(14)D.Va vs (11)Fox McCloud 2018

Ulti's Analysis
Some people point to Draven as the big cathartic result of this contest. Do not listen to those people. They are communists. Shout out to Jon Stewart's A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, and shout out to him in general. Him leaving The Daily Show is the biggest reason our political climate stopped having any nuance or humor whatsoever. He is BADLY missed. Want to know when and why and how democrats stopped being cool? When Jon Stewart stopped being the checks and balances in our discourse. He would make fun of everyone and anyone, not just one side of things like you see now with everyone expected to fall in line. Go read the Board 8 politics topic some time if you feel like puking in your mouth at all the one sided mentally ill leftist garbage in there. These people don't just dislike a president. They LOATHE a president and buy into every single piece of mainstream media brainwashing, because it's very easy to exploit the mentally ill and the mentally weak. It's no accident most of those people end up voting for democrats these days, because the entire media is leftist. It wasn't always like that. There was a balance to things. If Nancy Pelosi acted like a hung over idiot during State of the Union and kept falling asleep, he would make fun of it. If Bullshit Mountain (Faux News) spread their bullshit, he would make fun of it. If CNN or MSNBC spread their bullshit, he would make fun of it. If Jon Stewart were still alive and the media tried telling us an 11 year old drag queen 'performing' at clubs in New York for pedophiles was a good idea, Jon Stewart would eviscerate these people. If Jon Stewart and George Carlin were still alive, people would still be getting along instead of being in echo chambers and listening to fake news like the good little NPC bots they are. That isn't at a shot at either side, either. It's a shot at all of you. You all do it, you all know you do it, and you're all dumb enough to convince yourselves only you're right and the other side is evil 100% of the time. People see me shit on leftists all the time and assume I'm some redneck Trump supporting racist, which couldn't be a bigger lie. They just happen to be the biggest douchebags in America right now. I was just as vicious towards hardline conservative trash in the 80s and 90s back when they were acting the exact same way. But today for the leftists especially, that mentality is why most of you hate religion and churches. I get it. Well look in a mirror, champ. You act the same exact way now. You have become exactly what you hate -- joyless fuckheads who want to censor everything because you actually think making everyone else as miserable as you are is a good idea. Well piss off. You're now hated every bit as much as hardcore fundamentalist conservatives. Congratulations. Was it worth it?

Speaking of bullshit no one likes, we have to talk about Blizzard. Their one and only contest entrant didn't get 28% on and blown the fuck out by an overrated, overhyped fifth rate Nintendo character by accident.

This was the most cathartic and best result of the entire contest. In 2001, Blizzard released Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction, which was an expansion pack that added a fifth act on to Diablo 2 itself. This effectively means that Diablo 2 in the year 2000, almost 20 years ago, was the last time Blizzard would make a good video game. Everything they have done since has been abject, total, and complete garbage. I tried thinking of a few different ways to go about this writeup, but I'll just get into each series one by one. But before we do that, we need to go back in time and look at exactly how and why Blizzard became such garbage in the first place. I will point out that the PC master race idiots, including a bunch of Board 8 users, tried telling me during the Activision-Blizzard merger that Blizzard would be better off for this. Those people looked like idiots then and they look even dumber now, because as usual, I was proven right. I have the patience of a serial killer. It was only a matter of time before I was proven correct, and this is my best and most successful example to date. Blizzard is complete shit.

In 1996, a company you've never heard of called Vivendi Games (then known as CUC International) announced their intent to acquire Davidson and Associates, another company you've never heard of. What you have heard of are the names "Activision" and "Blizzard", which are the companies involved in the mergers we're about to discuss. Vivendi Games would eventually acquire Blizzard, a subsidiary of Davidson and Associates due to a corporate merger, in the year 2000. Most people think the Activision merger is what started the decline of Blizzard, but this all started in the year 2000. It just takes awhile for corporations to worm their way into a culture and get rid of all the good people that helped build up a company in the first place. But make no mistake. This started in 2000. When World of Warcraft happened not long after the Vivendi deal, people assumed everything was gravy. It was actually the exact opposite, because it would be the financial catalyst for Vivendi and Activision to complete another corporate merger to form Activision Blizzard. Bobby Kotick came out not long after and said that video game development should in no way be about having fun, which should have been a signal to anyone with two functional brain cells to rub together to stop buying video games from these people, but the public is a bunch of mentally weak sheeple punkass bitches. When I rail on people for being dumb and buying dumb games and funding dumb things, World of Warcraft and the billions upon billions of dollars the disposable income idiots still living with their parents funneled into that game is the prime example. That is the example of millennials being dumb with money and then bitching later about not being able to afford things. It's your own fault. Piss off and stop trying to tell me socialism is the answer for your own stupidity. I don't have to pay for your bad decisions. Fuck you. Got mine.

If these people were smart, they would have done their research into Vivendi and realized these people were bad news. But I get it, people only care about video game quality, which is why the Warcraft series is as good a place to start as any. It would be one thing if World of Warcraft was actually good, but it's nothing more than programmable addiction, as beautifully told by Johnathan Blow: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/107343/MIGS_2007_Jonathan_Blow_On_The_WoW_Drug_Meaningful_Games.php

Warcraft

With the popularity of Warcraft 2 launching the battle.net service and Starcraft being a cultural phenom, the hype for Warcraft 3 was insane. I remember it. I was there. Blizzard promised us better graphics, a new engine, and a new way to play RTS. They would slow burn on the web site and release one unit at a time. The footmen looked so cool! Wow look at those grunts! The animation and graphics are sick! It was awesome. We were eventually told there would be races beyond humans and orcs. There would be elves and undead, too? Say what?! That's nuts! But Blizzard balanced three races perfectly in Starcraft, so adding one more with better graphics should be a breeze, right?

Nope. I still remember when that hero RPG item bullshit was first announced, and how people completely lost their shit for it. I remember how disappointed I was and I remember thinking at the time that this was the worst idea for an RTS there could ever be. You can't take a genre about micromanaging units while macromanaging resources in real time and add in singular units that completely warp the game balance into being all about them. It stops being an RTS. People were of course stupid and thought it was a great idea because Blizzard (more on that bullshit mentality in the Diablo section, holy fucking hell), but I knew. RPGs and RTS do not mix.

When Warcraft 3 and Frozen Throne ultimately came out, it was a mess and stood as the worst video game ever made for 10 solid years. The main reason was the hero RPG item system, which ruined both single player and multiplayer. No longer did you micromanagement skills matter. The entire game became about leveling up 1-3 hero units and micromanaging them only. It was a joke, and it ruined one of my favorite genres beyond all repair. I remember thinking at the time that such idiocy had to be intentional, and it was later confirmed by Blizzard themselves that it in fact was. They never wanted to make an RTS at all and wanted to only go the RPG route. I could not have been more vindicated from the morons who tried telling me this is what Blizzard wanted all along. They wanted RPG only and hamfisted an RTS game because people were hyped for an RTS other than Starcraft.

Single player was bad. Multiplayer was infinitely worse. There was no balance to speak of, and almost units outside of heroes mattered. The only things that did matter were stacking items on heroes, leveling up on neutral minions, and making units that countered opposing heroes -- not that this even matters once a hero reaches a high enough level. The logic behind this braindead, idiotic design decision was to have some action earlier in multiplayer games. It would be the single worst design idea in gaming history, even including all the idiotic trash Hearthstone does. Hero units and RPG effects were never, ever meant to exist in an RTS realm. The genre was not designed for it. It was every bit a mistake as Akuma in Street Fighter 2. That game was in no way designed for aerial fireballs. RTS was in no way designed for balance once hero units got involved. Some were worse than others, but all of them are complete cancer. None worse than the Blademaster unit, which can go invisible from level 1 and warp the entire game around him even existing. If you're playing against an orc, your entire strategy becomes walling your base off with pathing glitches so the Blademaster can't enter your base. If you're in a bad spot on the map, you're fucked. You then have to tech to detection as soon as possible. It's one example of hundreds how the hero RPG item system was so badly implemented in a genre never designed to handle it that it ruined my opinion of Blizzard for good. And this was only the first example. They could have redeemed themselves with other games. Instead it just kept getting worse for almost two decades, and only recently have people begun figuring out what trash this company is.

Some people point to the lore as a reason why Warcraft 3 is good. The entire plot, and I mean the entire plot, was ripped from Starcraft and given a medieval coat of paint. No credit given for a rehash of old themes with new faces. Some people claim Dota makes Warcraft 3 good. Again, this has nothing to do with Warcraft 3. Dota was talented people using the map editor. That's it. That has nothing to do with Warcraft 3 at all, but people are so desperate to defend anything Blizzard does that they'll cling to anything. It's also a good way to spot people that know nothing about Dota, because the original version of it that Guinsoo made was garbage IceFrog had to come along and improve on the model, and let's not pretend inventing the MOBA genre is something to be proud of. There is no community in video games worse than MOBA players. Zero. I've played a lot of video games and have been in a lot of communities. Nothing touches MOBAs for people being human waste.

I'll let Brian Kibler explain this one, who can do it in a much nicer and quicker way than I can: https://twitter.com/bmkibler/status/1063868235009773568

Warcraft 3 was actually given a balance update recently where they nerfed/buffed a ton of stuff and added new maps. It was the first one in something like 9 years, and people fell over themselves giving Blizzard credit for this. Two seconds on Google offers proper context. Number one, what took them so long? The game was a broken mess from day one. And number 2, the new maps were all player made. Imagine my shock, the players themselves are better at design than Blizzard. Again. It also turned out this all happened due to Warcraft 3 Remastered being on the horizon, because Blizzard has run out of ideas, people have FINALLY figured out they're shit, and the only thing left for them is graphical updates on old games.

World of Warcraft happened not long after Warcraft 3 and not long after the Vivendi screwjob, and no game has ever had a worse effect on a company than WoW did. The only comparable example is Nintendo released Wind Waker and discovering just how stupid their fan base actually is. They realized they could sell literal shit with a shiny coat of paint on it and their fans would eat it right up. Well WoW is the Blizzard version of this. WoW is nothing more than accepting a quest and following a yellow map marker over and over again for thousands of hours at a time and 15 dollars a month. I am in no way exaggerating this and it's embarrassing as a human being that so many of my fellow humans fell for such obvious programmable addiction. I still, to this day, see people on my friend list doing nothing with their entire lives outside of World of Warcraft. There is no substance there. There is nothing actually happening. It's just quest, yellow exclamation point, repeat.

At one point, this garbage-ass formula had 10 million active players. That's 150,000,000 dollars a month, or 1.8 billion dollars per year. Blizzard con jobbing all these people into paying for a terrible video game remains the dumbest thing I have ever seen in gaming history. It would be one thing if WoW was actually good. It being garbage is another thing entirely. There is zero defense for anyone that's ever paid a dime to play that game. None. You are a sucker and a chump, and you need to stay away from used car lots. Granted you could see a car with no engine, no tires, no transmission, and no steering wheel and you'd take out a second mortgage and a personal loan to buy it if it said "Blizzard" on it.

Oh wait, none of you actually have a house to take out a second mortgage because you spent everything playing WoW and now you're stuck living with your parents well into your 20s. And of course you're the same people who think socialism is the answer. Amazing logic.

When WoW finally collapsed, which happened very quickly once people realized the game was bad, Blizzard finally panicked and skipped the whole classic leveling thing. Now you can just jump right to level 110 (the cap was 60 when the game first came out, for those who were smart enough not to play this trash) and join raiding parties. This I can actually defend, and it's what should have been there from the jump. Raiding is legitimately fun, and so is the game's storyline. Had Blizzard just done this from the jump, the game would have been defensible. But they didn't, therefore they and the game are not defensible. Chris Rock once made a joke about how black men get credit for being good fathers to their kids and not having babies out of wedlock. Why the fuck am I supposed to give people credit for doing something they should have been doing in the first place? No credit given for doing your job, and no credit given to Blizzard for doing something they should have done from day one. Fuck Blizzard and fuck you too if you defend this crap. They only act in the best interest of their players when they panic. More on that in the Hearthstone section.

People will point to "the world" and "immersion" as defenses for WoW, which are fair points. The one thing Blizzard actually does well are aesthetics. It's how they trick people into thinking their games are actually good. You can click on a unit a lot and get funny quotes. You get good graphics. You get immersion. All masks for shitty gameplay. MMORPGs, or Massive Morbidly Obese Recluses Pretending to be Girls, is by far the worst genre in gaming. I don't exactly give credit to any company profiting off of making one. I will never for as long as I live remember how utterly obnoxious that fanbase was in the 2000s, both online and in real life. There was nothing more annoying in gaming history for me than WoW players. If it wasn't jock assholes pretending to be gamers, it was smelly nerds with worse hygiene than usual talking about nothing but WoW and failing out of college. Fuck all of those people. I don't know why abstinence only education is a thing when the religious right could just buy people WoW accounts and have a much higher success rate of ensuring virginity until marriage. The only good thing to ever happen in that game was the funeral raid, which was a great thing for WoW because a bunch of braindead idiots thought a funeral in a PvP zone was a good idea and thus it demonstrated how stupid Blizzard fans are, and it was also a positive for Board 8. It was a major point that drove the jp's fat ass off of our board, because he was literally crying about it and got no support here. For once, Board 8's bullying of the persecuted paid off. Good riddance to that idiot.

I'll cover Hearthstone in its own section, because that game is such laughable garbage and Blizzard has lied about it so many times now that it deserves its own section. I need to close this section with one final and obvious point. The success of WoW sucked up all of Blizzard's attention. No Starcraft until 2010. No Diablo until 2012. No updates on old games past the bare minimum, and even then the fans played a bigger part than Blizzard did.

Look at this time line: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/b20/timeline.html

Notice anything funny? Once WoW happens, there is NOTHING else for the entire decade. They're also so embarrassed by anything after 2014 that they stopped updating the time line. It's the classic story of not caring once one gets rich. As of this writing, that company is worth 36 billion dollars on the backs of you idiots funding bad video games. They're buying yachts and spending time not making video games. What are you left with? Bad video games and wondering why you're unsuccessful into your adulthood. Blizzard has lost their grit because they made fuck you money. I'm worth a paltry 11 million (I say paltry because compared to 36 billion I ain't shit), but the difference with me is I got more gritty when I made my money because it showed me how the world actually works. Blizzard? They're just laughing at you all the way to the bank.

Starcraft

In 1998, Starcraft and Brood War both came out in the same year. I know, hard to imagine given how slow Blizzard is today, but that pair of games paired with bnet was a cultural phenom for years. It set the stage for online tournaments, it revived the economy of a country (really, this happened), it really set the stage for video games as an online platform, and above all it was just a damn good video game. It was so good that Starcraft actually got people to lie to themselves and convince themselves Warcraft 3 was good. Think about this. That is impressive.

So given how good Starcraft was, how fast the games came out, and how good the plot was, we wanted more. It was okay if Blizzard took their time, because we wanted them to get it right. Mind you, this is something we started openly asking for back in the year 2000.

So we waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

...

...

...

...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Years_a_Slave_(film)

12 years between Starcraft games. Duke Nukem Forever and Half-Life 3 eat all these jokes, yet somehow Blizzard never does. 12 years of time might as well be dog years in the tech world. The iPhone isn't even that old. That's longer than the time period between 9/11 and Obama announcing that Bin Laden was dead. Remember W's presidency? That was only 10 years ago. Facebook is only 14. Youtube is only 13. I could go on.

To the point. Let's revisit 2009, where Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision-Blizzard, went on record as saying he would raise the prices of games even higher and that the main goal in game design would be to take all the fun out of making video games. These are literal word for word quotes that happened right before Starcraft 2 was announced.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/93689-Activision-CEO-Says-He-Would-Raise-Prices-Even-Higher

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/94711-Bobby-Kotick-Wants-to-Take-the-Fun-Out-of-Making-Games

This right here should really be enough for anyone who isn't a complete fucking idiot, but we're talking about Blizzard fans. When Starcraft 2 was finally announced, it was announced as a 3 part series where we would get the three races as three separate games. But don't worry! Fear not! We were promised at the time by Blizzard, the same company that had just gone on record as saying games need to be more expensive and not fun, with profit above all else, that only the first game would be fully priced. I said at the time this was a blatant lie and to this day I have those Escapist articles bookmarked for anyone dumb enough to deny Kotick's literal words.

Not that it didn't stop some of you, notably the PC master race idiots like joyrock, from trying to defend this vomit. Well what do you know, Starcraft 2 ended up being three fully priced games. "Imagine my shock." It's almost like Blizzard's CEO went on record as saying he would pull this crap just to see how many people would be stupid enough to defend him. Oh and make sure to buy the collector's edition for 200 dollars each, suckers.

As for Starcraft 2 the game, Wings of Liberty and Legacy of the Void are actually decent. There aren't nearly enough missions that are actually RTS, though. Too much timed bullshit or random gimmicks. Give me a base with nothing in it and let me work. Enough with the bullshit. But it's Blizzard, and bullshit is all they know anymore. The Zerg stuff was the biggest dumpster fire of it all, with literally zero RTS maps in the entire game.

The highlight of all of Starcraft 2 was a random shooter mini game on the Hyperion. I honestly don't know to this day if that's a credit or discredit to Starcraft 2 itself. I never bothered with the multiplayer, but I'm sure LordOfDabu would be able to destroy it with a rant of his own. Starcraft, like Warcraft, was rereleased with an HD update because Blizzard is out of ideas. It was an absolute dumpster fire.

Diablo

I'm old enough to remember when Diablo first came out. It was this amazing, controversial game that drove all the pro-censorship conservatives insane. Diablo got lumped in the pile with Mortal Kombat, Doom, Postal, and so forth as games who were corrupting the youth or some such. We would continue to hear stupid shit about games causing mass shootings and sex crimes from more than one republican idiot (including Trump, who I actually like but come on bro, that's just dumb). This is nothing new for those morons, because they would rather blame anything else for their failures as a parent instead of the mirror. Remember when they also tried blaming music, movies, public schooling, their kids' friends, and even TV? There are some stupid fucking people out there. Remember Jack Thompson, the idiot Florida lawyer that made it his crusade to take down video games and he ended up disbarred? Good riddance, trash.

Diablo was in it right from the jump, and it's no accident the game itself was fantastic. It was simple, clean, and effective. 16 floors of increasing difficulty, an environment change every few floors, and one town. That's it. Find some items, gear up, and keep it moving. Eventually you kill Diablo and start over until your character reaches level 50. I never bothered much with the multiplayer in the Diablo games, because it was nothing more than a dupe fest that Blizzard never bothered fixing (surprise surprise). Even Hellfire, that weird expansion not totally made by Blizzard, was great. You trap a skeleton behind a wall as the archer and gain like 30 levels right at the jump.

Four years later, we got Diablo 2. I was initially put off a bit, because I was expecting a similar experience to the original. Open green fields, more than 8 directions of movement, 4 acts, and a bunch of bright colors? Auras? Hirelings? What the fuck? But the game eventually grew on me a lot, and with the expansion pack I came to love it to death. Outside of dupewords (surprise surprise, duping was again a problem and Blizzard refused to ever fix it), everything added by Lord of Destruction was amazing. Runes rendering all other gear obsolete was dumb, but the rest of the game was good enough to make up for it. Over the years I got paladin and sorceress to 99, and beat the game with all the others. Believe it or not, the most fun I had was with a Kicksin (assassin that kicks). My greatest accomplishment in that game was making a legitimate, real Last Wish. I found the sword and all the runes on one character myself, without really looking for them. I don't know if Blizzard upped the drops of runes or what, but soloing Uber Trist and the buffed version of Diablo that drops an Anni stone was an incredible experience. The Anni was a pretty high roll and the torch was of course assassin points. That whole run was great. Eventually got her to 97.

Necro is highly overrated. Never cared about him. Barbarian is boring. Druid is just a bad sorceress paired with a bad barbarian. Sorc, Paladin, Amazon, and Assassin are where it's at. It's kind of funny watching idiots pretend I'm a sexist for liking Trump when in almost every game I play I naturally gravitate toward female characters. Love them in Diablo. I vastly prefer FemShep. I always played as a girl in the Elder Scrolls games. I could go on. It shows the utter stupidity of giving idiots a keyboard, anonymity, and no consequences. People used to get punched in the mouth and taught via peer pressure not to say or do stupid things. Now we give everyone a keyboard, treat everyone like they're special, give everyone a trophy just for showing up, and invent social media to pander to delusions of grandeur. Again, Chris Rock said it best. No credit for doing what you're supposed to do. Social media is the worst invention in our planet's history and it isn't close. But I'm getting off subject here.

The two major issues with Diablo 2 were inventory space and Blizzard themselves. Blizzard never once made any real action against botters or cheaters. They deleted accounts, sure, but you had to FLAGRANTLY cheat to do it to the point of selling duped items. If you just duped and gave things to friends, they didn't care. They also time ban legit people all the time while never actually addressing the bot problem. I don't know how it's possible to be that dumb, but it's Blizzard. I'm not surprised by it, but the games used to be good so we didn't care. Then there's the inventory space, which holy hell could Blizzard be stupider about this? It's way too small, we end up having to use the Horadric Cube for more space, and then Blizzard comes out and tells people increasing inventory space would put too much strain on their servers. If this was any other company I would assume it's an April Fool's Joke to say something this hilariously and legendarily stupid, but it's Blizzard. They're in the Tyson Zone at this point. There is nothing about that company I wouldn't believe at this point, because their idiocy is legendary.

Which brings us to Diablo 3, one of the most hyped games ever made, and a game none of us were actually able to play at launch because Blizzard had one server when the game was first released. We're thankfully getting into the age of the internet where youtube and internet archiving was a thing, so even Blizzard sycophants can't deny this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I43GUnZN_s4

When we were finally actually able to play the game, people thought something was wrong with it. Items were not dropping. Ever. Anywhere. The whole point of Diablo is killing stuff, picking up gear, and getting stronger. That's how dungeon crawls work. We would maybe get an occasional good thing for killing a boss, but that's about it. People actually thought the game was glitched.

Nope!

"Working as intended." -Jay Wilson, director of Diablo 3

I covered the myriad of lies and bullshit Blizzard put out with Diablo 3 in my review, and there's no reason to repeat them all: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/930659-diablo-iii/reviews/151408

The short version: Blizzard opened this game with a real money auction house, made item drops nonexistent, released a buggy mess, lied about it, got caught, insulted the entire player base, and Jay Wilson had to resign over it. They were more worried about emulating what d2jap was doing with Diablo 2 than they were designing a video game. That much is clear to anyone that's not a complete and total fucking idiot. If you didn't think low item drops coincided with a real money auction house, you are thoroughly a moron and there is no helping you.

Bethesda is catching holy hell for Fallout 76, as they should. It's being called the worst launch ever. Well I'm here to tell you that Diablo 3 was the single worst launch in gaming history, and I give no fucks about any rereleases or ports or fixes or whatever since. That game is forever indefensible trash, and somehow, some way, it gets worse.

"Do you guys not have phones?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUkPkOq4BdY

If you want to know which people and which web sites are in no way trustworthy for honest gaming information, pay close attention to the people who defended this announcement. There are actually people out there dumb enough to think fans booed because of sexism and that people equate mobile gaming with things females like. If ever you need an example of why SJWs are a cancer on our culture that we need immediate chemo for, this is it. I say this as someone whose mother died of cancer when I was only 17, after a years long battle with something that should have killed her within 6 months. I get my stubbornness from her, clearly =p. SJWs are worse, because when the big C hits someone in your own family it's very easy to see something that needs to be dealt with and overcome. But when cancer disguises itself as something friendly, as SJWs will do at first, that's when you get something truly evil. That's when you get things like open borders for easy invasions, 11 year old drag queens promoting pedophilia, and daily viral meltdowns from people too stupid to understand why their SJW culture doesn't make them happy. These people are parasites and need to be excised immediately. There is no nice way to put it. It's beyond obvious they don't even play video games, and any company who buys into that filth deserves the loss in sales that will follow. Star Wars found that out the hard way. Hillary Clinton tried to embrace that nonsense and lost an election over it, when all she needed to do was stay even keel for a year and she would have won in a landslide. I could go on for years about why SJWs and communism are the worst people in human history (look at the length of this one writeup; don't even doubt me that I could write a book on it and I probably should), but I digress. I won't even link to the sites who tried pushing that dipshit narrative, but they're easy to find.

To the point. Females have nothing to do with why Diablo Immortal and Blizzard are dumpster fires. Polygon covered it beautifully, and there's a wonderful quote from Steve Jobs in there that absolutely exemplifies why Blizzard is a shitty company today: https://www.polygon.com/2018/11/5/18064290/blizzard-diablo-immortal-reaction-explainer-blizzcon

There have been a lot of bad press conferences over the years, from 599 US DOLLARS to Wii Music to anything a member of the Bush family says (PLEASE CLAP), but nothing will ever top the embarrassment of the Diablo Immortal announcement. You have to suck at a level never before seen to get booed at your own convention, but that's exactly what happened there. Wyatt Cheng, who by all accounts is a fantastic dude, was in no way ready for that immediate backlash and is in no way a public speaker. The guy was thrown on stage when he wasn't naturally meant for it, and I don't blame him for what happened. That is 100% the fault of his bosses for being fucking trash. Plain and simple.

What happened next shocked me, because I'm used to Blizzard getting away with this garbage and their paid off minions like Forbes and PC Gamer using the PR spin machine to make them come out looking good. It's finally stopped working. In October of 2018, Blizzard's stock was over 83 dollars a share. That press conference was the catalyst for a complete stock collapse, the exodus of hundreds of employees, and millions of players. They couldn't even lie about this one. Activision themselves reported it. Eat shit, sycophants. As usual, Ulti Was Right. I only need a long enough time line.

There are two major things in play here. One, Blizzard got meme'd. Gamers are a pretty smart bunch for as much garbage as I fling at them, and once something gets meme'd they're out. That press conference was so hilariously bad that there was no other result to be had. Of course people are going to leave. It's why Europe banned free speec--- errrrrrr, banned memes. Social engineers know the effectiveness they can have, and Europe doesn't exactly want their citizens having free speech when they're being lorded over by an unelected beurocracy known as the European Union. And if you support restricting free speech, fuck you.

The other is that Blizzard's employees are both quitting and are being paid to leave. Activision took charge after the stock collapse and will take a more active role in cutting costs and developing games, as I predicted. '''By the way, good job to the PC master race idiots on Board 8 who tried telling me a decade ago that Activision merging with Blizzard wouldn't mean Activision deciding things for them. How does crow taste, you little bitch boy rho male idiots?'''

This will add up to Blizzard getting even worse, as we have recently seen in an ever increasing pace of speed. Former employees are all over the internet in open revolt against their business practices, their work hours, and how they no longer know what game players want. Easy articles to find so I won't link to them all. I will simply give you one: https://screenrant.com/diablo-2-producer-blizzard-gamers/

Hearthstone

The worst video game ever made, and a game so bad that I can't just lump it into the 'other modern Blizzard games' section to give it shorthand attention. The idiocy of Hearthstone truly has to be experienced to be believed. Things started off well enough because Hearthstone was able to attract two audiences that were in dire need of something new -- frustrated Blizzard fans and frustrated Magic the Gathering players. Blizzard fans I've covered already, but it's impossible to talk about Hearthstone without mentioning why Magic sucks, and a lot of it is for the same reason Blizzard sucks. Hearthstone might be the worst game ever, but Magic is the worst game ever. Behind all the aesthetics and the artwork and the lore of Magic is a game that fundamentally does not work due to the mana system. That game has been around since 1993, and Wizards refuses to fix it, update it, or print anything whatsoever that would help fix the problem. It is very possible, and in fact quite plausible, for a game of Magic to exist where one person literally cannot play due to not drawing their mana producers, and Magic's idiotic community continues to defend this crap even to this very day. I'll get to the community being a virus later.

It actually mirrors the Blizzard time line. The only people still hanging on to Magic are company loyalists and stupid people, and the number is a lot less than it used to be. It took a pro tour final having someone get mana screwed into a 3 card starting hand (when you mulligan, you reshuffle and draw a starting hand minus one, so the player had to mull 4 times) for Wizards to actually change something, but all the changed was letting you look at the top card of your library with the option of punting it to the bottom if you mull. That's it. Everything else is the same. The fix is actually really simple, and props to metroid composite for this idea. Allow basic lands in the sideboard. If you need a land, skip your draw step and go fetch one. This makes it so there's two disadvantages to doing it -- a weaker sideboard and you're not drawing a card -- and it adds a lot of strategy to an already overly complicated game (https://twitter.com/nathanfillion/status/428761514984472578).

Will Wizards do this? Of course not. Why? "Tradition". If tradition is your only reason for doing something stupid, then you have a very bad idea and very stupid people in charge. Tradition is why gay marriage took way longer to legalize than it should have and why legalizing weed is taking WAY longer than it should. You people can bash me for hating SJWs all you want, but I promise you I hate fundamentalist conservatives every bit as much. Really I hate most people but I'm nice in real life and use the internet to vent, but I digress.

Magic has other major problems besides the mana, as well. The community is a virus. Spend a long enough time with these losers and you become a jaded, smelly asshole rules lawyer looking to get one over on people. I could explain this in detail but anyone that's ever visited a hobby store already knows how bad those people smell. It's disgusting, and some stores are having to adopt hygiene standards due to lost revenue. I am in no way making that up: http://i.imgur.com/OIcI5Uh.jpg

Imagine being a grown-ass adult with bad hygiene. But sure bro, it's the fault of women that you're an incel and not at all an issue with you. Loser.

Then there's the secondary market, where an entire thesis can be written over how awful vendors and secondary markets are for any overarcing product they sell. Gamestop is loathed for a reason, and I promise you Magic's secondary market is worse. It's made possible for three reasons. One, printing is a joke. Buy a box or case of any other card game and you'll get most of what you need. Buy one in Magic and you'll be lucky to get half of what you need. This allows vendors to charge stupid prices for already overpriced bullshit, and they get to inside trade to boot. That leads to reason #2. Wizards has been caught leaking inside information to vendors too many times to list at this point, and it's hilarious watching that virus of a community try to deny it and defend it. There are people who have leaked entire sets in advance and vendors like Star City were magically dumping product before the leak knowing reprints were coming. Three is the reserved list, which started this problem in the first place. Magic players panicked over baseball cards tanking in value, and the tanking of collectible value in general in the 90s, and made Wizards legally sign a contract that certain valuable cards would never be reprinted. It is the most anti-player thing you'll ever see in a game, and if you come across someone who defends the reserved list policy, know right then and there that you are dealing with a massive piece of shit and move on from them socially. Trust me on this. Go hang out with better people. It's why I openly support counterfeit Magic cards

The event that got me to quit Magic was rules lawyering in general, specifically this garbage-ass community defending the Borborygmos Enraged Pithing Needle bullshit: https://www.channelfireball.com/articles/the-mtg-ethicist-pithing-needle-and-concession-expectation/

If you defend that in any way, you are a fucking scumbag and I want nothing to do with you. Ever. Thankfully, most people have common sense and didn't defend it. Only the virus section of the Magic fanbase did, and they very quickly drove away everyone else. Only a complete and total fucking idiot scumbag piece of trash, like the guy who wrote that Channel Fireball article, would ever defend the rules lawyering trash that goes on in Magic. I and millions of other quit over it. There are other examples I could bring up, like a player getting DQd when his opponent cheated, game quality being at its lowest point since the early 90s, stores having no revenue from the game anymore, and so forth, but I bring up rules lawyering last for the simple reason of no one actually liking a tattle tale. No one likes them in grade school, in the family, or as adults. It's no accident that this childish mentality killed Magic for so many of us, and is currently killing GameFAQs thanks to having the worst moderation system on the entire internet among any major gaming site.

If you hop on Google trends, Hearthstone's biggest spike in interest was directly due to that Borborygmos trash. All these factors combined had players thinking there had to be something better out there, and along came Hearthstone. Magic and Blizzard have very similar time lines with very similar issues, right down to the only people left defending either brand being the worst people in our society. It was only natural for these two games to be related.

Hearthstone filled a void and beautifully tricked people into thinking it was actually a good game due to providing people what Magic couldn't -- constant mana. On turn one, you have one mana and it's not colored. On turn two you have two mana. If a card says it costs 5 mana, it costs 5. Simple and easy. Above all that, the player on turn decides everything outside some rare exceptions. None of this dumb rules lawyering stack bullshit where I can name a card and have a judge say I didn't name the card. None of that. Hearthstone is digital only with a contained economy, so no secondary markets. No smelly losers. No reserved lists. No politicking or cliques. Just people playing cards, which is all any of us ever wanted. Hearthstone blew up due to filling a void we all wanted filled and had over 100 million players at its peak.

But this is Blizzard we're talking about. Too good to be true. Hearthstone started as a little side project from a small indie company, which Blizzard eventually acquired and took over. When Blizzard gets involved with anything, you can guarantee a lot of lying a bullshit will soon follow. When Hearthstone first came out, only 8% of the game was RNG based. This was annoying, but whatever. The occasional misfire on Lightning Storm or Animal Companion kept variance in there.

Blizzard thought this was a fantastic idea, and pushed for more and more RNG until Hearthstone was unrecognizable. Now, well over 25% of the game is RNG based and all player skill has been removed from deciding any results. Every single game, no matter what class you play, comes down to randomized luck. Nothing else ever matters. Blizzard wants things this way, no matter how many tournaments get ruined by randomized bullshit and no matter how many players quit over it. What people want is a card game based on skill, because Hearthstone's mana and functional gameplay are legitimately perfect. It even implements 9 classes plus neutral cards in a remarkably balanced way. The issue is Blizzard and their RNG fetish. They intentionally and deliberately removed any and all skill aspects from Hearthstone, because their belief is that this attracts more players and makes more money.

There is no ban option on ladder, no card ban options, no sideboards, and nerfs typically take forever to happen on problem cards. We only got quick nerfs recently because Blizzard thoroughly panicked over the insane number of players that quit the second Smash Bros. Ultimate came out. Imagine that, a great game from a company that actually cares attracted people. Shocking and amazing information. Blizzard openly and admittedly loathes their customers, and no game proves this better than Hearthstone does.

A few examples offhand:

-literally calling the players too stupid to understand a nerf beyond mana costs when nerfing Fiery War Axe. -lying to players when deciding not to update Deathstalker Rexxar for each new set, claiming it's too difficult to code due to text size. Mike Donais got DESTROYED on reddit for this one. -claiming no Druid cards are a problem before nerfing the problem Druid cards immediately after Smash Bros. Ultimate came out and stole away a massive amount of Hearthstone players. -claiming Vicious Syndicate's article about polarity (https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/meta-polarity-and-its-impact-on-hearthstone/) is wrong because Blizzard's internal data says so. This one is just LAUGHABLY stupid given play data is public information, but Blizzard has gotten away with lying to people for 20 years so why not keep trying? -claiming Cubelock was only the 12th best deck in the game after nerfing every other tier 1 deck, then having to nerf Cubelock anyway. -waiting a year to fix Naga Sea Witch in wild, which only happened because one angry player took out ad space on the Hearthstone subreddit and attracted media attention. -nerfing Unleash the Hounds because they don't like players punished for playing minions, then printing Spreading Plague and refusing to touch Mind Control Tech, before banning Mind Control Tech in arena. -when nerfing Tess Greymane, they outright lied and tried to slide it in under "bug fixes" so they wouldn't have to give players the free dust, then blamed the players for being mad about it. Kripp, the #1 Hearthstone streamer, made a video saying that people should in no way be celebrating a victory here for convincing Blizzard to change course, as them being dumb and trying this in the first place is a massive insult. -they printed The Caverns Below, a card so badly designed that it was nerfed three times, and they tried to not nerf it at all by citing win rate stats before saying it should be nerfed due to 'player feels'. Two nerfs for Caverns directly, and one for Giggling Inventor because Caverns easily abused it. This was also the fault of the players. You cannot make this shit up. -their constant lying about arena deserves its own rant, but just know that a topic like this happens about 5 times per year at least: https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/75h2io/blizzard_is_lying_about_the_arena_again_either/ -failing to properly test Jan'alai's battlecry with Brann Bronzebeard, then lying to players and claiming it was a client side issue. -lying to players about sales data and play rate metrics when this information is all public, which is similar to what Wizards tried to pull with Magic not too long ago. -Shudderwock and Kingsbane. I don't need to say much else. I'd be stealing davidponte's thunder. Ask him about those two cards some time.

I could easily go on. Just look at how long this writeup is. If you want someone else's opinion from someone a lot calmer than I am, VaatiVidya covers it very well here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkMqbjOyZBs

Multiple streamers have quit, Ben Brode has left (shout out to DonnyG for being right on this, Brode was the man and he is BADLY missed, he was never the problem), Blizzard designers are quitting left and right, stock is down $45 per share in a month, and Hearthstone is at its lowest point in popularity since launch according to Google trends, so I am on the right side of history with Hearthstone being a garbage video game. Yet hilariously, the cultists who defend Blizzard in a sycophantic manner actually continue to claim the game is skill based; Blizzard has openly said it isn't, just for the record.

Blizzard 100% does not want Hearthstone to be skill based, and it's hilarious watching complete idiots like ColZach in the Hearthstone topic try to claim otherwise. This company has been lying to people for almost 20 years, and you still get total morons defending this crap like they're being paid. I actually wouldn't be surprised if Zach was being paid by them, because it's hard to imagine someone being that dumb naturally. They never wanted Hearthstone to be an e-sport. That's their goal for Overwatch only, I have this directly from Blizzard themselves, and Hearthstone will absolutely continue to get worse and worse as more people leave and more sets don't sell. Pair this with Activision taking a more active role in the company and the whistle being blown everything, and Hearthstone's collapse will be the catalyst for the entire company's paradigm shift for the worse. Despite what idiots with their manic ritalin habits and attention spans shorter than goldfish want to think, I actually have something called a "memory". Go get one and pay attention.

Speaking of Overwatch.

Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch

I honestly don't hate either one of these games. I don't like them, but it isn't due to some high-reaching hatred of Blizzard. The games just aren't very good, but at least they aren't bottom of the barrel vomit like Warcraft 3 and Hearthstone.

Heroes of the Storm took a big risk and tried to shake up the MOBA genre in two different ways. The game removed all items and it randomly plops giant things right in the lanes. Imagine you're playing League and Baron just shows up mid lane for one side when everyone is level 5. That's essentially what HotS does, while having all the characters available be Blizzard characters. I personally think both of these ideas are really stupid, but I actually appreciate the risks taken. It just isn't a MOBA without character progression beyond experience points. I want to be able to buy items and snowball things. That's the entire point of a MOBA, and it's why Dota and League are well ahead of HotS in popularity. Even the Blizzard machine couldn't get HotS off the ground in any meaningful way, and in December Blizzard once again took a giant shit on their players and announced the end of Heroes of the Storm as an e-sport. Remember when Blizzard paid to stream HotS on ESPN? Well neither does Blizzard, apparently. All the time and all the work put in by the players was gone in an instant because Blizzzard fans are too stupid to know better than to trust a company that has lied to them for almost 20 years. There is no longer anything for you to play for. Take the hint and put your effort elsewhere.

Overwatch is a game I want to like, because it puts a new spin on what Team Fortress 2 and Counterstrike started. You get these 5v5 FPS arena fights with pretty good characters, you start things, and then.... done in less than 5 minutes. The fuck? Not nearly enough time to get to know your team, the players, or really what you're doing, and things just end. It's like getting a lap dance and 5 minutes in the girl goes 'time's up, 20 dollars please'. Yeah I'll take an hour with an escort and an actual fuck next time, thanks.

Overwatch has two major problems. One is the community being every bit as toxic as any MOBA, and we've covered the MOBA issue already. No need to rehash it. The other is Blizzard themselves, and people getting banned for picking off meta. See for yourself: https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20759172361?page=1

And this subpar version of TF2 is Blizzard's best game since Diablo 2, which says a lot. It's the only game that actually got a character into the field this year, as a 14 seed no less, and D.Va's more known for pornography than she is Overwatch. It's not like Fox is some amazing character, either. Star Fox 64 and the arwing itself is cool. Falco is cool. Fox's dad is cool. The game itself being quotable is cool. Even Slippy's incompetence is adorable in its own way. But Fox? He's kind of lame, and he's been an annoyance in Smash from day one. And he went out there and got 72% in this match, by far the biggest blowout he's ever gotten in these contests.

It was not due to Fox himself being any good. It's because finally, fucking finally, people are seeing what I've seen all along. Blizzard is indefensible, unsalvageable waste and D.Va was paying for it. This useless POS character was a threat to win our contest? Please. Voters are too smart for that now. It took you guys awhile, but you're finally where I'm at and I couldn't be prouder of you for it. A lot of you are going to read this writeup and think I'm insulting you directly. For some that's true, but for 72% of you I could not be happier to have you in my life. I'm not even kidding. I made this writeup extra vicious to see who actually has reading comprehension, because if you get this far down and see how much I love you guys, we're good. If you just skim or stop halfway, I'll know because you won't see this. <3

"So why are you buying Blizzard games when you clearly hate them?"

I don't buy them. Haven't spent one penny on a Blizzard game since Warcraft 3. My brother in law did sound engineering for Blizzard in the mid 2000s for a couple years and I get all their games for free. He currently works for EA. Dude really knows how to pick em, doesn't he? I've shown the proof to metroid composite, Forceful Dragon, and Leon4, three people I trust with my life who I know wouldn't share his info with people. You're free to ask them if it's true or not.

Another connection I have is through my wife's coworker's husband (they're a gay couple) does web engineering for Blizzard and I meet a bunch of them around Christmas. This is the second year I've run into a bunch of them via holiday parties and such. Holiday parties kinda suck, but it's part of the deal when you're married. 2017 is when I more or less got it from them that Hearthstone is not a skill based game, that they couldn't believe it became an e-sport, and that their main goal was Overwatch. Blizzard would eventually admit this publicly and it made their defenders on Board 8 look completely dumb for doubting me in the first place. This year their main fear is being laid off. Activision is serious about cutting costs and taking things over. A lot of people are being forced to quit.

And here we are. Blizzard only got one character in, and she got thoroughly embarrassed. In a way, D.Va is the perfect mascot for them. Good on the eyes, bad on substance, and overhyped trash when all is said and done. Good riddance.