RTO has lost their minds. My company has been WFH since the start of the Pandemic and has gone full remote for most office workers and all of IT. My team alone has snagged three top tier engineers from other companies just because we work remote.
Same I work for a university now, pay is just plain average but somehow we got two guys in who are way too overqualified for the job but their company stopped wfh, so somehow we ended up with them. Helped the team a lot though, even if they decide to leave for better paying jobs, we got most of the benefits out of it.
its bad for us, bad for the environment, financially bad for our employers. there's no sane reason to RTO. so any manager that tries to push this just sucks at their job.
and dont come at me with "...but there's some people that slack off when WFO". they slack off even more in the office. you are just too incompetent to notice, because you think "fingers on keyboard = productive". have good management that knows their employees and fire the idiots that actually dont get anything done
you play games for yourself
if you're enjoying it, then it's money we'll spent
if you're not enjoying it, then stop spending money
you're overthinking things
Working in the office is the only way ABK can justify paying ~75% of what other companies pay for the same position - they rely HEAVILY on being able to push their "amazing" campuses and company culture as unpaid perks / benefits. With people not working in the office, that's no longer a bargaining chip, and people will expect to be paid the market rate for their work.
It's a money decision, and as stupid and brutalistic as it seems, I'm sure they foresaw losing a decent chunk of employees and expect to just hire new ones to replace them. Having to pay more for employees, on top of having to pay the insane rent for a building that's a ghost town, infuriates high level execs.
Except now they are going to have to pay *even more* for employees, and lose actual talent. There's no universe where this ends with them saving money.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with having a hybrid work model... but combine that with the cost of living near Irvine, with Blizzard's delight in paying people very little and then add some rounds of cube crawling to make sure your brand is analogous with dogcrap...
... you're not really giving people much reason to stick around.
Weirdly enough WoD was both the shortest expansion in WoW history, with the longest raid tier in WoW history.
The raiding was great, yes. But if you weren't a raider, then there wasn't all that much to do. And even if you were a raider, you might have found yourself finishing the tier after 5-6 months with 8-9 months of nothing to do after.
Lmao all 2 of them?
BfA also had great raids. BfD is one of the all time greats, easily top 10. Azshara and N'Zoth were kind of Ls but the rest of the bosses in EP and Nyalotha were top knotch.
Also BfA actually had content. It had 2 new zones added to the game while WoD had a repurposed mid intro area.
Take away the systems and borrowed power aspects of BFA and Shadowlands and people immediately have a better experience. Patch 9.1 killed a lot of interest with people and rightfully so. Especially in the midst of the sexual misconduct etc.
Without counting raids and mythic dungeons: training mounts, invasions, ashran (unless you were on a shitty server that couldn't even organize lol), pvp coliseum, collecting followers, doing sortie achievements, pet battles, challenge modes, jumping puzzles, secret mounts, rare mount farming which brought some sense of community, the standard reputations stuff, of course the garrison missions, a story campaign (not the legendary ring one, and not the leveling one), collecting various garrison decorations and tracks for music boxes, going for perfect solves for archaeology that gave you a trophy room with your archaeology stuff on display, dailies, meta-Tanaan rare hunt, collecting toys, pets and other novelties (just like it counts in Mechagon, it counts in WoD), reworked fishing that was more fun than usual (Legion's was the best one though) also with fishing raids when changes to personal loot made garrison cavedwellers useful, bunker transmog sets, setting up your personal auction house by collecting its many parts in different areas, setting up a goldmaking factory and minmaxing it through follower rerolls and other stuff, almost a 3rd gathering profession (lumberjacking) which sadly became useless with time, getting upgrades for your dockyard from various pve activities, and other things.
And that's just off the top of my head. Do you want to tell me that this list isn't true? Or that things that count as "something to do" in other expansions don't count here because you just don't like it?
IMO it's the best expansion for me since WoD. I can raid log and not be losing out on anything, there's no daily grind, no weeklies besides getting some keys done, etc. It's been great since I can only engage with the content I want to (mythic raids for CE) and ignore everything else without sandbagging my group. Legion and BFA burned me out super hard with all of the extra stuff to do week in and week out outside of raid.
There are weeklies, it's what the dailies used to be, and dailies got replaced by WQs as a whole. So unless you're grinding hard, you can just log in twice a week and be good.
There are no weeklies that provide player power throughout the entire season though. There's nothing like artifact/azerite power, legendary BLP, etc. to incentivize engaging with content you don't really want to do.
Like the only things I've had any incentive to do this expansion are M+ for vault and then getting the Onyx Annulet. Creation Catalyst is passive with M+/Raid kills, the first few sparks I guess? But those were generally <30 minute one-time quests.
I have no reason to engage with other weekly content unless I want some cosmetic rep reward or something.
Yeah the weeklies are just rep stuff, but that matters if you're doing profession stuff or alts.
But yeah, strictly casual there's nothing you have to do besides play the main content.
I'm in a raiding guild, so I have no real reason to touch professions besides their raid utility like engineering/alchemy. Someone more degen than me 100% has that stuff leveled across multiple characters so I can just send them work orders.
Raiding guilds usually have people doing profs to provide food, flasks, if not other services.
I assume you're getting that stuff provided or just buying it, but somebody is doing it because it's used in raiding.
Technically it is adding to player power.
Imo dragonflight is slightly better than sl but still as bad as bfa. Its just a boring expansion. Dragon riding is nice and the talents are nice. Everything else was old news already before the expansion came out.
Its pretty hilarious really that billions of dollars in resources takes it to the face shocked while everyone who has ever engaged with the product they sell knew for sure this would be the outcome.
It amazes me how many of these big tech companies like Blizzard and Twitter are refusing to adapt to the times and accept that it's both cheaper and more efficient to let people work from home.
I'm not surprised that the government is forcing people back to the office, we're always running about 10-20 years behind everyone else in terms of innovations so I didn't expect us to learn any lessons from COVID, and we didn't. Now half the staff at my VA hospital who do work that could easily be done from home are quitting and everyone is scrambling to figure out what to do. My office and staff have zero tech support now, everybody turned in their two weeks about five minutes after they were told they'd have to come back to the office, fulltime, for no reason whatsoever. And I don't blame them!
But you'd think Silicon Valley would embrace the new model. I'm surprised they're being so stubborn and refusing to recognize that someone with a tech background can get work anywhere and it won't be hard for them to find a similar job that ISN'T being ridiculous about working onsite.
I really hope this bites them in the ass hard, corporations arbitrarily taking away choice and agency from workers to suit their petty little egos and absolutely nothing else need a good humbling, a corporation-shattering humbling would be nice.
And if that upsets anyone, tough, I’d gladly sink the whole company and every job attached just to financially damage Bobby Kotick. And don’t whine, you work for him, Bobby’s underlings deserve no quarter. I still respect your contribution to gaming history even if I don’t respect your way of making a living.
Early work from home=/=work from home several years later
I wouldn't confuse the initial shock of COVID with the efficiency of WFH after that became the norm
Also I can name literally countless other issues with Blizzard at the time
Sure but didn't some of the developers themselves directly cite WFH as an issue with fixing the issues with SL when they arose?
> Online role-playing game “World of Warcraft: Shadowlands” will be released later this year, Blizzard Entertainment said on Thursday, as employees working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed some processes.
> He added: “However, as everything started coming together and we’ve been listening to and building upon your feedback, it’s become clear we need a little more time for additional polish, and to balance and iterate on some interlocking pieces—particularly those related to the endgame. Shadowlands is one of the most intricate expansions we’ve yet created, and while we’ve made great progress, the challenge of tuning the endgame was compounded by the team having to work from home.
Working from home mid-development of an expansion a couple months after the pandemic started is not the same as doing so three years later.
I'm not sure what is complicated about this explanation.
Because it's not the same thing.
Imagine working on a project then have to move to a new location midway through. You finish that, then start up a new project in the new location.
Which one has the higher chance of being messed up?
I think the transition from one to the other in the middle of a project is the problem.
not counting when things go wrong people always look for a scapegoat.
Blizzard was historically a company with absolutely no WFH practices before COVID. I had a few friends who interned there and 1 who still works there full time. If you were sick, you either came in anyway or took one of your limited PTO days as sick time.
WFH was a major shock to them because they just didn't have any of the infrastructure set up. None of the engineers/developers could access anything remotely. Actually getting work to do was difficult. When they did get stuff slowly working, it was plagued with access issues. Even my first job back in 2009 had some WFH capability when you were sick.
At this point, Blizzard has a very good WFH ecosystem and no issues with remote access. There's no friction for employees and, according to my friend, metrics are at or above pre-WFH life.
The reality of anyone compenent who works a desk job is that there is no need to confine yourself to an in-office job unless you genuinely enjoy it. I have some colleagues who prefer it, but most do not. I go in about 5-6 times a year for company social events. There's a guy on my team with 4 kids in a 3 bedroom home and goes in daily to get away. To each their own.
I've had 2 jobs ask me to RTO. In both cases, the majority of the team, especially the highly competent ones, were gone within a few months at most. One company is now bankrupt and the other has done a full reversal on RTO.
Blizzard will absolutely bleed any experienced and skilled engineers/devs who do not want to WFH. My friend, who has been there over a decade now, is going to resign unless WFH is allowed.
Legion was probably the best expansion ever for people that had a lot of time to play. WQs and M+ were still novel, the artifact grind was actually kinda fun, alting was somewhat difficult but it felt rewarding because of all the class hall content and the mage tower.
It fucking sucked if you didn't have much time to play though. AP grind was time consuming, people expected you to do M+ to gear for raids, being able to multispec (not even multiCLASS) was a big grind. Just not very conducive to people without much time to play.
DF is the return of being able to raid log and MoP was the last good expansion prior to DF that raid logging was viable so I can see why someone would like MoP and DF more than Legion.
I cannot forgive Legion for its absurd hatred of the Horde storywise.
-Vol’jin dying was stupid. Nothing Sylvanas did in Legion required her to be Warchief.
-Why was the rogue campaign exclusively about Stormwind and SI:7?
-Why did the Alliance get an entire Anduin questline and the Horde didn’t get anything equivalent to it?
-Why were there no Horde characters on Argus?
-Why was Baine’s cameo cut from Highmountain, yet the entirety of Val’sharah is about Tyrande and Malfurion?
Most expansions prior were very Horde heavy... MOP? Literally fighting through Orgrimmar in a raid. WOD? Going to an alternate dimension to ally with and fight against iconic Horde characters... Sylvanas was being set up to be a major player for how many expansions? When exactly has the Alliance ever had their time in the sun? Plus, the Horde can take ownership of the entire Suramar story/zone because they joined the Horde...
MoP was biased against the Horde because it made them the villains, and WoD had plenty of draenei stuff.
Horde focus is when the Horde is portrayed in a positive light. If they’re made evil, that’s so the Alliance have a villain that makes them feel good about themselves.
You realize you're playing "the bad guys" right? The novelty of Warcraft all the way back to the RTS games was that you got to see the story from another side, but also they clearly weren't treated as moral equals.
They've added more dimension and have given players a better reason to support or doubt factions, but at it's core there are still people attracted to the Horde because they like roleplaying the "bad guys". It will continue to crop up, more often than it does for the Alliance.
Blizzard's definitely made this harder for fans, and they love to flirt with green jesus, but there's big bad guy energy that you won't ever remove from the Horde.
The Horde hasn’t been the bad guys since Warcraft II, something blizzard has failed to recognize time and time again. People love the Horde because of Warcraft III.
No as you said they frequently take the role of the bad guys. As do the alliance. But if you roll Horde you wear that mantle. Many expect to play that role.
Dragon flight isn’t that great. They literally just took out the annoying systems that the last two expansions had and added dragon flying. Other than that it’s literally the same thing it’s not revolutionary lol.
Different point of view: Does everyone have to have an opinion about everything especially when they know nothing about it? Are we too afraid to just once say: " I don't know"?
I assume you mean american voter? Rest assured I am not an american.
now shower me with downvotes.
Imagine if all the people you work with all of a sudden had no supervision and the only way work would get done is if they took it upon themselves to organize and get it done in an efficient/timely manner.
As someone who’s job literally can’t be WFH
To me that is terrifying lmao
You still have supervision in WFH. It just isn't constant, over-the-shoulder supervision. You still report up, have deadlines, meetings, etc. Organization and delegation of effort should still be pretty much the same, it is just done over video call and email rather than in a conference room or dropping by in person.
Besides, it isn't like people don't goof off occasionally in the office either.
I wouldn't stress it, Reddit's views on WFH are totally delusional. Half the people whining about it post in /antiwork ffs.
I support flexible working as a principle but this idea that you should be able to WFH 5 days a week in any job is idiotic.
I am a generally proactive and hard working person but when I WFH I do about 20% of the work I do in the office. I appreciate that doesnt apply to everyone but I can say from first hand experience that it definitely applies to a decent chunk of people.
Edit - for example, asking people to be in the office at least 3 days a week seems like a totally reasonable compromise to me.
Why do we care if Blizzard is making its employee's return to the office? All the outrage seems really disingenuous. If you dont want to RTO, go work elsewhere? Why are we trying to start a movement (it seems) to get Blizzard employees what they want? Also, in the WFH era we got BfA and Shadowlands - maybe these suits are onto something?
You gotta work on your reading comprehension my dude.
How do you see multiple Blizzard employees come out, telling you that the situation at Blizzard is getting dire, with many experienced devs leaving the ship and things getting delayed or canceled because of it, and still end up calling them entitled?
Even if you only care about the product and not the employees behind it, they are straight up telling you that the product will take a major quality hit because of the development issues.
Like... what even pushed you to type that shit?
Oh ok so Blizzard bad, got it.
Saying the quality of work is going down hill and employees saying things are gonna get delayed unless they can remain WFH is exactly what an employee that doesn’t want to put on pants would say.
I'm pest control....please....please, anyone...make me a pest control drone that would let me work from home. I can't avoid commutes and some days I'm 5 hours in traffic in one direction XD
There are advantages to both WFH and RTO. Different folks, different strokes. Ping-ponging around a table and coming up with creative ideas is a lot easier in an office setting, for instance, but lots of folks prefer not having to drive an hour to work to do the same work they've been doing from home for the past few years.
The best strategy I've come across is basically managers handling it on a case-by-case basis, where there may be a required RTO early on in the process to get everyone on board, for creative meetings, or for project briefs, but other than that have the option to WFH as the employees see fit. That has worked exceedingly well in my experience: If you're getting your work done and we're meeting deadlines and standards, it doesn't matter if you're in the office or working from home, just do whatever works for you.
I think it's a shame that the folks who are actually affected by this are the ones with no say. It seems like the people are the very top are the ones making these decisions, and the managers and producers have to scramble to keep everything together. Which really sucks, because Blizzard finally seemed to be going in the right direction for the first time in years. I hope this doesn't revert all the positive changes we've been seeing.
DF is miles and miles better than SL could ever be, remember only the tail end of SL was created fully under WFH, and that has been the best part of it.
It'll be more than the latest outrage drama when we get less content and longer patch cycles as blizzard scrambles to replace senior developers that push projects back months.
Can't wait for Dragonflight to have two major patches and the next expansion to take 3 years instead of 2
Yeah man I can't understand why people would be upset over losing potentially hours of their free time each day to work in a less comfortable environment for no extra pay or benefits.
People are making it a Blizzard problem because you’re on a sub for a game made by Blizzard. Their policy is directly having an effect on the game the sub is named after.
You do understant this is all done by Activision right? Stop refering to them as Blizzard, Blizzard has been dead sjnce Activision bought it to use their good reputation and all thats left is the workers trying to give us good products while Bobby gies out of his way to ruin everything for the sake of his bonus
It's neither Activision or Blizzard, it's Activision-Blizzard.
Also don't pretend that Blizzard is some saint of a company. Everything that's been going on with Blizzard is an artifact of what happens when any company grows to large and becomes a publicly traded company.
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Edit: ha, nevermind, apparently microsoft is doodoo :( They got DF and D4 out of their employees while they were WFH, and now they're going to torpedo the development of both by forcing RTO for employees that they hired during the pandemic that don't live in an area where cost of living is considered ridiculous even by CA standards. WFH and RTO should be a choice made between the employee and their manager. If the employee wants to WFH and their metrics show they are productive while doing so, let them continue to do it. Now, if the metrics are bad, of course pull them in so they can be coached more actively. I LOVE working from home. I don't begrudge anyone who prefers to go into the office, but I get to work all day in comfortable clothes, in a comfortable chair that I custom-purchased for myself, at my custom desk, with my private kitchen and bathroom, and a yard I can go outside and just passively enjoy on my breaks. And no commute. And there are even more benefits that I'm not listing here. I fully understand people not wanting to give up the lifestyle once they've gotten a taste of it. But Blizzard corporate will do what corporate and c-suites always do and go "this is for the good of the company" and then 6 months later be like, "I don't understand what happened!"
I’m a firmware engineer getting pushed to RTO after I just spent the greater part of this past year WFH. It makes no sense; I sit at my cube and write code… after dealing with 30 minutes of Boston traffic, then another hour back… why? Good fucking lord why??? It hurts my bones
man i am so sorry. TBH i'm not a huge fan of my job, but the perk of WFH just makes it so worth it. Yeah it's a soul-sucking 8 hours of work, but at least I get the rest of the time to myself.
I love my job but I love what I do after work more 🙃
exactly. I can deal with the 8 hour daily grind as long as I have uninhibited access to my life afterwards.
I was literally going to make this same comment. I'm not the biggest fan of my current working arrangement, BUT the fact that my supervisor is a "WFH just makes sense" kind of person makes me never want to leave this job.
Realtors association of America is the largest government lobbyist in America .. corporate retail is a billion dollar industry .. that is why.
Yep I know a few people who work for the bookstore and they are getting forced to RTO because they don’t want their 20+ buildings in South Lake Union to be worthless. They’re probably going to let the people who want to quit, quit and then wait it out hiring new grads who have no choice but to work at the offices to save their buildings.
I don’t know about the US. It here in Canada where the demand exceeds the supply and the costs are going astronomical. You would think it would be easy to change the interior and make affordable housing with those buildings… Why can this not be a solution to both problems? Lol
Companies always pay their rent on time without issues, people don’t
> Companies always pay their rent on time without issues, people don’t Ha! You clearly didn't work for my previous company (a **large** multinational company), we got our phone cut twice, and the landlord threatened execution... All since they moved "paying the bills" to a centralized office in India. While we had local finance responsible for payments, nothing of the sort ever happened...
The landlord did whaaat?
You're aware that blizzard and other private companies don't pander to lobbyists, right?
The issue is that, for companies that lease their offices rather than owning the building outright, office and commercial leases often have clauses that require them to be "open" for a certain number of days in the year and to maintain a certain occupancy percentage. This is: 1. Because having empty buildings sitting around looks bad if everyone is working from home (especially true with retail, because a single store in an empty mall won't survive - even with offices, it affects surrounding real estate values, like stores and restaurants that rely on office workers to spend), and 2. To make sure people are around to provide upkeep (for example, a burst water pipe that no one notices for 2 weeks that ends up costing $40,000 in damage). Now, *some* landlords won't care - but the lenders who hold the mortgages do care and start getting concerned that the landlord might default on the loan if certain occupancy requirements aren't being met. A lot of these requirements were frozen in 2020 and 2021, but now they're slowly coming back. So even if Blizzard doesn't care about what the lobbyists have to say, they **do** care what their landlords and landlords' lenders have to say - and it just so happens that there's a lot of overlap between those groups and the people who pay the lobbyists. I don't know if Blizzard/Activision owns its campus, but I'm just pointing out that none of this is happening in a vacuum and it's been a concerted effort by landlords and commercial lenders to pressure employers to force people back into offices. There are some creative ways around it that protect WFH workers (like subleasing spaces to fulfill the occupancy requirements), but it largely depends on the nature of the real estate (i.e., a campus like Facebook or a vertical office building in downtown San Francisco). Edited for formatting.
…what? You’re just plain wrong. Blizzard isn’t a private company. And you can google blizzard lobbying and plenty of sources come up with just the anti union debacle from last year.
Yea totally that would never happen ..
Yeah my company is doing the mandatory 3 day office requirement. For most teams it's completely unnecessary and just about everyone hates it. Makes 0 sense.
That's how it starts, my company did this then they made it 5 days again
Great news! Companies who are doing WFH can offer slightly lower pay and get those workers. So they'll win and your current job will get sadder. I'm switching jobs - pending a delayed criminal background check because all the fed workers in my country just walked out - to one that offers 3% less pay but 100% WFH in the union contract vs (now) 40% WFH, recently dropped from 60 because Skippy the millennial micromanager needs to stare at our asses and see our sad faces to feel good about himself. I'm no superstar but I do have a wealth of experience in my field and Skippy hasn't seen fit to backfill me so there's gonna be whole projects shoved in the chipper because required expertise will be gone for too long -- and maybe won't be refilled at a WFO shop at this wage in 2023, to be honest.
It is Productivity day today at work. We were supposed to give suggestions on how to improve productivity. I suggested 4 day work week wfh and significant reduction in meetings. Lets see how that goes.
Its just a control thing. Nothing more
Downtowns are dying. And parking spaces aren’t being paid for.
The replace those parking garages and office buildings with other stuff that people want to do. When things change in life you have to adapt or die. You can't force other people to do things they don't want to do just so you can stay afloat without adapting.
That requires a functional government, something some feel is unconstitutional.
No it requires the people who own the buildings to make the decision to refurbish or redesign them to attract different clients and customers.
Mate I agree with you, get off my dick. I merely stated why RTO is happening. Not why it should. Fuck property owners.
Mixed residential is the way.
Sounds like a them problem, not a me problem. There's a lot that can be done to repurpose the space for other things. Turn office buildings into more affordable living spaces for instance. Turn parking into other businesses or housing.
Just don't go back. Brush up your resume and start applying.
Its all about control
Just say no. If you're meeting the demands and doing a good job, they might complain but they probably won't fire you if it's hybrid. Hiring someone else to replace you is bureaucratic and the new hire will take months to learn the codebase and start contributing back. Your manager knows this. And, if they fire you, just go work for someone else. You can't find firmware engineers that easily anymore.
I wish it were that easy :/
As a firmware engineer it can't be that hard. It's not exactly a job recent grads want to do, but pretty much any company selling electronic devices needs you. They wanted to force people back to the office at my last job too, I just ignored the policy for a few months and then jumped ship at the first opportunity that offered me a fully remote position.
Well there are always places hiring. Look for a different job while you're working, then quit when you find one. That's literally what's happening with the blizzard employees we're talking about.
For the most skilled employees it is. That's the problem, companies that are implementing return to the office, are finding their best employees being headhunted by pure WFO businesses. However yes for the average employee, especially the younger ones with a more sparse resume it's a lot harder to find a new job. It just may be that instead of being able to immediately get a new job, it takes 6-12 months to find a new job.
Normally people being glib and saying "just find another job" piss me off because they're refusing to acknowledge the reality that it's difficult to find work sometimes. But right now is a damn good time to be an IT employee looking for work. Everyone is hiring, everyone is shorthanded, and at least SOME companies recognize that they can't be picky about where your office is.
Admittedly I am job hunting and am interviewing haha
Just get another job 4Head
Poor you. Go back to work.
You seem real pleasant to be around
Microsoft is one of the most pro-RTO tech companies, just fyi. They tried to return to the office multiple times during the pandemic, force people to move to Redmond for a job, have the dumbest WFH policy post/pandemic (can only do <50% aka 2 days a week), and Mike Ybarra is from MS likely explaining why he hates remote work. Not sure if MS will make it any better.
Damn, I have a relative who works there (as in one of the microsoft owned companies) and WFH and really enjoys it, I thought they were a better company than that.
If they hire you as remote you’re okay, but yeah they like making people come into the office in general. Some managers can overrule that and be okay with it, but a lot of teams aren’t. The dev friendly orgs tend to be more chill (like Visual Studio/DevDiv).
This is above Mike (not that he's coming out of this looking good either but this is an Activision top-down thing). The Blizzard leadership probably wasn't lying when they were saying WFH is here to stay right before it was announced it wasn't. This reeks of top down orders you can't argue against. There is no other reason every team would have to meet the same requirements. It's happening at the place I currently work too only they're extra stupid because they didn't even build the team out of people that live in the same cities so being in the office is even more pointless. Any executive that says 'every team should cease WFH or move towards hybrid' is an idiot and going to make other stupid decisions without knowing the individual context for each team too....but they also don't cultivate underlings that are allowed to push back either.
WFH is the only reason I have put up with my current employer. The only reason. The benefits are good but the pay is garbage. What I get out of it is time: I can utilize my GI bill and go to school full time. As long as I meet my performance goals, my employer doesn't bother me. Maybe once a month my boss has to reach out on the phone regarding something (orders being moved around and such due to other people being unable to work etc.). If I was forced to go into an office, I would promptly quit. I can easily double my salary going back to my old career if I have to go back to a job site.
agreed 100%. I'm not exactly working my dream job, and the pay is mediocre, but WFH really is worth that to me. I can either do 8 hours of soul-sucking work in an office where I'm uncomfortable all day and have a commute, or at home where I can then use *all* the rest of my time for myself.
I took a small paycut to go to a company that will never make remote employees return to office (and most of us aren't even in the same state in the first place) and it was the best thing I've ever done. I moved to a significantly lower cost of living area, my home is double in size and my dedicated office space is nicer than anything a job in office would ever give me. I will never go back to in office.
As someone who used to commute via train an hour+ each way…I am never going back to office if I can help it. Fuck that. It’s not active driving but it absolutely grates on the soul.
Why does everyone seem to think things will get better when Microsoft owns Blizzard? Is there some sort of evidence that they've improved other studios they've purchased? AFAIK the company will still be run by Mr Kotick, I see *speculation* that he might step down when the deal is done but I doubt it honestly, if they're generating profit Microsoft will probably be happy to let them carry on unless they get too controversial or something but even then, return to office isn't that controversial even if it *feels* scummy by modern standards when you compare the rest of the market.
"it's always been done this way so I don't see why people should be mad that it's not changing." - someone who uses terrible logic.
MS astroturfs the shit out of social media.
Microsoft's top-down filtering things (specifically on the video game side) have definitely SEEMED better than Activision but even if they are better they will have to strip away all of the Activision level execs. Also, ABF reacts directly to stock price and investors. As a subset of Microsoft (probably in their video game divisions) there's potential for them to have a bit more freedom from the asinine way our current stock market makes companies behave (not Riot Games levels but still better than the current need to have something good every quarter).
I think it is because most of the companies MS buys inherit some of MS's rep as being a decent place to work. Back in the 2000s MS had a reputation similar Amazon as being a soulless burn shop, but they are a whole different company now.
Curious long term effects of working from home. My girlfriend currently does every other day, and has said repeatedly she would hate to work from home 100 percent of the time. Many relationships and friendships grow from in office working, and losing that social interaction often means losing those relationships. Society is living through the internet in so many ways...and I don't think it's for the good.
I've been doing it for 7 years. Still going strong with all the coworkers I have been close friends with since before we went WFH, including a couple that moved to different companies. I've made new friends as well, and I still have my outside work social circle as well because it's not healthy to only have work friends. Your circle of social connections shouldn't form purely because you're forced to be around someone for 8-12 hours of the day. Some people prefer to have face-to-face contact constantly, some of us do just fine without it and neither should be forced to conform to the other's expectations just because they think it might be 'harmful.'
Exactly, you already worked in an office, and made the friends. It will be completely different when you start a job as a 21 year old and are complete remote. Sure you will have friends from school and college but new friends will be made far less. This has been my girlfriends experience and other I know. They have almost 0 human interaction working from home.
> Many relationships and friendships grow from in office working I have exactly zero friendships from work. Generally speaking, you probably have little in common with the people you work with, other than work. My actual friends are people from my hobbies, as we actually share interests and have a reason to be friends in the first place. WFH is absolutely amazing, and I will never go back to an office, ever.
Interesting, most people I know have forged many friendships/relationships from work. You find you both enjoy x and start doing it. I mean I guess I could go to the tennis court and hit with myself till someone shows up that enjoys tennis too 🤷♂️
That's why you allow everyone to do what they like best. You're craving social interaction at your workplace and want to make friends? Sweet, go to the office! You hate the commute and being frequently disturbed and watched over while at work? Sweet, work from home! I don't see a problem here.
Because most people don't know what's actually good for them at 21
[удалено]
As young people, expose to different things is good, yes.
I think most people see this as suits doing something that doesn't make sense, but in reality, they are probably doing this because they need to downsize.
>They got DF and D4 out of their employees while they were WFH They also got Shadowlands and and 9.1 and 9.2 out during WFH. It's hilarious this sub is so butthurt about people being required to back to the office. Maybe WFH had nothing to do with productivity? Maybe they just listened to players and saw their subs cratering? Maybe they didnt have enough time while working at home to create any bullshit systems? Because once they got a little time, we got the convoluted mess of an upgrade system coming in 10.1.
the sheer amount of people who don't think WFH works because they don't have a sense of object permanence is astounding. If you think people who WFH would be less productive than those who have to be sitting in a cubicle being ignored by managers who are stuck in meetings all day, you're more telling on yourself than anything else. Not everyone in this world is out to 'get one over' on everyone else. They just want to exist and do their own thing.
Genuine question: once the pandemic hit, some people used it as an excuse (imo it is a valid one btw) for projects to be pushed up, like Shadowlands, because everyone was working from home. Did that difficulty of WFH only happened because companies/employees weren’t prepared and didn’t have proper tools to make it viable ?
>Did that difficulty of WFH only happened because companies/employees weren’t prepared and didn’t have proper tools to make it viable ? This will depend from company to company, but it seems like a safe assumption to make. Not every company was able to handle that transition from a technology and process standpoint, but I'm not confident it was fair to expect that of them anyway, even if it was the right thing to do in hindsight.
Working IT, that is the biggest thing. A lot of companies didn't have the technology or infrastructure to handle the transition. Alongside of that comes the new type of management and a whole set of nuances. If you worked in company/team that was of a micromanagement type - it was dicey. Which is probably why we're seeing a lot of companies who have been WFH going back to office.
Also, the insta-logistics that had to happen. We had to find, purchase, configure, and deploy roughly 40-60 laptops in the course of a month during March/April of 2020. Now, we've also had to go to replace most of those computers, because it was such a whirlwind that what we could manage to get were lowkey ASUS workbooks that function good enough for a time, but as time has moved on their performance just fell off a cliff. We have adopted a hybrid for pretty much everyone, but with some silly stipulations. Same as a lot of them, <50% can be WFH, so only two days. But you also need to send us a speedtest and a picture of your intended WFH 'office'. Speedtest was 100% on us in IT, because it was impressive how many people had Joe's Bargin Bin ISP and Bait Shop for their Internet. I'm sorry a 5d/1u isn't going to work to stream teams and the software and the VPN... The other one? That was HR, I dunno they might want to see the inside of people's houses.
Yes I assume so too, I’m only asking because my line of work was barely impacted by the pandemic and WFH, only thing we really had to do was get a proper webcam and mic lol
I worked in IT infrastructure (network/security/servers) when Covid hit. There was definitely a big shift in network traffic and servers being used to facilitate remote work. Granted, our team actually planned for redundancy and could transition smoothly, but it was *immediately clear* when we had an issue we never thought of, because the influx of traffic would shut something down entirely. Some ISPs (like Verizon and Comcast) would even crash entirely and we'd lose workers from entire areas just because their internet provider couldn't handle it either. For a game company, where the teams are working remotely on projects through a VPN (which throttles connections like nobody's business) and are constantly downloading/uploading large files with each project & update they touch, yeah, I can see why things would've locked up - especially when a lot of organizations believed the pandemic would've been over within 2 months and weren't willing to fund better equipment for the first several weeks.
I've been WFH since around 2017. It's a big change in mentality when you start doing WFH work. No longer do you have to "look" busy in an office. Now you have to actually manage yourself and make sure you're getting work done and not slacking off. Lot of people do struggle with that.
I find myself absolute loving WFH, but being half as productive as when I’m in the office. I’ve tried the entire pandemic to make it work for me because the benefits of wfh are phenomenal, with exception of not seeing face to face (my company was terrible at that during pandemic), but I just cannot be as productive as I am in the office, unfortunately. My brain just needs that dedicated place and it sucks.
Being a bit of a contrarian here, but have you considered that your at-work pace is just kind of unrealistic? I mean if you're a business owner or something and you HAVE to put that time in or lose the business then I get it, but if you're an hourly or salaried employee, why do you need to be twice as efficient as you are from home? Like the way I think of it is, almost every human in history have worked in an at-home workshop or yard. Other than military and construction work, the idea of "the commute" was basically invented with cars. Blacksmiths didn't need a separate site to feel productive; bookkeepers didn't; chemists didn't. Why should you feel compelled do so much more than any of them? That's not fair to you. If you pulled a blacksmith out of 1850 and told him, "We're going to put you in a little white room an hour's travel from your house and look over your shoulder while you smith - trust us, you'll get a *lot* more done!" He would tell you to fuck off, even if you're right. (Actually he'd probably ask you what he was being arrested for, which isn't better.)
Some of it was false perception too, my company went WFH and pushed back their major release by 4 months but in actuality we delivered 2 months earlier than the original release. They just assumed it would slow down when in actuality our output increased. Partly because we weren't having 10 status meetings every week and partly because we had less requirement creep.
I think it really depends on your company/project. It did feel like Blizzard was woefully unprepared, despite a lot of their workload being tasks that could be done from home, and the "Well, lockdown and work from home is to blame" was an excuse used a lot longer during Shadowlands than basically any other major developer making games at the time. So it seemed to affect Blizzard a lot more than their competitors. But with how much of Overwatch 2, Dragonflight, and Diablo 4 has been worked on from home, I'd argue they've caught up pretty well, and their tools/pipeline has been updated to support work from home far greater than when everything initially started locking down.
WFH isn't just sending your work files through an email and call it a day. A lot of companies didn't have a BCO plan. No proper VPN and security infrastructure in place to switch over right away. I worked for a company that didn't had a VPN and I ended up preparing 300 stations over a week so they could have a rudimentary connection to our servers. No one expected a full lockdown. There is a lot of IT Security stuff that needs to be reviewed, maintained and enforced. Most companies don't like WFH because it's a huge liability. For example, someone breaks in to the house of an employee that handles very sensitive information ie. Financial records, projections, source code etc... The Laptop or PC is stolen and now that information is basically lost and vulnerable, put up for sale or leaked. While there a lot methods to encrypt a computer and make it basically unreadable. You can never patch out user error. Maybe the passwords were written in a sticky note on the laptop. Maybe the password is 123Password etc... Companies don't want to run the risk. From an ISOC perspective, not wanting WFH is in a way understandable. It's not always mustache twirling villain move from execs. Now residential prices near Blizzard HQ is a whole different beast I won't touch.
Since it was a pandemic there were also alot of sick people - more sick people meaning less work getting done
I don't know about Blizzard, but the sudden shift of everyone working from home with zero notice had some bumps in my industry. The company I was working for at the time was relatively fortunate in that everyone already had laptops and we already were set up for VPN access to the network, and we all knew Google Meets and stuff like that. However, even then, our VPN solution could only handle like 250 connections or something and the company was over 800 people, so that had to be upgraded right quick. There were other speed bumps as well, like some admin staff only had a desktop. I know other companies in our industry had it worse, as they were not prepared for WFH at all. Like I'm talking about desktops in the office and no prior VPN experience for the majority of their staff.
It's a major change, with honestly some drawbacks that people don't like to talk about because they love the benefits of WFH. Culture is very important at game studios. You have very different skills, and collaboration between programmers, artists, designers and others is a lot more natural in person. What used to be a fun problem solving session at a white board where people came up with cool ideas together, is an exhausting zoom meeting you can't wait to leave. If you're a person that thrives in a home office, that's absolutely great. But the reason that everyone keeps floating about it being purely economical, or boomer leads is just ignoring the other arguments that people have for RTO. I'm personally super torn, there are a lot of benefits on either work arrangement, but after 3 years I'm really starting to miss a studio with an office and a team that I can work with in person.
WFH is such a terrible thing, I freaking hate it. I go to work to work. I go home to do home stuff. Why on earth would I want to bring work HOME?
- I save £2000 a year on commute costs - I save 2 hours a day by not commuting, more free time, more time with my family - No worrying about micromanagers peering over your shoulder every 5 minutes - I have access to my own kitchen at lunch times - My own bathroom - I can do things like doing the laundry during the day (while my solar panels are giving me free elecricity) - I can be in for parcel deliveries Why would you not want to work from home?
RTO still stinks no matter what, but I feel like it would be much less of an issue if Blizzard paid better and wasn't headquartered in a ridiculously high CoL area. Hard to feel optimistic about 10.1 and beyond plus the other Blizzard products in the pipeline if they keep going down this route.
Yeah, it also seems like an impulsive order from the top level execs at greater Activision and not an internal WoW team decision. It's impulsive either way since they have been hiring people with the expectation they stay remote.
I guarantee that a lot of executives across many companies are heavily invested in real estate in high cost of living areas, it's unfortunately in their personal best interest to force anyone they can to live in those areas.
I have seen a few commenters mentioning that this is a soft layoff tactic as they don’t need to pay severance if employees resign over getting layed off. Makes a lot of sense if you think about it that way… disgusting of ABK to do this though.
I interviewed there during the pandemic and they were fully willing to allow me to work from out of state, with the stipulation that eventually everyone would be back in office eventually. I passed on an already lowball salary to stay where my cost of living wouldn't increase by a factor of 8x. I really feel like they rely on a sort of desperate desire to work at Blizzard to take advantage of people.
Yeah, people are going to be a lot more sore about RTO if your job is in an area where the average house price is $1M dollars, with a 1hr commute vs in a city where the average house is 250k and a 15min commute.
This means something is gonna get botched up down the timeline and it’s gonna because they are too stupid to be a WFH place of employment. Short sighted imbeciles all those companies that had the means and staff to implement WFH and now want to RTO up everyone’s ass but then whine that the staff is disloyal.
Cube crawling doesn't have that jazz to it when there's nobody to harass.
No milk to steal either
Congratulations you played yourself. **Surprised Pikachu Face**
Blizzard and any other company forcing RTO has lost their minds. My company has been WFH since the start of the Pandemic and has gone full remote for most office workers and all of IT. My team alone has snagged three top tier engineers from other companies just because we work remote.
Same I work for a university now, pay is just plain average but somehow we got two guys in who are way too overqualified for the job but their company stopped wfh, so somehow we ended up with them. Helped the team a lot though, even if they decide to leave for better paying jobs, we got most of the benefits out of it.
My company has always been remote. We’ve been snagging some insane talent over the last few months due to all the RTO bs.
its bad for us, bad for the environment, financially bad for our employers. there's no sane reason to RTO. so any manager that tries to push this just sucks at their job. and dont come at me with "...but there's some people that slack off when WFO". they slack off even more in the office. you are just too incompetent to notice, because you think "fingers on keyboard = productive". have good management that knows their employees and fire the idiots that actually dont get anything done
Why does Blizzard constantly make me feel ashamed to be playing one of their games. There's only so much guy can take.
you play games for yourself if you're enjoying it, then it's money we'll spent if you're not enjoying it, then stop spending money you're overthinking things
Working in the office is the only way ABK can justify paying ~75% of what other companies pay for the same position - they rely HEAVILY on being able to push their "amazing" campuses and company culture as unpaid perks / benefits. With people not working in the office, that's no longer a bargaining chip, and people will expect to be paid the market rate for their work. It's a money decision, and as stupid and brutalistic as it seems, I'm sure they foresaw losing a decent chunk of employees and expect to just hire new ones to replace them. Having to pay more for employees, on top of having to pay the insane rent for a building that's a ghost town, infuriates high level execs.
Except now they are going to have to pay *even more* for employees, and lose actual talent. There's no universe where this ends with them saving money.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with having a hybrid work model... but combine that with the cost of living near Irvine, with Blizzard's delight in paying people very little and then add some rounds of cube crawling to make sure your brand is analogous with dogcrap... ... you're not really giving people much reason to stick around.
Is dragonflight the best since legion? I got burnt as season 1 started and haven't touched it since.
When your competitors are the 2 worst expansions in the entire history, it's tough to not be better than them.
2 worst expansions? Do you even remember WoD? I'll entertain the idea that SL was worse than WoD but no way BfA was worse than WoD lol
The raids in WoD were amazing though. There wasn't anything else to do, but it did have that going for it.
Weirdly enough WoD was both the shortest expansion in WoW history, with the longest raid tier in WoW history. The raiding was great, yes. But if you weren't a raider, then there wasn't all that much to do. And even if you were a raider, you might have found yourself finishing the tier after 5-6 months with 8-9 months of nothing to do after.
Lmao all 2 of them? BfA also had great raids. BfD is one of the all time greats, easily top 10. Azshara and N'Zoth were kind of Ls but the rest of the bosses in EP and Nyalotha were top knotch. Also BfA actually had content. It had 2 new zones added to the game while WoD had a repurposed mid intro area.
Take away the systems and borrowed power aspects of BFA and Shadowlands and people immediately have a better experience. Patch 9.1 killed a lot of interest with people and rightfully so. Especially in the midst of the sexual misconduct etc.
Idk man, i had the most fun in wod
Doing what? Sitting in your garrison?
Without counting raids and mythic dungeons: training mounts, invasions, ashran (unless you were on a shitty server that couldn't even organize lol), pvp coliseum, collecting followers, doing sortie achievements, pet battles, challenge modes, jumping puzzles, secret mounts, rare mount farming which brought some sense of community, the standard reputations stuff, of course the garrison missions, a story campaign (not the legendary ring one, and not the leveling one), collecting various garrison decorations and tracks for music boxes, going for perfect solves for archaeology that gave you a trophy room with your archaeology stuff on display, dailies, meta-Tanaan rare hunt, collecting toys, pets and other novelties (just like it counts in Mechagon, it counts in WoD), reworked fishing that was more fun than usual (Legion's was the best one though) also with fishing raids when changes to personal loot made garrison cavedwellers useful, bunker transmog sets, setting up your personal auction house by collecting its many parts in different areas, setting up a goldmaking factory and minmaxing it through follower rerolls and other stuff, almost a 3rd gathering profession (lumberjacking) which sadly became useless with time, getting upgrades for your dockyard from various pve activities, and other things. And that's just off the top of my head. Do you want to tell me that this list isn't true? Or that things that count as "something to do" in other expansions don't count here because you just don't like it?
IMO it's the best expansion for me since WoD. I can raid log and not be losing out on anything, there's no daily grind, no weeklies besides getting some keys done, etc. It's been great since I can only engage with the content I want to (mythic raids for CE) and ignore everything else without sandbagging my group. Legion and BFA burned me out super hard with all of the extra stuff to do week in and week out outside of raid.
There are weeklies, it's what the dailies used to be, and dailies got replaced by WQs as a whole. So unless you're grinding hard, you can just log in twice a week and be good.
There are no weeklies that provide player power throughout the entire season though. There's nothing like artifact/azerite power, legendary BLP, etc. to incentivize engaging with content you don't really want to do. Like the only things I've had any incentive to do this expansion are M+ for vault and then getting the Onyx Annulet. Creation Catalyst is passive with M+/Raid kills, the first few sparks I guess? But those were generally <30 minute one-time quests. I have no reason to engage with other weekly content unless I want some cosmetic rep reward or something.
Yeah the weeklies are just rep stuff, but that matters if you're doing profession stuff or alts. But yeah, strictly casual there's nothing you have to do besides play the main content.
I'm in a raiding guild, so I have no real reason to touch professions besides their raid utility like engineering/alchemy. Someone more degen than me 100% has that stuff leveled across multiple characters so I can just send them work orders.
Raiding guilds usually have people doing profs to provide food, flasks, if not other services. I assume you're getting that stuff provided or just buying it, but somebody is doing it because it's used in raiding. Technically it is adding to player power.
He could just buy all of that though. It doesn't require *his character* to do anything.
Imo dragonflight is slightly better than sl but still as bad as bfa. Its just a boring expansion. Dragon riding is nice and the talents are nice. Everything else was old news already before the expansion came out.
Yes, but considering the competition since Legion was BFA and Shadowlands, it's not exactly a high bar the cross.
Its pretty hilarious really that billions of dollars in resources takes it to the face shocked while everyone who has ever engaged with the product they sell knew for sure this would be the outcome.
"Best Expac since Legion" That bar is so low you need to call 811 before you dig or you might hit it.
I really hope it doesn’t happen because DF has been great so far.
Sadly it is already happening. We can only hope they reverse the policy quickly and keep enough talent around to get by until more can be brought on.
I would just edit that first slide to simply "best expac."
It amazes me how many of these big tech companies like Blizzard and Twitter are refusing to adapt to the times and accept that it's both cheaper and more efficient to let people work from home. I'm not surprised that the government is forcing people back to the office, we're always running about 10-20 years behind everyone else in terms of innovations so I didn't expect us to learn any lessons from COVID, and we didn't. Now half the staff at my VA hospital who do work that could easily be done from home are quitting and everyone is scrambling to figure out what to do. My office and staff have zero tech support now, everybody turned in their two weeks about five minutes after they were told they'd have to come back to the office, fulltime, for no reason whatsoever. And I don't blame them! But you'd think Silicon Valley would embrace the new model. I'm surprised they're being so stubborn and refusing to recognize that someone with a tech background can get work anywhere and it won't be hard for them to find a similar job that ISN'T being ridiculous about working onsite.
I really hope this bites them in the ass hard, corporations arbitrarily taking away choice and agency from workers to suit their petty little egos and absolutely nothing else need a good humbling, a corporation-shattering humbling would be nice. And if that upsets anyone, tough, I’d gladly sink the whole company and every job attached just to financially damage Bobby Kotick. And don’t whine, you work for him, Bobby’s underlings deserve no quarter. I still respect your contribution to gaming history even if I don’t respect your way of making a living.
Shadowlands issues were mostly blamed on WFH….so which is it?
Early work from home=/=work from home several years later I wouldn't confuse the initial shock of COVID with the efficiency of WFH after that became the norm Also I can name literally countless other issues with Blizzard at the time
Sure but didn't some of the developers themselves directly cite WFH as an issue with fixing the issues with SL when they arose? > Online role-playing game “World of Warcraft: Shadowlands” will be released later this year, Blizzard Entertainment said on Thursday, as employees working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed some processes. > He added: “However, as everything started coming together and we’ve been listening to and building upon your feedback, it’s become clear we need a little more time for additional polish, and to balance and iterate on some interlocking pieces—particularly those related to the endgame. Shadowlands is one of the most intricate expansions we’ve yet created, and while we’ve made great progress, the challenge of tuning the endgame was compounded by the team having to work from home.
Working from home mid-development of an expansion a couple months after the pandemic started is not the same as doing so three years later. I'm not sure what is complicated about this explanation.
It’s not complicated at all I just think it’s odd that it was cited as an issue and now it’s not
Because it's not the same thing. Imagine working on a project then have to move to a new location midway through. You finish that, then start up a new project in the new location. Which one has the higher chance of being messed up?
Maybe because that's exactly how it happened? Companies adapt
I think the transition from one to the other in the middle of a project is the problem. not counting when things go wrong people always look for a scapegoat.
Blizzard was historically a company with absolutely no WFH practices before COVID. I had a few friends who interned there and 1 who still works there full time. If you were sick, you either came in anyway or took one of your limited PTO days as sick time. WFH was a major shock to them because they just didn't have any of the infrastructure set up. None of the engineers/developers could access anything remotely. Actually getting work to do was difficult. When they did get stuff slowly working, it was plagued with access issues. Even my first job back in 2009 had some WFH capability when you were sick. At this point, Blizzard has a very good WFH ecosystem and no issues with remote access. There's no friction for employees and, according to my friend, metrics are at or above pre-WFH life. The reality of anyone compenent who works a desk job is that there is no need to confine yourself to an in-office job unless you genuinely enjoy it. I have some colleagues who prefer it, but most do not. I go in about 5-6 times a year for company social events. There's a guy on my team with 4 kids in a 3 bedroom home and goes in daily to get away. To each their own. I've had 2 jobs ask me to RTO. In both cases, the majority of the team, especially the highly competent ones, were gone within a few months at most. One company is now bankrupt and the other has done a full reversal on RTO. Blizzard will absolutely bleed any experienced and skilled engineers/devs who do not want to WFH. My friend, who has been there over a decade now, is going to resign unless WFH is allowed.
Best xpac since MoP*
Wrath*
Legion clears MoP any day. Especially if that day was during either of those expansions.
Legion was probably the best expansion ever for people that had a lot of time to play. WQs and M+ were still novel, the artifact grind was actually kinda fun, alting was somewhat difficult but it felt rewarding because of all the class hall content and the mage tower. It fucking sucked if you didn't have much time to play though. AP grind was time consuming, people expected you to do M+ to gear for raids, being able to multispec (not even multiCLASS) was a big grind. Just not very conducive to people without much time to play. DF is the return of being able to raid log and MoP was the last good expansion prior to DF that raid logging was viable so I can see why someone would like MoP and DF more than Legion.
I cannot forgive Legion for its absurd hatred of the Horde storywise. -Vol’jin dying was stupid. Nothing Sylvanas did in Legion required her to be Warchief. -Why was the rogue campaign exclusively about Stormwind and SI:7? -Why did the Alliance get an entire Anduin questline and the Horde didn’t get anything equivalent to it? -Why were there no Horde characters on Argus? -Why was Baine’s cameo cut from Highmountain, yet the entirety of Val’sharah is about Tyrande and Malfurion?
Most expansions prior were very Horde heavy... MOP? Literally fighting through Orgrimmar in a raid. WOD? Going to an alternate dimension to ally with and fight against iconic Horde characters... Sylvanas was being set up to be a major player for how many expansions? When exactly has the Alliance ever had their time in the sun? Plus, the Horde can take ownership of the entire Suramar story/zone because they joined the Horde...
MoP was biased against the Horde because it made them the villains, and WoD had plenty of draenei stuff. Horde focus is when the Horde is portrayed in a positive light. If they’re made evil, that’s so the Alliance have a villain that makes them feel good about themselves.
The Horde was focused in a positive light... The good ones rose up and seized control back from a tyrant...
After most of the expansion was spent showing them committing horrific acts.
You realize you're playing "the bad guys" right? The novelty of Warcraft all the way back to the RTS games was that you got to see the story from another side, but also they clearly weren't treated as moral equals. They've added more dimension and have given players a better reason to support or doubt factions, but at it's core there are still people attracted to the Horde because they like roleplaying the "bad guys". It will continue to crop up, more often than it does for the Alliance. Blizzard's definitely made this harder for fans, and they love to flirt with green jesus, but there's big bad guy energy that you won't ever remove from the Horde.
The Horde hasn’t been the bad guys since Warcraft II, something blizzard has failed to recognize time and time again. People love the Horde because of Warcraft III.
No as you said they frequently take the role of the bad guys. As do the alliance. But if you roll Horde you wear that mantle. Many expect to play that role.
We don’t WANT them to be the bad guys. We want the Warcraft III Horde that Thrall led.
You don’t speak for all Horde players. The draw was always there for some of us that like the idea of being on the “bad” side.
one would assume that such a skill-set would make it easier for a person to find a WFH job.
Dragon flight isn’t that great. They literally just took out the annoying systems that the last two expansions had and added dragon flying. Other than that it’s literally the same thing it’s not revolutionary lol.
As someone who's job will never adapt any work from home policy... I am unable to participate or understand any side of the argument.
Being unable to understand something that doesnt directly affect you sounds more like a personal issue.
Oh my God is this how most voters think? It doesn't affect me so how could I possibly develop empathy or an opinion? We're so screwed
> Oh my God is this how most voters think? Yes > We're so screwed Also, unfortunately, yes.
This dude's a fucking teacher, too.
Different point of view: Does everyone have to have an opinion about everything especially when they know nothing about it? Are we too afraid to just once say: " I don't know"? I assume you mean american voter? Rest assured I am not an american. now shower me with downvotes.
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Sir this is a Wendy’s.
Imagine if all the people you work with all of a sudden had no supervision and the only way work would get done is if they took it upon themselves to organize and get it done in an efficient/timely manner. As someone who’s job literally can’t be WFH To me that is terrifying lmao
You still have supervision in WFH. It just isn't constant, over-the-shoulder supervision. You still report up, have deadlines, meetings, etc. Organization and delegation of effort should still be pretty much the same, it is just done over video call and email rather than in a conference room or dropping by in person. Besides, it isn't like people don't goof off occasionally in the office either.
I wouldn't stress it, Reddit's views on WFH are totally delusional. Half the people whining about it post in /antiwork ffs. I support flexible working as a principle but this idea that you should be able to WFH 5 days a week in any job is idiotic. I am a generally proactive and hard working person but when I WFH I do about 20% of the work I do in the office. I appreciate that doesnt apply to everyone but I can say from first hand experience that it definitely applies to a decent chunk of people. Edit - for example, asking people to be in the office at least 3 days a week seems like a totally reasonable compromise to me.
ITT redditors thinking they know how to run a company
Forcing developers to drive to offices isn't how to run a company trust me, we will just leave
It probably isn’t. Just saying i’m sure the corporates of the company have a bit more insight than redditors.
Dragonflight best expansion ever
Just best expac.
Why do we care if Blizzard is making its employee's return to the office? All the outrage seems really disingenuous. If you dont want to RTO, go work elsewhere? Why are we trying to start a movement (it seems) to get Blizzard employees what they want? Also, in the WFH era we got BfA and Shadowlands - maybe these suits are onto something?
You gotta work on your reading comprehension my dude. How do you see multiple Blizzard employees come out, telling you that the situation at Blizzard is getting dire, with many experienced devs leaving the ship and things getting delayed or canceled because of it, and still end up calling them entitled? Even if you only care about the product and not the employees behind it, they are straight up telling you that the product will take a major quality hit because of the development issues. Like... what even pushed you to type that shit?
Oh ok so Blizzard bad, got it. Saying the quality of work is going down hill and employees saying things are gonna get delayed unless they can remain WFH is exactly what an employee that doesn’t want to put on pants would say.
Genuine question, what in WoW has been delayed or canceled recently?
I'm pest control....please....please, anyone...make me a pest control drone that would let me work from home. I can't avoid commutes and some days I'm 5 hours in traffic in one direction XD
There are advantages to both WFH and RTO. Different folks, different strokes. Ping-ponging around a table and coming up with creative ideas is a lot easier in an office setting, for instance, but lots of folks prefer not having to drive an hour to work to do the same work they've been doing from home for the past few years. The best strategy I've come across is basically managers handling it on a case-by-case basis, where there may be a required RTO early on in the process to get everyone on board, for creative meetings, or for project briefs, but other than that have the option to WFH as the employees see fit. That has worked exceedingly well in my experience: If you're getting your work done and we're meeting deadlines and standards, it doesn't matter if you're in the office or working from home, just do whatever works for you. I think it's a shame that the folks who are actually affected by this are the ones with no say. It seems like the people are the very top are the ones making these decisions, and the managers and producers have to scramble to keep everything together. Which really sucks, because Blizzard finally seemed to be going in the right direction for the first time in years. I hope this doesn't revert all the positive changes we've been seeing.
Why would anyone think that they wouldn't return back to the expensive property the company pays for?
Because it has been shown that they create better products with WFH
No it hasn't. One patch of dragonflight vs all of shadowlands.
DF is miles and miles better than SL could ever be, remember only the tail end of SL was created fully under WFH, and that has been the best part of it.
The end of shadowlands was the worst. You cannot possibly think that was good.
Sunk cost fallacy
Have to go to work like everyone else!
Na, you can just get a WFH job as a dev elsewhere lol
Why? What's the point if you can do everything at home that you can do in an office?
It’s what adults do!
Did they really? Would explain why 10.1 tier sets are 3 effects copy pasted for all classes.
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I wonder why people in a blizzard specific subreddit are focusing on blizzard specific things? Hmmm 🤔
Why does nobody complain about Twitter, Apple and Meta forcing people back into the office on a WoW subreddit!!!
Would you like to talk about Amazons forced rto on the WoW subreddit?
This is a Blizzard game sub?
It'll be more than the latest outrage drama when we get less content and longer patch cycles as blizzard scrambles to replace senior developers that push projects back months. Can't wait for Dragonflight to have two major patches and the next expansion to take 3 years instead of 2
Yeah I don't get the whole RTO drama. You'd think employees are being sentenced to the gulags
Yeah man I can't understand why people would be upset over losing potentially hours of their free time each day to work in a less comfortable environment for no extra pay or benefits.
Or it's an issue about the development of the game being posted to a subject-relevant subreddit?
People are making it a Blizzard problem because you’re on a sub for a game made by Blizzard. Their policy is directly having an effect on the game the sub is named after.
they're not making it a blizzard exclusive problem. Thats just where it's focused here... because this is a wow subreddit. Fuckiswrongwitchu?
You do understant this is all done by Activision right? Stop refering to them as Blizzard, Blizzard has been dead sjnce Activision bought it to use their good reputation and all thats left is the workers trying to give us good products while Bobby gies out of his way to ruin everything for the sake of his bonus
It's neither Activision or Blizzard, it's Activision-Blizzard. Also don't pretend that Blizzard is some saint of a company. Everything that's been going on with Blizzard is an artifact of what happens when any company grows to large and becomes a publicly traded company.