Blizzard didn't lose their touch, the player base changed

Community General Discussion
21

If you think Blizzard have gotten worse, I have no issue with you.

As far as the playing community in-game is concerned, I think player behavior improved significantly over time. I’ve been playing my main since BC, while I only dabbled on a warrior in vanilla, and in BC and Wrath, the toxicity of any group were insane, especially for us pure DPS. I had personally experienced being yelled at because my rotation was wrong during trash pulls, tanks pulling all the trash in a room and quitting, being refused any heals because I or other DPS did something wrong that only the healer could see, being kicked from a heroic group (that I spammed 3 hours for in trade) because the tank’s guildie came online and wanted to join, getting kicked because my friend who had a physical disability (which I explained to others in the group) couldn’t “keep up” before being called names, and basically name calling and finger pointing any time we wiped.

Nowadays the worst I would get is silence. Any verbal toxicity is rare at best. In fact, the last truly toxic LFD/LFR group I remember was in LFR SoO, which was way back in MoP.

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22

It’s Blizzard that has changed. The game is supposed to evolve and get better, but that’s not what happened. The game started out as having “add & improve” cycles with each expansion, the it changed along the way to a lets “remove or limit this & that” every expansion. The game is just a shell of it’s former self now; so many things have been stripped away.

Like another poster said, they need to have looked at reasons why people stay as well as reasons people leave. I guess that’s part of the playerbase’s fault for not praising what they loved instead of just complaining about what they hate. However, at the end of the day it’s not our decision anyway.

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23

What I gives you the right to say that considering your achievements?
Wow is certainly accessible as
Your armory shows. But tell me about what part of the game
You push yourself in?

24

After mythic raiding, M+ dungeons, arena ladders, rated battlegrounds, and war mode, I’m not sure how much more Blizzard could have pandered to the “hard core” crowd as pretty much all activities except for a handful all have hard modes. They even added a heroic mode to warfronts (although it’s not that hard, admittedly.)

Or are you implying that most casual friendly aspects be removed and only designed as hard modes?

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25

The game was built such that those naive kids in their early teens would grow into their late teens and early adulthood into the types of players who were passionate about WoW, who would then interact with the next generation of naive kids, and so on.

The game always gave players the little push where it’s better to have more friends, it’s better to have more game knowledge, it’s better to improve your character. You weren’t just fed all the content and shineys and mounts and whatever, those were rewards for doing the things that make an MMO an MMO. And Blizzard moved away from that.

So I’d say Blizzard did lose their touch, and it caused the playerbase to change. There was always a stream of players coming in, getting old, and being replaced by new players. It just so happens that the game didn’t move in the direction where the players coming in aren’t staying at rates higher than the players retiring anymore.

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26

If you must know, I don’t push myself in this game at all, there isn’t any point in it! I play to relax and have fun

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27

Here’s a radical thought: instead keep predicting and guessing what are players changing into or what is going to be the next ‘hot thing’, how about focus on things that won’t change?

Players won’t be magically enjoy time-gated content.
Players won’t be fond of being grounded until the developers decided ‘it is time’.
Players won’t be happy to see their previous baseline skills repackaged as ‘talents’.
Players won’t be thrilled to be told that ‘in order to do content X you must be in Spec Y because your favorite spec Z sucked if you like doing content X’.
Players won’t be glad to spend more time on ‘traveling from point A to point B’ than they previously do.

Let’s start with that, instead doing stuff like removing portals and try to tell players how such change makes the world ‘feels’ bigger.

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28

Anyone attempting to discuss the change in Blizzard as “casual” vs. “hardcore” or “skilled” vs. “unskilled” is using the wrong frame. Harder dungeons in Cataclysm, LFR, the back and forth between raiders vs. non-raiders… all that type of stuff is just part of the eternal back-and-forth that they’ve always grappled with.

The real root of the change in Blizzard is not about “hardcore” vs. “casual.” It’s about a single-minded focused on orienting the game around maximizing the “time played” metric. That’s where, in a way that kind of gets to the soul of the company, to their ethic and principles in game design, they’ve really changed.

Sure, it affects all that other stuff, off and on, in myriad ways. But they’re being driven much more by “what keeps the player online” these days rather than “what makes a fun and satisfying experience” and it deeply shows. It’s not driven by a changed playerbase, it’s driven by a greater (and more sophisticated) focus on the business side of Blizzard on analysis of player retention metrics, and a single-minded pursuit of short-term, quarterly profits rather than long-term health of the brand.

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29

How long did you play Wild Star?

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30

This would make sense if the game wasn’t rock bottom population wise. However its in the gutter and has been declining since they started down this path of garbage decisions. Only reason the game has stayed as strong as it has is off the back of good will misplaced by players.

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31

Agreed, everyone started to hate Vanilla about the same time I did (was never going to log into it again, then got an invite to BC beta.)

BC improved the game for me, as well as lots of people. We had stuff to do instead of stagnating at 60, unable to raid. OR, the people who COULD raid but had pretty much done it all had new stuff to do.

I think change is good, with me liking most of them. I love the game moving away from “epics for raiders only!” Eventually, Blizzard found out that a LARGE portion of their player base either could not, or did not WANT to do that content; But those people still had 15 bucks a month to spend.

I also love titanforging. Like other things, it was only spoiled by elitism. There is nothing wrong with the possibility of something being better, what is wrong is a group of people saying “Since that COULD be better, we DEMAND that you keep doing stuff until you get a BETTER one.”

I don’t think the answer is making everything “Vanilla”, in more ways than one. The answer is to stop being such elitist jerks, just play with everyone, and have fun.

BZZT, or for 15 years, since beta phase 3 of Vanilla, only taking a vacation a bit after WoD started until Legion was released. If they went by my MAU, or whatever the heck that time played daily metric is, they’d also be INCREDIBLY SUCCESSFUL! During most of those years, when I did play, I’d often be logged in for at least 2 hours a day.

I also disagree that Blizzard has “changed for the worse.” Legion was the BEST expansion for me, OF ALL TIME. It fit my playstyle the most, kept me logged in the most, having a fun time the most. BFA was an adjustment, seeing all the fun of Legion go away. I basically was just stuck in the drudgery, in BFA, until 8.2 with stuff I actually like doing again.

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32

They really didn’t have to change anything to cater to casuals, they would have played regardless and would always strive for that best gear, spoonfeeding them just made the progression system worthless.

You said that the playerbase changed but it didn’t, they adapted to blizzard making changes. Your whole argument actually shows that blizzard did lose its touch, by catering to casuals that liked the game the way it was. They would have learned regardless. Making it easier and easier is what killed/killing the game, and BfA shows the penultimate of those efforts. Or lack of effort, since thats what this expansion was to begin with.

Making progression worthless and time spent worthless is what is currently killing the game, there is no pride in what you do or no feeling of accomplishment since some scrub that spends less than a few weeks played time can do the same thing you do in a few days. You get something earlier, who cares, anyone can get it now. And people still have the audacity to complain that some things take too long.

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33

This hardcore-is-the-right-way-casuals-killed-the-game narrative will be put to the test in the weeks and months after classic launch. Wildstar bet on this narrative only five+ years ago. Today, they no longer exist.

The wildcard for classic might be streamers. With their ability to move the market (as influencers in millennial-speak) and prop up demand, the devs might be able to leverage the draw of the streamers to keep interest in classic alive longer than it would have normally been. So far they’ve done this brilliantly. But the market eventually catches on and hype can’t keep it up forever. I doubt even streamers like Asmongold would have been able to save Wildstar. lol

The people argument is more compelling than the software argument. The world changed, the player base changed. Vanilla WoW’s monster success was being the right game at the right place at the right time in online gaming history. We’ll see how quickly or slowly players in classic revert to the mean (figuratively and literally).

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34

and we’re coming back for Classic.

35

Yeah I mean there’s nothing wrong with stoning people, it’s just the community that’s changed, our perception, it’s actually alright.

36

Granted I might be out of the loop, but I don’t know if Blizzard is pushing time played metric for WoW specifically. I mean I took a look at their latest reports, and they’re indicating hours played for the entirety of Blizzard.

Hours played can be an important metric for games with no subscription models, which are the entirety of Blizzard’s output save for WoW, since it could be used to extrapolate in-game purchase revenues and forecast expected sales numbers for future expansion packs or sequels. And of course for King, MAU and time played is everything, since ad revenue would be a major source for Candy Crush. For WoW, they were focusing on the fact that the number of subscribers had increased as well as the revenue, but I couldn’t find any mention of time played.

For WoW particularly, hours played metric wouldn’t make sense. Blizzard would make MORE money if subscribers played LESS as they would save on bandwidth and server costs. Granted hours played would indicate whether or not such subscribers will stay, but that’s more of a nebulous type of argument.

But in any event, I’ll search more, but I have yet to find any Blizzard or Activision statements linking time played to WoW. I would revise my opinion if I could find any documents making such links.

37

Sorry, I can’t take this thread as seriously credible. You never played vanilla and also, I don’t really think you were old enough to really understand the complexity of the game design and difficulty till the game design was drastically and permanently changed in a way that makes you unable to see and perceive the full picture of how much they have lost their touch.

For example, as a hypothetical, It’s like trying to tell your dad how your grandpa hasn’t lost his sharpness when you never really knew just how sharp your grandpa was because you never saw or experienced how sharp he was in his 20’s and 30’s when your dad lived it. When you really only remember how your grandpa was from 50 on when you were old enough to actually understand the concept of what “being sharp” was.

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38

I think this is the biggest lie.

The player base didn’t change. Blizzard did. They wanted to capture a different audience and changed how they design the game to do so.

They complain about a cyclical player base, they went out of their way to forcibly acquire. They’ve been creating a game to entertain for hours instead of months, and It shows.

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39

I think the design philosophy and content release schedule we had in both Mists of Pandaria and Legion was the best, for an expansion. WOTLK was good but had little content and bad endgame content overall: Naxx rehashed, the small repetitive Trial of Crusader and one year of ICC, etc.

WoD was abandoned halfway and BFA, while having content to do, is failing miserably in its design philosophy. Cataclysm only failed because Blizzard tried to do a World Revamp and at the same time one full-fledged expansion, instead of using the World Revamp as Endgame content.

What Vanilla has that no other expansion ever had is well explained by Kaplan/Tigole referencing a quote from Metzen in Blizzard latest video:

That’s what WoW is missing, even in LK people had this feeling because of Achievements, and BC because most players were still new to the game.

This is something that I think Elder Scrolls Online and other MMO do better than WoW = Releases new Content/Expansions but keep the whole world still relevant in some scale.

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Entertain? If the masses were entertained they would still be playing. They changed their model from being about the quality and fun of game play to being about how much $$$ they can squeeze out of you. It’s the difference between a mom and pop shop and how a corporation works. While the mom and pop shop cares about reputation and quality of their product to the customer the corporation cares about the profit margins of it’s share holders.

Same with Blizzard, who they are ultimately trying to please has changed from the customer to the share holder.

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