Disconnected with the player base? It use to be FOR the players and now its just ‘for the money’ or the shortest quickest path to shut people up.
Don’t get me wrong, as a video game company making money makes sense, I would have the same mind set to make money but now out cast my whole community. Yes to many voices to listen to, trolls, hate, love, anger, dislike, whatever else combo the masses want to bring but something has changed and no this is not new.
I am just wondering at what point did this happen? Was it when activision bought them out? was it when wow went mega big? or something else that made blizzard go ‘for the player…PSH we don’t need to listen to them’
Maybe it was just being lazy? More easy to ignore countless crys for a better game/more content/changes we want and not do anything then engage the player base.
I have been playing WoW for a long time and can’t think of a single example of when they “listened to the players”
Sure, they used to have better communication but it was never great and has been a constant complaint since the game launched.
Overall, WoW has been a buggy unbalanced mess since launch and nothing has really changed…except that some players have created some romanticized version of Blizzard being great and caring
If they did things “just for the money” they wouldn’t have merged the AHs because now, the gold you earn from 3 callings which you can knock out easily in 20 minutes is more than enough a week’s consumables.
They made player gold more valuable which means that token sales would directly suffer as a result of this decision.
And if they were in it “just for the money” don’t you think they’d keep raising the sub fee instead of keeping it static for 17 years?
Welp as their unofficial motto goes “you think you do, but you don’t”
Like they think we don’t know what we want and that they do being nothing but pandering to a minority of players and doing the opposite of what the playerbase wants for some reason
Race changes
Faction changes
Realm transfers
Players complained about not being able to change their characters’ appearances, Blizzard came out with the barber shops.
Yep, Blizzard never listens to the players.
Also, people complained for years about multiboxers, Blizzard finally implemented changes to make it harder to multibox up to and including disallowing any hardware or software solutions that streamline the effort required to multibox.
They still do regular world boss and dungeon tuning so this is a strange argument. If anything this supports my point that things were always bad because those are things that could have been fixed during testing.
Yeah. How had that gone, lol. Hint: They added it back in for the money
Its interesting that you mention that the adding garrisons was giving players what they wanted…right before you mention they took them away because that is what players wanted. Did players also want class halls added and taken away?
Cataclysm. It was the first time they received a large amount of backlash for an expansion design and it caught them off guard. From then on the direct developer to player exchanges were fewer and fewer until they pretty much had been replaced by PR spin in Warlords.
people want different things. Blizzard does listen to it’s playerbase and if you say "i’ve been playing WoW for a long time and can’t think of a single example of when they “listened to the players” " you should get yourself checked for alzheimer’s.
The examples you provided for “listening to the players”…they tuned their content and they made bad design decisions and corrected them to try to slow down rate at which players were leaving.
Neither of which is “listening to the players”. Tuning should be done before content release (and was likely identified/ignored in testing) and implementing emergency fixes to stop players from quiting is money focused
When players complained that talents were too “cookie-cutter” in Wrath and Cata, they revamped the whole talent system to try and fix this, and are doing it yet again.
WoD had almost no good content for non raiders, so they added back class quests, introduced World Quests, a whole quest storyline and zone in Suramar, and created Mythic+.
When players were notably upset at Legion for how it handled RNG legendaries, they created deterministic ways to obtain them.
When players were upset at Artifact Power, they reworked it until it became a cosmetic and QoL currency.
They made mission tables optional rather than mandatory.
They removed Titanforging.
They nerfed loot drops for Shadowlands after players complained about loot " falling from the sky".
They tried to listen to players who wanted meaningful choice in the game with Covenants.
They then pulled the ripcord.
Zereth Mortis was a result of direct feedback from Korthia, making the 2nd legendary account wide and giving world content players a whole zone to discover in a brand new way.
Hilarious that you included this as an example of “listening to players”
Do you ever read the forums? This is still a constant complaint
So were they listening to players when the changed the first time and got rid of talent trees or when they brought them back? They also did this so horribly that everyone still used cookie cutter builds so I dont know that I would call this “listening”
This was a problem the entire x-pack and they didnt fix it until the last patch. Good job I guess.
lol are you kidding me? Blizz moving away from tough dungeons in WotLK because of complaints about how CC was mandatory in dungeon groups in BC is them not listening to players? Just “tuning” ?
Obviously we do not have any sources to use to explain Blizzard’s reasoning justify their changes.
But more often than not, the changes they do implement to fix player identified problems are way to slow for me to believe they are “listening”
For example, it took them almost 3 weeks to really address the lower Kara tuning issues which should have done before release. Im not sure I would give them credit for listening on that problem
No large MMO in the industry moves that quickly, and I have played most of them. Such a large ship to move likely requires many unseen hands we probably know nothing about.