Recently, Blizzard had to make a pretty large cutback on employees. One such employee that was let go did an AMA on Reddit yesterday. Said Redditor worked on World of Warcraft, Starcraft II, and Diablo 3 in Quality Assurance and as a Game Master, two of the most notoriously thankless jobs in the gaming industry. Surprisingly, though, s/he had some positive things to say about the company.
One contributor had asked her/him if they had gotten back into the gaming industry and inquired about the difficulty of doing so. The former Blizzard employee responded that they had not tried and were not sure if they wanted to even try due because “I know I’m not going to find another gaming company like Blizzard.”
The ex-employee seemed to like a lot of aspects about her/his former job, but were pretty critical of many of the devs. At one point, they said that the majority of the developers for Starcraft II were dicks.
When asked why Ghostcrawler is such an “unrepentent [sic] shitheel” the ex-GM replied with a laugh and said “welcome to the majority of devs at Blizzard.” However, s/he said that “the WoW team is [way] nicer than the SC2 team [and] actually listen to other people’s ideas about how to improve things.”
There were some other pretty interesting bits in the AMA session. Some of the best parts were stories that other Redditors told.
One was about a player’s experience with a GM turning into a slime in the middle of a dungeon without tipping the players running said dungeon off. After the players started complaining about the slime taking forever, the GM revealed his/herself. Makes me wish we would see more GM interaction with players in current WoW.
Some of the stuff was a bit of a bummer to read about certain developers being kind of asshole-ish, but nonetheless, it made me pretty happy to hear that the former employee had had an overall positive experience. That AMA is definitely worth a read if you’re a WoW player or just overall Blizzard fan.
