damn it Enekie these just aren’t getting old
Warfronts aren’t over until I have all the armor.
Islands are just the right kind of boring for me, provided they don’t reduce the XP you get. I still haven’t done them on a max level in months, though I want to grind out at least the toys from the vendor.
I’m not so sure there will be Siege 2 since devs said we’d know who the last boss is at the end of this raid & it’s Azshara or N’zoth. This gives a whole patch for Sylvanas and Tyrande to ride a tandem bike in at the end of the raid and be like “'sup guys we’ve been prepping to fight DEATH ITSELF, we’ll need N’zoth to live in this dagger so we can spin it and see who kisses Nathanos ^_^”
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Stop giving Danuser ideas
Do you find warfronts fun though?
About the third time I run the same warfront I feel like I’m fighting not to fall asleep. The repeatability value just feels very low and I’m not sure how to fix that. My guess is Blizzard isn’t sure how to fix them either.
A lot of the criticism of lack of content in BfA comes down Blizzard assuming players would run islands and warfronts at a much higher rate than they actually did.
Pretty much this. Warfronts are about as engaging as watching paint dry the 3rd time through
And the only reason i tolerated Island Expeditions as long as i did was for rep.
What’s a warfront?
I don’t know anyone who finds warfronts fun.
In fact, wasn’t it originally a big problem where people would show up and AFK because the NPCs would eventually take care of it?
Point being: I concur that getting rid of warfronts makes sense at this point, since they’re not great. But dang, it’s kind of a trip to look back on BFA and realize that over 50% of the selling features turned out to be duds, isn’t it.
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Warfronts should have been a pvp thing not a PVE thing. For those that didn’t want to pvp they could have had a pve implementation with gathering resources.
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There are a few things I wish about warfronts:
There were more of them e.g. Eversong and all were going on at once to make the world actually feel like it’s at war.
They used the dynamic AI on islands (and a lot more of it) e.g.
— loads of enemy units and new characters that hover between nameless NPCs and big lore NPCs
— Allied units that get buffs based on your performance and might follow you automatically, seeing you as a “hero unit” of sorts (as opposed to “buying” NPC helpers like you do now)
They simplified the resource gather/spend component of the RTS angle e.g. you mine, get wood, loot enemies and it all becomes a single resource — perhaps sent back/ handed to NPCs.
**
As it is now, if at all possible I go in as a healer otherwise it’s so boring. If it was more “alive” and fast paced, the time it takes wouldn’t matter so much. As they are now, they take too long.
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Here’s the thing. I know we talk about how it was great when we were just individual soldiers in the army instead of being The Champions or whatever, and that’s all true, but…
I don’t think anyone’s fantasy in WoW involved being a Peon/Peasant and gathering lumber.
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Agreed. I get they were trying to give it an RTS feel but they could have done that without us continually (warfront after warfront) earn and use the right to chop wood.
For example, have heaps of NPC squads running around. Peons/serfs come to the players and you go with a half dozen of them + a few soldier NPCs (island AI style with dialogue,too) and fight to protect them as they chop wood. Or something.
“We can make this exciting… sometimes a Treant will pop up!” Bahahhaha
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It was more like they would show up and afk because the people who weren’t afk would eventually take care of it.
I don’t think this gets enough mentions as to why BfA is bad. They invested a huge amount of effort into features most people didn’t like. Yet all I hear is BfA is bad because corporate greed.
Corporate greed isn’t the reason the story is bad.
Corporate greed isn’t the reason islands/warfronts flopped.
Corporate greed isn’t the reason class design is bad.
Corporate greed may be the reason the war campaign wasn’t voice acted but the writing was so bad voice acting would have only made it worse.
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I’m not sure they’re unrelated. Corporate greed is definitely a factor in the new Blizzard culture which adamantly refuses to understand what gamers want in this decade or listen to their own customers.
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Actually, it kind of is.
Profits Over Product mindset means that they’re churning out shorthand content. You’ll recall that most of the stuff we’re talking about today actually were brought up by consumers in beta. Hell, some of them were brought up in alpha.
It’s worth remembering that the concepts sounded cool. Warfronts sounded awesome. Azerite armor sounded like getting three different abilities instead of just the one that the Artifacts gave. But all of them turned out like flops early in the beta and all of them could have been fixed.
But fixing those things costs money that could buy the CEOs another yacht, so they didn’t happen.
You are right, of course.
BfA’s story is just one entry in a long, long list of capitalism’s sins.
I don’t really associate Ion having almost no accountability with corporate greed, more like corporate incompetence.
I mean look at FFXIV, the latest expansion was probably the best storytelling in the MMO format ever and their director manages to be far more popular with his own playerbase than Ion despite using a translator to speak English.
Yet they’re both run by greedy, profit driven corporations. Blizzard even likely spent more on story than FFXIV did. Just… one managed to hire competent people to put in charge of important aspects of the game and one didn’t.
Don’t be silly.
It’s so they can buy another yacht that is big enough to put their current yacht inside of it, like some depraved matroyshka doll.
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There’s a big difference between wanting more profits, and demolishing your reputation, products, and employees’ lives because you can’t stand not having all the green.
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I think differently: The sacking of Stormwind by the First Horde was portrayed as something that frightened the entirety of Lordaeron and was the reason why they banded together.
Arthas’ doing the grim maneuver of purging Stratholme was a moral horizon that he would never recover from.
And there’s more in Warcraft. The fall of the Nerubians as a people. The War of the Sands. The genocide of the Draenei in the past, ecetera.
Mass killings were always portrayed as very serious within Warcraft. Yes, it’s cliched and we can expect it, but the difference between the lasting impression that Teldrassil had given us and the multitude of others is that, all the while each are on the same level of severity (pretty bad) nothing really compares to Teldrassil.
Teldrassil was a poignant factor and was happening as we were playing through it. We were going in with expectations to be subverted. And we were wrong, some could say that we were lied to but that would be too aggravating.
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I feel like there’s a very small difference, to some degree.
Even at the level of greedy corporations, when FF14 initially bombed so hard that they even considered remaking the game from the ground up, they made the decision at the greedy corporation level to take that risk because, well, who knows. Maybe it was pride, maybe they actually believed customer retention would win out. Either way.
When anything Blizzard does starts bombing hard, they monetize the corpse and pull out as many resources as they can manage.
I don’t disagree or doubt that the competency of certain parties and individuals played large roles, but at some level both companies are operating on significantly different values.