With Morhaime gone there's pretty much nothing left of the original Blizzard team. Ion is a lawyer/salesman. Sad.
I remember Morhaime had to apologize because the hard rock band they hired for a BlizzCon was swearing left and right, and it wasn't appreciated by all.Don't remember Morhaime having to apologize for Samwise doing some faction hate thing. I mean, the guy loves the Horde because he fleshed out a lot of it. Not a problem for me.
Afrasiabi and Kaplan still work for blizzard
"Blizzard tried to manage expectations that they weren't going to announce Diablo 4 at Blizzcon, but I'm not sure that got through."I am 100% sure that they denied they will announce Diablo 3 just weeks before they did at the Blizzcon just to make it a real surprise. So this really didn't mean anything.
Blizzard got the Devs, just need more people to right more lore and the like, keep the Train on rails.
The direction the game has taken is pretty clear for all to see. Ion is a salesman and it shows, nothing currently in the game is designed to promote fun and meaningful gameplay, they'd rather have all the game mechanic promote timegating and RNG to try and keep people playing. He has effectively implemented a mobile-game gating philosophy (applied to FTP games) to a subscription based MMORPG on PC. And its not working, BFA feels like a chore and a way to kill time at best, rather than an experience where players can have "fun". This stems from accountants running the company, and has really not much to do with the dev team actually working on the game either. Last proof is 8.2, where the vast majority of mounts are either reskins or gold gated, (gold=euro for most working people), with the exception of the nicest one, which is given for a 6 month sub (LOL).
Since you are a couple people above me I won't block-text people.I disagree, the new zones at the very least seem to be thought out and work pretty well within themselves, with suitable difficulty for mobs and locations.
"it all comes down to preserving Blizzard's brand as the maker of games ranked at the highest quality." I couldn't help but laugh at that. What they've been releasing the last 5-10 years doesn't come remotely close to what blizzard considered quality before selling the companys soul to activision.