Anyone Watch Former Vanilla WoW Dev Commentary on Retail?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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This is why we gave to be adamant about no changes.

I can’t take this fool in the pink sparkles hat seriously. And ion is just… incompetent? Certainly incapable of taking a step back and solving big picture issues.

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Even Kevin Jordan advises going into playback settings and putting him on 1.5x playback speed.

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You’re part of the problem

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This mentality is also one you utilize as a hardcore raider who’s theorycrafting. Remember, Ion after all was managing the guild called Elitist Jerks back in the days, which also ran the hotspot site for any hc raiders who wanted to min-max their performances. I frequently visited and posted on that site myself, as i was in that mindset too for a good while. It was fun in WotLK where raiding mattered.

And it was very effective, don’t get me wrong. It did the job of getting you the best out of your class/spec.
But i for one stopped having fun doing all this extra wörk when the games social structures started breaking down with sharding/crz etc.

What’s raiding the hardest stuff worth if you’ve got no community that tracks your server specific guilds progress at every step?
What’s raiding worth if you suddenly compete with thousands of guilds across all realms, rather than a couple guilds dedicated to only your realm, with it’s very own community?
Suddenly it all became about the number of bosses your guild killed in the fastest time…rather than fighting out an internal server competition with each tier that each realm experienced differently.

And what’s it worth when anyone can get seriously powerful items from the most easy tasks? Because even if you kill the hardest content, you never surely loot the most powerful items in the game, because with titanforging there’s always something that could’ve dropped that was better than what you got after finally killing that hardcore boss…

There’s no meaning behind trying to be the most skilled raiders anymore. I and many others it seems don’t care for numbers if that’s all that’s gonna define my guild and my character. It used to be much more than that, because of the social elements to raiding and your realm. Whereas now it’s all confined to guild cliques, and the realms don’t matter at all anymore. It sucks.
I don’t care for competing with other guilds when there’s no realm community who’s like “you know this super cool guild xy is on MY realm!? And they already killed xy boss?! Crazy right? One day i wanna play in that guild!”. (GL getting into any great guild nowadays Billy, cause you’re competing with much more than just 1 realms population this time)

Now it just feels like we ended up at a point where Ion directed the game into purely endgame and raiding, without any of the foundations which kept it meaningful (which required a consistent world/community).

In BFA (and other recent xpacks), anything that’s happening outside of the actual instances in the game is just a boring chore to get to the “good” parts.
It’s because all those chores take place in an environment of convenience and anti social behaviours, so they can be completed as efficiently as possible…
It really feels like the game is designed by a hardcore, analytical raider who doesn’t bother with all the other things in WoW that made it so rich, because he doesn’t see the point… and we don’t either anymore thanks to that same mentality still directing the game.

I wish he’d just have kept on making amazing raids. Ulduar is still my favorite up until his day, and he helped making it. I don’t think there’s anyone more qualified and skilled for the raid design job than him.
But i guess he wanted to achieve IRL titles and prestige as well, so he chose a path that leads towards that. Fair enough. Unfortunately though the game hasn’t had it’s best times with that approach though, and to me it’s pretty clear as to why that happened.
The mentality towards designing it also still seems to have stayed the same…which makes me worried for the future of this precious game.

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While I do enjoy listening to other points of view, there is a reason these former game devs are capitalizing on a game/company hate.

It’s lucrative.

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If you think they are capitalizing on game company hate you haven’t even tried to watch/listen, have made up your mind before hand, and just like labelling things you decided you don’t want to hear. Sounds like a political agendist, honestly.

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Kevin Jordan thinks there should be new content developed once Classic has had it’s original run. The double standard here is the praise he’s getting from some people in this thread. Those same people then go to the threads asking for post Naxxramas content to be developed and call those people trolls.

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a professional streamer makes :open_mouth: faces all the time and overexaggerates about everything and screams randomly to get more viewers
female ones display cleavage too

no, streamers who make a living off of it like he does are allowed to talk slowly and actually talk about stuff that children and teenagers might not be able to comprehend; his audience will be plenty broad without having to do that stuff after Classic comes out… unless Classic doesn’t get big because of stuff like overdone spell batching, overdone leeway, or RCR abuse

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Or maybe he’s interested in the direction the game he and a couple others designed is going in. Maybe he’s giving constructive feedback because he’d like to see it successful again.

Very small minded view you have. Like Ion.

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To be fair, as a Dev in original Vanilla he would have more knowledge of what was planned before TBC and the expansion was done up and released.

So he’s in a unique position to say “I know what we HAD planned back then, and i think it should be implemented…”

little bit different to people coming up with their own “THEY SHOULD ADD THIS!” stuff…

Also. I would rather listen to a Vanilla Dev than Ion… He’s sucked all the fun out of the game along with Brack and their QOL changes and your daily chore list. Anyways. Back to my popcorn

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I personally enjoyed listening to some of this guys commentary.

However, I have to note that Ion probably did this guy a favor by not hiring him. Activision isn’t interested in developing an MMORPG anymore. They are in the Cash Shop business which is apparently more lucrative than gaining subscribers.

This guy wouldn’t even be allowed to make most of the changes to WoW he’d want too.

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Agreed, IF someone did that then your point is valid.

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Ion shouldn’t be in the position he’s in. It’s pretty clear his thinking is too stiff and mechanical for design. Not saying he should be fired, just that he’s in the wrong position.

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Oh wow, someone has an OPINION that you agree with. Let’s make a new post treating it like an absolute truth that everyone else has to agree with now.

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Yeah I’m pretty sure one of the designers responsible for WoW has an opinion that holds more water than most other people.

Like I don’t know about you, but I typically prefer the OPINION of a doctor about some habit I have rather than some street corner psychic.

But that’s just me.

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You’re missing out then man. Street corner psychic changes my life… gave me these meds, look like shards of glass… so good.

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I agree, very well said.

In addition to losing Kevin Jordan, I think losing Jeff Kaplan, Mark Kern, Alan Adham and Rob Pardo from the WoW team (and, in the case of Kern, Adham and Pardo, who later left the company), the community pillar of the game crumbled.

Efficiency (e.g., LFG/LFR) replaced community which ultimately kills fun. For exmample, LFG/LFR replaced all my dungeon-running friends (where I spent most of my time). Once my friends were gone, the fun was gone and the game died for me.

I moved to PvP in MoP and made some new friends. But even then, the efficienty hammer was used on PvP in WoD and was made worse, which is saying a lot since PvP in MoP had its fair share of problems to begin with.

Blizzard has managed to kill the need for any friends in the game - which was the main reason I played the game in the first place. It’s more efficient than ever, and yet more boring than ever.

All the convenience and efficiency “improvements” came at a cost to the soul of the game - they gutted the game of meaningful friends (and, therefore, fun). Efficiency de-humanized the game in a way.

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Ion-competent. Coined it.

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Oh, Razaell. Incompetent is when you’re more than competent. This man Ion Hazzikostas is not just competent…he’s in-competent.

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Yea ion is much better