This is an English translation of my original article written in Croatian.
Who are the 4 heralds of doom?
4 top developers working on it are
Tom Chilton a.k.a. Evocare a.k.a. Kalgan,
Jeff Kaplan a.k.a. Tigole
Alex Afrasiabi a.k.a. Furor
Rob Pardo a.k.a. Enoyis
Every one of them, with an exception of Mr.Chilton were gamers before they joined WoW team. Rob Pardo was a guild leader in "Everquest" and Tigole was one of his guild members who later took the position of guild master when Pardo went over to Blizzard. Furor was their close EQ friend who at the time was in another guild .1) Tigole Biggies (which is an anagram of Big Ole Titties) was a member of a "PRO" Everquest guild which took pride in many "server first kills". Today he is Blizzards lead quest designer responsible for all those ultra cool quests in which you got to kill thousands of bird people, take their bone dust else be poor and unwanted. This is a tale telling excerpt from his EQ guild web page; "Fair Use and Parody, Fuckers Legacy is looking for the hardcore players. If you raid every night and know your class, Legacy wants YOU" which helps us to understand his POV on the subject of designing quests. HARDCORE baby! 2) Furor, on the other hand, got banned from Everquest-a because he kept duping bind-on-pickup items on his rogue named Kalaran, after this unfortunate event he made another character, named Furor. He then leveled this new character in a matter of days once again abusing faulty game mechanics. Today Furor is Blizzard lead raid content designer and almost 1 year after the release of TBC not more than 1% of players have set foot inside instances that he designs. HARDCORE!
None of these guys have had ANY game design experience prior to World of Warcraft. What they were, was pro gamers who had a habit of spending entire days in Everquest. They also had a grudge against hybrid knights who were almost as good a tank as warriors were in Everquest. This was not to the liking of future Blizzard employees so they decided to organize mass server standoffs and even tried crashing servers intentionally to help their favourite class. Here is a quote: Fellow Warriors,I know that I'm no formal leader of the Warrior community. I'd love to see someone like Furor or Brutul take this up, but still I can't stand by and watch this anymore without taking action!
After years of watching us erode into what we are now. Years of seeing the parses, the breakdowns, the explanations of how sad balance and particularly our class has become. Here's where I personally am at on this:
I'm willing to be banned to make a statement! If you are as upset about our situation as I am, then lets do this: stone in the On Tuesday, December the 2nd, beginning at 9AM (EST) lasting until 9PM (EST) Warriors of all levels will stage a STAND DOWN at or around the Plane of TranquilityPlane of Knowledge on all Servers.
- We will bag our weapons, save for Warrior Epic (a ceremonial weapon of decoration). If you have the Jagged Blade of War, please wield it for this event.
- We will /join serverwide.standdown:warrior
- We will /feedback, /bug and /afk the same message: "I am a Warrior/Monk/Rogue. Hear my plea. I demand a statement be issued concerning Melee balancing! Until then, I will stand here and wait."
- We will /lfg using the LFG window to use the message text of: Standing Down
- We will periodically notify the zone of our purpose using Shout or OOC, but will ignore hecklers globally addressing them via /tell or in channel only.
** Recommended SHOUT text: "Today we STAND DOWN in defiance of the pure melee class imbalance that exists, and has existed, in Norrath. May Rallos strengthen our plea to the Gods!"
** Recommended OOC text: "PURE MELEE STAND DOWN! serverwide.standdown:warrior! BALANCE THE CLASSES!" As they came to work for Blizzard they were finally able to make their favorite classes (warriors and rogues) intentionally stronger than the rest of the classes. They had a particularly strong grudge against the hybrid tank class of WoW (druid). They made druids extinct, and when druids of WoW started talking about server wide standoffs they got banned. Pretty ironic, dont you think? Getting banned by the very same people who once got banned for fighting for their class. How does one get a job in Blizzard?
Hello my name is Tigole, and my game designer qualifications are as follows:
- I played EQ with Rob Pardo.
- I crashed a server in EQ when I got pissy over something.
- My handle is a stupid play on "Bigole Titties"
Please let me be in charge of your new MMOs, I will make them as awesome as I am.
Sincerely, Jeffrey Kaplan 3) Mr. Rob Pardo (Enoyis) was Tigoles guild master in a guild called
(Legacy of Steel). Furor was in another guild called Fires of Heaven which was quite friendly with the LoS. Fires of Heaven guild collectively migrated into WoW and they are the only guild ever to be allowed to perform a PvE=>PvP transfer. This was allowed because they had an "inside man". Latest post on their web pages says: We're looking for the following:
Druid (Restoration) Shaman (Restoration preferred, other specs still considered) Priest (Shadow) As you can see, all hybrids have to specialize into healing otherwise they will not be accepted into the guild. The players mirror the official standing of Blizzards devs, who seek to protect their fav. tanking class (warrior).
When I applied to a guild with my tanking druid, who was sort of competition to tanking warriors (same as knights once were in Everquest) this is the reply that I got:
This is how it was (and how it still is) to play a hybrid class in WoW:
This is Kalgan, talking about his *WARRIOR*, which he finally got to work as intended. ;)
And this was (and still is) the sad stat of druids at the same time;
Now, why did Mr. Pardo choose to risk the health of the project by employing his EQ cronies?
We shall never know, but one thing is certain, this was a bad, bad move. At the very same time when Mr.Pardo decided to employ his buddies, most of the original WoW team had left the company and went over to NCSoft to make Guild Wars, coincidence? Was THAT the reason they left, but were obligated by NDA not to discuss it?
Censorship!
All links related to this problem end up in "file not found". Blizzard does not want you to know that they had employed the wrong people for the job.
Kalganisms:Let us now talk a bit about
4) Mr. Tom Chilton, the lead man on "The Burning Crusade" and on"Wrath of the Lich King". Before WoW he had worked on Ultima Online:
q: How did you get that call sign? Any particular meaning?
a: "Evocare" was a word one had to shout in the later stages of Ultima 3 in order to cross beyond the silver serpent and reach the castle of Exodus. I thought the name sounded wicked cool, and would be a great idea for an Ultima Online character name. q: Can you describe your "big break" into the gaming industry?
a: I worked with Kirk "Runesabre" Black and various other dev team members
as a tester for UO:R. This opportunity gave me the chance to demonstrate my understanding of game design, and combined with the coding skills required of a UO designer and some openings on the dev team, I managed to get a job as a UO designer We cant tell why he had been given the opportunity to work on UO but in the end he worked on:
Ultima
Online: Age of Shadows (2003), Electronic Arts, Inc. Ultima Online:
Lord Blackthorn's Revenge (2002), Electronic Arts, Inc. Ultima Online:
Third Dawn (2001), Electronic Arts, Inc.
At the time I had been playing UO. When Tom made his contribution to the game he brought into it larger-than-human sized weapons and turned the game into a item grind fest. He also turned PvP into a contest of "who has a bigger sword" instead of focusing it on individual player skills. The game suddenly begun losing subscribers, Tom decided to release the game to a new market to buy himself time (before the game inevitably dies) and find himself another job. The job he found was WoW. Kalgans philosophy of game design revolves around basing the game on grinding, that way he can hide the lack of any serious game content behind killing thousands of mobs. Another one of his contributions to the genre is the dogma that everyone should be able to play the game. In order to achieve this goal he oversimplifies the game. A side effect of this oversimplification is that this makes balancing and hotfixing the game much easier. He keeps fixing the gaping flaws of the game by introducing better and better gear not realizing that this way he is not addressing the core problem and therefore making the problem grow in size. We need to address an audience like my mom, who plays once in a while but still manages to get to Level 60 and doesn't raid, all the way to people who play 14 hours a day who need less sleep than the rest of us. He also tends to balance the class population by using cattle prod approach. When a particular class begins showing signs of growth he will cripple it to discourage players from rolling it. Rob Pardo says: If you liked the original WoW, thank me. If you like TBC, thank Kalgan TBC hits the shelves!
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