Every ending is a beginning and today marks a new beginning for me.
After 17 years at Blizzard, with long and careful contemplation, I have made a difficult and bittersweet but ultimately exciting decision to pursue the next chapter in my life and career.
Before I even joined Blizzard, I was already a huge fan of the company and its games. In particular, I was extremely passionate about the emerging genre of real-time strategy games. It was a dream come true when I was given the opportunity to work on StarCraft, which at the time was being created by a very small team by today’s standards. It was tremendously fulfilling to get to know everyone on the team personally and to contribute our energies toward a shared goal in such a creative and engaging environment.
Blizzard Entertainment has been simply the best place in the world to be a game designer. The best aspect of designing games at Blizzard is that the entire company is passionate about the gameplay within each and every product. From the executive team to customer service to our global offices, every single person is a player and contributes to making the best possible games. It’s for very good reason that the first credit on every Blizzard game is “Game Design by Blizzard Entertainment.”
I’m really proud of the contributions I was able to make to Blizzard’s accomplishments. From building lasting games, to supporting the growth of eSports, to extending the Warcraft world into a feature film, and of course to being able to celebrate our shared passions with the Blizzard community online and at BlizzCon.
The Blizzard community is ultimately the reason why we come to work every day and pour our souls into every world and experience we create. Blizzard’s players are the most passionate in the world and your commitment and dedication are truly awesome to behold. Creating entertainment for you has been an incredible opportunity, and I know that you will continue to grow and become even stronger as a community over the years to come. It has been so meaningful on a personal level to help create joy for all of you.
I’m looking forward to new challenges in my career, but I will always cherish the time I spent with you all and the amazing and collaborative teams at Blizzard. It was both satisfying and humbling, and it made me a better developer and a better person. I look forward to playing Blizzard games as a player for many years to come. Most important, now I have plenty of time to learn how to build a competitive Hearthstone deck.
As to what I will be doing next, I don’t have an answer for you yet . . . but I will “when it’s ready.” My priorities are to enjoy the summer with my family, play plenty of games, and think about what’s next. The game industry is such an exciting place right now with PC gaming thriving, the new consoles, mobile games, and virtual reality becoming an actual reality. It’s like having an empty quest log and going into a new zone for the first time.
In the past, I haven’t been the most avid Twitter user, but I’ll strive to do better and keep you updated there—@Rob_Pardo. Please stay in touch!
Rob
Rob Pardo has held multiple titles and responsibilities at Blizzard Entertainment for almost two decades, including Lead designer for World of Warcraft and its expansions, Warcraft III and its expansions along with Starcraft:Broodwar.
He has also had various other titles such as designer, lead and producer and has in some way contributed to every game Blizzard has created to this date. In 2006 he recieved a award from Times magazine for being one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
The reasons to as why he is leaving is being speculated upon heavily, the most popular theory is that Rob Pardo doesn't like the path Blizzard Entertainment is taking regarding development of its games and has decided to leave the company much like what Blizzard North, the original creators of the Diablo Franchise did.
No matter what the reason for him leaving there is no question about that the loss or Rob Pardo will heavily affect Blizzard Entertainment.
A short and sweet summary from TL user paralleluniverse of Rob Pardo and his time at Blizzard Entertainment:
On July 04 2014 17:49 paralleluniverse wrote: Rob Pardo leaves behind an impressive legacy at Blizzard. As chief creative officer, his role was to supervise the game directors for all of Blizzard's games, so he was ultimately responsible for basically everything, both the good and the bad. In particular, he was lead designer on WC3, arguably Blizzard's best game, and also lead designer on WoW and the first few expansions. Over almost 10 years of WoW, the game has progressively gotten better.
Pardo strongly rejected microtransactions and gold buying in WoW. But unfortunately, that has failed to translate. Microtransactions are all over WoW. Gold buying was legalized with the guardian cub, which I argued against, and is now gone. But I laud them for retaining the $40 expansion model, despite the industry moving decisively towards the model of selling worthless DLC and microtransactions. As Jay Wilson's supervisor, Pardo was also ultimately responsible for the RMAH that destroyed D3. I also argued against that, and it's gone too.
Amongst his most major failures was the disastrous launch of Battle.net 0.2 that came with SC2. It was the biggest regression of any online platform ever. It launched without chat channels, without even whisper functionality, it gutted all the amazing game features and social features of the 2002 WC3 Battle.net, it had one of the worse and most meaningless ladder systems, it was lifeless and barren because you didn't know if anyone was online and it was impossible to interact with anyone not on your friends list. And he got up at Blizzcon, and announced Battle.net 0.2 as if it was the greatest thing ever, when in fact, it was worse in every single regard, with not one single new or innovative feature... other than Facebook integration, obviously. While, over a very long time, Battle.net 2.0 improved, there's still nothing--not one feature--new or innovative about it.
So under Pardo, the game design at Blizzard has been set at an extremely high level of quality and polish. The gameplay in Blizzard's games is the best in the industry, and has only improve because of Pardo. Heroes of the Storm fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2. WoW's game systems are better than ever. And for this reason, Pardo will be greatly missed. But Blizzard's business model has gotten more greedy and unfair over time, for example, D3 launched with a RMAH and Hearthstone uses an unfair "buy advantages for real money" model. But it's not entirely clear whether Pardo was fighting for or against this distinctive and indisputable shift to more greedy and unfair business models. I suspect, to a small extent, it was the latter.
It would be really neat to see him try his hand in designing RTS games again, even if it's on a small team. However, I think he'll probably be working on other genres if he stays in the gaming industry.
On July 04 2014 05:47 FlowOfIdeas wrote: Let's be honest, does anyone really care about this? Do you REALLY?
Uh, yeah. This is pretty big.
Rob Pardo was the initial lead designer for Starcraft II and had a huge influence on the design. And he is involved in the creative direction for every Blizzard game. I think currently he is/was the lead designer of TITAN, Blizzard's mysterious next-gen MMO that keeps getting postponed. Him leaving the company probably has some sort of implications for the development of that project.
"Rob Pardo has held multiple titles and responsibilities at Blizzard Entertainment for almost two decades, including Lead designer for World of Warcraft and its expansions, Warcraft III and its expansions along with Starcraft:Broodwar."
So, in other words, one of the geniuses who gave us WC3. I sincerely hope he is going to build his own company, and in turn create a new RTS game. I genuinely wish for it.
Come on! Give us what WC4 would have been, but you know, with the Blizzard of old!
This is tremendous news. Rob Pardo was extremely influential in design and had an simplistic, elegant approach that made his credited games immensely popular. I have my own personal theories about why he's leaving, and I think he probably disagrees with the path Blizzard is taking in their recent games. Dustin Browder made a blog post about the design of Heroes of the Storm earlier today and through reading the entire thing I kept thinking "Rob Pardo would never sign off on something like this, he prefers the 'make everything overpowered' approach rather than baby-stepping and keeping things flat." Now this news comes out that Pardo is leaving. The design decisions for games like D3, SC2, Heroes, post-TBC WoW, Hearthstone have been widely criticized by many of Blizzard's "classic" fans, the ones who grew up with BW, War2, War3. That's not to say that their new design philosophy is bad, it's just different from where they were 15 years ago. Perhaps Rob believes that as an executive he's too far from working day-to-day in the trenches with the rest of the design team, and will be looking for a smaller studio where he can be more directly involved with the nitty gritty details.
Fuck. He was the reason WoW was awesome, joined the team as head designer in 2006, that was the era of TBC basically and LK which gave us fights like LK and Ulduar which was awesome. I would probably think he moved way from WoW design in the end but still he was one of the OGs that took Blizzard from a good company to one of the most influential companies.
Sounds like he has got a new job though? Wonder where it will be ;o
On July 04 2014 05:47 FlowOfIdeas wrote: Let's be honest, does anyone really care about this? Do you REALLY?
User was temp banned for this post.
Whole TL.Net should care and thank its existence to Rob Pardo, and this is why: Back in late 1996 at E3, StarCraft made its first appearance and it was horrible. It basically looked like Warcraft2 but in space but Blizzard were planning on releasing it anyway. The only reason for why they decided to remake the entire Starcraft game early 1997, which pushed the release back all the way to 1998, to look like what it is today was supposedly because of Rob. He had just started out at Blizzard and kept nagging at the senior developers and designers along with some other programmers to make it better.
If it wasn't for Rob we could potentially have had this version of Starcraft today:
Rob Pardo has been credited on the following games:
Lead Designer
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade World of Warcraft Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos StarCraft: Brood War
Designer
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor Diablo II Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition StarCraft Diablo III
This isn't just some guy leaving blizzard. This is pretty much like Miyamoto leaving Nintendo. I have no idea how Blizzard can recover from this. This is truly the end of the road.
The days of classic Blizzard ended the day WoW became a hit. It's sad to see him leave Blizzard, but it'll be interesting for Blizzard to move on and also for him to work on something new.
The lead designer of my favourite Blizzard games. I am pessimistic on Blizzard behalf, but hopeful for Rob Pardo, hope he continues to make great games elsewhere!
Rob Pardo is the dumbfuck who wanted this stupid ladder system in SC2. The other guy who proposed a nice ELO approach got ignored. That's when we got 100 Divisions with no way knowing how well we did.
On July 04 2014 07:29 [N3O]r3d33m3r wrote: Rob Pardo is the dumbfuck who wanted this stupid ladder system in SC2. The other guy who proposed a nice ELO approach got ignored. That's when we got 100 Divisions with no way knowing how well we did.
User was warned for this post
LoL also has a division system, and I believe it is well-liked. I personally think that ladder system is excellent.
On July 04 2014 07:29 [N3O]r3d33m3r wrote: Rob Pardo is the dumbfuck who wanted this stupid ladder system in SC2. The other guy who proposed a nice ELO approach got ignored. That's when we got 100 Divisions with no way knowing how well we did.
User was warned for this post
LoL also has a division system, and I believe it is well-liked. I personally think that ladder system is excellent.
In the very beginnning, people really despised our system. It was unclear where you stood. Now with the GM league and Bonus pool fixes i think people finally settled with it, however this was not always the case.
On July 04 2014 07:18 Pegas wrote: Rob Pardo has been credited on the following games:
Lead Designer
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade World of Warcraft Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos StarCraft: Brood War
Designer
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor Diablo II Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition StarCraft Diablo III
This isn't just some guy leaving blizzard. This is pretty much like Miyamoto leaving Nintendo. I have no idea how Blizzard can recover from this. This is truly the end of the road.
Hearthstone is doing well, and World of Warcraft still needs a while more of decline before it stops being a cash cow. Blizzard will last and will still make tons of money and decent games, especially since its franchises still hold sway enough to sell tons of copies even when they're heavily criticized.
SC2 is 1 of 128287 priorities for a guy like Pardo. picking the guy apart for this is such a laugh.
On July 04 2014 07:29 [N3O]r3d33m3r wrote: Rob Pardo is the dumbfuck who wanted this stupid ladder system in SC2. The other guy who proposed a nice ELO approach got ignored. That's when we got 100 Divisions with no way knowing how well we did.
Browder is/was the lead designer guy, he decided what resources got allocated for what problems.. and what problems were the highest priority.
get together $100 million and make ur own game guy.
On July 04 2014 07:29 [N3O]r3d33m3r wrote: Rob Pardo is the dumbfuck who wanted this stupid ladder system in SC2. The other guy who proposed a nice ELO approach got ignored. That's when we got 100 Divisions with no way knowing how well we did.
User was warned for this post
Could you please show a source to this stating that Rob Pardo was the one responsible for features of Battle.Net, as far I know of he only dealt with the Game directly and not the Battle.Net part, like the ladder system.
EDIT: This is regardless if the ladder system is good or bad, I just thought that Rob Pardo never dealt with the Battle.Net aspect and exclusively just focused on the game itself.
Whole TL.Net should care and thank its existence to Rob Pardo, and this is why: Back in late 1996 at E3, StarCraft made its first appearance and it was horrible. It basically looked like Warcraft2 but in space but Blizzard were planning on releasing it anyway. The only reason for why they decided to remake the entire Starcraft game early 1997, which pushed the release back all the way to 1998, to look like what it is today was supposedly because of Rob. He had just started out at Blizzard and kept nagging at the senior developers and designers along with some other programmers to make it better.
If it wasn't for Rob we could potentially have had this version of Starcraft today:
I remember that awesome quote from a TL.net article about the pathing: "StarCraft I was basically trying to create orcs in space accidently resulting in a masterpiece" (freely quoted). Rob Pardo was working behind the scenes for all to long, and as much as I am not in the mood of playing StarCraft II nowadays I have to admit that I have had almost 5 years of fun with StarCraft II alone - for like 50 bucks. Before that, I had roughly 3 or 4 years fun with WoW, played all through classic and TBC. Before that, during that, and after that, I loved Diablo I and especialy II, grinding for nights, ruining my grades (well, not too badly though. I was still passing). WarCraft II was awesome, but I was too young to really enjoy it (much like StarCraft I), but WC III and TFT, though I mainly played single player and LAN fungames, was a blast.
So, thank you, mr. Pardo, for all the effort and work you put into the games. Godspeed on your way.
Lead Designer World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade World of Warcraft Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos StarCraft: Brood War
Throw Warcraft 2 and Diablo 2 in there and you have every single game I love blizzard for xD... I hope he gets to do some lead designing again. :D LEGEND.
On July 04 2014 05:47 FlowOfIdeas wrote: Let's be honest, does anyone really care about this? Do you REALLY?
User was temp banned for this post.
Whole TL.Net should care and thank its existence to Rob Pardo, and this is why: Back in late 1996 at E3, StarCraft made its first appearance and it was horrible. It basically looked like Warcraft2 but in space but Blizzard were planning on releasing it anyway. The only reason for why they decided to remake the entire Starcraft game early 1997, which pushed the release back all the way to 1998, to look like what it is today was supposedly because of Rob. He had just started out at Blizzard and kept nagging at the senior developers and designers along with some other programmers to make it better.
If it wasn't for Rob we could potentially have had this version of Starcraft today: *snip image for space
Well, as Rob was saying for Blizzard was a team effort. So who know exactly who was pushing to do what. But Rob was the lead designer of BW, working with the foundation of Starcraft, whose lead designer was Patrick Wyatt. But Rob has certainly been very influential in designing Blizzard's games. Best of luck to the guy.
I am surprised by this. I doubt that Blizzard was of let him go due to problems with Titan, since Pardo is the man most credited for WoW, which made them a huge amount of money. I guess we can speculate all day, but I hope he gets back into the industry at some point. Blizzard has a lot of good programmers, artists etc, but Pardo seemed to be the guy who saw the big picture when making games.
On July 04 2014 09:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: This is a huge loss for the Blizzard franchise and our community. That being said, I wish him the best of luck on his future endeavors.
On July 04 2014 05:44 Integra wrote: The reasons to as why he is leaving is being speculated upon heavily, the most popular theory is that Rob Pardo doesn't like the path Blizzard Entertainment is taking regarding development of its games and has decided to leave the company much like what Blizzard North, the original creators of the Diablo Franchise did.
On July 04 2014 06:26 Excalibur_Z wrote: I have my own personal theories about why he's leaving, and I think he probably disagrees with the path Blizzard is taking in their recent games. Dustin Browder made a blog post about the design of Heroes of the Storm earlier today and through reading the entire thing I kept thinking "Rob Pardo would never sign off on something like this, he prefers the 'make everything overpowered' approach rather than baby-stepping and keeping things flat." Now this news comes out that Pardo is leaving.
oh ffs, maybe the guy's just getting older (17 years at Blizzard), is rich, and doesn't want his kids growing up to pass him by. Leave it to the esports community to be dead set on using this to validate any and all criticisms they have with Blizzard games.
Let's hope it shakes things up over at blizzard. They've been reproducing cloned storylines (Hi metzen!), cloned animation styles and cloned gameplay for the last decade now. They might actually become innovative game developers again if they ditch some of the old guard, I can only hope more of them leave. Pardo can start his own company and deliver mediocre games funded by kickstarter based on his reputation so no reason to feel sorry for him.
This guys had a big helping hand in creating some of the greatest games I have ever played in my life. Warcraft series, BW, and WoW/TBC are the games that I have the most fond memories of playing.
That being said, this guy is a legend and this is a huge loss for Blizzard. He is irreplaceable and maybe it was the right decision for him to leave, given the direction Blizzard has been going with their games.
He will be missed hopefully he stays in the game industry, but he probably has enough money to settle down and retire.
On July 04 2014 10:44 zlefin wrote: Has blizzard's stock price been affected by this? Losing one of their top people seems like it should yield a minor reduction at least.
lol.Of course the stock price hasn't been affected. Why would it?
Contrary to what people believe Blizzar isn't run by 5 people. Just like David Kim isn't the guy who balances SC2.
They may be leading work, but rest assured they are working in big teams where a lot of talented people do work. Rob and David are just the faces of Blizzard in media.
Rob Pardo leaves behind an impressive legacy at Blizzard. As chief creative officer, his role was to supervise the game directors for all of Blizzard's games, so he was ultimately responsible for basically everything, both the good and the bad. In particular, he was lead designer on WC3, arguably Blizzard's best game, and also lead designer on WoW and the first few expansions. Over almost 10 years of WoW, the game has progressively gotten better.
Pardo strongly rejected microtransactions and gold buying in WoW. But unfortunately, that has failed to translate. Microtransactions are all over WoW. Gold buying was legalized with the guardian cub, which I argued against, and is now gone. But I laud them for retaining the $40 expansion model, despite the industry moving decisively towards the model of selling worthless DLC and microtransactions. As Jay Wilson's supervisor, Pardo was also ultimately responsible for the RMAH that destroyed D3. I also argued against that, and it's gone too.
Amongst his most major failures was the disastrous launch of Battle.net 0.2 that came with SC2. It was the biggest regression of any online platform ever. It launched without chat channels, without even whisper functionality, it gutted all the amazing game features and social features of the 2002 WC3 Battle.net, it had one of the worse and most meaningless ladder systems, it was lifeless and barren because you didn't know if anyone was online and it was impossible to interact with anyone not on your friends list. And he got up at Blizzcon, and announced Battle.net 0.2 as if it was the greatest thing ever, when in fact, it was worse in every single regard, with not one single new or innovative feature... other than Facebook integration, obviously. While, over a very long time, Battle.net 2.0 improved, there's still nothing--not one feature--new or innovative about it.
So under Pardo, the game design at Blizzard has been set at an extremely high level of quality and polish. The gameplay in Blizzard's games is the best in the industry, and has only improve because of Pardo. Heroes of the Storm fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2. WoW's game systems are better than ever. And for this reason, Pardo will be greatly missed. But Blizzard's business model has gotten more greedy and unfair over time, for example, D3 launched with a RMAH and Hearthstone uses an unfair "buy advantages for real money" model. But it's not entirely clear whether Pardo was fighting for or against this distinctive and indisputable shift to more greedy and unfair business models. I suspect, to a small extent, it was the latter.
On July 04 2014 07:18 Pegas wrote: Rob Pardo has been credited on the following games:
Lead Designer
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade World of Warcraft Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos StarCraft: Brood War
Designer
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor Diablo II Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition StarCraft Diablo III
This isn't just some guy leaving blizzard. This is pretty much like Miyamoto leaving Nintendo. I have no idea how Blizzard can recover from this. This is truly the end of the road.
what a record WOW this guy owes me YEARS of lifetime
Over almost 10 years of WoW, the game has progressively gotten better.
Heroes of the Storm fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2.
Snowballing and 50 minute games that are already decided 10-20 minutes in. And the things that cause this.
out.
Purposefully lowering skill cap by removing mechanics might work great to attract the casual and therefor biggest market to your game, but claiming this model improves upon other designs because "you can't lose in the opening minutes" is outright delusional. Also the VAST majority of people who played WoW will tell you vanilla and TBC were easily the best era of the game. So again..
On July 04 2014 07:18 Pegas wrote: Rob Pardo has been credited on the following games:
Lead Designer
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade World of Warcraft Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos StarCraft: Brood War
Designer
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor Diablo II Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition StarCraft Diablo III
This isn't just some guy leaving blizzard. This is pretty much like Miyamoto leaving Nintendo. I have no idea how Blizzard can recover from this. This is truly the end of the road.
what a record WOW this guy owes me YEARS of lifetime
Yeah he owes me too, forgot to add two more :
Design Director StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010)
Executive Producer Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
Seems every single success title that Blizzard ever made was tied to his name and contribution.
First Greg Street leaves now Robert Pardo, something tells me something big will happen @ Blizzard soon. What it is we can only speculate.
This guy pretty much ruined the diablo franchise and from what I've been hearing from my buddies at blizzard (3 of them lol) he has/had final say on a lot the stuff that goes on and he ruined b.net as well. Not to be a hater because I'm sure he had his hayday and did a lot, but the negatives are what I will remember most about this guy.
I'm trying to find links that directly link Rob Pardo to BNet 2.0, but to no avail. Can anyone show me something that suggests he worked directly on that?
On July 04 2014 19:59 Spaylz wrote: I'm trying to find links that directly link Rob Pardo to BNet 2.0, but to no avail. Can anyone show me something that suggests he worked directly on that?
One of the best game designers ever, and by far the best RTS game designer. He is the one that should have been in charge of SC2...
On July 04 2014 06:26 Excalibur_Z wrote: This is tremendous news. Rob Pardo was extremely influential in design and had an simplistic, elegant approach that made his credited games immensely popular. I have my own personal theories about why he's leaving, and I think he probably disagrees with the path Blizzard is taking in their recent games. Dustin Browder made a blog post about the design of Heroes of the Storm earlier today and through reading the entire thing I kept thinking "Rob Pardo would never sign off on something like this, he prefers the 'make everything overpowered' approach rather than baby-stepping and keeping things flat." Now this news comes out that Pardo is leaving. The design decisions for games like D3, SC2, Heroes, post-TBC WoW, Hearthstone have been widely criticized by many of Blizzard's "classic" fans, the ones who grew up with BW, War2, War3. That's not to say that their new design philosophy is bad, it's just different from where they were 15 years ago. Perhaps Rob believes that as an executive he's too far from working day-to-day in the trenches with the rest of the design team, and will be looking for a smaller studio where he can be more directly involved with the nitty gritty details.
- Disorganised chat (chat was amazing and had great functionality?) - Disconnected from single player experience (wat) - New players got pwned (define new) - Ladder system served only the elite (errrrrrr lol?) - Can't find a custom game except for DotA (not true again?)
Is that actually real? They just listed all the reasons that made WC3 fucking amazing but think they're the highest priority negatives? LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL BLIZZARD (Y)
On July 04 2014 21:21 Kaos_StarCraft wrote: Lessons Learned from Warcraft 3: (2009)
- Disorganised chat (chat was amazing and had great functionality?) - Disconnected from single player experience (wat) - New players got pwned (define new) - Ladder system served only the elite (errrrrrr lol?) - Can't find a custom game except for DotA (not true again?)
Is that actually real? They just listed all the reasons that made WC3 fucking amazing but think they're the highest priority negatives? LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL BLIZZARD (Y)
This is when we found out that everyone @ Blizzard is drunk as fuck with the WoW money.
I think they hired some XBOX Live guy to make b.net 0.2? Greg Something.
Whatever. The legacy Rob Pardo leaves behind is insane, he's a genius in my book. Even the RMAH is a brilliant idea that suffered from circumstances, mainly the failure of D3 item design and difficulty scaling.
One flaw though: he should have never approved flying mounts in WoW, it killed world PvP
On July 04 2014 05:47 FlowOfIdeas wrote: Let's be honest, does anyone really care about this? Do you REALLY?
User was temp banned for this post.
Whole TL.Net should care and thank its existence to Rob Pardo, and this is why: Back in late 1996 at E3, StarCraft made its first appearance and it was horrible. It basically looked like Warcraft2 but in space but Blizzard were planning on releasing it anyway. The only reason for why they decided to remake the entire Starcraft game early 1997, which pushed the release back all the way to 1998, to look like what it is today was supposedly because of Rob. He had just started out at Blizzard and kept nagging at the senior developers and designers along with some other programmers to make it better.
If it wasn't for Rob we could potentially have had this version of Starcraft today:
Amen.
Thank you Rob for your contributions, and I am looking forward to playing the games you will be working on.
On July 04 2014 21:21 Kaos_StarCraft wrote: Lessons Learned from Warcraft 3: (2009)
- Disorganised chat (chat was amazing and had great functionality?) - Disconnected from single player experience (wat) - New players got pwned (define new) - Ladder system served only the elite (errrrrrr lol?) - Can't find a custom game except for DotA (not true again?)
Is that actually real? They just listed all the reasons that made WC3 fucking amazing but think they're the highest priority negatives? LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL BLIZZARD (Y)
The chat was fine, but the public channels were pretty messy and spread out between listed channels nobody used like WCG rooms and Frozen Throne USA #6, etc.
The ladder system was random, and new players bounce between playing other noobs and level 25 orcs that solo you with the blademaster, even after 20 games, while searching at 8pm.
As for custom games, it pretty much was nothing but
DOTA NO NOOBS NO DL random DOTA u pick ur nose Hentai tower defense dota all random no niggers life of a pesant furry edition DoTa NO nOoOoObbbbbs tyler is gay lol wintermaul 3v3 ENCHANTED EIDITON
...there was stuff like official wintermaul wars, castle builder, Genesis of Empires etc that was listed 20 seconds after your 15th refresh, that was already filled by the time you clicked it X_x
seriously, I don't know why they decided to fix bnet by purging it with fire...but come on.
DOTA NO NOOBS NO DL random DOTA u pick ur nose Hentai tower defense dota all random no niggers life of a pesant furry edition DoTa NO nOoOoObbbbbs tyler is gay lol wintermaul 3v3 ENCHANTED EIDITON
On July 05 2014 00:39 PineapplePizza wrote: DOTA NO NOOBS NO DL random DOTA u pick ur nose Hentai tower defense dota all random no niggers life of a pesant furry edition DoTa NO nOoOoObbbbbs tyler is gay lol wintermaul 3v3 ENCHANTED EIDITON
Pretty much the best thing for a game to turn into.
DOTA NO NOOBS NO DL random DOTA u pick ur nose Hentai tower defense dota all random no niggers life of a pesant furry edition DoTa NO nOoOoObbbbbs tyler is gay lol wintermaul 3v3 ENCHANTED EIDITON
You sir, just made my day. That is as accurate as it is amazing.
Seriously though, the old BNet had a sense of community and "socialness". It certainly had shortcomings - I mean, come on, it's pretty old, and still, it beats BNet 2.0.
On July 04 2014 21:38 DaVinci wrote: I think they hired some XBOX Live guy to make b.net 0.2? Greg Something.
Whatever. The legacy Rob Pardo leaves behind is insane, he's a genius in my book. Even the RMAH is a brilliant idea that suffered from circumstances, mainly the failure of D3 item design and difficulty scaling.
One flaw though: he should have never approved flying mounts in WoW, it killed world PvP
If he was the guy behind D3's AH and flying mounts, then lol, blizzards about to get a whole lot better.
On July 05 2014 00:39 PineapplePizza wrote: As for custom games, it pretty much was nothing but
DOTA NO NOOBS NO DL random DOTA u pick ur nose Hentai tower defense dota all random no niggers life of a pesant furry edition DoTa NO nOoOoObbbbbs tyler is gay lol wintermaul 3v3 ENCHANTED EIDITON
...there was stuff like official wintermaul wars, castle builder, Genesis of Empires etc that was listed 20 seconds after your 15th refresh, that was already filled by the time you clicked it X_x
seriously, I don't know why they decided to fix bnet by purging it with fire...but come on.
I played custom games until 2010 and it was never like that. Though, maybe my server was different.
On July 04 2014 21:38 DaVinci wrote: I think they hired some XBOX Live guy to make b.net 0.2? Greg Something.
Whatever. The legacy Rob Pardo leaves behind is insane, he's a genius in my book. Even the RMAH is a brilliant idea that suffered from circumstances, mainly the failure of D3 item design and difficulty scaling.
One flaw though: he should have never approved flying mounts in WoW, it killed world PvP
Ya, you are right, they hired Greg Canessa for the new Bnet. Greg Canessa was one of the main leads behind the whole xbox live system like the unlock rewards and stuff like that. He is gone now, they kicked him.
On July 04 2014 21:38 DaVinci wrote: I think they hired some XBOX Live guy to make b.net 0.2? Greg Something.
Whatever. The legacy Rob Pardo leaves behind is insane, he's a genius in my book. Even the RMAH is a brilliant idea that suffered from circumstances, mainly the failure of D3 item design and difficulty scaling.
One flaw though: he should have never approved flying mounts in WoW, it killed world PvP
Ya, you are right, they hired Greg Canessa for the new Bnet. Greg Canessa was one of the main leads behind the whole xbox live system like the unlock rewards and stuff like that. He is gone now, they kicked him.
Basically as part of a company, you share in the mistakes and glories. It's harder to pin a fall guy and the guy that did all the right things. Kinda gets all mixed together.
On July 04 2014 21:38 DaVinci wrote: I think they hired some XBOX Live guy to make b.net 0.2? Greg Something.
Whatever. The legacy Rob Pardo leaves behind is insane, he's a genius in my book. Even the RMAH is a brilliant idea that suffered from circumstances, mainly the failure of D3 item design and difficulty scaling.
One flaw though: he should have never approved flying mounts in WoW, it killed world PvP
Ya, you are right, they hired Greg Canessa for the new Bnet. Greg Canessa was one of the main leads behind the whole xbox live system like the unlock rewards and stuff like that. He is gone now, they kicked him.
Basically as part of a company, you share in the mistakes and glories. It's harder to pin a fall guy and the guy that did all the right things. Kinda gets all mixed together.
It wasn't that hard for Blizzard apparently to do blame since they replaced half the Bnet team, including Greg Canessa.
On July 04 2014 05:47 FlowOfIdeas wrote: Let's be honest, does anyone really care about this? Do you REALLY?
User was temp banned for this post.
Whole TL.Net should care and thank its existence to Rob Pardo, and this is why: Back in late 1996 at E3, StarCraft made its first appearance and it was horrible. It basically looked like Warcraft2 but in space but Blizzard were planning on releasing it anyway. The only reason for why they decided to remake the entire Starcraft game early 1997, which pushed the release back all the way to 1998, to look like what it is today was supposedly because of Rob. He had just started out at Blizzard and kept nagging at the senior developers and designers along with some other programmers to make it better.
If it wasn't for Rob we could potentially have had this version of Starcraft today:
It was that and the release of of a non-playable demo of Dominion:Storm over Gift 3. The demo that was shown at E3 wasnt even a demo of the game, it was basically a movie that Ion Storm tricked the press/E3 attendees with. But it looked so good that Blizzard decided they had to step up their game to compete, which is when they went back and basically fundamentally re-designed the game to make it what it was.
Pardo leaving is beyond huge, it's like Steve Jobs leaving Apple. Especially since the other old Blizzard guys like Metzen have become incredibly lazy.
The latest Blizzard games have not had the same addictive and fun gameplay, and i fully expect this to get worse with Pardo gone since he was, from what i have read, "old Blizzard incarnate".
i do not think much speculation is required to figure out why Pardo is leaving. He pretty much says it right in his good bye message.
he is bored of WoW after so many years he is tired of working on the large teams required by AAA development. and these teams get larger each year and each person in the team gets more and more specialized.
he'll tell any one who'll listen that he loved the time he got to work on Hearthstone.
all the heavy lifting for Hearthstone is over
Pardo doesn't want to go back to managing and co ordinating multiple teams of 100s of people where he never gets to put his own finger prints on the nuts and bolts of the game in development.
he has alluded to all of these issues in previous interviews over the past year without ever expressing anger or dissatisfaction with his job. which is smart PR on his part. obviously, Pardo is very media savvy.
one thing is crystal clear: he no longer experiences the same ultra high level of job satisfaction that he did in his first few years at Blizzard.
Kind of scary for Blizzard future. Probably won't affect their sales much because their IP and reputation is still strong, but this will definitely make people who were fans of Blizzard since the beginning leave ship.
Guy is moving on to smaller teams and smaller projects. It's the era of small teams again and with game like bastion, sometimes always monsters and hyper light drifter, the man is seeking to do new things and make smaller games.
We should all be pumped for what he is going to do.
On July 05 2014 11:04 JimmyJRaynor wrote: i do not think much speculation is required to figure out why Pardo is leaving. He pretty much says it right in his good bye message.
he is bored of WoW after so many years he is tired of working on the large teams required by AAA development. and these teams get larger each year and each person in the team gets more and more specialized.
he'll tell any one who'll listen that he loved the time he got to work on Hearthstone.
all the heavy lifting for Hearthstone is over
Pardo doesn't want to go back to managing and co ordinating multiple teams of 100s of people where he never gets to put his own finger prints on the nuts and bolts of the game in development.
he has alluded to all of these issues in previous interviews over the past year without ever expressing anger or dissatisfaction with his job. which is smart PR on his part. obviously, Pardo is very media savvy.
one thing is crystal clear: he no longer experiences the same ultra high level of job satisfaction that he did in his first few years at Blizzard.
In the same way we haven't experienced that level of ultra high user satisfaction as players of Blizzard games. Weird correlation.
On July 05 2014 11:04 JimmyJRaynor wrote: i do not think much speculation is required to figure out why Pardo is leaving. He pretty much says it right in his good bye message.
he is bored of WoW after so many years he is tired of working on the large teams required by AAA development. and these teams get larger each year and each person in the team gets more and more specialized.
he'll tell any one who'll listen that he loved the time he got to work on Hearthstone.
all the heavy lifting for Hearthstone is over
Pardo doesn't want to go back to managing and co ordinating multiple teams of 100s of people where he never gets to put his own finger prints on the nuts and bolts of the game in development.
he has alluded to all of these issues in previous interviews over the past year without ever expressing anger or dissatisfaction with his job. which is smart PR on his part. obviously, Pardo is very media savvy.
one thing is crystal clear: he no longer experiences the same ultra high level of job satisfaction that he did in his first few years at Blizzard.
In the same way we haven't experienced that level of ultra high user satisfaction as players of Blizzard games. Weird correlation.
Just you and some other other folks on the internet. Everyone I know likes the blizzard games.
On July 04 2014 07:29 [N3O]r3d33m3r wrote: Rob Pardo is the dumbfuck who wanted this stupid ladder system in SC2. The other guy who proposed a nice ELO approach got ignored. That's when we got 100 Divisions with no way knowing how well we did.
User was warned for this post
LoL also has a division system, and I believe it is well-liked. I personally think that ladder system is excellent.
It's not well liked. Most people prefer just straight up numbers and divisions, not a confusing promotion demotion and no number system.
On July 04 2014 05:47 FlowOfIdeas wrote: Let's be honest, does anyone really care about this? Do you REALLY?
User was temp banned for this post.
Whole TL.Net should care and thank its existence to Rob Pardo, and this is why: Back in late 1996 at E3, StarCraft made its first appearance and it was horrible. It basically looked like Warcraft2 but in space but Blizzard were planning on releasing it anyway. The only reason for why they decided to remake the entire Starcraft game early 1997, which pushed the release back all the way to 1998, to look like what it is today was supposedly because of Rob. He had just started out at Blizzard and kept nagging at the senior developers and designers along with some other programmers to make it better.
If it wasn't for Rob we could potentially have had this version of Starcraft today:
It was that and the release of of a non-playable demo of Dominion:Storm over Gift 3. The demo that was shown at E3 wasnt even a demo of the game, it was basically a movie that Ion Storm tricked the press/E3 attendees with. But it looked so good that Blizzard decided they had to step up their game to compete, which is when they went back and basically fundamentally re-designed the game to make it what it was.
Dominion storm barely looks better than KKND which came out before it. Early Starcraft looked bad even by the standards of the time.
I'm glad Dominion Storm kicked the Blizzard development team to wake them up though. Otherwise I don't know where I'd be. AoE2 was a lot of fun at the time and many people played dune and the command and conquer series.
On July 05 2014 11:04 JimmyJRaynor wrote: i do not think much speculation is required to figure out why Pardo is leaving. He pretty much says it right in his good bye message.
he is bored of WoW after so many years he is tired of working on the large teams required by AAA development. and these teams get larger each year and each person in the team gets more and more specialized.
he'll tell any one who'll listen that he loved the time he got to work on Hearthstone.
all the heavy lifting for Hearthstone is over
Pardo doesn't want to go back to managing and co ordinating multiple teams of 100s of people where he never gets to put his own finger prints on the nuts and bolts of the game in development.
he has alluded to all of these issues in previous interviews over the past year without ever expressing anger or dissatisfaction with his job. which is smart PR on his part. obviously, Pardo is very media savvy.
one thing is crystal clear: he no longer experiences the same ultra high level of job satisfaction that he did in his first few years at Blizzard.
In the same way we haven't experienced that level of ultra high user satisfaction as players of Blizzard games. Weird correlation.
making software in a small team is hella fun whether its a video game or any other kind of cool groundbreaking software product.
for people who enjoy this.... rarely does this type of person like managing 100s a peoeple.
On July 05 2014 11:04 JimmyJRaynor wrote: i do not think much speculation is required to figure out why Pardo is leaving. He pretty much says it right in his good bye message.
he is bored of WoW after so many years he is tired of working on the large teams required by AAA development. and these teams get larger each year and each person in the team gets more and more specialized.
he'll tell any one who'll listen that he loved the time he got to work on Hearthstone.
all the heavy lifting for Hearthstone is over
Pardo doesn't want to go back to managing and co ordinating multiple teams of 100s of people where he never gets to put his own finger prints on the nuts and bolts of the game in development.
he has alluded to all of these issues in previous interviews over the past year without ever expressing anger or dissatisfaction with his job. which is smart PR on his part. obviously, Pardo is very media savvy.
one thing is crystal clear: he no longer experiences the same ultra high level of job satisfaction that he did in his first few years at Blizzard.
In the same way we haven't experienced that level of ultra high user satisfaction as players of Blizzard games. Weird correlation.
Just you and some other other folks on the internet. Everyone I know likes the blizzard games.
It's not that surprising that Rob Pardo is leaving - Blizzard hasn't been the same company it once was for quite some time. Things have changed. Blizzard's approach to making games has changed... significantly. Some think it is has changed for the better, many others for the worse. I "like" Blizzard games, but I used to love them. Oversimplification and childproofing are the culprits, but that's a discussion for another thread.
Best of luck, Rob Pardo - go back out there and make the kinds of games that made you successful in the first place.
On July 04 2014 21:21 Kaos_StarCraft wrote: Lessons Learned from Warcraft 3: (2009)
- Disorganised chat (chat was amazing and had great functionality?) - Disconnected from single player experience (wat) - New players got pwned (define new) - Ladder system served only the elite (errrrrrr lol?) - Can't find a custom game except for DotA (not true again?)
Is that actually real? They just listed all the reasons that made WC3 fucking amazing but think they're the highest priority negatives? LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL BLIZZARD (Y)
EXACTLY.
Boss: "Hey guys, all people wanna do is play DotA. Like there are millions of games of DotA being played every month! What do we do to combat this?"
Intern with a squeaky voice: "Take the DotA concept and commercialize it?"
Boss: "No idiot, it's too difficult for new players and there's no single player experience. Plus it's competitive and gamers don't really want to see how they stand versus their peers."
I was watching a game history series on youtube called "All Your History" (are belong to us). And it tells the stories of pretty much every great game company you could name with a known franchise or super hit. It's very noticeable that in most cases of hugely successful companies, they eventually start splinting around. The original founders, the fathers of a beloved game, one by one start going their own way at some point. Honestly, I was wondering how Blizzard manages to stay so solid and indivisible (not counting Blizzard North) with all of its old boys still in the game. I guess the time has come for them to lose one of those iconic forefathers. Let's wish him well, and may he do great things with whatever he decides to do now.
can someone edit the first post to make it less subjective?
I mean, if you want to criticize micro transactions and that kind of stuff, you can, but the post implies that Rob was against that, and tries to give the impression that rob left because he hated that blizzard is "greedier" and uses "uses an unfair "buy advantages for real money" model.".
Wich could be true, but could be not. The OP and parallelunive are trying to give the impression that Blizzard is turning evil abd Rob left because of that, and now its the end of blizzard. I think that for a news this important, the post should be more objective.
Anyway, my opinion:
Rob sure was a very importan person for Blizzard, and the blizzard we know today woudn't exist if it wasn't because of him.
But Blizzard will keep going, and will keep making great games, because it doesn't matter how important one person is, he is just a person, and a single person doesn't make the game.
Im sure that we will see more of him, he will most probably stay in the videogame buisness, so i'm looking forward to what will he bring.
______ As a side not, you might not like micro transactions, but callin the hearthstone buisness model "unfair, buy advantages model" shows that you probably haven't played hearthstone, or haven't played other games where a real advantage is given to players who play
Rob Pardo leaving Blizzard? This is huge news. It's like Sid Meier leaving Firaxis. It's like John Carmack leaving iD (oh wait, that happened).
I hope he is going on to bigger and better things, although I can't see how much bigger and better you can get than Blizz. It sounds from his statement he wants to 'go small' again and get back to game design rather than people management... I can understand that.
It may not be as big of a loss for Blizz at first thought though. If all he is doing is managing people then maybe Blizz isn't using his talents to the fullest?
In any case I wish him the best and I will be following his new moves with great interest.
PS: It will be strange to see a Blizzcon without RP.
On July 05 2014 14:50 ElMeanYo wrote: Rob Pardo leaving Blizzard? This is huge news. It's like Sid Meier leaving Firaxis. It's like John Carmack leaving iD (oh wait, that happened).
I hope he is going on to bigger and better things, although I can't see how much bigger and better you can get than Blizz. It sounds from his statement he wants to 'go small' again and get back to game design rather than people management... I can understand that.
It may not be as big of a loss for Blizz at first thought though. If all he is doing is managing people then maybe Blizz isn't using his talents to the fullest?
In any case I wish him the best and I will be following his new moves with great interest.
PS: It will be strange to see a Blizzcon without RP.
I guess I should ask if you play Alpha Centauri.
But yeah, this is like when John Lennon left the Beatles. I suspect Yoko Ono was involved in stealing Rob Pardo from Blizzard.
On July 05 2014 14:19 [SXG]Phantom wrote: can someone edit the first post to make it less subjective?
I mean, if you want to criticize micro transactions and that kind of stuff, you can, but the post implies that Rob was against that, and tries to give the impression that rob left because he hated that blizzard is "greedier" and uses "uses an unfair "buy advantages for real money" model.".
Wich could be true, but could be not. The OP and parallelunive are trying to give the impression that Blizzard is turning evil abd Rob left because of that, and now its the end of blizzard. I think that for a news this important, the post should be more objective.
Anyway, my opinion:
Rob sure was a very importan person for Blizzard, and the blizzard we know today woudn't exist if it wasn't because of him.
But Blizzard will keep going, and will keep making great games, because it doesn't matter how important one person is, he is just a person, and a single person doesn't make the game.
Im sure that we will see more of him, he will most probably stay in the videogame buisness, so i'm looking forward to what will he bring.
______ As a side not, you might not like micro transactions, but callin the hearthstone buisness model "unfair, buy advantages model" shows that you probably haven't played hearthstone, or haven't played other games where a real advantage is given to players who play
Glad someone else sees the same bias I did... HS quite literally uses the exact same business model as every other online card game (except card hunter I think) and the only online card games I've seen people label P2W are the ones that make free player grinding just about impossible. Which HS really isn't at all.
Also, while it's trendy to rail against bnet 2.0 ParallelUniverse missed the real point there - cross platform chat. Chat used to be silo-ed by game, now it's unified. Sure BNet 2.0 was horribly rushed and missed a lot of important features, but to say it was done solely for Facebook integration just shows how hard you're trying to hate on Blizzard...
As an aside, the entire bnet 2.0 and desktop launcher development has been interesting to watch ever since I heard that Blizzard was going to make a Steam competitor.
On July 04 2014 06:26 Excalibur_Z wrote: This is tremendous news. Rob Pardo was extremely influential in design and had an simplistic, elegant approach that made his credited games immensely popular. I have my own personal theories about why he's leaving, and I think he probably disagrees with the path Blizzard is taking in their recent games. Dustin Browder made a blog post about the design of Heroes of the Storm earlier today and through reading the entire thing I kept thinking "Rob Pardo would never sign off on something like this, he prefers the 'make everything overpowered' approach rather than baby-stepping and keeping things flat." Now this news comes out that Pardo is leaving. The design decisions for games like D3, SC2, Heroes, post-TBC WoW, Hearthstone have been widely criticized by many of Blizzard's "classic" fans, the ones who grew up with BW, War2, War3. That's not to say that their new design philosophy is bad, it's just different from where they were 15 years ago. Perhaps Rob believes that as an executive he's too far from working day-to-day in the trenches with the rest of the design team, and will be looking for a smaller studio where he can be more directly involved with the nitty gritty details.
I know you said it yourself, but that's a lot of speculation ;D He could really be just looking for something other than Blizzard's preferred genres.
On July 05 2014 11:04 JimmyJRaynor wrote: i do not think much speculation is required to figure out why Pardo is leaving. He pretty much says it right in his good bye message.
he is bored of WoW after so many years he is tired of working on the large teams required by AAA development. and these teams get larger each year and each person in the team gets more and more specialized.
he'll tell any one who'll listen that he loved the time he got to work on Hearthstone.
all the heavy lifting for Hearthstone is over
Pardo doesn't want to go back to managing and co ordinating multiple teams of 100s of people where he never gets to put his own finger prints on the nuts and bolts of the game in development.
he has alluded to all of these issues in previous interviews over the past year without ever expressing anger or dissatisfaction with his job. which is smart PR on his part. obviously, Pardo is very media savvy.
one thing is crystal clear: he no longer experiences the same ultra high level of job satisfaction that he did in his first few years at Blizzard.
In the same way we haven't experienced that level of ultra high user satisfaction as players of Blizzard games. Weird correlation.
Just you and some other other folks on the internet. Everyone I know likes the blizzard games.
That's what he said, people like Blizzard games. All games before starcraft 2 were "omagad, game breaking, too good, can't believe this game is real!" stuff. Blizzard on a game was enough to make it a must buy for many people. they're not as good as they used to be.
On July 05 2014 11:04 JimmyJRaynor wrote: i do not think much speculation is required to figure out why Pardo is leaving. He pretty much says it right in his good bye message.
he is bored of WoW after so many years he is tired of working on the large teams required by AAA development. and these teams get larger each year and each person in the team gets more and more specialized.
he'll tell any one who'll listen that he loved the time he got to work on Hearthstone.
all the heavy lifting for Hearthstone is over
Pardo doesn't want to go back to managing and co ordinating multiple teams of 100s of people where he never gets to put his own finger prints on the nuts and bolts of the game in development.
he has alluded to all of these issues in previous interviews over the past year without ever expressing anger or dissatisfaction with his job. which is smart PR on his part. obviously, Pardo is very media savvy.
one thing is crystal clear: he no longer experiences the same ultra high level of job satisfaction that he did in his first few years at Blizzard.
In the same way we haven't experienced that level of ultra high user satisfaction as players of Blizzard games. Weird correlation.
Just you and some other other folks on the internet. Everyone I know likes the blizzard games.
That's what he said, people like Blizzard games. All games before starcraft 2 were "omagad, game breaking, too good, can't believe this game is real!" stuff. Blizzard on a game was enough to make it a must buy for many people. they're not as good as they used to be.
I know, things are not a good as they used to be. The movies are not as good, the sci fi is not the good stuff from our youth. The Blizzard games have been drained of the magic by a cynical internet and old age. Damn kids and their stupid dog.
On July 05 2014 11:59 Plansix wrote: Guy is moving on to smaller teams and smaller projects. It's the era of small teams again and with game like bastion, sometimes always monsters and hyper light drifter, the man is seeking to do new things and make smaller games.
We should all be pumped for what he is going to do.
I definitely some of the bigger devs like Activision and EA aren't as good as they should be. Some of the indie games you get from smaller game devs (I'm thinking of Transistor for example) seem to be way more polished than the big titles with lots of bugs in them. Some of the smaller devs are baring their teeth with some really well designed and well polished games.
Valve gets him and he's partnered up with IceFrog? They pretty much have the competitive FPS and MOBA scenes covered already, if they can make a true successor to SC:BW...
On July 05 2014 11:04 JimmyJRaynor wrote: i do not think much speculation is required to figure out why Pardo is leaving. He pretty much says it right in his good bye message.
he is bored of WoW after so many years he is tired of working on the large teams required by AAA development. and these teams get larger each year and each person in the team gets more and more specialized.
he'll tell any one who'll listen that he loved the time he got to work on Hearthstone.
all the heavy lifting for Hearthstone is over
Pardo doesn't want to go back to managing and co ordinating multiple teams of 100s of people where he never gets to put his own finger prints on the nuts and bolts of the game in development.
he has alluded to all of these issues in previous interviews over the past year without ever expressing anger or dissatisfaction with his job. which is smart PR on his part. obviously, Pardo is very media savvy.
one thing is crystal clear: he no longer experiences the same ultra high level of job satisfaction that he did in his first few years at Blizzard.
In the same way we haven't experienced that level of ultra high user satisfaction as players of Blizzard games. Weird correlation.
Just you and some other other folks on the internet. Everyone I know likes the blizzard games.
That's what he said, people like Blizzard games. All games before starcraft 2 were "omagad, game breaking, too good, can't believe this game is real!" stuff. Blizzard on a game was enough to make it a must buy for many people. they're not as good as they used to be.
I know, things are not a good as they used to be. The movies are not as good, the sci fi is not the good stuff from our youth. The Blizzard games have been drained of the magic by a cynical internet and old age. Damn kids and their stupid dog.
It has nothing to do with age. Games are getting easier and dumber which is why Dota 2 is such an amazing game; it's the same as Dota 1 which was made when games were still good.
On July 05 2014 23:11 Ciryandor wrote: Here's a what if:
Valve gets him and he's partnered up with IceFrog? They pretty much have the competitive FPS and MOBA scenes covered already, if they can make a true successor to SC:BW...
If valve were to ever make a full single/multi player RTS (with Rob) it would be more Warcraft than Starcraft. With all the experience they have with DOTA, building an RTS is practically the same thing.
I mean, Valve already have things like hero's and an RTS engine. Just put in buildings that can make units and they are good to go, hell I would buy it even without a single player campaign. Practically the same game as dota, its free money Valve, hire Rob
On July 05 2014 23:11 Ciryandor wrote: Here's a what if:
Valve gets him and he's partnered up with IceFrog? They pretty much have the competitive FPS and MOBA scenes covered already, if they can make a true successor to SC:BW...
If valve were to ever make a full single/multi player RTS (with Rob) it would be more Warcraft than Starcraft. With all the experience they have with DOTA, building an RTS is practically the same thing.
I mean, Valve already have things like hero's and an RTS engine. Just put in buildings that can make units and they are good to go, hell I would buy it even without a single player campaign. Practically the same game as dota, its free money Valve, hire Rob
On July 05 2014 23:11 Ciryandor wrote: Here's a what if:
Valve gets him and he's partnered up with IceFrog? They pretty much have the competitive FPS and MOBA scenes covered already, if they can make a true successor to SC:BW...
If valve were to ever make a full single/multi player RTS (with Rob) it would be more Warcraft than Starcraft. With all the experience they have with DOTA, building an RTS is practically the same thing.
I mean, Valve already have things like hero's and an RTS engine. Just put in buildings that can make units and they are good to go, hell I would buy it even without a single player campaign. Practically the same game as dota, its free money Valve, hire Rob
Balacing a RTS is much harder than a MOBA.
Nah, the important part of any game is core gameplay. If the core game is well designed and is something people enjoy playing then changing some numbers is the easy part. Thats why people like Pardo are important, and hypothetically speaking if Valve were to make an RTS having people that know what makes a genre good (Icefrog for DOTA) is the absolute priority.
And it doesn't even have to be Valve, any big company that looks at the market now and says 'well it looks like a good time for a warcraft RTS clone' would only have to come up to Rob and a few other former Blizzard employees and say 'look here is a pile of cash, make me a game that anyone who likes war3 will drool over'. I can guaranty you that anyone that has ever played war3 (many many millions) will hype the fucking shit out of its 'spiritual successor'
He did great things once. But if he was the guy responsible for Battle.net 0.2 and Diablo 3 auction house I'm not so interested in what he's going to do next
On July 06 2014 00:02 Zandar wrote: He did great things once. But if he was the guy responsible for Battle.net 0.2 and Diablo 2 auction house I'm not so interested in what he's going to do next
there was a diablo 2 auction house? i don't recall that.
you should check out the infrastructure around C&C and CoH and then you'll see that Battle.Net from 1998 to 2014 has been really good.
did Pardo make a few mistakes amongst the hundreds of things he created ... sure he did. i'll put up with those mistakes given all the great stuff he has been a part of.
if you never make a mistake then you are not trying to stretch any boundaries.
Of course he made mistakes. It's game design, it's not easy.
Still... WC3 was pure genius. For that, he has my eternal respect. Also, yes, it would be kickass if he did make another RTS. We'll see what happens though. I would definitely love it if we could have a successor to WC3...
That's wishful thinking though. No way Valve is going to hire him and make an RTS. It would be a direct concurrent to Dota. Makes little sense on a business standpoint.
On July 06 2014 00:02 Zandar wrote: He did great things once. But if he was the guy responsible for Battle.net 0.2 and Diablo 2 auction house I'm not so interested in what he's going to do next
there was a diablo 2 auction house? i don't recall that.
On July 06 2014 01:37 PVJ wrote: Blizzard is a very different company now.
The use of word "different" instead of a honest opinion.
TL's enforcement of political correctness makes me less and less interested in visiting this website. "Hey, you are not allowed to post negative stuff we don't agree with!"
nothing wrong with saying "different".. it fits...
making a AAA level game in 2014 is completely different from any form of game development that occurred in the 1990s at Blizzard.
on the Activision side... what Bob Whitehead, Allan Miller and David Crane did to start Activision.... is in a completely different world than what is done now at Activision to make games.
you can't really compare Pitfall to Skylanders... 2 different worlds.
On July 04 2014 17:49 paralleluniverse wrote: Heroes of the Storm fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2.
I'm trying sooooooooo hard not to get baited by this. :|
Why are you trying? That guy is either trolling or don't have a clue what he is talking about.
Not trying to troll you but I agree with him. Every "MOBA" since the original DotA has been an attempt to recreate the same game. The heroes, items and last hitting rules might differ in each iteration but the game still keeps getting faithfully recreated in the same image.
Heroes that run on macro instead of micro. Talents that replace the traditional item slots with Aghanim's effects at every choice. Choosing the hero you want to play beforehand and being matched appropriately after the fact (not important for full team play, but for solo queue it's pretty great). Multiple maps with unique objectives that alter the way the game is played. Dismissing difference from DotA off the cuff as "casualization" is doing yourself a disservice. It's a different game and you may find that you enjoy playing it.
On July 04 2014 17:49 paralleluniverse wrote: Heroes of the Storm fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2.
I'm trying sooooooooo hard not to get baited by this. :|
Why are you trying? That guy is either trolling or don't have a clue what he is talking about.
Not trying to troll you but I agree with him. Every "MOBA" since the original DotA has been an attempt to recreate the same game. The heroes, items and last hitting rules might differ in each iteration but the game still keeps getting faithfully recreated in the same image.
Heroes that run on macro instead of micro. Talents that replace the traditional item slots with Aghanim's effects at every choice. Choosing the hero you want to play beforehand and being matched appropriately after the fact (not important for full team play, but for solo queue it's pretty great). Multiple maps with unique objectives that alter the way the game is played. Dismissing difference from DotA off the cuff as "casualization" is doing yourself a disservice. It's a different game and you may find that you enjoy playing it.
Sure, the game is different. We get that. Everyone gets that. But how does that give any credence to the fact that he stated that it fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2?
The reasons to as why he is leaving is being speculated upon heavily, the most popular theory is that Rob Pardo doesn't like the path Blizzard Entertainment is taking regarding development of its games and has decided to leave the company much like what Blizzard North, the original creators of the Diablo Franchise did.
Wonder when everyone else will wake up and realize that Blizzard doesn't care about anything but money. One of the main reasons why SC2 has been consistently going downhill.
Thank you for SCBW, truly loved playing it for 10 years.
Blizzard North splintered off and basically disbanded because it was decided for them to start work on Diablo 3, and the whole team had already been working on nothing but Diablo games for like 7 years. It's not exactly the same thing.
On July 06 2014 03:49 FT.aCt)Sony wrote: The reasons to as why he is leaving is being speculated upon heavily, the most popular theory is that Rob Pardo doesn't like the path Blizzard Entertainment is taking regarding development of its games and has decided to leave the company much like what Blizzard North, the original creators of the Diablo Franchise did.
Wonder when everyone else will wake up and realize that Blizzard doesn't care about anything but money. One of the main reasons why SC2 has been consistently going downhill.
Thank you for SCBW, truly loved playing it for 10 years.
Well, as soon as Blizzard realises success isn't about shiny graphics (BW, CS and Diablo II didn't need that) but about gameplay instead. Maybe then we'll get more popularity.
One part of gameplay in SC is mechanics. Lots of people had to refine that in BW - building placement, micro... SC2 has less of those. Oh and how do I miss exciting PvP games with reavers. Hopefully reavers come back in LotV.
If the community misses the opportunity to change SC in LotV, then, well, it may be the end of StarCraft.
On July 06 2014 04:10 Excalibur_Z wrote: Blizzard North splintered off and basically disbanded because it was decided for them to start work on Diablo 3, and the whole team had already been working on nothing but Diablo games for like 7 years. It's not exactly the same thing.
Rumor had it that the Blizzard North guys had a pretty intense rivalry with Blizzard proper as well (remember they were a separate company that made Diablo before getting bought by Blizzard just prior to release).
It's all rumor though, so it's hard to get into specifics without more speculations and rumors, but in a nutshell I agree that them disbanding is very different from Rob Pardo leaving (but I could be wrong, I don't know the guy or anything).
On July 06 2014 06:23 Jerubaal wrote: Nope, the only reason my puny brain can comprehend is that Blizzard is teh suxxor and that's why he left.
I`m going on conspiracy theory here that Rob Pardo and blizzard had a massive fallout and here is my reason:
Remember every time a dev (like GC) or a comunity manager (like Daxx) left, there would be in his thread alot of other blues that would wish him well, gl , etc. In this case not a single blue wished him goodbye or gl in any of his threads during all 5 Blizzard Bnet forums.
On July 06 2014 06:23 Jerubaal wrote: Nope, the only reason my puny brain can comprehend is that Blizzard is teh suxxor and that's why he left.
I`m going on conspiracy theory here that Rob Pardo and blizzard had a massive fallout and here is my reason:
Remember every time a dev (like GC) or a comunity manager (like Daxx) left, there would be in his thread alot of other blues that would wish him well, gl , etc. In this case not a single blue wished him goodbye or gl in any of his threads during all 5 Blizzard Bnet forums.
On July 06 2014 06:23 Jerubaal wrote: Nope, the only reason my puny brain can comprehend is that Blizzard is teh suxxor and that's why he left.
I`m going on conspiracy theory here that Rob Pardo and blizzard had a massive fallout and here is my reason:
Remember every time a dev (like GC) or a comunity manager (like Daxx) left, there would be in his thread alot of other blues that would wish him well, gl , etc. In this case not a single blue wished him goodbye or gl in any of his threads during all 5 Blizzard Bnet forums.
nice catch. fascinating observation. any big thing that happens with Blizzard in the next 6 months could trigger a slew of "this is why Rob Pardo left" threads.
you would think some "blues" wouldn't even know there was a major feud going on with Pardo and some of his colleagues though.. and those "blues" would wish him well.
another big question is: who will replace Rob Pardo as head creative director chief guy?
Blizzard has 8 senior creative game designers that can replace Rob Pardo. Blizzard can continue to put out new products without him just like how Apple will keep pumping out iphones without Steve Jobs. I dont think Rob was going to invent the next great thing Blizzard is going to put out (excluding whatever TITAN is/was supposed to be).
On July 04 2014 17:49 paralleluniverse wrote: Heroes of the Storm fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2.
I'm trying sooooooooo hard not to get baited by this. :|
Why are you trying? That guy is either trolling or don't have a clue what he is talking about.
Not trying to troll you but I agree with him. Every "MOBA" since the original DotA has been an attempt to recreate the same game. The heroes, items and last hitting rules might differ in each iteration but the game still keeps getting faithfully recreated in the same image.
Heroes that run on macro instead of micro. Talents that replace the traditional item slots with Aghanim's effects at every choice. Choosing the hero you want to play beforehand and being matched appropriately after the fact (not important for full team play, but for solo queue it's pretty great). Multiple maps with unique objectives that alter the way the game is played. Dismissing difference from DotA off the cuff as "casualization" is doing yourself a disservice. It's a different game and you may find that you enjoy playing it.
Sure, the game is different. We get that. Everyone gets that. But how does that give any credence to the fact that he stated that it fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2?
The point is that improvements that HotS has made to the MOBA genre are bold, necessary and right. This is what I mean when I said that gameplay in Blizzard games has improved significantly under Rob Pardo.
It's cool that you're a wannabe game dev, but I think the popularity of DotA compared to HotS speaks for itself. You played DotA in beta..and your post on their dev forums was largely and justly ridiculed since you seem to speak from a place of ignorance. I implore you to at least 'watch' more DotA so you don't make such biased and uniformed opinions such as "Ursa OP". Also, the fact that you think the game simply snowballs for one team shows me you probably don't really know what you're looking at in DotA and with so little time played that's hardly surprising.
You're a fan of HotS, and that's great. However claiming a game has fundamental gameplay flaws when you're clearly uniformed on the intricacies of said game makes your opinion highly questionable and almost laughable. DotA has been played for years, on a competitive to casual level. I would be surprised if HotS manages to last as long as it has.
Back on topic, cheers to Rob. Good careers come to and end and hopefully he finds a new home for his creativity. I can't say I'll miss him at Blizzard since the company has undergone many changes from the days when they were viewed as one of the best and innovative game companies for their selected genres. But I hope he finds a new company that values him, and that we still see his name in game development as the man obviously has a plethora of knowledge.
It's cool that you're a wannabe game dev, but I think the popularity of DotA compared to HotS speaks for itself. You played DotA in beta..and your post on their dev forums was largely and justly ridiculed since you seem to speak from a place of ignorance. I implore you to at least 'watch' more DotA so you don't make such biased and uniformed opinions such as "Ursa OP". Also, the fact that you think the game simply snowballs for one team shows me you probably don't really know what you're looking at in DotA and with so little time played that's hardly surprising.
You're a fan of HotS, and that's great. However claiming a game has fundamental gameplay flaws when you're clearly uniformed on the intricacies of said game makes your opinion highly questionable and almost laughable. DotA has been played for years, on a competitive to casual level. I would be surprised if HotS manages to last as long as it has.
Back on topic, cheers to Rob. Good careers come to and end and hopefully he finds a new home for his creativity. I can't say I'll miss him at Blizzard since the company has undergone many changes from the days when they were viewed as one of the best and innovative game companies for their selected genres. But I hope he finds a new company that values him, and that we still see his name in game development as the man obviously has a plethora of knowledge.
On July 06 2014 03:49 FT.aCt)Sony wrote: The reasons to as why he is leaving is being speculated upon heavily, the most popular theory is that Rob Pardo doesn't like the path Blizzard Entertainment is taking regarding development of its games and has decided to leave the company much like what Blizzard North, the original creators of the Diablo Franchise did.
Wonder when everyone else will wake up and realize that Blizzard doesn't care about anything but money. One of the main reasons why SC2 has been consistently going downhill.
Thank you for SCBW, truly loved playing it for 10 years.
Well, as soon as Blizzard realises success isn't about shiny graphics (BW, CS and Diablo II didn't need that) but about gameplay instead. Maybe then we'll get more popularity.
One part of gameplay in SC is mechanics. Lots of people had to refine that in BW - building placement, micro... SC2 has less of those. Oh and how do I miss exciting PvP games with reavers. Hopefully reavers come back in LotV.
If the community misses the opportunity to change SC in LotV, then, well, it may be the end of StarCraft.
Define exactly what is mechanics. Because for my definition sc2 doesn't lack at all and I've been playing sc/bw for a very long time. For me sc2's mechanics > sc1 by a large margin. It's not even close. I'm kind of getting tired of all those little remarks that are trying to compare the 2 games. The strategy on the other hand is clearly better in sc1 or ateast I like how the game is played compared to sc2. I wish they could redesign sc2 and make it more close to sc1 units while keeping the same engine / gameplay. Now we could've got a badass game
It's cool that you're a wannabe game dev, but I think the popularity of DotA compared to HotS speaks for itself. You played DotA in beta..and your post on their dev forums was largely and justly ridiculed since you seem to speak from a place of ignorance. I implore you to at least 'watch' more DotA so you don't make such biased and uniformed opinions such as "Ursa OP". Also, the fact that you think the game simply snowballs for one team shows me you probably don't really know what you're looking at in DotA and with so little time played that's hardly surprising.
You're a fan of HotS, and that's great. However claiming a game has fundamental gameplay flaws when you're clearly uniformed on the intricacies of said game makes your opinion highly questionable and almost laughable. DotA has been played for years, on a competitive to casual level. I would be surprised if HotS manages to last as long as it has.
Back on topic, cheers to Rob. Good careers come to and end and hopefully he finds a new home for his creativity. I can't say I'll miss him at Blizzard since the company has undergone many changes from the days when they were viewed as one of the best and innovative game companies for their selected genres. But I hope he finds a new company that values him, and that we still see his name in game development as the man obviously has a plethora of knowledge.
That's not exactly impressive. I don't know what you're trying to prove with that photo apart from your lack of knowledge about the game after that many hours just makes your dev suggestions even more suspect. You know people have put thousands of hours into DotA and still consider themselves neophytes? While you believe your under 500 hours played makes you an authority. Your arrogance is appalling.
Well all things come to an end, I believe he was just tired and wanted a fresh new challenge. I mean he's worked at Blizzard for over 15 years and the guy deserves a long vacation, before starting to work on new challenges.
I don't think his departure is in bad spirit or whatever that people seem to suggest, I just think that he has had enough 15+ years at Blizzard and wants to take a long break, before going on to design new games.
He is a very big name so I'm sure he'll have many doors open to him once he starts looking for job!
It's cool that you're a wannabe game dev, but I think the popularity of DotA compared to HotS speaks for itself. You played DotA in beta..and your post on their dev forums was largely and justly ridiculed since you seem to speak from a place of ignorance. I implore you to at least 'watch' more DotA so you don't make such biased and uniformed opinions such as "Ursa OP". Also, the fact that you think the game simply snowballs for one team shows me you probably don't really know what you're looking at in DotA and with so little time played that's hardly surprising.
You're a fan of HotS, and that's great. However claiming a game has fundamental gameplay flaws when you're clearly uniformed on the intricacies of said game makes your opinion highly questionable and almost laughable. DotA has been played for years, on a competitive to casual level. I would be surprised if HotS manages to last as long as it has.
Back on topic, cheers to Rob. Good careers come to and end and hopefully he finds a new home for his creativity. I can't say I'll miss him at Blizzard since the company has undergone many changes from the days when they were viewed as one of the best and innovative game companies for their selected genres. But I hope he finds a new company that values him, and that we still see his name in game development as the man obviously has a plethora of knowledge.
That's not exactly impressive. I don't know what you're trying to prove with that photo apart from your lack of knowledge about the game after that many hours just makes your dev suggestions even more suspect. You know people have put thousands of hours into DotA and still consider themselves neophytes? While you believe your under 500 hours played makes you an authority. Your arrogance is appalling.
A guy with 3 posts is ridiculing paralleluniverse as a noob? I suggest you check yourself before you find yourself in the crosshairs of a mod. You won't get banned or warned for your post most likely, but it doesn't reflect well if you dismiss established posters in the community as "inexperienced" or "uninformed."
His photo contradicts your initial claim that he is inexperienced with DotA. 100+ hours on a game is plenty to come up with a well thought out and informed opinion on said game, especially if one has a lot of experience in other competitive games of similar type. One doesn't have to master every aspect to give an honest and great critique. In fact, having stupendous amounts of time in the game often makes one's opinions less valid, since they are invested in all mechanics and rules the game has already implemented. For example, if every DotA/LoL/SC2/Hearthstone/CS:GO match started with you typing out a standard paragraph at 150 wpm or you got a -30% general penalty, that would be stupid. However, if it went on for 2 year and 50% of the player base was able to accomplish it, a removal of the stupid "feature" would cause uproar since so many people had invested time into that "skill." It doesn't mean it was a good idea to begin with, just that so many people had grown attached to a bad mechanic because it gave them an easy advantage.
Like others have said, probably wouldn't read too much into it. 17 years is a long time to stick with a company, especially these days. Maybe there were a few rifts between him and the teams, or mistakes made by him, but it doesn't sound like he's leaving because of any specific, big reason(s). He probably wants to move on to other projects, and Blizzard doesn't have the resources and structure to allow him to do so. If he does begin a new project, I look forward to it as much as I look forward to all Blizzard projects. If not, I still wish him the best of luck!
On July 06 2014 22:37 aksfjh wrote: [spoiler=Before you wreck yourself]
You logged on a alt account to try and talk down to me. Maybe you should be checking yourself.. I don't see anything I said as ban or even warning worthy, if the mods disagree they're free to that opinion however stating a game has fundamental balance issues because "Ursa is OP" among other things is quite comical.
Also that strawman and completely off topic rant is cringe worthy. You also think post count means something, which is quite sadly "forum elitism" and is for lack of a better word quite pathetic. Interestingly enough, he got warned by a mod for his "DotA Dev" thread since he couldn't be bothered to read stickies or forum rules before he posted it. Anyway, I've said my peace. Having alt accounts come out of the woodwork to try and attack me is indicative of a feeble person, and I don't think PU needs you to fight his battles if he can't argue his point clearly and logically himself.
I hope the irony isn't lost on you. Have a nice day.
On July 06 2014 08:17 DDie wrote: Back in the days i would be shocked by this, but blizzard lost it's ''legendary'' status a long, long time ago... so i don't really care.
I agree. There were more important guys leaving Blizzard like Patrick Wyatt.
On July 06 2014 22:37 aksfjh wrote: [spoiler=Before you wreck yourself]
You logged on a alt account to try and talk down to me. Maybe you should be checking yourself.. I don't see anything I said as ban or even warning worthy, if the mods disagree they're free to that opinion however stating a game has fundamental balance issues because "Ursa is OP" among other things is quite comical.
Also that strawman and completely off topic rant is cringe worthy. You also think post count means something, which is quite sadly "forum elitism" and is for lack of a better word quite pathetic. Interestingly enough, he got warned by a mod for his "DotA Dev" thread since he couldn't be bothered to read stickies or forum rules before he posted it. Anyway, I've said my peace. Having alt accounts come out of the woodwork to try and attack me is indicative of a feeble person, and I don't think PU needs you to fight his battles if he can't argue his point clearly and logically himself.
I hope the irony isn't lost on you. Have a nice day.
Edit for a typo.
I don't think what you said is warning worthy either, though you don't come off as particularly friendly if your first few posts at tl are pot shots at someone who is just discussing his views, especially when those views are backed up by logic. I read PU's post and I thought it was thought-provoking to say the least, even if I know jack-shit about Dota. You can agree or disagree with his post, but you're not going to get friendly reactions when you have 3 posts and you're calling someone a wannabe game dev just because he wrote about some of the ideas he's had. Especially if that person is already an established community member.
It seems you already have history with PU as well, you seem to dislike the guy (if your posts about PU's post on dota 2 dev forums is anything to go about).
It's cool that you're a wannabe game dev, but I think the popularity of DotA compared to HotS speaks for itself. You played DotA in beta..and your post on their dev forums was largely and justly ridiculed since you seem to speak from a place of ignorance. I implore you to at least 'watch' more DotA so you don't make such biased and uniformed opinions such as "Ursa OP". Also, the fact that you think the game simply snowballs for one team shows me you probably don't really know what you're looking at in DotA and with so little time played that's hardly surprising.
You're a fan of HotS, and that's great. However claiming a game has fundamental gameplay flaws when you're clearly uniformed on the intricacies of said game makes your opinion highly questionable and almost laughable. DotA has been played for years, on a competitive to casual level. I would be surprised if HotS manages to last as long as it has.
Back on topic, cheers to Rob. Good careers come to and end and hopefully he finds a new home for his creativity. I can't say I'll miss him at Blizzard since the company has undergone many changes from the days when they were viewed as one of the best and innovative game companies for their selected genres. But I hope he finds a new company that values him, and that we still see his name in game development as the man obviously has a plethora of knowledge.
That's not exactly impressive. I don't know what you're trying to prove with that photo apart from your lack of knowledge about the game after that many hours just makes your dev suggestions even more suspect. You know people have put thousands of hours into DotA and still consider themselves neophytes? While you believe your under 500 hours played makes you an authority. Your arrogance is appalling.
A guy with 3 posts is ridiculing paralleluniverse as a noob? I suggest you check yourself before you find yourself in the crosshairs of a mod. You won't get banned or warned for your post most likely, but it doesn't reflect well if you dismiss established posters in the community as "inexperienced" or "uninformed."
His photo contradicts your initial claim that he is inexperienced with DotA. 100+ hours on a game is plenty to come up with a well thought out and informed opinion on said game, especially if one has a lot of experience in other competitive games of similar type. One doesn't have to master every aspect to give an honest and great critique. In fact, having stupendous amounts of time in the game often makes one's opinions less valid, since they are invested in all mechanics and rules the game has already implemented. For example, if every DotA/LoL/SC2/Hearthstone/CS:GO match started with you typing out a standard paragraph at 150 wpm or you got a -30% general penalty, that would be stupid. However, if it went on for 2 year and 50% of the player base was able to accomplish it, a removal of the stupid "feature" would cause uproar since so many people had invested time into that "skill." It doesn't mean it was a good idea to begin with, just that so many people had grown attached to a bad mechanic because it gave them an easy advantage.
That's 500 hours into the game (still basically a noob in most aspects) NOW. His initial thoughts about dota2 (thoughts that he more or less mirrors exactly today) were written 2012, during the beta — at a point his current 500 hours I have no doubt would be nowhere close to that. Your argument that Kneeb4r's claims are faulty is actually faulty.
It's cool that you're a wannabe game dev, but I think the popularity of DotA compared to HotS speaks for itself. You played DotA in beta..and your post on their dev forums was largely and justly ridiculed since you seem to speak from a place of ignorance. I implore you to at least 'watch' more DotA so you don't make such biased and uniformed opinions such as "Ursa OP". Also, the fact that you think the game simply snowballs for one team shows me you probably don't really know what you're looking at in DotA and with so little time played that's hardly surprising.
You're a fan of HotS, and that's great. However claiming a game has fundamental gameplay flaws when you're clearly uniformed on the intricacies of said game makes your opinion highly questionable and almost laughable. DotA has been played for years, on a competitive to casual level. I would be surprised if HotS manages to last as long as it has.
Back on topic, cheers to Rob. Good careers come to and end and hopefully he finds a new home for his creativity. I can't say I'll miss him at Blizzard since the company has undergone many changes from the days when they were viewed as one of the best and innovative game companies for their selected genres. But I hope he finds a new company that values him, and that we still see his name in game development as the man obviously has a plethora of knowledge.
That's not exactly impressive. I don't know what you're trying to prove with that photo apart from your lack of knowledge about the game after that many hours just makes your dev suggestions even more suspect. You know people have put thousands of hours into DotA and still consider themselves neophytes? While you believe your under 500 hours played makes you an authority. Your arrogance is appalling.
A guy with 3 posts is ridiculing paralleluniverse as a noob? I suggest you check yourself before you find yourself in the crosshairs of a mod. You won't get banned or warned for your post most likely, but it doesn't reflect well if you dismiss established posters in the community as "inexperienced" or "uninformed."
His photo contradicts your initial claim that he is inexperienced with DotA. 100+ hours on a game is plenty to come up with a well thought out and informed opinion on said game, especially if one has a lot of experience in other competitive games of similar type. One doesn't have to master every aspect to give an honest and great critique. In fact, having stupendous amounts of time in the game often makes one's opinions less valid, since they are invested in all mechanics and rules the game has already implemented. For example, if every DotA/LoL/SC2/Hearthstone/CS:GO match started with you typing out a standard paragraph at 150 wpm or you got a -30% general penalty, that would be stupid. However, if it went on for 2 year and 50% of the player base was able to accomplish it, a removal of the stupid "feature" would cause uproar since so many people had invested time into that "skill." It doesn't mean it was a good idea to begin with, just that so many people had grown attached to a bad mechanic because it gave them an easy advantage.
That's 500 hours into the game (still basically a noob in most aspects) NOW. His initial thoughts about dota2 (thoughts that he more or less mirrors exactly today) were written 2012, during the beta — at a point his current 500 hours I have no doubt would be nowhere close to that. Your argument that Kneeb4r's claims are faulty is actually faulty.
Seriously, the fuck ? How many hours do we need to play in order to get a general idea of the game ? Because even if any moba needs like thousands of hours in order to master every hero (we gotta admit nobody can, because the game constantly changes), it doesn't change the fact that we do have a strong opinion about the general game. He's nowhere near faulty, he just has an opinion, now move on. Fuck that, i dont know why I'm getting baited by this comparison but it sure pisses me off. I'm not gonna read this thread anymore.
Please stop the personal attacks on each other and focus on maturely addressing each other's opinions and whatnot. For the record, there are no alt accounts here.
On July 04 2014 17:49 paralleluniverse wrote: Heroes of the Storm fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2.
I'm trying sooooooooo hard not to get baited by this. :|
Why are you trying? That guy is either trolling or don't have a clue what he is talking about.
Not trying to troll you but I agree with him. Every "MOBA" since the original DotA has been an attempt to recreate the same game. The heroes, items and last hitting rules might differ in each iteration but the game still keeps getting faithfully recreated in the same image.
Heroes that run on macro instead of micro. Talents that replace the traditional item slots with Aghanim's effects at every choice. Choosing the hero you want to play beforehand and being matched appropriately after the fact (not important for full team play, but for solo queue it's pretty great). Multiple maps with unique objectives that alter the way the game is played. Dismissing difference from DotA off the cuff as "casualization" is doing yourself a disservice. It's a different game and you may find that you enjoy playing it.
Sure, the game is different. We get that. Everyone gets that. But how does that give any credence to the fact that he stated that it fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2?
The point is that improvements that HotS has made to the MOBA genre are bold, necessary and right. This is what I mean when I said that gameplay in Blizzard games has improved significantly under Rob Pardo.
Doesn't Dustin Browder deserve some credit for this? Because Browder reports to Pardo its really hard to "lay blame" or "assign credit" for 1 specific feature in games Browder is lead designer.
Personally, i think both guys are great game designers.
On July 04 2014 17:49 paralleluniverse wrote: Heroes of the Storm fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2.
I'm trying sooooooooo hard not to get baited by this. :|
Why are you trying? That guy is either trolling or don't have a clue what he is talking about.
Not trying to troll you but I agree with him. Every "MOBA" since the original DotA has been an attempt to recreate the same game. The heroes, items and last hitting rules might differ in each iteration but the game still keeps getting faithfully recreated in the same image.
Heroes that run on macro instead of micro. Talents that replace the traditional item slots with Aghanim's effects at every choice. Choosing the hero you want to play beforehand and being matched appropriately after the fact (not important for full team play, but for solo queue it's pretty great). Multiple maps with unique objectives that alter the way the game is played. Dismissing difference from DotA off the cuff as "casualization" is doing yourself a disservice. It's a different game and you may find that you enjoy playing it.
Sure, the game is different. We get that. Everyone gets that. But how does that give any credence to the fact that he stated that it fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2?
The point is that improvements that HotS has made to the MOBA genre are bold, necessary and right. This is what I mean when I said that gameplay in Blizzard games has improved significantly under Rob Pardo.
Doesn't Dustin Browder deserve some credit for this? Because Browder reports to Pardo its really hard to "lay blame" or "assign credit" for 1 specific feature in games Browder is lead designer.
Personally, i think both guys are great game designers.
It's all a team effort, but the big guys will always have the power to change the direction of the game. Not every feature or decision goes through them, but if an established feature is axed or advertised, there's a large chance that the head guys were on board.
It's cool that you're a wannabe game dev, but I think the popularity of DotA compared to HotS speaks for itself. You played DotA in beta..and your post on their dev forums was largely and justly ridiculed since you seem to speak from a place of ignorance. I implore you to at least 'watch' more DotA so you don't make such biased and uniformed opinions such as "Ursa OP". Also, the fact that you think the game simply snowballs for one team shows me you probably don't really know what you're looking at in DotA and with so little time played that's hardly surprising.
You're a fan of HotS, and that's great. However claiming a game has fundamental gameplay flaws when you're clearly uniformed on the intricacies of said game makes your opinion highly questionable and almost laughable. DotA has been played for years, on a competitive to casual level. I would be surprised if HotS manages to last as long as it has.
Back on topic, cheers to Rob. Good careers come to and end and hopefully he finds a new home for his creativity. I can't say I'll miss him at Blizzard since the company has undergone many changes from the days when they were viewed as one of the best and innovative game companies for their selected genres. But I hope he finds a new company that values him, and that we still see his name in game development as the man obviously has a plethora of knowledge.
That's not exactly impressive. I don't know what you're trying to prove with that photo apart from your lack of knowledge about the game after that many hours just makes your dev suggestions even more suspect. You know people have put thousands of hours into DotA and still consider themselves neophytes? While you believe your under 500 hours played makes you an authority. Your arrogance is appalling.
A guy with 3 posts is ridiculing paralleluniverse as a noob? I suggest you check yourself before you find yourself in the crosshairs of a mod. You won't get banned or warned for your post most likely, but it doesn't reflect well if you dismiss established posters in the community as "inexperienced" or "uninformed."
His photo contradicts your initial claim that he is inexperienced with DotA. 100+ hours on a game is plenty to come up with a well thought out and informed opinion on said game, especially if one has a lot of experience in other competitive games of similar type. One doesn't have to master every aspect to give an honest and great critique. In fact, having stupendous amounts of time in the game often makes one's opinions less valid, since they are invested in all mechanics and rules the game has already implemented. For example, if every DotA/LoL/SC2/Hearthstone/CS:GO match started with you typing out a standard paragraph at 150 wpm or you got a -30% general penalty, that would be stupid. However, if it went on for 2 year and 50% of the player base was able to accomplish it, a removal of the stupid "feature" would cause uproar since so many people had invested time into that "skill." It doesn't mean it was a good idea to begin with, just that so many people had grown attached to a bad mechanic because it gave them an easy advantage.
That's 500 hours into the game (still basically a noob in most aspects) NOW. His initial thoughts about dota2 (thoughts that he more or less mirrors exactly today) were written 2012, during the beta — at a point his current 500 hours I have no doubt would be nowhere close to that. Your argument that Kneeb4r's claims are faulty is actually faulty.
Seriously, the fuck ? How many hours do we need to play in order to get a general idea of the game ? Because even if any moba needs like thousands of hours in order to master every hero (we gotta admit nobody can, because the game constantly changes), it doesn't change the fact that we do have a strong opinion about the general game. He's nowhere near faulty, he just has an opinion, now move on.
You don't attempt to "identify and fix fundamental flaws" of a game, especially not the beast that is dota, with a mere <500 (<100 at the time it was written) hours into it. You have nowhere near a good enough "general idea" of the game at that point. That's what we're taking issue with and point out.
Opinions. That's all it is. And opinions can be wrong.
On July 04 2014 06:26 Excalibur_Z wrote: This is tremendous news. Rob Pardo was extremely influential in design and had an simplistic, elegant approach that made his credited games immensely popular. I have my own personal theories about why he's leaving, and I think he probably disagrees with the path Blizzard is taking in their recent games. Dustin Browder made a blog post about the design of Heroes of the Storm earlier today and through reading the entire thing I kept thinking "Rob Pardo would never sign off on something like this, he prefers the 'make everything overpowered' approach rather than baby-stepping and keeping things flat." Now this news comes out that Pardo is leaving. The design decisions for games like D3, SC2, Heroes, post-TBC WoW, Hearthstone have been widely criticized by many of Blizzard's "classic" fans, the ones who grew up with BW, War2, War3. That's not to say that their new design philosophy is bad, it's just different from where they were 15 years ago. Perhaps Rob believes that as an executive he's too far from working day-to-day in the trenches with the rest of the design team, and will be looking for a smaller studio where he can be more directly involved with the nitty gritty details.
Hey Excalibur_Z, where did you find that blog post?
On July 04 2014 06:26 Excalibur_Z wrote: This is tremendous news. Rob Pardo was extremely influential in design and had an simplistic, elegant approach that made his credited games immensely popular. I have my own personal theories about why he's leaving, and I think he probably disagrees with the path Blizzard is taking in their recent games. Dustin Browder made a blog post about the design of Heroes of the Storm earlier today and through reading the entire thing I kept thinking "Rob Pardo would never sign off on something like this, he prefers the 'make everything overpowered' approach rather than baby-stepping and keeping things flat." Now this news comes out that Pardo is leaving. The design decisions for games like D3, SC2, Heroes, post-TBC WoW, Hearthstone have been widely criticized by many of Blizzard's "classic" fans, the ones who grew up with BW, War2, War3. That's not to say that their new design philosophy is bad, it's just different from where they were 15 years ago. Perhaps Rob believes that as an executive he's too far from working day-to-day in the trenches with the rest of the design team, and will be looking for a smaller studio where he can be more directly involved with the nitty gritty details.
Hey Excalibur_Z, where did you find that blog post?
Definitely a loss. Even if he is to blame for some things, no one bats 1.000. Individual mechanics/features that you happen not to like, or that are even rightly rejected/derided, cannot outweigh the stellar creative output that Pardo has overseen and directly contributed to. We can all speculate on reasons, but ultimately Blizzard is now without one of the key figures who built it into the gaming juggernaut that it is.
I am very interested to see where he lands and what he makes. I hope that Blizzard can carry on without him.
On July 04 2014 17:49 paralleluniverse wrote: Rob Pardo leaves behind an impressive legacy at Blizzard. As chief creative officer, his role was to supervise the game directors for all of Blizzard's games, so he was ultimately responsible for basically everything, both the good and the bad. In particular, he was lead designer on WC3, arguably Blizzard's best game, and also lead designer on WoW and the first few expansions. Over almost 10 years of WoW, the game has progressively gotten better.
Pardo strongly rejected microtransactions and gold buying in WoW. But unfortunately, that has failed to translate. Microtransactions are all over WoW. Gold buying was legalized with the guardian cub, which I argued against, and is now gone. But I laud them for retaining the $40 expansion model, despite the industry moving decisively towards the model of selling worthless DLC and microtransactions. As Jay Wilson's supervisor, Pardo was also ultimately responsible for the RMAH that destroyed D3. I also argued against that, and it's gone too.
Amongst his most major failures was the disastrous launch of Battle.net 0.2 that came with SC2. It was the biggest regression of any online platform ever. It launched without chat channels, without even whisper functionality, it gutted all the amazing game features and social features of the 2002 WC3 Battle.net, it had one of the worse and most meaningless ladder systems, it was lifeless and barren because you didn't know if anyone was online and it was impossible to interact with anyone not on your friends list. And he got up at Blizzcon, and announced Battle.net 0.2 as if it was the greatest thing ever, when in fact, it was worse in every single regard, with not one single new or innovative feature... other than Facebook integration, obviously. While, over a very long time, Battle.net 2.0 improved, there's still nothing--not one feature--new or innovative about it.
So under Pardo, the game design at Blizzard has been set at an extremely high level of quality and polish. The gameplay in Blizzard's games is the best in the industry, and has only improve because of Pardo. Heroes of the Storm fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2. WoW's game systems are better than ever. And for this reason, Pardo will be greatly missed. But Blizzard's business model has gotten more greedy and unfair over time, for example, D3 launched with a RMAH and Hearthstone uses an unfair "buy advantages for real money" model. But it's not entirely clear whether Pardo was fighting for or against this distinctive and indisputable shift to more greedy and unfair business models. I suspect, to a small extent, it was the latter.
I wish Rob the best of luck for the future.
This seems to be a very good post, and I think that I overlooked some of the great things Pardo did for Blizzard Games.
On July 04 2014 17:49 paralleluniverse wrote: Rob Pardo leaves behind an impressive legacy at Blizzard. As chief creative officer, his role was to supervise the game directors for all of Blizzard's games, so he was ultimately responsible for basically everything, both the good and the bad. In particular, he was lead designer on WC3, arguably Blizzard's best game, and also lead designer on WoW and the first few expansions. Over almost 10 years of WoW, the game has progressively gotten better.
Pardo strongly rejected microtransactions and gold buying in WoW. But unfortunately, that has failed to translate. Microtransactions are all over WoW. Gold buying was legalized with the guardian cub, which I argued against, and is now gone. But I laud them for retaining the $40 expansion model, despite the industry moving decisively towards the model of selling worthless DLC and microtransactions. As Jay Wilson's supervisor, Pardo was also ultimately responsible for the RMAH that destroyed D3. I also argued against that, and it's gone too.
Amongst his most major failures was the disastrous launch of Battle.net 0.2 that came with SC2. It was the biggest regression of any online platform ever. It launched without chat channels, without even whisper functionality, it gutted all the amazing game features and social features of the 2002 WC3 Battle.net, it had one of the worse and most meaningless ladder systems, it was lifeless and barren because you didn't know if anyone was online and it was impossible to interact with anyone not on your friends list. And he got up at Blizzcon, and announced Battle.net 0.2 as if it was the greatest thing ever, when in fact, it was worse in every single regard, with not one single new or innovative feature... other than Facebook integration, obviously. While, over a very long time, Battle.net 2.0 improved, there's still nothing--not one feature--new or innovative about it.
So under Pardo, the game design at Blizzard has been set at an extremely high level of quality and polish. The gameplay in Blizzard's games is the best in the industry, and has only improve because of Pardo. Heroes of the Storm fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2. WoW's game systems are better than ever. And for this reason, Pardo will be greatly missed. But Blizzard's business model has gotten more greedy and unfair over time, for example, D3 launched with a RMAH and Hearthstone uses an unfair "buy advantages for real money" model. But it's not entirely clear whether Pardo was fighting for or against this distinctive and indisputable shift to more greedy and unfair business models. I suspect, to a small extent, it was the latter.
I wish Rob the best of luck for the future.
This seems to be a very good post, and I think that I overlooked some of the great things Pardo did for Blizzard Games.
It still haunts me how anyone in their right mind would approve Bnet 2.0. It was one huge step backward from the online interaction system of SC:BW and WC3. I still believe SC2 could have grown much bigger provided with all the new technology boosting e-sports (Twitch, Facebook etc) if Bnet 2.0 wasn't such a failure.
People do not play games. They play human beings behind the games.
Maybe so, but he had a design position equal in rank to the creative development position that Chris Metzen currently has, and everyone is aware of his impact on storylines. We don't really know whether Pardo was as hands-on as Metzen is, but he definitely could have exerted influence if he wanted to.
Managers exert influence but telling somebody to do something is different than doing it yourself. The people Pardo ordered to do something won't necessarily do it in the same way he would. It's the dilemma for any growing business. Your best designers, programmers, salespeople, accountants, lawyers, marketers, writers, etc. won't always be your best managers. It's a totally different job that requires a different skillset and one that Pardo might have eventually burned out on.
EPT![[image loading]](http://www.peterguber.com/telltowin/ssp/rob-pardo/public/assets/62/98/82/rob_pardo.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://img.engadget.com/common/images/8672446356734323.GIF?0.4297142981714308)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/diAMfgN.png?1)
