Blizzard News is the game company's official news site with patch notes, announcements, and statements on its games and leadership.
HN commenters link it for official statements, such as on a tournament controversy, and for game updates on StarCraft II and Heroes of the Storm.
I am not sure how much HN cares about this story (it was mentioned twice, from what I saw, but I've been following it on Reddit where it's been a fixture of /r/all all week), but it's worth reading Blizzard's official statement:
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/blizzard/23185888/regarding-last-weekend-s-hearthstone-grandmasters-tournament
Honestly, my takeaway from this entire situation is that we can't really win against Chinese influence. They use techniques that we find unimaginable and are unprepared to take on. They have state media that tells 1.4 billion people what to think, and if people have their own thoughts, they disappear never to be seen again. There is no way we can fight that at the scale of "buyers of computer games". Blizzard is a publicly-traded corporation, and therefore their main goal is to make as much money as possible; throwing a "we got you bro" over to China means that they have 1.4 billion more potential customers. Nobody who can be held legally accountable for "breach of fiduciary duty" is going to do anything to prevent themselves access to that market. If the casualty is some player of some children's card game, or a Dali Lama quote being deleted from Instagram, so be it. You can't go to prison for being a spineless bastard, but if you tank a Fortune 500 company's stock by standing up for human rights, you can. So it's not surprising what actions these companies are taking. We can't compete with China's system, and we can't resist a…
allow me:
New Leadership at Blizzard (https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/blizzard/23706475/new-leadership-at-blizzard)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28048919 (245 points, 12 hours ago, 192 comments)
Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years (https://www.pcgamer.com/how-blizzards-reputation-collapsed-in-just-3-years/)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28022066 (376 points, 3 days ago, 221 comments)
Blizzard Recruiters Asked Hacker If She ‘Liked Being Penetrated’ at Job Fair (https://www.vice.com/en/article/3aq4vv/blizzard-recruiters-asked-hacker-if-she-liked-being-penetrated-at-job-fair)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28011541 (53 points, 4 days ago, 74 comments)
Activision Blizzard Hires Notorious Union-Busting Firm WilmerHale (https://www.promethean.news/news/activision-hires-notorious-union-busting-firm-wilmerhale)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27998878 (627 points, 5 days ago, 358 comments)
Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/28/activision-blizzard-walkout-allegations-harassment-frat-boy-culture)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27991211 (175 points, 6 days ago, 192 comments)
Video game developers at Activision Blizzard say they'll walk out Wednesday (https://www.axios.com/activision-blizzard-walkout-harassment-lawsuit-fefa807b-107e-41e2-a6e2-78a086119e04.html)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27975530 (495 points, 7 days ago, 528…
The director came out and said it wasn't an MBA-types problem, but their attachment to their original vision of Overwatch.
Remember that Overwatch came from Project Titan, the megaproject designed to be the MMO successor to World of Warcraft. When their design goals failed, they shipped a modified PVP portion as Overwatch, and they intended to ship the MMO in pieces, with the story mode and skills system as massive components.
Overwatch 2 was them trying Titan again, and failing.
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/overwatch/23952480/director-s-take-reflecting-on-the-future-of-overwatch-2
Update: In fairness to Blizzard, I did just check this again and it seems like they have started maintaining Warcraft 3 Reforged again, releasing some small patches last year and a significant update in January 2023:
https://news.blizzard.com/en-gb/warcraft3/23896791/warcraft-iii-reforged-patch-1-35-0-now-live
I'll have to take another look now that this has been released.
But still, there was a 2 year stretch between 2020 and 2022 when the game was in a very crappy state and absolutely nothing was done to improve it or address the issues.
Did they really give back the money though? Last I heard they said they "believed" that he should get the money, not that he would get it.
>We now believe he should receive his prizing. We understand that for some this is not about the prize, and perhaps for others it is disrespectful to even discuss it. That is not our intention.
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/blizzard/23185888/regarding-last-weekend-s-hearthstone-grandmasters-tournament
Yeah, the only real changes in the initial Resurrection release were the obvious graphical improvements, and some fairly minor quality-of-life improvements to the stash system.
That said, they have started to make actual gameplay changes since then. Last month gave us the first gameplay patch to Diablo 2 since 2010: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/diablo2/23788293/diablo-ii-resurrected-patch-2-4-ladder-now-live