Blizzard admitted in blizzcon that extreme alt unfriendliness, ridiculous ap grinds were a mistake in blizzcon, yet words mean nothing without actions to accompany them which is why shadowlands could just end up being ridiculously grindy and full of time gates. As well as most likely being rushed to meet the release deadline because 8,3 was clearly not ready, full of bugs and clearly rushed questlines and systems. And guess what, there’s no shadowlands beta yet, they are nowhere even close to ready so expect a rushed expac because they won’t push the deadline passed 2020.
8.3 has made grinding and alt unfriendliness worse, from purposefully wasting as much player time as possibly by forcing them to fly around huge distances, to demand daily grinds to collect currency for mandatory cloak upgrades to ridiculous grinds for corrupted gear.
Corrupted gear that are worse than legendaries, at least with legendaries you knew you would get them eventually and at the end they were forced to add a vendor. For corrupted gear? You want a specific effect at a specific corruption level and you need MULTIPLE of them.
And guess what? Skill no longer matters. Doing good dps is now RNG, because it is all about who gets lucky and gets their infinite stars first that gives them 20-30k dps depending on spec, yeah a huge dps increase and your character’s performance depends completely on LUCK. Just look at your bad guildie get lucky and suddenly have top dps because he got lucky. Even after the 25% nerf we are talking about 10-20k dps increase which is crazy(and also why the mythic race is gonna be a failure because they either roflstomp with corrupted gear or the raid can’t be done if you don’t get lucky to get your bis corrupted gear)
But don’t worry. All you have to do if you want to compete in pve or pvp is to keep grinding as much as possible so you get your infinite stars so you don’t stay behind, just keep playing to improve those metrics m8, you don’t want to stay behind in corrupted gears and cloak levels and be at the bottom ;^)
And you know what? If they actually cared about fun corrupted gear and not just forcing people,through infinite rng grinds they could have easily made a currency and a vendor for corrupted gear. But they didn’t, Ion would have a heart attack if he show swtor’s class vendors that have legendaries aka tactical sand set pieces all sold for easy to aquifer currency instead of forcing people into grinds to get them.
And for the people who are just gonna pretend that is normal grinding and how things always operated let me link a post that proves you wrong. But let’s be honest, it won’t stop your blind defense or blizzard
As much as I want to have hope in shadowlands. It is clear they are just gonna double down on grinding and time gates so people stay more and don’t leave because if they leave they ll get punished by missing out on time gates and rng gear.
Difference is, when you use punishment as a way to keep players staying, the moment they decide to leave, they don’t come back unless huge changes are implemented.
