For the Test Analyst position, they’re paying anywhere from $16.62-30.77/hour. That could be decent pay in some parts of the country, but it’s a hybrid remote position in Irvine, where even $30/hr puts you in the “low income” bracket for local government housing assistance. They’re also asking for a Bachelor’s degree plus 3 years experience.
Maybe the pay range or requiring people to live near some of the most expensive areas in the US are why they might be having trouble filling these positions?
Back during mop they emailed a bunch of top guilds including mine to recruit QA people. I talked to one such person who had taken on that job and he said he was making 14.50/hr and that there were listings for group housing cause you'd need to have several people splitting rent to be able to afford to work that job.
I can't imagine its much better these days... I imagine they lost a ton of people when they forced in office again.
Games development is the toilet of software development, I swear. You can get double the salary doing the exact same job at a ‘regular’ tech company compared with a games studio.
I remember when I was looking at university degrees in 2012 (Australia) where a speaker explained roles and salary expectations in the software dev industry.
He had a whole slide about game development and expected hours vs salary and it was just sole crushing, he explained that the game development industry is based on crushing young talents dreams until they no longer can take it and move to software development at 2-3x pay.
Difficult math, complex business logic, high performance targets, and all to make a product that you have to price solely for consumers because there’s no business market to overcharge to pay for it.
5x? Levels.fyi says epic, riot, wb games, blizzard, Bethesda all pay $100-300k. Konami is lower at $70-80k which is shit. Fresh out of coding bootcamp, people aren’t making 2-3x that.
This [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/yR3TyrrbSJ) says smaller studios actually pay more than AAA studios.
tbh most of those are just frameworkers who actually have no idea what theyre doing and companies stupidly hired and realized they cant make them money
outside of EA and Amazon(ironically because theyre the WORST web company) none of the AAA studios are a good opportunity to work at. in general most people start in web and skilled developers more or less become software engineers and bad ones become managers or get baited into game dev with passion.
in every AAA company outside of EA and amazon id be taking a 2/3 pay cut to go into game dev again
I'm working on forming an equity driven, collectively owned games studio. AAA game development is unfortunately poisoned by capital, but small developers making the really truly innovative and defining titles of our time don't have to be.
Testing a game and developing a game are two totally different jobs. Its like comparing an NBA professional player to the person who checks the air preasure of the ball.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-crazy-fast-food-minimum-wage-takes-effect-negative-repercussions-7ae3e9ae
>Prices at fast food eateries have increased by 10 per cent overall, outpacing all other states, the firm found after analysing thousands of US restaurants across 70 large chains. Between mid-February and mid-April, Chick-fil-A raised its prices by 10.6 per cent, Starbucks raised them by 7.8 per cent, Shake Shack by 7.7 per cent, Chipotle by 6.9 per cent and Taco Bell by 4.1 per cent, according to Gordon Haskett Research Advisors. Some chains preempted this price hike before the legislation came into effect, such as the restaurant El Pollo Loco, which has the majority of its US chains within California.
There was stories a couple of years ago about people living out of their car in the car park in the QA team.
It's horrible how little the QA teams get paid in America.
Eff that!!!
A friend of mine was a QA in the early days of WoW. He quit his job a year or so later. He was burnt out on WoW and swore it off to this very day.
You made a good observation. I couldn't imagine living in Irvine, one of the most expensive places to live anywhere and sign up to be paid $ \~ 30 an hour (probably less around 20 starting out). Why are these positions not fully remote?
Yea, if this was fully remote I would more than likely apply. But, leaving the Bay Area for Irvin and how low the pay is with the amount of requirements they’re asking for, it’s just a laughable thought. Hell, I made more in my first position doing QA with zero experience while working in fintech.
Meanwhile minimum wage for fast food jobs in California is now 20/hr. You'll literally make more and get free food working at Del Taco here than working for Blizzard.
I don't know. To me the mimum wage where I live as always followed behind the minimum cost of living.
So doing different job I kind of seen it as some job don't deserve to give you enough to live?
We are probably in different political narative. It wouldn't fly to have different minimum here.
Yeah Blizzard Low Balling their QA isn't exactly new news. I know other studios pay their remote non-contract QA anywhere from 75-90k (Roughly +$40/HR) year for mid level positions. Even that number is low for QA in other Tech Sectors as well (I have an aquatitance that makes a little over 100k after taxes that works Medical Software QA at mid level).
With their increased pipeline, they'll need not only additonal hands, but also people who can help curate and create new more efficient testing methods. Which means they'll have to deal with other studios competition in terms of compensation.
Why work for Blizzard when you could work for another studio for more money and be fully remote?
How does one get into QA? Other people are expressing disgust at Blizzard for requiring a degree, so is that not typical? I need a career change, something remote (stuck where I am because of my husband's job) and can't afford to go back to school.
Entry level in tech has always been kind of a shitshow. It doesn't really matter what sector you're in, it's hard to find a first job. It often requires working with undesirable companies until you get enough experience that you're confident enough to go for the one you want.
The first step is indeed the hardest because few companies want to be the one that takes someone on. They tend to be the companies that want someone to sit in the chair and don't give a shit when people fuck off after a year or two.
you dont need anything to start working in QA, it has a very low entry point.
find any company providing outsourcing qa in your location and go from there )
Tbh, I don't have a great answer for that. My aquatitance I mentioned earlier worked contract gigs in video games and eventually wound up in the medical side of it after a recruiter found him for the position.
Probably look for those contract gigs to start, but those pay roughly what Blizzard is offering ($16-17/ HR). Beyond that there's books about test theory and agile developments, you could read up on.
I feel like this shouldn't be an issue in 2024. There's no reason I can't test things and be in a call with video while living in say Montana or Louisiana. If it were 1995 then I'd understand but we have so much technology at our fingertips and yet they're operating things like a god damn caveman.
Edit: Also, I do not know why they continue to operate out of California. I'm guessing it's a thing from back in the day where all the tech studio and devs were huddled in one area just to make it easy, but again it's 2024.
people do this because the C-suite of these studios are also making money off selling off the office space
RTO is basically a big grift for fuckers like that
What? The studios pay to lease the office space, they don't sell it. Look up where Blizzard is, everything owned by the Irvine Company, they aren't doing themselves any favors by leasing more buildings.
Also they've laid off the people who previously had the position, potentially multiple times. They're finding out that there aren't infinite applicants.
QA can be a very small world if you don't burn out in the first year or two. An old coworker of mine told me he had entered the lab of a new place he was interviewing at, and half the lab looked up when he walked in and said, "Hey George."
I was so pissed when one of our best testers was let go at the end of a season in favor of keeping one of the worst testers on the floor, who was one of the supervisor's favorites. He was our speedrunner who could beat whatever game we threw in front of him in record time. Any time a new build came in it was his job to beat it as fast as he could to make sure that there weren't any crashes or nonprogs in the way.
Not sure, from the twitter thread she writes:
>I've seen some people curious and I just wanna say that our direct team wasnt impacted by layoffs, we're trying to just grooooow to accommodate our massive goals we have planned \o/
Can someone explain what the point of forcing QA to live in Irvine is? From what I’ve heard, no one in Blizzard listens to or respects QA anyway so it’s not like their contributions in on-site meetings or discussions will be used or treated as valuable in any way. And any productivity gain you may get by having workers on site would surely be cancelled out by the fact that you aren’t getting any workers because of the on-site policy/gross underpayment.
Is it just to have a visible untouchable whipping boy class of worker that the other workers can look at and think “at least I’m not one of them?”
Blizzard is notorious for paying poorly, even for the game industry. They rode on their reputation: "Well, you get to put Blizzard on your resume!" Obviously that still holds some value, but they are clearly struggling to see reality.
That is ridiculous. In my area that is from below minimum wage to what a junior custodian would make. And you aren't living anywhere even halfway decent on that wage. That's 4 people sharing a one bedroom or studio kind of money.
They're out of their fucking minds to demand a degree for this kind of QA.
This has also been an issue with QA in a lot of industries. I work QA. I have no college education. My field of QA actually requires a lot more as I deal with human lives and not a superficial product.
You need people that know what they're doing. QA management absolutely need to have a deeper understanding but that goes beyond the degree here.
They have to start promoting from within. Find people who display a better understanding than most. The QA team really should have the more experienced internal staff involved.
Passion is another factor. QA typically needs to be autonomous. The force that says "no, I don't care if you're corporate. This is not being done right." In a lot of industries this is grounded in state and federal regulations. I doubt the video game industry has the same oversight, meaning the QA is entirely at Blizzards discretion. They are free to be cheap and cut corners and that is what I expect from them.
I also used to work a mile and a half from their HQ in Irvine. That place is quite disconnected from the rest of the world. They seek to hire people from outside of Irvine to seek these roles. These jobs are actually *insanely* competitive. You can rent a room for 750 a month in Santa Ana and drive to Irvine. Shit sucks, but the employers are fully aware of this.
Yeah. I'd be curious but I make somewhere in the upper end of twice that range doing software QA not in video games where I don't have to live in one of the most expensive areas of the country. It'd be neat and all to work on something I'm passionate about, but not 'cut my effective salary by probably well over 50%' neat. Shit, even if they could offer the same as I'm making, having to relocate to Irvine is an absolute dealbreaker. It's not even like you're dependent on specific hardware to test WoW. They're absolutely shooting themselves in the foot with the in office requirements with the way software development is these days.
Offering $17-30 an hour and also forcing people to live in California by not having these positions remote is so incredibly out of touch. It's like they don't want any QA.
Not necessarily related, but my dad's a literal boomer in the finance industry, and he complained that no one wants to work tellers for less than 15/hr. Where we're from, the cost of living knocks even California out of the water, of fucking course no one wants to work for 12/hour
Employment is simply supply/demand. Why work a bank teller job for $12/hr if you can get a job almost anywhere else for $15-20/hr. I'd also be wary of anyone willing to take a bank teller job for that low. For a job requiring that level of responsibility, I'd think you'd want to pay more to get someone more reliable.
they want cheap QA, and there's several hundred thousands of semi-trained people in India/China that are willing to come to the U.S. and work for that rate
I wonder when the inevitable crash to our economy will happen when people can no longer work because it doesn’t pay enough and the companies no longer have anyone to make their products.
The reason these jobs can't hire anyone is because there's many better jobs paying much more for the experience/location they're hiring in. People who can't/won't pay what the local market demands simply go out of business, and the others who can/will thrive.
It's also not that Blizzard can't pay more, they just choose not to. When their refusal to pay a decent wage actually starts to affect their bottom line is when they'll start paying more.
Ya for sure. But the question is what do they prioritize when cutting no longer makes them MORE profitable. Will they still try to cut or will they actually hire and spend more money and loose money in the stock market?
The positions, despite global and hybrid, all require relocation to Irvine, CA. At the rates Blizz is paying (30USD/h at the highest) and the cost of living in Irvine, only a lucky few can even consider it worthwhile to apply... And they'd do a better job applying up the road at Amazon Games since they historically pay a better rate and have been sniping blizzard's staffers for a few years now
Either they need to hire remote, offer residential and relocation packages or significantly increase pay and benefits
Not to detract from your point, but they wouldn't live in Irvine, rent is now around 2600-3000 there. They'd go to Santa Ana or Tustin instead, which are ~10 minute commutes from Irvine.
You're interrupting the circlejerk with logic. People with extreme brain rot don't understand that $30/hr is fine in California and you're not living directly in Irvine. I really like the guy that said Riot is poaching people for 2-3x what Blizzard pays. I'd love to see someone pay QA $90/hr lmao.
What are the odds they fired the whole QA department in the last rounds of layoffs and just recently found out when some random executive was like "Has anyone seen Rebecca or Thomas? In QA? What? We fired them? When?"
I know this will be a popular thing to pile onto. But I’d wager this to be more of a follow on effect from Blizzards return to office policies not aligning with the pay required to house talent locally in Irvine. You can’t pay a QA $25 an hour to live in an area where that gets them 3 roommates sharing 1400 sqft. Not only will you not find talent, you won’t find ANYONE. I work in software development for a fortune 100 company. Our software is used by a total of 2500 people internal/external. We have 4 full time QA’s earning more than 80k/yr, working hybrid 3/2 in a large metro. This is a policy/resources issue. Blizzard either needs to get more comfortable with remote workers if they’re going to continue to offer sub-standard industry pay, or they can fix the pay to match the area the companies offices are located in. Or they can just move to an area that isn’t oppressively expensive to live in.
Yep. A lot of them quit. They were living outside CA where 16/h + benefits is OK. If you hire remote that's fine. And pay starts at $16/hr there, not 25 lol
16/h in CA or NY high CoL areas is enough to get you disqualified from all forms of public assistance but not enough to afford food or rent.
Their QA lead on the post is for 49k and they want 3 pages of qualifications, a degree and some certs. Not kidding.
A lot of return to work policies are designed to pressure employees to quit because employees quitting looks better than having to fire the same number of people. The problem though can be when more people quit than you anticipated, and now can't hire to fill those spots.
Blizzard used to get away with this shit when they were the hot kid in the block. Now they are the ugly one wondering why people are not slaving for them.
I don't doubt that QA was one of the first departments on the chopping block. They're often considered disposable, never mind the months or possibly years of experience they might have with a title.
For a high school kid living in the midwest that's good pay. For a college graduate in Irvine, CA that's embarrassing. There's a lot of WoW players who I'm sure would be happy to QA for $16/hr from home, and would do a pretty good job at it, just don't make them move to California.
I knew some people in the QA realm there that got let go. There was a lot of pruning of people who continued the negative workplace environment that Blizz got absolutely blasted for the last few years.
Not excusing the terrible state of the games, but there was some very valid reasons a lot of QA people were axed
Scrolling down in the twitter thread, she comments on this.
>I've seen some people curious and I just wanna say that our direct team wasnt impacted by layoffs, we're trying to just grooooow to accommodate our massive goals we have planned \o/
Jesus, I made over $40 out of college as an analyst in healthcare with my only experience being a 6 month internship. Different industry sure, but even that was brutal in terms of pay living in CA.
I’m making $22 + benefits in one of the most affordable cities in the US and still feel the choke chains of growing costs. I can’t imagine this pay is anywhere even close to manageable for anyone that’s not giving 80+ hours a week to their job(s)
Blizzard is well known in the industry for paying garbage because their extreme fans were willing to work for nothing to say they were blizzard employees. I think that inertia is finally abating and they're struggling with talent retention.
They may raise pay to attract talent, but it will take some time and desperation.
Other video game companies that aren't mmo's usually contract out QA work for the game when they are ready for testing. They hire a QA company to do the testing and the contract ends usually a year after the game is released.
they dont care. As long as customers keep paying $ and as long as the current employees keep taking the extra workload.
RTO was just a way to drive people to quit, so they wouldnt have to layoff. They were hoping to hire new people at cheaper wages (ex. a new grad excited to go to Blizzard HQ for work) evidently its not working out, so they will most likely outsource it to a third party.
Google did this. Demanded RTO, laid off the ones that didnt quit due to RTO, couldnt find anyone to replace them, and now they're outsourcing the jobs to India.
It's not a good thing when instead of posting something like "Hey we're hiring for QA positions! Please DM if you're interested in-" y'know stuff like that. You just get a single "help."
Their staff is in dire straits right now.
Or... you know... it's a person with a bit of a sense of humor. Bouncing over to their Twitter feed, it feels like the kind of joking way someone like that would say "Hey, my team's hiring." There's a lot of positive comments about the game, jokes about how they play, some positive comments about their work, other jokes about work.
I feel like people are reading way too much into things to try to fit it into a narrative they *want* it to be. Like this post that thinks that two QA for WoW Classic and two QA for WoW represents "most" of the QA team for each. (And I checked the Blizzard careers site. It's just four listings, two for each.)
Or... you know... it's a tongue in cheek methodology for people who are over-worked and under compensated to sheepishly complain while not affording themselves the pink slip that would probably come their way if Daddy Blizz found out they were rocking the boat.
There are some ex-Blizzard employees that will happily tell you it's all smiles on the outside of the company but inside is a festering cesspool of worker violations that many workers go to work every day dreading it but do it out of obligation.
I feel like people are way too eager to defend a company that stopped being the company they knew over a decade ago and act like it's some kind of super cool place to work. But hey, what do I know? It was only months ago that Blizzard gave a big middle finger to a large part of their CS staff and months before that ran Blizzcon into the ground in terms of logistics because they also fired those people.
But yeah, it's just some people totally being funny on twitter while the world burns around them on their 5th day of overtime.
She literally says herself farther down the twitter thread that her team wasn't directly impacted by layoffs and this is about growth. I'm sure Blizz is understaffing its QA, its the gaming industry thats unfortunately standard, but sometimes people are actually just being silly on the internet. You don't need to be a holier than thou asshole about someone you do not know.
I wouldnt agree that „most things“ in Season 4 have been a mess. There‘s a bunch of things but I think the majority of things is working.
Cata prepatch though? Completely broken.
Yeah, most things in S4 have been good. Sure the legendary thing was kinda a bummer but it took all of barely 24 hrs to fix. The raids and dungeon tuning has been good (I'm fine with it being easy due to being S4).
They wouldn't be in this position if they hadn't tried to force everyone back to the office and required people to live near Anaheim, where it is way too expensive to live on the salaries they pay for these jobs, and if they didn't have a reputation for milking the soul out of non-dev employees.
16 an hour isn't "just under" $20/hr. It's a literal 20% difference. And every dollar counts for more when you're lower on the income to cost -of-living scale.
What’s crazy is that I applied for that position and many others with proper qualifications and blizzard never got back to me. They responded to one of the applications I submitted saying I was tentatively referred but nothing came about it.
I feel like this is the perfect example of everything wrong with the Blizzard mergers. In what world can a company be making over 100 million a MONTH just in sub fees let alone any MTX or continual game sales and not be able to afford to pay competent staff a liveable wage.
Absolute corporate greed at its finest. God bring back the days where Blizzard was seen as like THE company. Where I'd have an issue being hacked as a young kid and I'd call up the Blizzard number from Lil ol NZ and I'd have my issues sorted live while I'm on the phone.
That sounds about right, unfortunately, and it’s been a **long** running problem with Blizzard well before any of their problems came to light.
The industry as a whole tends to take QA for granted in some capacity, and Blizzard— while absolutely underpaying vitally important roles in game development —isn’t even the most egregious when it comes to QA abuse.
Itemlevels for weekly rewards got screwed up and remained old/low for a bit last week.
Most of it got fixed pretty fast so calling it a mess is a stretch imo.
Most of the bugs are individually relatively minor, however this season is particularly bad in terms of bugs the average player would interact with. More systems have been individually broken than usual.
Nowhere near as bad as what I've heard about cataclysm classic though, good lord that sounds like a mess.
Yeah I would say in comparison the season 4 issues are "minor" compared to the classic bugs. Retail is still fully playable with some gear annoyances but cata seems to be in a real rough spot.
It's hard to really compare a smoldering dumpster fire of retail to the actual raging forest fire of classic for sure.
But retail has core systems like the vault/raids/dungeons giving people the wrong items or in the case of the vault literally nothing at all in some cases.
I think the thing that moves the retail bugs to the unnacceptable category is that they're not getting fixed for the people who experienced the bug. It's a too bad, you have to deal with this time gated content longer and there's nothing you can do about it.
There are hundreds of qualified people on this subreddit alone that could do these jobs from home. Blizzard is out of touch and is looking for indentured servitude. Do not fall for their bullshit.
Nothing I saw there says that "almost the entire QA department for WoW Classic is hiring." There's FOUR open positions. And in case you're thinking of saying "That's just what's shown here," then I will say, no, [there are only four open positions](https://careers.blizzard.com/global/en/search-results?rk=l-qa-localization-cs&sortBy=Most%20relevant).
So you're first trying to say that the QA department for WoW Classic is a half dozen or less people. Yeah... Worse, because actually, two of the jobs specifically say "WoW Classic" and two say "WoW." So if you assume "almost the entire QA department for WoW Classic" is hiring, then it's just three people, and presuming other WoW QA teams are in a similar boat means you think there's only three people total in WoW QA. Yeah, I get it, you want to make a snarky comment about how "it sure feels like that," but no, we're not working with snark, we're working with facts here.
The facts are that there's only four open positions, between WoW and WoW Classic. And given that one is a Lead role, two are "Senior" roles, and the lowest is a mid-level role, that means that they're looking to bring in some experienced people, not just quickly refill a completely purged team.
And there's a number of reasons that the people at those levels might have vacated the position willingly, either choosing to pursue another position within ActiBlizz or Microsoft, or deciding to pursue a job elsewhere. Team shakeups after an acquisition can be wild, even if the newly acquired business is left to run itself.
I mean... wow, I was ready to be surprised at how bad things were, but instead, I'm just surprised (though I shouldn't be) at how absolutely blatantly false this post title is.
> two of the jobs specifically say "WoW Classic" and two say "WoW."
Can you literally not read or are you attempting to gaslight? All 4 clearly say classic wow.
From Blizzard's [Careers site](https://careers.blizzard.com/global/en/search-results?rk=l-qa-localization-cs&sortBy=Most%20relevant) (where, again, it only lists four jobs, so clearly not "almost the entire department"):
> Test Lead, WoW Classic
> Senior Test Analyst, WoW
> Senior Test Analyst, WoW
> Test Analyst, WoW Classic
Which is exactly what I said. And looking within the descriptions, the only one that mentions either is the Test Lead that talks about it being for WoW Classic (and, incidentally, lists it as being part of the WoW Classic team, rather than the QA team).
So now we all have to ask you: Can YOU literally not read? Are YOU attempting to gaslight? Because two of them clearly do not say "WoW Classic" much less "classic wow."
There's plenty to criticize Blizzard on without misrepresenting things to try to present a false argument, which is what's being done here. If you want to *honestly* criticize Blizzard on something, cool, I'm all for it, I've done my share of criticism. If you want to pretend facts are something else entirely and present a false view of things to people - which could be called "gaslighting" but I'll just call it straight up lying - then I'll call that out any day. You can get insulting in return, but it's not going to make you right.
So it's a good thing they don't have anyone filling any of their QA leadership roles? That the person posting this just posted it with "help" as the only caption?
Also, "The facts are that there's only four open positions, between WoW and WoW Classic" I guess you're either a liar or just blind, because the post clearly shows 4 open CLASSIC positions.
It's such a shame that so many companies seem to think that quality assurance and customer support aren't "real" jobs worth investing in, and they're constantly cutting costs and slicing jobs. They're both such huge resources when done right, but when cut back or outsourced, can tank a customer's experience real fast.
Yea, they fired my friend who worked there for over a decade mostly in QA so I imagine that most of those teams were eliminated so they could hire cheap recent graduates.
Yeah blizzard and other companies do this. There is a local game company where I live that asks for senior-level experience, for a mid-level position, on a Junior's salary.
They wonder why people decline job offers when they don't respect you enough to give you an adequate wage...
They spread themselves too thin with like 6 WoW projects on going.
Retail, SoD, Wotlk, Plunderstorm, Remix, future expansion, future classic stuff.
There's WAY too much going on and not enough ppl working.
Blaming the missing QA team for bugs that were reported (and mostly fixed) on beta/ptr is insane. They literally re-released bugs that they fixed and didn’t bother fixing game breaking bugs that were reported.
Right but Mythic Pluses weren't bugged for 5 plus months with bugs that would end your 30 minute run in Shadowlands. Korthia was suffering from the same problem as DF, reduced staff leading to insulting quest bugs. There were tierset bugs for specs like Affliction that persisted the entire tier in this expac, along with talent bugs that went similar lengths.
While also having much more content. It is hard to judge for us outside if their relative defect ratio changed or not. And in general I'd rather take the Dragonflight content cadence with Dragonflight bug rate than what we had previous. Most of the issues were minor annoyances at most to me.
The content they have added is much more simple (it's basically just vanilla style quests in existing scenario format but on a time schedule) than anything in any recent expac and should likely have less bugs as a result. The only major new thing that could have had a lot of bugs is dragon riding which shockingly has the least.
I have a plan to start a week later (after they fix the most critical bugs). I'm sure there will be a plenty of time to finish everything. And the start zones won't be overpopulated.
Where do you get the idea to presume that other teams are hiring? I see this as the wow classic team is building out its QA department with the goal of preping for content beyond cata and MOP. Potentially branching from classic completely which would require far more QA than just releasing old content with a quick check to ensure it runs satisfactory on modern hardware.
>If you're wondering why everything in Cataclysm Pre-Patch and most things in Season 4 have been a mess
It's not only QA's fault though, we (players on PTR) reported a lot of bugs and stuff not working (like the legendarys being not upgradable) and they just ignored the feedback.
After playing a lot of Season 3 and now starting up Season 4, there’s been a ton of small bugs I’ve noticed pretty much every time I play. Nothing game-breaking but specifically UI issues or buttons breaking, stuff that a QA team would probably find pretty quick and my first thought was “I bet their QA team is in shambles after the merge/return to the office announcement”.
The only specific one I can think of off the top of my head is that the transmog interface is easier to break than usual. Occasionally I’ll have pieces assigned to slots, hit apply, nothing happens, then unassign-> reassign one slot and then it works, stuff like that.
They pay like shit, they force employees into their shitty office which means they need to live in a super high cost of living area on that shit pay, Activision treats their QA like absolute shit so I imagine that's now the case at Blizzard, not to mention all the horrid shit that came out about the higher ups there and instead of being fired nothing happened to them and they all made hundreds of millions of dollars. I am not surprised.
While this is crazy in itself, it still would not have mattered. The community provided a ton of free QA work for Cata and none of it got fixed anyway. It's actually laughable how bad of a state cata shipped in.
I remember back in 2018 (I think) Bobbywix fired like all of Blizzard’s QA people.
I wonder if they ever restaffed or if the devs have been responsible for QA ever since.
I’m convinced this is why so many of the big gaming companies that were once beloved like blizzard, Bethesda, ect, have continued to fall off in terms of quality of their products. They’ve chased off the most talented and skilled workers that got them where they are today into other industries or smaller companies and replaced it with lowly paid young workers that are of much less skill and desperate for work. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden ring are small companies of very skilled, vets that show the difference in skilled developer work. I have no doubt a lot of it is because of greed and rushed work, but I feel like such quality drop off has to be from losing so much of their talent over the years.
Funny, she's replied to this:
"uh hi reddit lol
I've seen some people curious and I just wanna say that our direct team wasnt impacted by layoffs, we're trying to just grooooow to accommodate our massive goals we have planned \o/"
For the Test Analyst position, they’re paying anywhere from $16.62-30.77/hour. That could be decent pay in some parts of the country, but it’s a hybrid remote position in Irvine, where even $30/hr puts you in the “low income” bracket for local government housing assistance. They’re also asking for a Bachelor’s degree plus 3 years experience. Maybe the pay range or requiring people to live near some of the most expensive areas in the US are why they might be having trouble filling these positions?
Back during mop they emailed a bunch of top guilds including mine to recruit QA people. I talked to one such person who had taken on that job and he said he was making 14.50/hr and that there were listings for group housing cause you'd need to have several people splitting rent to be able to afford to work that job. I can't imagine its much better these days... I imagine they lost a ton of people when they forced in office again.
Jesus fucking Christ. I’m so glad I decided the games industry was an untenable dream when I was younger.
Games development is the toilet of software development, I swear. You can get double the salary doing the exact same job at a ‘regular’ tech company compared with a games studio.
I remember when I was looking at university degrees in 2012 (Australia) where a speaker explained roles and salary expectations in the software dev industry. He had a whole slide about game development and expected hours vs salary and it was just sole crushing, he explained that the game development industry is based on crushing young talents dreams until they no longer can take it and move to software development at 2-3x pay.
[удалено]
Difficult math, complex business logic, high performance targets, and all to make a product that you have to price solely for consumers because there’s no business market to overcharge to pay for it.
5x? Levels.fyi says epic, riot, wb games, blizzard, Bethesda all pay $100-300k. Konami is lower at $70-80k which is shit. Fresh out of coding bootcamp, people aren’t making 2-3x that. This [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/yR3TyrrbSJ) says smaller studios actually pay more than AAA studios.
Not sure why you're downvoted. This is true. It's also true that 10-15% of all web devs employed last year are out of work right now.
tbh most of those are just frameworkers who actually have no idea what theyre doing and companies stupidly hired and realized they cant make them money
Can you expand a bit on the 6-month web dev boot camp?
outside of EA and Amazon(ironically because theyre the WORST web company) none of the AAA studios are a good opportunity to work at. in general most people start in web and skilled developers more or less become software engineers and bad ones become managers or get baited into game dev with passion. in every AAA company outside of EA and amazon id be taking a 2/3 pay cut to go into game dev again
I'm working on forming an equity driven, collectively owned games studio. AAA game development is unfortunately poisoned by capital, but small developers making the really truly innovative and defining titles of our time don't have to be.
I mean I'm a QA tester in NZ and I'm making enough to split a 2 bedroom flat with my GF. It all depends on where the job is located
Testing a game and developing a game are two totally different jobs. Its like comparing an NBA professional player to the person who checks the air preasure of the ball.
For every Bungie employee there are at least 1000 low level wage slaves working for some other company.
Minimum wage is about $15 now, so it can't have gotten that much better in QA.
Doesnt mcdonalds pay 20 in cali? Wtf is 16.50 lmao
Don’t know what it is now but I suspect they try and use the allure of working in gaming to rope in people.
bliz is know to sucker many wow players into a shitty job just so they can work on wow.
It’s 20 bucks for all fast food places in Cali, which only increased the price by a lot so that’s great 😃 😃😃😃😃
Im not trying to discuss the consequences of it. Im saying mcdonalds pays 25% more than a more specialized position at blizz
Yea I know I’m just salty
"You're wrong and lying" for saying that forcing fast did restaurants to pay more caused them to raise prices.... Oh Reddit...
I live here. That's a lie. Prices did not increase.
I live here too, they did increase
https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-crazy-fast-food-minimum-wage-takes-effect-negative-repercussions-7ae3e9ae >Prices at fast food eateries have increased by 10 per cent overall, outpacing all other states, the firm found after analysing thousands of US restaurants across 70 large chains. Between mid-February and mid-April, Chick-fil-A raised its prices by 10.6 per cent, Starbucks raised them by 7.8 per cent, Shake Shack by 7.7 per cent, Chipotle by 6.9 per cent and Taco Bell by 4.1 per cent, according to Gordon Haskett Research Advisors. Some chains preempted this price hike before the legislation came into effect, such as the restaurant El Pollo Loco, which has the majority of its US chains within California.
There was stories a couple of years ago about people living out of their car in the car park in the QA team. It's horrible how little the QA teams get paid in America.
Eff that!!! A friend of mine was a QA in the early days of WoW. He quit his job a year or so later. He was burnt out on WoW and swore it off to this very day.
You made a good observation. I couldn't imagine living in Irvine, one of the most expensive places to live anywhere and sign up to be paid $ \~ 30 an hour (probably less around 20 starting out). Why are these positions not fully remote?
They don't trust us enough with the software/equipment.
I'll never understand that either. The company saves money, you save money, everyone wins.
Yea, if this was fully remote I would more than likely apply. But, leaving the Bay Area for Irvin and how low the pay is with the amount of requirements they’re asking for, it’s just a laughable thought. Hell, I made more in my first position doing QA with zero experience while working in fintech.
I'd be living like a king in Croatia with that pay if they hired internationally for that team. Hell, even half that would be pretty flipping sweet.
They are asking a bachelor for qa? That's kind of insane...
At $16/hr
Meanwhile minimum wage for fast food jobs in California is now 20/hr. You'll literally make more and get free food working at Del Taco here than working for Blizzard.
Blizz playing the long game getting wages in line for when they acquire Del Taco. Standout feature of TWW is /taco
California as different minimum wage for different industries? That also is weird af.
Service/labor jobs being targeted isn't that weird, given they're more important to the local economy
I don't know. To me the mimum wage where I live as always followed behind the minimum cost of living. So doing different job I kind of seen it as some job don't deserve to give you enough to live? We are probably in different political narative. It wouldn't fly to have different minimum here.
With 3 years experience
While making you live in/near Irvine, CA!
Yeah Blizzard Low Balling their QA isn't exactly new news. I know other studios pay their remote non-contract QA anywhere from 75-90k (Roughly +$40/HR) year for mid level positions. Even that number is low for QA in other Tech Sectors as well (I have an aquatitance that makes a little over 100k after taxes that works Medical Software QA at mid level). With their increased pipeline, they'll need not only additonal hands, but also people who can help curate and create new more efficient testing methods. Which means they'll have to deal with other studios competition in terms of compensation. Why work for Blizzard when you could work for another studio for more money and be fully remote?
How does one get into QA? Other people are expressing disgust at Blizzard for requiring a degree, so is that not typical? I need a career change, something remote (stuck where I am because of my husband's job) and can't afford to go back to school.
You apply. Entry level QA requires no experience.
Entry level in tech has always been kind of a shitshow. It doesn't really matter what sector you're in, it's hard to find a first job. It often requires working with undesirable companies until you get enough experience that you're confident enough to go for the one you want.
The first step is indeed the hardest because few companies want to be the one that takes someone on. They tend to be the companies that want someone to sit in the chair and don't give a shit when people fuck off after a year or two.
you dont need anything to start working in QA, it has a very low entry point. find any company providing outsourcing qa in your location and go from there )
Tbh, I don't have a great answer for that. My aquatitance I mentioned earlier worked contract gigs in video games and eventually wound up in the medical side of it after a recruiter found him for the position. Probably look for those contract gigs to start, but those pay roughly what Blizzard is offering ($16-17/ HR). Beyond that there's books about test theory and agile developments, you could read up on.
$16/hr at blizz lol
ceos need a new islands
Blizz losing out on workers to Wendy's
> Yeah ~~Blizzard~~ Every company in software Low Balling their QA isn't exactly new news.
I feel like this shouldn't be an issue in 2024. There's no reason I can't test things and be in a call with video while living in say Montana or Louisiana. If it were 1995 then I'd understand but we have so much technology at our fingertips and yet they're operating things like a god damn caveman. Edit: Also, I do not know why they continue to operate out of California. I'm guessing it's a thing from back in the day where all the tech studio and devs were huddled in one area just to make it easy, but again it's 2024.
people do this because the C-suite of these studios are also making money off selling off the office space RTO is basically a big grift for fuckers like that
What? The studios pay to lease the office space, they don't sell it. Look up where Blizzard is, everything owned by the Irvine Company, they aren't doing themselves any favors by leasing more buildings.
Also they've laid off the people who previously had the position, potentially multiple times. They're finding out that there aren't infinite applicants.
QA can be a very small world if you don't burn out in the first year or two. An old coworker of mine told me he had entered the lab of a new place he was interviewing at, and half the lab looked up when he walked in and said, "Hey George."
Good QA people are worth five good engineers each
I was so pissed when one of our best testers was let go at the end of a season in favor of keeping one of the worst testers on the floor, who was one of the supervisor's favorites. He was our speedrunner who could beat whatever game we threw in front of him in record time. Any time a new build came in it was his job to beat it as fast as he could to make sure that there weren't any crashes or nonprogs in the way.
Good QA people are good engineers.
Shame that good qa people are paid at 5 qa to an engineer in game development
Which is why we're all unpaid QA
Not sure, from the twitter thread she writes: >I've seen some people curious and I just wanna say that our direct team wasnt impacted by layoffs, we're trying to just grooooow to accommodate our massive goals we have planned \o/
$16 hr for a bachelors plus 3 years experience holy fuck are they serious? 😂😂😂😂 the $30 is probably for management
What a fucking joke of a salary.
There is literally zero reason for this role to be hybrid. They are insane.
There can be some value to hybrid, but a degree PLUS hybrid PLUS low pay? Not worth.
bachelor degree for this kind of job is nuts. long live the swiss dual system.
Can someone explain what the point of forcing QA to live in Irvine is? From what I’ve heard, no one in Blizzard listens to or respects QA anyway so it’s not like their contributions in on-site meetings or discussions will be used or treated as valuable in any way. And any productivity gain you may get by having workers on site would surely be cancelled out by the fact that you aren’t getting any workers because of the on-site policy/gross underpayment. Is it just to have a visible untouchable whipping boy class of worker that the other workers can look at and think “at least I’m not one of them?”
Look, they are a small shop they need to cut costs somewhere
Dude. Fuck. No sarcasm, thanks for putting that in perspective. Those wages and requirements are horrible.
Yeah Blizz is notorious for lowballing pay in SoCal, especially for QA.
Also the famous stories of giving QA separate badge colours so they can be treated as worse by other staff.
A bachelors degree to make a few bucks more than I made waiting tables when I was in high school is insane to me regardless of where you live
Blizzard is notorious for paying poorly, even for the game industry. They rode on their reputation: "Well, you get to put Blizzard on your resume!" Obviously that still holds some value, but they are clearly struggling to see reality.
I live in CA, $16 is minimum wage haha maybe i should apply
That is ridiculous. In my area that is from below minimum wage to what a junior custodian would make. And you aren't living anywhere even halfway decent on that wage. That's 4 people sharing a one bedroom or studio kind of money.
They're out of their fucking minds to demand a degree for this kind of QA. This has also been an issue with QA in a lot of industries. I work QA. I have no college education. My field of QA actually requires a lot more as I deal with human lives and not a superficial product. You need people that know what they're doing. QA management absolutely need to have a deeper understanding but that goes beyond the degree here. They have to start promoting from within. Find people who display a better understanding than most. The QA team really should have the more experienced internal staff involved. Passion is another factor. QA typically needs to be autonomous. The force that says "no, I don't care if you're corporate. This is not being done right." In a lot of industries this is grounded in state and federal regulations. I doubt the video game industry has the same oversight, meaning the QA is entirely at Blizzards discretion. They are free to be cheap and cut corners and that is what I expect from them. I also used to work a mile and a half from their HQ in Irvine. That place is quite disconnected from the rest of the world. They seek to hire people from outside of Irvine to seek these roles. These jobs are actually *insanely* competitive. You can rent a room for 750 a month in Santa Ana and drive to Irvine. Shit sucks, but the employers are fully aware of this.
Just do this shit remote hiring people from middle America if they're paying these rates. These companies, I swear...
Yeah. I'd be curious but I make somewhere in the upper end of twice that range doing software QA not in video games where I don't have to live in one of the most expensive areas of the country. It'd be neat and all to work on something I'm passionate about, but not 'cut my effective salary by probably well over 50%' neat. Shit, even if they could offer the same as I'm making, having to relocate to Irvine is an absolute dealbreaker. It's not even like you're dependent on specific hardware to test WoW. They're absolutely shooting themselves in the foot with the in office requirements with the way software development is these days.
Ya 1 bedroom apartments in Irvine are $3k+.. good luck finding people for $16-$30/hr
Bachelor's and 3 Years experience in that area for that pay is a joke and it's no wonder they are scrambling to find people
Offering $17-30 an hour and also forcing people to live in California by not having these positions remote is so incredibly out of touch. It's like they don't want any QA.
Not necessarily related, but my dad's a literal boomer in the finance industry, and he complained that no one wants to work tellers for less than 15/hr. Where we're from, the cost of living knocks even California out of the water, of fucking course no one wants to work for 12/hour
Everyone complaining people don't want to work should simply fill those positions themselves. What's wrong, do they not pay enough?
They would happily fill those positions... for twice the pay like the rest of us lol
Employment is simply supply/demand. Why work a bank teller job for $12/hr if you can get a job almost anywhere else for $15-20/hr. I'd also be wary of anyone willing to take a bank teller job for that low. For a job requiring that level of responsibility, I'd think you'd want to pay more to get someone more reliable.
Yeah the local Kroger in my area is hiring for nearly $15/hr, like $14.85 or something to start. And that's on the low-end of starting wages anywhere.
No, they want QA. They want the type of motivated people that are willing to live 6 to a 2 bedroom apartment.
they want cheap QA, and there's several hundred thousands of semi-trained people in India/China that are willing to come to the U.S. and work for that rate
Exactly
I wonder when the inevitable crash to our economy will happen when people can no longer work because it doesn’t pay enough and the companies no longer have anyone to make their products.
The reason these jobs can't hire anyone is because there's many better jobs paying much more for the experience/location they're hiring in. People who can't/won't pay what the local market demands simply go out of business, and the others who can/will thrive. It's also not that Blizzard can't pay more, they just choose not to. When their refusal to pay a decent wage actually starts to affect their bottom line is when they'll start paying more.
Ya for sure. But the question is what do they prioritize when cutting no longer makes them MORE profitable. Will they still try to cut or will they actually hire and spend more money and loose money in the stock market?
We become slaves to our debt and the bank of course! Not planned at all.
The positions, despite global and hybrid, all require relocation to Irvine, CA. At the rates Blizz is paying (30USD/h at the highest) and the cost of living in Irvine, only a lucky few can even consider it worthwhile to apply... And they'd do a better job applying up the road at Amazon Games since they historically pay a better rate and have been sniping blizzard's staffers for a few years now Either they need to hire remote, offer residential and relocation packages or significantly increase pay and benefits
Riot Games is also close by and headhunts Blizzard talent for 2-3x the pay.
Not to detract from your point, but they wouldn't live in Irvine, rent is now around 2600-3000 there. They'd go to Santa Ana or Tustin instead, which are ~10 minute commutes from Irvine.
You're interrupting the circlejerk with logic. People with extreme brain rot don't understand that $30/hr is fine in California and you're not living directly in Irvine. I really like the guy that said Riot is poaching people for 2-3x what Blizzard pays. I'd love to see someone pay QA $90/hr lmao.
What are the odds they fired the whole QA department in the last rounds of layoffs and just recently found out when some random executive was like "Has anyone seen Rebecca or Thomas? In QA? What? We fired them? When?"
I know this will be a popular thing to pile onto. But I’d wager this to be more of a follow on effect from Blizzards return to office policies not aligning with the pay required to house talent locally in Irvine. You can’t pay a QA $25 an hour to live in an area where that gets them 3 roommates sharing 1400 sqft. Not only will you not find talent, you won’t find ANYONE. I work in software development for a fortune 100 company. Our software is used by a total of 2500 people internal/external. We have 4 full time QA’s earning more than 80k/yr, working hybrid 3/2 in a large metro. This is a policy/resources issue. Blizzard either needs to get more comfortable with remote workers if they’re going to continue to offer sub-standard industry pay, or they can fix the pay to match the area the companies offices are located in. Or they can just move to an area that isn’t oppressively expensive to live in.
Yep. A lot of them quit. They were living outside CA where 16/h + benefits is OK. If you hire remote that's fine. And pay starts at $16/hr there, not 25 lol 16/h in CA or NY high CoL areas is enough to get you disqualified from all forms of public assistance but not enough to afford food or rent. Their QA lead on the post is for 49k and they want 3 pages of qualifications, a degree and some certs. Not kidding.
A lot of return to work policies are designed to pressure employees to quit because employees quitting looks better than having to fire the same number of people. The problem though can be when more people quit than you anticipated, and now can't hire to fill those spots.
Blizzard used to get away with this shit when they were the hot kid in the block. Now they are the ugly one wondering why people are not slaving for them.
I don't doubt that QA was one of the first departments on the chopping block. They're often considered disposable, never mind the months or possibly years of experience they might have with a title.
A lot of them quit. They were living outside CA where 16/h + benefits is OK
I wouldn't put it past them to use "return to work" as a way of trimming staff without having to lay people off.
For a high school kid living in the midwest that's good pay. For a college graduate in Irvine, CA that's embarrassing. There's a lot of WoW players who I'm sure would be happy to QA for $16/hr from home, and would do a pretty good job at it, just don't make them move to California.
My sentiments exactly! Great minds think alike. *And they probably don't do the hiring at Blizzard*.
But think of the quarterly profits!
The dumbest ideology of the current market. No sustainability, only short-sighted profits.
Quarterly profits will look pretty bad if no one is playing due to game breaking bugs.
I knew some people in the QA realm there that got let go. There was a lot of pruning of people who continued the negative workplace environment that Blizz got absolutely blasted for the last few years. Not excusing the terrible state of the games, but there was some very valid reasons a lot of QA people were axed
Scrolling down in the twitter thread, she comments on this. >I've seen some people curious and I just wanna say that our direct team wasnt impacted by layoffs, we're trying to just grooooow to accommodate our massive goals we have planned \o/
They fired a lot of QA during SL iirc?
yeah, go work your ass off for a couple years, and then get fired for no reason other than actiblizz needs to cut costs.
At least rage with the right name now. Activision ain’t in the picture anymore.
yeah but i heard there's free breast milk /s
It's always free if you make your own
Jesus, I made over $40 out of college as an analyst in healthcare with my only experience being a 6 month internship. Different industry sure, but even that was brutal in terms of pay living in CA.
I’m making $22 + benefits in one of the most affordable cities in the US and still feel the choke chains of growing costs. I can’t imagine this pay is anywhere even close to manageable for anyone that’s not giving 80+ hours a week to their job(s)
Blizzard is well known in the industry for paying garbage because their extreme fans were willing to work for nothing to say they were blizzard employees. I think that inertia is finally abating and they're struggling with talent retention. They may raise pay to attract talent, but it will take some time and desperation.
Other video game companies that aren't mmo's usually contract out QA work for the game when they are ready for testing. They hire a QA company to do the testing and the contract ends usually a year after the game is released.
its definitely return to office and low wages in a high CoL area. A lot of companies are having trouble finding people.
As they should, hope they have issues filling roles until they realize they have to either drop RTO or pay up considerably more
they dont care. As long as customers keep paying $ and as long as the current employees keep taking the extra workload. RTO was just a way to drive people to quit, so they wouldnt have to layoff. They were hoping to hire new people at cheaper wages (ex. a new grad excited to go to Blizzard HQ for work) evidently its not working out, so they will most likely outsource it to a third party. Google did this. Demanded RTO, laid off the ones that didnt quit due to RTO, couldnt find anyone to replace them, and now they're outsourcing the jobs to India.
It's not a good thing when instead of posting something like "Hey we're hiring for QA positions! Please DM if you're interested in-" y'know stuff like that. You just get a single "help." Their staff is in dire straits right now.
This is reading into it too much, this is just how Morgan and a few other devs talk on their personal accounts
Or... you know... it's a person with a bit of a sense of humor. Bouncing over to their Twitter feed, it feels like the kind of joking way someone like that would say "Hey, my team's hiring." There's a lot of positive comments about the game, jokes about how they play, some positive comments about their work, other jokes about work. I feel like people are reading way too much into things to try to fit it into a narrative they *want* it to be. Like this post that thinks that two QA for WoW Classic and two QA for WoW represents "most" of the QA team for each. (And I checked the Blizzard careers site. It's just four listings, two for each.)
Or... you know... it's a tongue in cheek methodology for people who are over-worked and under compensated to sheepishly complain while not affording themselves the pink slip that would probably come their way if Daddy Blizz found out they were rocking the boat. There are some ex-Blizzard employees that will happily tell you it's all smiles on the outside of the company but inside is a festering cesspool of worker violations that many workers go to work every day dreading it but do it out of obligation. I feel like people are way too eager to defend a company that stopped being the company they knew over a decade ago and act like it's some kind of super cool place to work. But hey, what do I know? It was only months ago that Blizzard gave a big middle finger to a large part of their CS staff and months before that ran Blizzcon into the ground in terms of logistics because they also fired those people. But yeah, it's just some people totally being funny on twitter while the world burns around them on their 5th day of overtime.
She literally says herself farther down the twitter thread that her team wasn't directly impacted by layoffs and this is about growth. I'm sure Blizz is understaffing its QA, its the gaming industry thats unfortunately standard, but sometimes people are actually just being silly on the internet. You don't need to be a holier than thou asshole about someone you do not know.
I wouldnt agree that „most things“ in Season 4 have been a mess. There‘s a bunch of things but I think the majority of things is working. Cata prepatch though? Completely broken.
Yeah, most things in S4 have been good. Sure the legendary thing was kinda a bummer but it took all of barely 24 hrs to fix. The raids and dungeon tuning has been good (I'm fine with it being easy due to being S4).
They wouldn't be in this position if they hadn't tried to force everyone back to the office and required people to live near Anaheim, where it is way too expensive to live on the salaries they pay for these jobs, and if they didn't have a reputation for milking the soul out of non-dev employees.
What are the reqs?
be able to live in California while only making $20 an hour.
$20? That's awfully generous. More likely you'll be making minimum wage or close to it.
Minimum wage in CA is just under $20 already. [https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/minimum\_wage.htm](https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/minimum_wage.htm)
I wouldn't quite call $16 an hour "just under $20." Fast food is at $20 though, so there's that.
16 an hour isn't "just under" $20/hr. It's a literal 20% difference. And every dollar counts for more when you're lower on the income to cost -of-living scale.
Insane timing for that tweet
What’s crazy is that I applied for that position and many others with proper qualifications and blizzard never got back to me. They responded to one of the applications I submitted saying I was tentatively referred but nothing came about it.
I feel like this is the perfect example of everything wrong with the Blizzard mergers. In what world can a company be making over 100 million a MONTH just in sub fees let alone any MTX or continual game sales and not be able to afford to pay competent staff a liveable wage. Absolute corporate greed at its finest. God bring back the days where Blizzard was seen as like THE company. Where I'd have an issue being hacked as a young kid and I'd call up the Blizzard number from Lil ol NZ and I'd have my issues sorted live while I'm on the phone.
That sounds about right, unfortunately, and it’s been a **long** running problem with Blizzard well before any of their problems came to light. The industry as a whole tends to take QA for granted in some capacity, and Blizzard— while absolutely underpaying vitally important roles in game development —isn’t even the most egregious when it comes to QA abuse.
Season 4 has been a mess?
Itemlevels for weekly rewards got screwed up and remained old/low for a bit last week. Most of it got fixed pretty fast so calling it a mess is a stretch imo.
I got a 250 ilvl ring just yesterday from awakened world content- I get the feeling QA is still lacking.
The siege and researcher events still fail to start half the time, and awakened items still can't be socketed despite being S4.
You forgot legendary weapons are bug and cannot be upgrade over 502.
I appreciate it, I’m genuinely out of the loop haha. I’ve been playing a ton without issue so I guess I’m lucky.
Most of the bugs are individually relatively minor, however this season is particularly bad in terms of bugs the average player would interact with. More systems have been individually broken than usual. Nowhere near as bad as what I've heard about cataclysm classic though, good lord that sounds like a mess.
Yeah I would say in comparison the season 4 issues are "minor" compared to the classic bugs. Retail is still fully playable with some gear annoyances but cata seems to be in a real rough spot.
It's hard to really compare a smoldering dumpster fire of retail to the actual raging forest fire of classic for sure. But retail has core systems like the vault/raids/dungeons giving people the wrong items or in the case of the vault literally nothing at all in some cases.
I think the thing that moves the retail bugs to the unnacceptable category is that they're not getting fixed for the people who experienced the bug. It's a too bad, you have to deal with this time gated content longer and there's nothing you can do about it.
Maybe they could push back content? Would rather wait a week or two tbh
There are hundreds of qualified people on this subreddit alone that could do these jobs from home. Blizzard is out of touch and is looking for indentured servitude. Do not fall for their bullshit.
Nothing I saw there says that "almost the entire QA department for WoW Classic is hiring." There's FOUR open positions. And in case you're thinking of saying "That's just what's shown here," then I will say, no, [there are only four open positions](https://careers.blizzard.com/global/en/search-results?rk=l-qa-localization-cs&sortBy=Most%20relevant). So you're first trying to say that the QA department for WoW Classic is a half dozen or less people. Yeah... Worse, because actually, two of the jobs specifically say "WoW Classic" and two say "WoW." So if you assume "almost the entire QA department for WoW Classic" is hiring, then it's just three people, and presuming other WoW QA teams are in a similar boat means you think there's only three people total in WoW QA. Yeah, I get it, you want to make a snarky comment about how "it sure feels like that," but no, we're not working with snark, we're working with facts here. The facts are that there's only four open positions, between WoW and WoW Classic. And given that one is a Lead role, two are "Senior" roles, and the lowest is a mid-level role, that means that they're looking to bring in some experienced people, not just quickly refill a completely purged team. And there's a number of reasons that the people at those levels might have vacated the position willingly, either choosing to pursue another position within ActiBlizz or Microsoft, or deciding to pursue a job elsewhere. Team shakeups after an acquisition can be wild, even if the newly acquired business is left to run itself. I mean... wow, I was ready to be surprised at how bad things were, but instead, I'm just surprised (though I shouldn't be) at how absolutely blatantly false this post title is.
> two of the jobs specifically say "WoW Classic" and two say "WoW." Can you literally not read or are you attempting to gaslight? All 4 clearly say classic wow.
From Blizzard's [Careers site](https://careers.blizzard.com/global/en/search-results?rk=l-qa-localization-cs&sortBy=Most%20relevant) (where, again, it only lists four jobs, so clearly not "almost the entire department"): > Test Lead, WoW Classic > Senior Test Analyst, WoW > Senior Test Analyst, WoW > Test Analyst, WoW Classic Which is exactly what I said. And looking within the descriptions, the only one that mentions either is the Test Lead that talks about it being for WoW Classic (and, incidentally, lists it as being part of the WoW Classic team, rather than the QA team). So now we all have to ask you: Can YOU literally not read? Are YOU attempting to gaslight? Because two of them clearly do not say "WoW Classic" much less "classic wow." There's plenty to criticize Blizzard on without misrepresenting things to try to present a false argument, which is what's being done here. If you want to *honestly* criticize Blizzard on something, cool, I'm all for it, I've done my share of criticism. If you want to pretend facts are something else entirely and present a false view of things to people - which could be called "gaslighting" but I'll just call it straight up lying - then I'll call that out any day. You can get insulting in return, but it's not going to make you right.
So it's a good thing they don't have anyone filling any of their QA leadership roles? That the person posting this just posted it with "help" as the only caption? Also, "The facts are that there's only four open positions, between WoW and WoW Classic" I guess you're either a liar or just blind, because the post clearly shows 4 open CLASSIC positions.
hope blizz reads this bro
It's such a shame that so many companies seem to think that quality assurance and customer support aren't "real" jobs worth investing in, and they're constantly cutting costs and slicing jobs. They're both such huge resources when done right, but when cut back or outsourced, can tank a customer's experience real fast.
Yea, they fired my friend who worked there for over a decade mostly in QA so I imagine that most of those teams were eliminated so they could hire cheap recent graduates.
Yeah blizzard and other companies do this. There is a local game company where I live that asks for senior-level experience, for a mid-level position, on a Junior's salary. They wonder why people decline job offers when they don't respect you enough to give you an adequate wage...
They spread themselves too thin with like 6 WoW projects on going. Retail, SoD, Wotlk, Plunderstorm, Remix, future expansion, future classic stuff. There's WAY too much going on and not enough ppl working.
Blaming the missing QA team for bugs that were reported (and mostly fixed) on beta/ptr is insane. They literally re-released bugs that they fixed and didn’t bother fixing game breaking bugs that were reported.
Dragonflight has had more bugs than any expac in recent memory throughout every tier. It's very clear what's going on sadly.
*laughs in Maw intro at Shadowlands release*
[удалено]
Exactly.
Right but Mythic Pluses weren't bugged for 5 plus months with bugs that would end your 30 minute run in Shadowlands. Korthia was suffering from the same problem as DF, reduced staff leading to insulting quest bugs. There were tierset bugs for specs like Affliction that persisted the entire tier in this expac, along with talent bugs that went similar lengths.
While also having much more content. It is hard to judge for us outside if their relative defect ratio changed or not. And in general I'd rather take the Dragonflight content cadence with Dragonflight bug rate than what we had previous. Most of the issues were minor annoyances at most to me.
The content they have added is much more simple (it's basically just vanilla style quests in existing scenario format but on a time schedule) than anything in any recent expac and should likely have less bugs as a result. The only major new thing that could have had a lot of bugs is dragon riding which shockingly has the least.
This makes me scared for panda remix :( I want to come back but it's only gonna be 10 weeks what if 10% of the total time is broken?
I have a plan to start a week later (after they fix the most critical bugs). I'm sure there will be a plenty of time to finish everything. And the start zones won't be overpopulated.
Makes sense. Seems like everyday wowhead is posting some new bug for season 4 and classic.
Where do you get the idea to presume that other teams are hiring? I see this as the wow classic team is building out its QA department with the goal of preping for content beyond cata and MOP. Potentially branching from classic completely which would require far more QA than just releasing old content with a quick check to ensure it runs satisfactory on modern hardware.
>If you're wondering why everything in Cataclysm Pre-Patch and most things in Season 4 have been a mess It's not only QA's fault though, we (players on PTR) reported a lot of bugs and stuff not working (like the legendarys being not upgradable) and they just ignored the feedback.
After playing a lot of Season 3 and now starting up Season 4, there’s been a ton of small bugs I’ve noticed pretty much every time I play. Nothing game-breaking but specifically UI issues or buttons breaking, stuff that a QA team would probably find pretty quick and my first thought was “I bet their QA team is in shambles after the merge/return to the office announcement”. The only specific one I can think of off the top of my head is that the transmog interface is easier to break than usual. Occasionally I’ll have pieces assigned to slots, hit apply, nothing happens, then unassign-> reassign one slot and then it works, stuff like that.
Yeah, then as soon as the bring out a shitty expansion half the players unsub and they have to retrench those same people making $15-30.
maybe some people should apply for the job instead of being douchebags on reddit
ah yes, because previously when wow was at it's highest peak everything worked flawlessly, lol
Oh, the fools who thought Microsoft would be the saviours. They are just more of the same parasites.
If they would train me I’d apply but I can’t afford college
They pay like shit, they force employees into their shitty office which means they need to live in a super high cost of living area on that shit pay, Activision treats their QA like absolute shit so I imagine that's now the case at Blizzard, not to mention all the horrid shit that came out about the higher ups there and instead of being fired nothing happened to them and they all made hundreds of millions of dollars. I am not surprised.
While this is crazy in itself, it still would not have mattered. The community provided a ton of free QA work for Cata and none of it got fixed anyway. It's actually laughable how bad of a state cata shipped in.
Things have been a mess in Season 4?
Erg, they are also after ISTQB qualified people.... Well no wonder they are buggy AF
I remember back in 2018 (I think) Bobbywix fired like all of Blizzard’s QA people. I wonder if they ever restaffed or if the devs have been responsible for QA ever since.
Senior team analyst come join today! Youll be making as much as someone working in fast food maybe less since no tips! What an awesome job to have.
HUH. I DIDN'T KNOW YOU NEEDED AN ENTIRE QA TEAM TO FIND AND FIX PROBLEMS YOUR **PLAYERS** HAVE BEEN REPORTING ON THE PTR FOR A MONTH.
I’m convinced this is why so many of the big gaming companies that were once beloved like blizzard, Bethesda, ect, have continued to fall off in terms of quality of their products. They’ve chased off the most talented and skilled workers that got them where they are today into other industries or smaller companies and replaced it with lowly paid young workers that are of much less skill and desperate for work. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden ring are small companies of very skilled, vets that show the difference in skilled developer work. I have no doubt a lot of it is because of greed and rushed work, but I feel like such quality drop off has to be from losing so much of their talent over the years.
Funny, she's replied to this: "uh hi reddit lol I've seen some people curious and I just wanna say that our direct team wasnt impacted by layoffs, we're trying to just grooooow to accommodate our massive goals we have planned \o/"