A) People complain every beta though. Legion beta was filled with negative feedback.
B) When late alph/beta rolls around and it starts to look like warfronts/Islands aren’t going to be nearly as popular as they had hoped what choice did they have? Delay the expansion for a year while they start making new features from scratch? While players are up in arms about content drought?
Now class design, they have less of an excuse. I mean they could just pull the mop classes off the shelf and have something far better than they spent working on for BfA.
There’s a difference between greed, and working for profit. I’m not an especially money-driven person, but I wouldn’t do my job for free, and I’m not gonna turn down raises either.
This is getting into a much bigger topic than game design but I think it actually does come back down to greed, yes, because greed is short-sighted. A self-regulated market is a fantasy; all of history shows that corporations will always grab for short-term profit no matter what damage they know it will do them in the long run. Square and Blizzard are both profit-driven, but Square looks beyond the tip of its nose instead of grabbing at shinies, and that makes all the difference.
Blizzard putting the game team in charge of the overall story instead of people who are actually good at narrative and story telling saves them the tiniest fraction of a percent of their overall budget. So many of BfA’s issue could have been resolved at little to no cost that I’m hard pressed to attribute it to greed.
So many of the decision are not like “Oh we’re going to make a killing in the short term but we’ll pay for it in the long term.” it’s “This will hurt us now and hurt us later but we’re going to do it anyway.”
I’m not sure you can realistically put Square anywhere near Activision Blizzard’s level of corporate greed.
One responded to a tanking game due to their own mistakes by apologizing, shutting it down, and rebuilding it from the ground up.
The other responded to the most successful financial year ever by firing 800 people and is so out of touch with their own community they were actually surprised that announcing a Diablo Mobile game to the crowd at BlizzCon went poorly.
It’s a very Hazzikostas philosophy of content design: you have to grind the same boring thing over and over and over ad nauseum in the hope of the number generator finally spitting out the pieces you want. Keeps 'em coming back without having to actually keep creating new content.
They remind me of battlegrounds honestly. PvE battlegrounds though.
When you think about it, battlegrounds are the same old content, with different teams.
If anything it’d be neat to spice up warfronts by giving them not only different end bosses, but different racial themes each time. Idk, maybe one week Arathi gets reinforced by Draenei who have like Vindicaar-esque orbital tech that’s really messing with your soldiers or the ground, or maybe Alliance Darkshore gets attacked by Tauren shock-troops, which are really hard to bring down. I dunno, give them something to make them a little different each time and it’d be way more interesting.
Made even worse that you can only get certain pieces from the once-per-cycle quest reward… which can also just give you the completely normal transmog pieces instead.