No, they really weren’t. The difference then vs now was you didn’t have options so they could basically make the game they wanted and knew worked.
Now that you have about a thousand MMOs in market they have to pretend to care about game destroying ideas such as making the game a complete joke in difficulty to keep customers. It’s a bit different in say, Vanilla if you cry about “muh casual content” because what are you going to do? Go and play EverQuest where the same issue is a thing? Play Aion where the grind is even worse? Which is why games have to be made so horribly simple and easy these days, a lot of people are so weak the second they see the slightest amount of adversity in a game they will outright quit, now they have the options to find a game that will coddle them so it’s an actual threat.
They’ve been the same for years. I just always laughed at the fact folks paid thousands of dollars to go to Blizzcon. To then be sold games by these guys rofl. Not too smart but whatever LOL
Yeah, and that’s a fair stance to take and one I wish they stuck to more with WoW. The playerbase is essentially a dog that wants a bar of chocolate. We’ve seen what happens when we bend the game to satisfy these people, it declines. Or is it completely lost on you as to why the decline of WoW in terms of its playerbase coincided with when they started making the game very spoonfeedy and removed any semblance of challenge or achievement from the base game and instead made those things you had to go out of your way to find?
The things the Wrath-babies wanted were good for the short term, and outright DISASTROUS for the long term. For a “slippery slope fallacy” argument I’ve held onto for at this point over a decade, it’s proven to fall exactly in line with exactly where I said this would lead. This was something I saw at age 15, any educated adult should have seen this coming well before me, but that’s the thing. . . they don’t care how bad something is long term so long as they get the short term gratification.
I remember one time I was at Blizzcon when GC & his team did a class panel during MoP, and people were asking about what benefit magic mushrooms had for bear tanks. And the devs were spouting off this nonsense, and it became clear they didn’t even realize you couldn’t even use magic mushrooms in bear form.
Most expansions did not allow flying until either late in the expansion or or after it was over. Outland and Northend were exceptions. Why all of a sudden do people expect Blizzard to change that policy?
Here’s the thing, they didn’t merge all the AH, they merged the consumables.
The real money is in what they didn’t merge as all these world firsts and mythic raiding guilds have to burn tokens to get the best armors and gears over to their servers. I myself burned a couple tokens finishing up a set piece I wanted.
Right? I mean, it’s not like Blizzard is some paragon of responsiveness but to claim that it has never once in 17 years listened to its customer base is just bonkers.
People talk about how player housing will drive professions and crafting and that would be fine except that WoD teaches us that if players spend time in their houses / garrisons rather than out in the world then shared spaces seem emptier and given how much instanced content is already present, World of Warcraft becomes Lobby of Warcraft Instances.
I hope Bethseda releases Skyrim 2 so these single player people can just create their dream single player fortresses and decorate them the way they want.
Ghostcrawler literally told us when they took over they told them to maximize profits and not enjoyment.
Microsoft understands that happy players spend more time and money. So I’m hopeful that when Microsoft takes over they’ll prune the devs that won’t start designing for enjoyment.
People can say all they want about Microsoft - but they DO know what players like, that’s why they’re so successful. Now if EA had bought WoW, I’d be doomsaying right now. Lol.