boy it sure is interesting how this vast fantasy world has only two (2) matriarchies and one is made up of explicitly evil misandrists and the other keeps getting humiliated and brutalized
DON’T READ INTO THIS - CREATORS HAVE NEVER LET THEIR REAL WORLD BIASES INFLUENCE THEIR WORK
What’s the first one?
EDIT: For some reason I periodically forget the Naga are matriarchal.
Hot take: there are no “love to hate” villains in WoW because every villain with any charisma has it because of Warcraft 3.
Every villain they’ve invented for purposes of WoW has been pretty awful. Only the ones with significant build-up over a franchise are at all interesting, and they tend to be underwhelming.
Prediction:
Blizzard plans to redeem Sylvanas and have her come back as her Ranger General self, but the Horde isn’t going to take her back, and the Alliance definitely isn’t going to let her join. So Sylvanas ends up remaining neutral and joins up with her sister Vereesa.
Together they unite the High Elves and Blizzard gives us High Elves next expansion as a neutral race where once you finish the starting zone you pick either Alliance or Horde, they do this because they desperately need subs back and want people coming back ASAP.
That’s my prediction.
I’ve used the blue eyes on my warrior to RP the idea that blood or high elf is simply political distinctions.
Wraith has blue eyes, refused fel, and meditated to stave off her magical starvation.
But she still had remained loyal to quel’thalas and calls herself Sin’dorei for what it is: solidarity for the lives lost when Arthas invaded.
Just remove Void Elves and Blood Elves while you’re at it.
I don’t see Blizzard doing it. They make most of their money off of the cash shop, not subs, so it’s the whales feeding the perpetual cycle of pain right now. Besides, I don’t think High Elves would be enough to get people to come back. That’d be a bandaid solution at best. If they added High Elves like you said, and then introduced yet more borrowed power systems, empty world maps, time-gated content, etc… then you can bet High Elves wouldn’t do anything.
It seems to me that with how much money they make from the cash shop they’d want to actually make a halfway decent game. More players = more people buying things from your shop = more money for Blizzard.
Mind blowing they’re sitting on a gold mine and all they have to do is start listening to player feedback and change how they’re writing the story and designing systems.
The problem is they’re in full-blown Mobile Mode.
With mobile games, you market to your whales, not your dolphins, and certainly not your minnows. You aim for the big spenders, the people who will throw thousands of dollars a week at your game, compared to the Dolphins who might throw $50 or the minnows who’d throw $5.
The players who pay and never use the Cash Shop? These aren’t the people the Devs are interested in. They’re the people they actively hate and wouldn’t mind seeing go away.
Or, you know, that they could just offer more things to spend money on than just mounts and pets. Give me novelty armor sets that don’t fit cleanly into the cloth/leather/mail/plate categories, even if they’re straight-up just repurposed assets from NPCs, and I’ll probably spend hundreds of dollars playing Barbie doll dress-up.
I’d be ok with this if its NPC appearances. A cash shop transmog that lets me look like one of the Shattered Hand Orcs in WoD would be great. My only hesitation is the worry they’ll start prioritizing unique armors to the cash shop instead of putting them as rewards in the base game.
I genuinely believe that Blizzard could, with a little work, make WoW the undisputed, utterly untouchable king of the MMO hill that it once was. The framework is there, and it’s still good.
I also genuinely believe that they have no desire to do so, because even if Monthly Active Users are down (and continuing to decline) they’re still turning a profit, and because shifting focus now would require that they acknowledge that they’ve made some missteps and could do better - something that seems to be anathema to the current development team.
And as much as the devs might try to argue otherwise on Twitter, I don’t think there’s much genuine love or care going into WoW these days. That’s why I find the “insider leak, devs PANCIKING over WoW’s poor performance and community discontent!!” stuff you see going around every now and again so funny. No one at Blizzard cares enough about Warcraft to panic over subs dipping. No one at Blizzard cares enough about the playerbase to feel anxiety over people being unhappy with the latest obtuse, overdesigned borrowed power system.
This is a company that doesn’t even listen to the people they invite to the PTR specifically to give feedback. I think it’s safe to say the only thing they’re paying attention to right now is revenue.
But because I am hopeful and an idiot I’d like to think that maybe, just maybe, that will change one day.
It’s funny when you compare the FFXIV devs to the WoW devs. It’s night and day actually embarrassing when you look at WoW…
Now that’s not me saying FFXIV is better than WoW, there is stuff I like better about both. But when it comes to the devs and how much they care about the game and community? It’s not even close that the FFXIV work on the game with a passion that Blizzard seems to have lost.
Just the fact that when Viera came out 2 years ago and people were like, “Hey where are the male Viera?” The devs at first said they didn’t plan to add them, here we are 2 years later they surprise us with male Viera because the demand for them was so high. Blizzard devs can’t relate LMAO.
Also, the devs worked on male Viera in their spare time to get them done, that’s dedication and shows you care about the players.
Blizzard devs need to take heed: add bishie bunny boys to WoW too.
No. Not at all.
let’s be real, blizz will never add bishonen anything
they gave us hunky elves and then proceeded to viscously mock them for being “effeminate” for years
i’m confident the only reason male characters can’t have visible jewelry is because several devs take issue with the idea that Those People might play their game
Two years???
looks at the crowd for Ogres and High Elves all the way back from Classic and High Elves only got some customization options literal years later
Ogres and High Elves aside I wonder how many years it will be before the rest of the old races get heritage armor
The funny thing is, the Devs only had meant to gender-lock Viera because of the lore. They were basically bringing Viera straight out of FFXII, in which the males were so rare they were virtually unseen. Like, less than 1% of the population of Viera were male or something. So its not as if they didn’t add them out of spite.
Players pointed out, “Yeah, you said the same thing with the catboys,” which is true, males are rare lorewise in the Miqo’te race. So, here we are. FFXIV’s Devs went, “Wow, players want this and we did already invalidate any reason why a race should be gender-locked based on the rarity of one gender or another.”
Anyway high elves are too rare to be playable here have void elves instead
I feel like there’s only a 60% chance that we even get the fabled Draenei heritage set in the next three years and then never hear anything about it ever again.