Narrative Warfare: Thanks For Showing Us Terminal Convergence, Blizzard

Witness what happens to a game company when making good games that are fun to play is not the mission of the company anymore.

The World of Warcraft team had eight months to get it together for this new patch release. They had public testing of this raid. What you see here is not some weird glitch. This is a known issue, and they deliberately chose to ignore it because it wasn't important to them to release a properly-tested and polished extention to what is (as of this post) the current expansion for their flagship game product.

I'm using this specific example to talk about what tells you ought to be looking for when you're dealing with organizations converged by the Death Cult. When you see stuff like this, you're looking at terminal convergence and it is time to disengage entirely as fast as you can. (Yes, including emotional disengagment, following from yesterday.) The tells are all about an organization failing to fulfill its purported function--make games, sell razors, etc.--in favor of using the organization for the Death Cult's real objective of wielding power over a subject population.

Look at this video again. Remember that WOW is all about raiding. They had this raid on the board for about two years--that's how long out these design cycles go--and started the mapping and pre-viz at least a year ago, with the aim to go hard on putting that pre-viz into a playable space betweeen now and the expansion launch eight months ago. In short, even with the Wu Flu messing with things, they had plenty of time to get this done right.

Compare Blizzard to FF14. Same difficulty in adapting to the Wu Flu. Managed to get out TWO patches and get the next expansion ready for launch in that same time, and this was with one of their senior team leads in the hospital working from his bed while taking his cancer treatments. In short, Blizzard has no excuse for failing this hard, and everyone that sees this video knows it- especially the dev team.

And if we see it, so do their shareholders- who are not, contrary to belief, the last word on matters. While it is not the biggest of things to them, it is a bad sign and cause for concern that will come up with the next quarterly call, albeit in the usual glad-handing fashion Corporate prefers. It will not bother the Death Cultists one bit; they don't care, and you can't make them; so long as they call the shots, this will continue.

Once you see institutional incompetence reach unfixable levels, it's time to go. The patient cannot be saved and you're better off putting the animal down to save the rest.

And in this specific case, note that all of the men that made Blizzard what it is--with one or two exceptions--are now gone and doing new things with new enterprises and new organizations. (Don't expect the lessons of convergence to be learned by them, however.)

Learn to see when you're in Sodom. When you see it, RUN- and don't look back.