Look how long metro, snowfox and palehoof were green. You’ll essentially have to throw a sack of puppies into a river to lose it.
Though in this case I don’t see anything wrong with what Mira is doing.
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But that’s not true.
They’ve dumped a ton of goodwill to panic meet quarterly numbers. I mean the last two years have been proof of this. You could say fairly that’s Activision.
At some point the cost is going to be too big to continue doing this and they’ll stop. They’ll be forced to.
So I don’t think it’s fully intentional. I think like you’re saying they’ll float along as long as they can but ultimately they need to listen to us and they want a successful product as much as we do. The trouble is both confusion and hubris. Like said earlier the community can appear to be schizo but when you get them to fully provide feedback there are common threads running through all the complaints.
Specifically class design, the GCD changes everyone hated, etc. The modern changes are all bad and should be reverted. MoP class design was better. The game was better without CRZ/Sharding. You don’t have to ask why or understand why. Just do it. That’s what they ought to do.
I’d argue more the quarterly panic is more due to the internal scandals brought to light and the fact they have major competition is objectively crushing them to the point where even the non gaming media can’t help but report/acknowledge it.
I’m not going to argue the game is in a pretty poor state and getting worse overall…but as a very objective and fact-based person, I can’t help but see the improvements SL has made too especially in areas I would argue have been huge negatives for the game…namely infinite grind power systems. The sins that Legion started and BfA doubled down on SL has actually got largely right and made way better.
But at this point, I’ve come to expect far more from Blizzard. Just like a new person at a job is expected to make mistakes and generally be slower than someone whose been there longer, there still comes a point where it isn’t acceptable anymore. It stops being an issue of “you’re new and will get the hang of things” to “you’re just actually incompetent”. It is clear they want to transform the beloved MMO into a glorified e-sport with MMO elements to it. It’s clear they want to milk subscribers for as long as they can get away with. It absolutely is due to Activision.
But this all largely off topic anyway. Personally, I’ve no real intent to give any of the council members my seal of approval nor do I doubt any of them actually give a damn. They certainly don’t speak for me since only “I” speak for me.
Yeah my point is that it’s not proactive but reactive. That’s my read on it. That’s why I say if it’s reactive then they’re not intentionally screwing us over.
Yours is better than mine by virtue of a few things. Namely they stepped on multiboxing hard this expansion which I didn’t like and they left warlocks in the same terrible state they were in 8.0. In other words I had nothing to be happy about.
This I agree with 100%. The problem is their developers spend their time in the Bay area social environment which is the antithesis of the rest of the world. The rest of the world is culturally, ethnically homogenous. The impression from bay area to non-bay area can be surprisingly toxic for this reason. That of course isn’t the only difference but it explains a lot of why Twitter isn’t representative of the rest of the world.
Also agree on the e-sport thing. It’s along the same lines. The game is catered towards cutting edge instanced raiding when most of their players don’t care for this sort of thing at all.
They don’t understand their demographic and it’s hurting their business. That’s how I see it. I don’t think any of it is proactive but reactive which means they really don’t know what they’re doing.
It took a LOT more than that. They had free license to troll.
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Also, as J. Jonah Jameson once famously said, “Slander is spoken, in print it’s libel”.
This confuses me a bit. Blizzard is not in the San Francisco bay area. Blizzard is down in Orange County near LA. Irvine to be specific.
The rest of the world is also not homogenous. I am sure some towns are but I can walk out my door and see all kinds of different people from lots of backgrounds and origins. I live in a smallish town area even.
The vast majority of the world is homogenous. You’re just looking at it in terms of uniculture. I’m not saying that. Outside of the cities, or even in the cities you can go several city blocks and find a completely different group of people with different likes/dislikes. And the country is even more different. Go outside the country and find people even more different. Point being in each of these groups you have same likes/dislikes and same cultural beliefs.
The bay area is unique in that you have people of varying ethnic and cultural backgrounds living on top of each other. It’s not representative of the world beyond.
Also that they’re in Irvine and not SF is a good point but the situation isn’t terribly dissimilar. Most of the tech hubs in the country are in the same boat and why they don’t tend to understand the world outside.
I can’t get behind this anti wokeness or whatever you are intended. To say that Blizzard doesn’t understand their playerbase is just wrong. They absolutely 100% know their customer base. It’s just simply unacceptable to even fathom that a multi billion dollar industry isn’t neck deep in big data tools and technologies that give them the means to know actually so much about their customer base in borders on information overload.
Also these low rank and file game devs have absolutely no say (or, at best, minimal say) in the scope and direction of the game. They are little more than glorified code monkeys who are given a spec sheet and told to go make it. Your ire should be directed at the Blizzard executive leadership and even more at Activision leadership. Those individuals are the ones responsible for making the decisions that get translated and broken down into individual tasks the rank and file carry out irregardless of their personal opinions.
So no, I don’t buy Blizzard is out of touch and high on SJW agendas…in fact all evidence points to the contrary since Blizzard has been caught very much in a good old boys frathouse behind the scenes. Just because the spotlight is on them and you see all these supposed “woke” things happening doesn’t mean there is a culture shift happening…it’s purely a response meant to do damage control and make themselves look good for government agencies who themselves are largely incompetent buffoons at best.
I simply won’t give Blizzard a pass and will call a spade a spade. I 100% believe and would put IRL money down that Blizzard has data coming out of their ears that all gets sifted through and analyzed to death and the leaders have their meetings and conversations with projections on just how much can they push for MUA-friendly game elements and keep a certain percentage of the populace playing irregardless of overall happiness. They are certainly not getting all surprised pikachu face having worked as hard as they are on stuff and going “y u no like??? We no know how 2 do tings”.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on the first paragraph. I really don’t think these companies are saying “f the demographics we’re going to do what we want.” That’s not good business and they know that.
I do agree the rank and file aren’t designers. They don’t get to say what emotes get cut. I’m not blaming them either. You get a general sense from the forum that both men and women dislike the portrait, clothing and emote changes. Someone over at HQ is the reason this is happening though and that person is wholly out of touch with the player base.
Well the company isn’t the company that made WC3 or WoW anymore. They’ve since added a lot more people and those people come from varying backgrounds. So do provide varying types of feedback and do see the world through their own lens. You can’t say for example that the D3 directors, designers and such didn’t have massive discretion over that product. They did. They just didn’t fully appreciate the D2 demographic. I see the same thing happening with WoW. Maybe the devs came from projects that weren’t MMOs (like D3) and they make design choices they think would be good but are ultimately bad for the MMO.
I think they have data too. I just don’t think it’s as useful as you’re making it out to be. Unhappy people are often not very good at telling you what makes them unhappy.