Can we just get rid of Truebox by now?

This is relevant to my initial point. I'll even draw the string of logic for you.

"On the earnings call, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick told investors that the company had “once again achieved record results in 2018" but that the company would be consolidating and restructuring because of missed expectations for 2018 and lowered expectations for 2019."

• The layoffs are the result of Blizzard not meeting its sales expectations—and being aware that in the future they expect even lower gains, perhaps even zero growth.
• Blizzard did not meet their sales expectations, because their playerbase wasn't buying their products.
• The playerbase wasn't buying their products, because the games simply weren't fun.
• The games simply weren't fun, because the Developers became arrogant and thought they knew what was fun more-so than the playerbase themselves.
• This leads me back to where I initially began. Ignoring your customers is not a solid business strategy.

Didn't realize hearthstone made more money than WoW. But to be honest, I've never played it and don't know anything about it. Wouldn't even give another Blizzard game a chance at this point.

Yes, Activision technically owns it all. Obviously. All the games I mentioned are listed on the Blizzard website:
https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/

Learn to analyze the data more critically and actually play the games yourself. Also, talk to people who play the games. You'll learn more from that than any quarterly reports.

I played from the end of vanilla to mid-WoTLK before I quit the first time. Alot of people will tell you that's when the game began to change and lose the essence of what classic WoW was. The subs peaked in WoTLK due to the afterglow success of BC rather than WOTLK being amazing. That is, unless you think DK dominance and raiding a re-vamped Nax was the epitome of fun.

5 bullet points that are your opinion off why layoffs happened. Even though they contradict the stated reason for the layoffs and the fact more people are being hired than laid off. They overexpanded expecting to control more of the ESport market that Fortnight and others are currently dominating. So they are laying off people related to that and hiring more developers so they actually put out games faster.

Call of Duty and Destiny are not listed on Blizzards website.

Talking to players WoW failed 10 years ago and EQ died in 2004. You analyze what a companies actual performance is, not the noise of fanboys on forums. WoW will continue to die, it always was going to. But Activision continues to acquire new companies, expand their portfolio, and make new profitable games.

You're way off.

And yes, Call to Duty/Destiny are listed on the Blizzard website. They were included on the battle.net app when I still had it downloaded also.

Sure I am.

And it’s not hard to know who owns which games.



Which is battle.net, not Blizzard.com

Your problem is you don't read what people actually write and then you start responding to something completely different. All I said, was those two games are listed on the Blizzard site, and they are. I'm not going to take a screen to show you. Just go to the blizzard site and click games.

Moreover, it's funny you give all these reasons why the company is downsizing certain departments, when the CEO of the entire organization says exactly why. The article above summarized what the CEO said during a phonecall, "the company would be consolidating and restructuring because of missed expectations for 2018 and lowered expectations for 2019."

Let me translate that for you. They didn't make as many sales as they expected in 2018, and in 2019 they anticipate they will make less sales than they had originally estimated also. This is what I've been saying from the start, and I've stated why I think the sales aren't hitting their goals. The games aren't of sufficient quality anymore. The company tries too hard to appeal to the mainstream, ignores the players they currently have, and it ruins their games in the process.

Additionally, let's be real, if a company is performing poorly, they are always going to understate it during a meeting with investors. The situation is always worse than what a company is willing to admit publicly.

I'm going to bow out of this discussion at this point.

No new releases in 2019, hence the 20% increase in development staff so Blizzard can actually release a game outside of every 3-4 years.

Why are you two still arguing about Blizzard?

Hi, i was on the last official TL raid on Ragefire, it was more then half way through Kunark. It was a 5-7am PT poopsock against DB and it had 2 people in the raid that were box crews that made up over half our raid force. It was the dumbest thing ever.

People also eventually switched out their Mage boxes with Monk bots for DPS poopsocks. However, Ragefire was purely Openworld competive content - so it pushed people out to the max to gain an edge. AoCs probably take off the worst aspects from Ragefire.

I still support Truebox though. Those Multi-group boxing players created controversy on Phinigel despite there only really were 2 of them. If they do release a server without Truebox restriction + AoC I would still only recommend you to go there if you enjoy boxing 5+ characters. Else stick with a Truebox server.

People that are saying they would drop their box to let you in to your box group if you are lfg, are creating a false pink picture of boxing culture. There are maybe a few people willing to do that on a good day, but the large majority are egocentric players that doesn't want to share or have people take part in what they do.

From a social standpoint, I was on Ragefire till right about after Phinigel launched. Basically everyone of us who were playing regularly, was wanking in our each own corner with our 6box groups. Any social aspects of playing on that server was dead-by-boxing already in Kunark. Coming to Phinigel was a revelation on that part and felt so good and I never looked back on my 6box group and thought "Oh man, I really miss that".

I can get on board with true box for the first few expansions to help the server load and encourage people to make friends. But in the long run, true box is carpal tunnel city, and a major waste of power / carbon emissions. Eventually the population dwindles and boxing is more and more useful. Even if not , people should be able to play how they want since the impact on others is greatly diminished by aoc, load balancing, and eventually instanced group missions.

Second hand from these forums. Basically tons of picks with 30 mages in them cause hardware instability.

Pickzones cause stability issues, yes. AoC instances, no.

And, boxing has nothing to do with either. A player boxing six characters is no different to the server than six people each playing one.

They are basically the same thing in the view of DBG. I understand one assists you in multi-boxing and the other does scripting and other hacks such as warps, etc. In DBG's world, use of either is a bannable offense on TrueBox TLPs (and maybe on Live if the trend continues).

The trend is going the other direction on live. As long as you are at the keyboard, anything goes these days.

And not just on TLPs. Long before DBG, SOE would ban people on live servers for using keystroke macros to afk forage and stuff. It's any software that assists in playing this game with an "unfair" advantage, the unfair advantage is subject to whatever DBG deems it to be (if someone else has to give themselves carpel tunnel, you should have to as well!-sort of deal). I think wording was changed at some point to say "unattended" but, you can use hacks while attending while sitting down at your computer the entire time watching them (just like an assist program), but doesn't make them "legal".

I think that is because they've just given up on live. They probably don't make as much there because it can be F2P, whereas, TLP/Special servers you have to pay to play. So they cater more to their paying customers, and rightfully so, to keep them content and happy.

Edit: Not saying people don't pay to play on live, but they clearly wouldn't push a new TLP server each year if it wasn't a cash grab for them. If they had a strong and steady flow of income from live, they wouldn't need to.

There has always been a deliberate grey area between what is legal and what is not. Technically, things like gamparse, magelo, and gina are all illegal, but they have always been allowed. What is legal according to the letter of the law really doesn't matter--only what is actually enforced. And pretty clearly, nothing is enforced now on live as long as you are at the keyboard. It really doesn't matter what they used to do, only what they are currently allowing.

True. Sort of like EQPlayNice. These are all things that don't give you a major advantage in-game so, why bother? They'd have to ban pretty much their entire user base if they banned people for any of these programs.

There’s hasn’t been a new TLP every year.
Live population is higher (and the top end playerbase isn’t a bunch of F2P players...not doing anything in TBL or later expansions without a subscription)
Live actually gets expansions and new content....way more development time than TLPs.

TLP is the easier money, but until there is no more expansion development it’s easy to see where resources go to the most.

This. TLP players have always thought we are the center of the EQ world, but live still has more than 2x the number of servers, lots of active players, lots of money coming in. The most populated TLP's show higher population, but we also have to cram an expansion worth of farming into 2-3 months, while live gets a full year, so there are more players that are less active--just because the server population at any given moment is lower doesn't mean that the number of active subscribers playing on the server is lower. And, if F2P wasn't bringing even more money in than the susbscription model did, they wouldn't have switched to it (and stuck with it all these years since...)

Yes, I know the rules of Truebox. I boxed 4 on Agnarr, following the rules using no third party programs on 4 computers. Needing multiple computers is a stupid restriction. The game has evolved and boxing has become a part of the new everquest and a large number of subscribers box. I moved to one of the older tlp that doesn't have that restriction so I can game the way I enjoy and now 6 box. Many of us simply want a server we can play the way we enjoy and still enjoy the progression of a tlp that has AoC's. I am not asking for every server to be that way.

I was suggesting that if they would allow the assist type programs on a Truebox type server and keep the restriction of not allowing simultaneous broadcasting (which currently disconnects you on Truebox) it would allow people to box on one computer, but still limit the box armies that everyone dislikes.