I grew up on Warcraft orcs vs humans, Tides of Darkness, reign of chaos, diablo 1 and 2…
I want to look forward to Blizzard “turning the corner” (ion) but like… diablo 4 looks like path of exile 2 without the character customization of poe. The RTS team left and made a new company, so no warcraft 4 or starcraft 3. Overwatch 2 just lost Jeff, so no confidence there.
Patch 9.1 still has conduit energy. Still. The most pointless, awful system that most people don’t even notice and those that do hate it. So… the Wow team isn’t exactlt inspiring confidence either. This is like how they refused to rework azerite armor until it was too late.
That’s the point. It’s such a small thing and yet the WoW team is hyper protective of it- like Azerite armor. That’s a bad sign. They aren’t willing to move away from bad ideas because they are 100% high on their own stash.
You’re the one who sounds jaded. You’re acting like they can’t improve.
This sort of “every criticism is a sign you shouldn’t play anymore” is what gave us BFA. Blizzard listened to you guys and launched with Azerite armor without a vendor and almost launched without a respec system.
I blame the sunk cost fallacy. They already devoted so much time and resources to crafting these various systems that when they get the feedback ‘we don’t want these systems’ all they can think of is how to fix the system so we will want it instead of realizing the best ‘fix’ would be to just scrap it and do something else.
Of course WoW players also suffer from the sunk cost fallacy, and that’s why a lot of us are still playing a game that they aren’t particularly fond of anymore.
We’re not even talking about scraping core systems.
We’re talking about conduit energy, a system that primarily impacts people who do more than one type of content or play more than one spec per character.
Most people stick to 1 or 2 types of content and only one spec, so the system doesn’t even exist for them.
For the people who are most engaged in the game? This basically acts like a 3 day cooldown on respecing.
In vanilla wow, the most you had to do to respec was pay 50 gold. 3 days in insane. Time is money friendo.
Sure, that would be a small QoL adjustment…but overall that doesn’t even really effect most peoples game play.
The big problems are the covenant system as a whole and the loot systems.
If they allowed the free swapping of covenants and account wide reward unlocks, they would provide content for casuals while also provide min-maxing capability for the high end players…
But since the entire borrowed power system is built around covenants, they can’t make the change
The needed changes to the loot system are pretty self explanatory.
This is like… their fourth QoL fix to that system.
Instead of just turning it off.
That’s programming and dev resources, for multiple patches… going into a system that doesn’t even exist for most players and is detrimental to the most engaged players.
Do you see how this is emblematic of a deeper problem? Like, all of BFA?
Iirc, they really only outsourced art/animation, which was was actually pretty good (with a few terrible exceptions). The vast majority of WC3:Reforged problems were in-house.
As far as the topic in general; at this point Blizzard is basically a brand new company that just has the old Blizzard IPs. I won’t pretend that the old guard was perfect or that they had no hand in creating the current environment, but ultimately they’re gone now and the newer people are the ones that are driving these IPs towards the edge of a cliff.
No offense to any rank-and-file Blizzard types as they clearly have some talented artists and programmers. I’ve said this a couple of times recently, but I get the feeling that these problems are mostly at the management level.
They have all of their best people working on mobile games because they can make more money with cash grab mobile games. Blizzard is just letting all of their other games coast into maintenance mode to milk the people who are left.