This guy had a degree in creative writing and was a neet until his early 30s...

I'd say hard work was not too much a factor in his case lol. Unless you count running a guild in Everquest and then shitposting on their forums "hard work."

Blizzard just managed to somehow capture the extreme mega autists that stay loyal like the animals you keep in you're homes.

these guys work all day and sleep in their offices.

>neet
>has a degree
Pick one.

he has a pretty face for cock sucking

all of the games developed today are designed for the exact same goal, there are almost no video games designed to tell you a real story or pass a message, it's an entirely consumerist media whose only ambition is to smash your dopamine button to milk you out of your attention and money.

Here is the redpill for you: all of the big companies that you worship so much like Blizzard, Valve, DICE, Rockstar, etc... are testing and calibrating extensively their games with biometrics tools and behavioral experiments so they can distill the exact amount of frustration and pleasure to make you crave for the feelings again and again and again so you will spend money on their product (being by microtransactions or buying their next game) or talk about it and attract others in your degeneracy like blackholes are swallowing light.

There has been some articles talking about it but most of the industry avoid the subject because it would force them to reveal how their so called "QA department" work (pro-tip: it's not ethical) and how their testers are basically chimps for experiments.
Of course they prefer to show you how "creative" and "passionate" their game designers are and how they want to provide you an "experience" in some bullshit "behind the scene video" when in the back they have mechanized game design to level you wouldn't believe.

pcgamer.com/interview-valve-want-to-see-you-sweat-and-make-a-game-of-it/

gamasutra.com/view/news/29983/GDC_Europe_To_Succeed_In_FreeToPlay_Exploit_Human_Weaknesses.php

archive.is/1MhWq

Recently these companies understood they could capitalize on legions of young recluse white men with no real channels to express their competitive instincts (ironically BECAUSE they spent their childhood inside playing the vidyajew) and manufactured virtual hierarchies around their games with """e-sport""", matchmaking/ranking systems and streaming.

They want their audience to believe that you can become rich and famous if you waste your youth smashing buttons on their dopamine mouse trap, that's why Valve or Riots or EA are spending hundreds of millions in events to glorify some skinny or fat retards who decided that spending all day training to be good at the last FPS (which will be forgotten in 5 years) was a valid lifestyle.

I saw dozens of faggots during the last 5 years who had the potential to become high value individuals in society, people that could have been engineers, teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, etc... and who fell into the trap of dedicating everything for a "rank" on some MOBA, FPS or MMO, spending an astronomical amount of hours learning everything about something ABSOLUTELY USELESS in every other aspect of life because the game mechanics where designed to make them feel very good 10 minutes a day.
The funniest and tragic part was that they blame their failure on ADD or depression or anxiety or whatever bullshit they read online, not realizing their "passion" is what that completely fried their reward system.

Don't fall for the vidyajew Veeky Forums, if you are bored at home read a book, stare at charts, exercise, learn to program, learn an instrument or read about networking.

Reminder that Kaplan is the one responsible for the green hills of stranglethorn quest in wow.

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wrestle with jeff prepare for death

He got in the door before Blizzard went corporate, and there were no rules and requirements for hiring, Blizzard was still relatively small. Most of the top devs at Blizz came from other fields, like Ion was a lawyer in DC, and Ghostcrawler has a degree in oceanography but was a map maker for Age Of Empires. Degrees in game dev didn't exist back then, anyway. Kaplan got hired because he was a vocal min/maxer in Everquest, and got noticed by Pardo, who ran the guild Kaplan was in. He got hired as a quest designer, because of his writing background. Blizzard was a small company then, not a huge studio.

He's a game director now, because he was trained as a designer and manager by working on games all these years. He just got lucky. He's going to be one of the last generations of game devs who got to do that, from now on every hire has to go through HR and have degrees in game design, which is why American game studios are getting the snot kicked out of them by Eastern European studios that aren't corporate and aren't infested with SWJ supporting HR departments.

My opinion of him was that he's a mouthy prick, based on his behavior when he was in Everquest, but he seems to have mellowed and learned some social skills - and whatever his personality is, he hit a homerun with Overwatch.

tldr; he got in the door early and grew into his position.

>Unless you count running a guild in Everquest and then shitposting on their forums "hard work."
I unironically do. Running one of only three fucking guilds in Everquest that was up to date with current content took huge leadership skills and an unmitigated long term focus on achieving his goals.

Keep in mind that vanilla WoW was extremely casualized compared to Everquest. And that's despite South Park's stunningly accurate parody of the intense schedules WoW raiders were expected put themselves through if they didn't want to get fired from their guild. Meanwhile, raids were up to 72 fucking people in Everquest, nearly twice as much as the largest WoW raids. Just herding that many people to stay in the same spot for 5 minutes is difficult enough, imagine trying to get them to take down a boss by fighting it and not fucking up for hours.

Nevermind the fact that all it did was land him a job designing quests and dungeons in WoW. It was only after the game's massive success thanks in part to his work that he became a game director, and not long after that he worked non stop on a new MMO project for over 5 years that never saw the light of day, an all too common story in the gaming industry which is already notorious for its borderline illegal hours and low pay compared to literally anywhere else you could work with those skills. The the scraps of that failed still became one of the most successful recent shooters.

There's no incentive to be a doctor, engineer, teacher etc. It has nothing to do with vidya. My dad is a doctor and he fucking hates his job. The stress they put you through to obtain any of these titles is monumental. But for what? Some money? I don't need to bring home $100,000 a year to be happy. It's not called the rat race for nothing

Men were originally incentivized to pursue careers because of families. With the average female being closer to a sperm bank than a life partner, you're seeing men regress to the level of life which they find least stressful and most rewarding

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Hard work? I don't know.
The idea behind overwatch is cool and all but not mindblowing, it's a mix of two popular genres. What is indeed mindblowing is how they fleshed it out. The gameplay is alright, but what truly shines is the character design. I can imagine 80% of the roster as protagonists in their own games, and the games that I imagine them starring in are nothing alike.
>soul-searching cyborg ninja and his overly proud bushido archer brother
>death-defying german gentle giant in a huge-ass suit with an equally huge hammer and a futuristic shield
>time-skipping british girl and her pet dr. planet of the apes
>robot gandhi
>brazilian dj on rollerblades

it's literally insane how unique and well executed they are. inspiration alone does not do this, it's a matter of brainstorming a couple of concepts and then working on one of them for days on end

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>Eastern European studios are a beacon of light
>Eastern European studios get away with paying shit salaries when their releases do well

Lemme guess, you loved Witcher 3 so CD Projekt is a great place to work

>all of the games developed today are designed for the exact same goal, there are almost no video games designed to tell you a real story or pass a message, it's an entirely consumerist media whose only ambition is to smash your dopamine button to milk you out of your attention and money.
Holy shit, games are designed to be fun and replayable? They can't keep getting away with this!

Ironically the real problem is that there's too fucking many games recently that are designed to "tell stories" and "pass messages" because all the writers who aren't skilled enough to make it as novelists or screenwriters realized they can survive in the low standard dregs of the gaming industry. If more modern games were actually as you describe I wouldn't be playing decade old shit on emulators most of the time.

>The idea behind overwatch is cool
The idea being "what if TF2, but with money?"

>trash game that everybody forgot about in half a year

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100 truth sadly. RIP real gaming, I miss you.

>from now on every hire has to go through HR and have degrees in game design
Maybe in a select few companies, but the vast majority of the gaming industry hires based on your portfolio and will completely ignore your education. Video game companies are one of the few left in the modern world that are easier to get into by showing you're actuslly good at it rather than showing a degree saying you're good at it. Seriously, if you want to get a job at Bethesda, for example, you would be wise to start by making some successful Skyrim and Fallout 4 mods (and I mean actual mods with quests and/or dungeons, not model swaps or putting your waifu in the game) because that will place you much higher on the list than some idiot with a game design degree.

The nose knows.

Truth here. The psychology behind that type of game is very similar to the techniques casinos use to draw you in, and keep you at the table. Free drinks, they suspend the passage of time with no windows or clocks, hide the entrance, distract you and keep you disoriented with flashing lights and noise, and gear the games to pay out just enough to make you sit there all night feeding the games your cash.
I'd bet you cannot get a Blizzard employee who works at a high level to admit they're very aware of the triggers they employ to keep people playing, and what techniques they use to keep people playing. They stopped trying to hide it with the garrisons and command tables in the last couple of expansions, they're slot machines. They lure you in to pull that handle every day, to get a reward, and it's not cooincidence that most rewards take more than a month to complete, because that guarantees more than one month of game time fees. I would bet big money they have calculations and equations to determine the perfect amount of time to lead players around by the nose for every reward in the game. And, if they don't, they're working towards it. Listening to Ion Hazzawhatever speak, he's so enmeshed in the absolute control of every interaction in the game the player has, there's no way they're not controlling players like rats in a lab.

>there are almost no video games designed to tell you a real story or pass a message
what the fuck are you smoking.

Someday, we'll get the full story on Titan, and the shitshow around it. Considering it's failure drove Metzen to a nervous breakdown, it's gotta be a good story.

he sucked dick good i can attest to this fact

Oh, look, a neckbeard is putting words into my mouth, and inventing things about me, to win an argument only he thinks is worth having.

Fuck off, neckbeard.

Other folks described it pretty well in this thread. Kaplan was a pretty vocal and hardcore EQ player and he connected with members of Blizzard through playing EQ and they brought him on board. If you raid with someone in an MMORPG over the course of a few years (I'm guessing) you get to know them pretty well. You get to see how people are on a team, how they deal with stressful task/problem solving, and even outside of raids, you can see how they play and interact with others in the guild. It was in part his skill set, but he was also able to connect well with the right players (people that worked on Blizz) that were working on WoW.

tl;dr Gotta know the right people and not be a complete moron when presenting yourself to them

Portfolio? Oh, you're talking about game artists.

No, stupid. You don't get hired to be a game director with a fan art portfolio. You need industry experience and a degree. Just shut the fuck up, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. You're probably one of those "muh conceptual art" faggots who thinks putting poorly drawn boobs on mythical creatures means you're talented.

Probably spent a lot of his free NEET time developing a skill (writing) and marketing his skills. Something that most people on this board will never have the willpower to do.

>Other folks described it pretty well in this thread. Kaplan was a pretty vocal and hardcore EQ player and he connected with members of Blizzard through playing EQ and they brought him on board. If you raid with someone in an MMORPG over the course of a few years (I'm guessing) you get to know them pretty well. You get to see how people are on a team, how they deal with stressful task/problem solving, and even outside of raids, you can see how they play and interact with others in the guild. It was in part his skill set, but he was also able to connect well with the right players (people that worked on Blizz) that were working on WoW.

Wow, this is a pretty good way to describe it. Its a perfected virtual skinner box. I even myself am guilty of farming waaaay to much for rare mount drops

Yep. This is the ultimate videogame redpillme yet so many people ignore it.

isn't it what videogames are meant to do? I don't really see the issue.

He looks a lucky smug son of a bitch for sure. Suck the chrome of a harley tailpipe i bet

the fact that nobody replied to this means nobody knows jack shit about Jeff in here

>control + f "whoever came up"
>0 results
"Whoever came up with this sheer fisting of an encounter can go fuck themselves. Do me a favor so I don't waste my guild's time on this kind of jackass shit-fest again, send me an email at [email protected] when you decide to A) Implement an encounter that wasn't designed by a retarded chimp chained to a cubicle A.)Get a Quality Assuarance Department C) Actually beta test the fucking thing and D) Patch it live. And please for god's sake -- do it in the order I laid out for you. Don't worry, I won't charge you a consulting fee on that one. And for good luck you might as well E) Pull your heads out of your asses. While you're at it rename the game to BetaQuest since you've used up you're alotted false advertising karma on the Bazaar and user interface scam of '01.Fix the Emperor encounter. Fix Seru. Rethink your time-sink bullshit. Fix all the buggy motherfucking ring encounters (I suggest you let whoever made the Burrower one do this since that dude apparently laid off the crack the rest of you were smoking). Fix the VT key quest. Fix VT (just guessing it's fucked up considering your track record). Don't have the resources to fix this stuff? Move the ENTIRE Planes of Power team over to fixing Shadows of Luclin AND DO IT NOW. If you don't fix Luclin, you jackassess will be the only ones playing the Planes of Power."

why would anyone care he made a shitty quest

also chcecked

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it's mostly a meme. I like Jeff, especially this everquest forum post he made.

>shitposter from the deadest general

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Some of what you said is actually very true user, however it sounds to me like you should lay off the Alex Jones podcasts a little bit too.

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how do you enjoy it knowing that these gaming companies employ a full line of board certified psychologists and neuroscientists whose sole purpose is to steal as much time from you as possible in this attention economy? Bury your head in the sand? Every "hidden gem" in your favorite game was designed to push a button in your head.

Knowing valve brought in a big name economist for their TF2 hat economy, I wouldn't expect anything less.

hello my fellow faggot, havent visited it in over a year 2bh
banning gambling actually killed it

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I have worked on a few games where the devs didnt want to admit that it was a skinner box. I personally see no issue with it at all and I am working on a game now where I openly talk about the techniques I am employing. Although instead of "skinner box" I refer to it as strengthening the compulsion loop.

I just recently decided to strengthen the compulsion loop on an indie game I am working on now. And I have dev blogs where I actually talk about what techniques I am employing. I personally think that the reason most devs wont admit that they are making skinner boxes is that they simply don't realize it yet. Skinner box design is a natural result of building games in a competitive market. I don't personally see it as a bad thing as its kind of what people are paying for, they want that high so I will work hard to provide it.

This guy is a massive SJW. He now has his employees banning people before they're reported in-game based on youtube comments they don't like. They have a team of people trying to investigate links between what they deem as "toxic" comments on social media to Overwatch usernames so they can preemptively "take action".

So to answer your question OP; seeing how XLM, Cardano, Google, YouTube, etc. have all made it this far while being completely overrun by authoritarian ideologies, the only logical explanation is that you must adopt SJW ideals to be successful.

he was in a top hardcore raiding guild in everquest for many years before joining the dev team in WoW to help develops and balance bossfight mechanics.

Diablo 2 when

sucking dicks

Videogames are for manchildren

>all of the games developed today are designed for the exact same goal, there are almost no video games designed to tell you a real story or pass a message

I take it you probably havent played a lot of games. Storytelling IS possible in games. The Witcher series has a solid story behind it. Horizon Lost Dawn has an excellent story, because the guy who wrote most of Fallout New Vegas writes for it. Wolfenstein II has a great story. Bioshock Infinite has a fucking awesome story.

I don't doubt at all that the big studios are doing what you claim, but there is storytelling happening. The games we're talking about are MMOs, shooter, and MOBAs, where story is secondary or tertiary to gameplay. There's more than those genres in the gaming market, and in some of them, storytelling is doing just fine. WoW used to have semi-decent writing, now, not so much. Lore was a big part of the game in the early expansions, now it just exists as set decoration, it's one of my biggest complaints about the game, after the hamster wheel.

He made friends with a guy who ran a huge guild in EverQuest who got him a foot in the door job at Blizzard.

Thanks, we already established that. But hey, you tried.

Is this the jackdurden.com guy?

He was a real faggot in Everquest. Funny to hear him talk about TOKTHICK players when he was TOKTHICK as fuck as a player. He "won't tolerate" people talking bad about the devs but that was all he did in EQ. Predictably, he's found religion now that he's in the hot seat.
He has no clue how to balance an FPS, his "skill" is in tab-target MMO's. "We reduced the damage but increased the speed, so the overall DPS is the same, not sure why the hero's winrate dropped 20%" betraying a complete lack of understanding of how an FPS is played.
He likes "feels": this FEELS bad, this FEELS unfair, hey we made some changes guys they'll FEEL really good. Basically Overwatch an FPS made of pure soy.

you know the soy meme is dying because the people who use it are progressively more out of touch and unfunny

>unfunny
I wasn't joking, Overwatch is overly influenced by SJW's and identity politics
>out of touch
I'm out of touch with what, exactly?

OW is nothing special.

The loot boxes are what makes it successful. Putting literal gambling into games and expecting them not to be successful monetarily is stupid.

These fuckers need to be put behind bars.

I'll just leave this pose here

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Do more people play fortnite or OW? I’d assume fortnite rn. How long until blizzard makes a Battle Royale? What was titan

why assume something easily looked up i hate biztards man

it's ok OP. I'm banned from /v/ anyway so we can discuss this here.

A lot of people get very lucky and choose successful companies to work for. If your vision for the company matches theirs and you can perform properly (I.E. make THEM money) then you can move up the ranks quite well like Kaplan.

Somebody gave him drugs

Can you hook me up with some skinner box design guidelines?

production values is one thing, but overwatch designs are meta-generic

>take a slot machine
>put it in a video game

be good at things

you're a brain dead fucking neck beard if you unironically think stories in games aren't dogshit awful. Read a fucking book

Feels pretty good, I guess? The button they're pushing in my head is the dopamine release I get when I feel accomplished, and the games are designed to challenge me and reward me in just the right amounts at just the right pacing to generate that feeling. This loop is commonly known as "having fun" or and a game that fails to push this button is also known as a "bad game."

I don't know why you're talking about simple game design concepts as if it's a conspiracy that only you've figured out. This is literally the service that I'm paying for in the first place when i buy a game.

Nobody's talking about artists, retard. The topic here is game designers, and portfolio refers to the projects they've worked on. It's as easy as it's ever been to start modding levels into existing games or even building your own games from scratch with cheaply licensed or even free modern engines.

>You need industry experience and a degree.
No, not really. Go look up the game directors of your favorite video games and count how many of them have a "degree" in any way related to game design. It's a sham and the whole fucking industry knows it's a sham. They get there by designing games and being good at it. That's really it. The gaming industry really doesn't give much weight to your education unless you're doing something highly technical like building the engine and development tools or something totally unrelated to design and development, such as marketing or business.

now I see why overwatch is on its downfall

i wish this was true for overwatch
that shit is mega frustrating
the matchmaking system is completely broken

Look at Warframe. Also play an MMORPG for a couple years.

>No, stupid. You don't get hired to be a game director with a fan art portfolio. You need industry experience and a degree.

A degree? I have worked on games for more than 20 years. Nobody worth a shit bothered to get a game design degree. In fact, most devs will look down on people who go to school for game dev because its a pretty good indication of how stupid you are for thinking it would matter.

>The gaming industry really doesn't give much weight to your education unless you're doing something highly technical like building the engine and development tools or something totally unrelated to design and development, such as marketing or business.

This is an understatement. Playing an MMO hardcore for a few years while building levels for CS:GO and posting pictures on Mapcore is far more productive than going into debt to learn how to be a brush monkey. In fact its fucking hilarious!

>requires no formal education
Ok buddy
How are the tendies today?

google "saturn return"
going through it myself right now... awesome stuff, if you lean into it
t./x/phile

Maybe that explains why overwatch is such a terrible fucking game

I ate ten tendies today because 6 seems like too little, 7 would be perfect.
fuck you mcdonalds

>The Witcher series has a solid story behind it. Horizon Lost Dawn has an excellent story, because the guy who wrote most of Fallout New Vegas writes for it. Wolfenstein II has a great story. Bioshock Infinite has a fucking awesome story.

Read a fucking book then because your standards are so low that it would need an entire book itself to demonstrate it.

The witcher sucked ass. You couldnt create your own character. Instead you had to play with that faggot. It just gets lame eventually when you realise that even if you slay monsters and gain good stats you will always remain a faggot

Literally everything in life that causes pleasure has some downside to it. Video games are fun, relaxing, exciting, challenging, engaging, intense, etc. It is solely up to the person playing to limit the amount of time playing them, just as someone should limit the amount of cigarettes, porn, fast food, alcohol and other drugs, TV, gambling, reading and other sources of entertainment and pleasure. It's self control. Some people simply are better at it than others.

The issue is that many of these games are engineered toward building addiction, if you don't see the ethical issue in that then I guess you just don't have the mental capacities to understand the discussion.

>I don't know why you're talking about simple game design concepts as if it's a conspiracy that only you've figured out.
Maybe because millenials see video games as a completely harmless hobby (probably a knee jerk reaction to their boomer parents criticizing it while being clueless about it) while it's less and less the case and there are very real bad social consequences for lots people.

>This is literally the service that I'm paying for in the first place when i buy a game.
Good for you if you are conscious about it then but pretty sure most gamers have close to no awareness about how it works.

I alway get a laugh when I read under 25's on Veeky Forums thinking their life is over because they didnt graduate college at 21. Funfact for all my friends on Veeky Forums, you can turn your life around at any age if you put your effort into it.

And for all you hyper-neets look up learned helplessness.

>if you don't see the ethical issue in that then I guess you just don't have the mental capacities to understand the discussion.

Its not an ethical debate at all. The games are engineered this way but its on the individuals to make proper life choices. You cant blame the devs for the existence of people who become addicted to their games anymore than you can blame alcohol vendors for alcoholism.

Normally I'd agree about RPGs where you can't customize yourself, but the Witcher series are fucking great. Read the books.