Every single aspect of WoW is suffering because the teams are stretched way too thin. Having to maintain the Retail side of WoW, Classic WoW, Pandaria WoW and Cataclysm WoW is absolutely bonkers insane.
Seriously, DROP all the other crap — Classic WoW (maybe keep Hardcore WoW), drop Pandaria WoW and drop Cataclysm WoW. Retail should be the only thing ALL of the teams are focused on because it’s likely retail is where all the money is.
I seriously don’t understand people who want to be locked in an expansion. Classic was GOD AWFUL and no amount of nostalgia is going to ever going to fix that. The only thing Classic really had going for it was exploration because you’d always stumble into something and wonder what the lore behind it was etc.
As for Pandaria and Cataclysm, those expansions came and went. They are done. Let them go. Are we seriously going to have entire groups of people stuck in those expansions forever?? It has to be a dimishing return. Are we eventually going to have BC WOW, WRATH WOW, DRAENOR WOW, LEGION WOW….like holy crap.
You need to take teams from those other past expansions and reapply them to Retail. Retail is what keeps people coming back. You have a team that is on an 8 week crunch to create, de-bug and plan for the future of the game. Give them some more help because they obviously need it.
In theory, the older versions should have most of the bugs worked out with modest overhead. I suspect they stay and expand because a decent chunk of folks are playing them at least partially or even solely. That they keep investing in these (pets, mounts, etc) tells me there’s enough activity there to demand keeping them.
If they got rid of those, I think they’d get rid of people, rather than moving them over.
The bigger problems are the short timelines and trying to do too many mini features all at once.
And to make it worse, almost all mid patch mini features are just garbage.
While I’m not a fan of long content droughts…I would take it any day for a consistent flow of quality content every 6 months over this slop that we get ever 2-3
OP, oh yeah, I agree. There should’ve been only one “classic” iteration and perhaps one “seasonal” mode with a set duration, in addition to retail. Unfortunately blizz went in the direction of trying to satisfy most of the random calls for this-and-that including housing. They clearly sacrificed the quality of retail to do so.
Just saying… as a classic player too this feels like exactly what is happening.
Let me give you an example of what a ‘casual’ in MoP Classic has to look forward to;
Same dungeons whole expansion but you get a new seasonal affix…
Gem and Cape quest (nothing new)
FARMING
New rewards for challenge modes (platinum mode) but after you have what you want there’s not much point doing that either.
So i think they’re just using TBC/Classic/MoP as money packets. The only development that is happening for classic is probably classic +. The rest are mostly them just re-deploying the patches and updates.
When/If WoD drops i lose Symbiosis on my Druid and I will be very upsetty spaghetti
We don’t know why things are as they are. For all we know we may have plenty of folks on the game, but maybe one person is mucking things up at every chance.
Or maybe the folks on the game now don’t really even like it and are just there for a check and a resume bullet
I think most of us know that it goes beyond that.
Because it’s not so much just the timeframe and necessity of workload to complete projects …
It’s the design.
Take the story for example.
Go across the lore-forums, the general discussion and even some of the most famous lore content creators across Twitch & Youtube – Like Nobel87 – and you’ll see the general consensus isn’t happy with the retcons, slop ideological overwriting and poor storytelling.
Then you have the class designs.
Needless to say, many are upset with the flow of their class or the removal of a favourite ability (or both). This wasn’t a lack of teams being spread too thin — This was a designed, premediated CHOICE. For some specs, you went from a design that was already fundamentally good for the majority audiences — to something loathed, hated or that rings out boredom.
Now as for the content itself, like the dungeons & raids, delves and a few other various activities — they, for the most part, have been rather decent … And yeah sure, there’s loads of bugs of which I could agree with your thread @ the employees being stretched too thinly — However, that’s not to say there still isn’t design issues and disgusting flaws with the new philosophy applied to major aspects of the game.
I feel like ‘mismanaged’ is an understatement at the moment.
Honestly speaking, I loved Dragonflight for the most part, save except a few things here & there — but the whole family cinematic @ the Amirdrassil raid finish just reminded me of some ‘Fast & Furious’ concept with Dominic Toretto @ how cliche & oversold it was lol
Shadowlands was an abomination.
The War Within was pretty forgettable
and Midnight, thus far – has just been feeding the stereotypical California writing predictions, lol
This isn’t simply just my opinion – It’s MANY peoples takes on the above expansions. lol
Like honestly, I know people want to snort the bad writing like mana-crystal crack and furiously deny it, because they think it’s some obscene political war — but sometimes it’s simply poor writing with poor concepts and overused SJW pandering that’s gone too far.
… At least with the story anyway. As for the class designs and lackluster bug-fixes, yeah I suppose you’re right – it’s mostly due to being horribly mismanaged
Lots of people have no interest in retail. You don’t seem to understand that classic versions require minimal development time, and the devs creating content are not the same as those maintaining it. Classic versions are just a “free” playerbase because they don’t need an art team, balance team, cinematic team, voice actors, etc. It’s all done, they just have to put the servers up and keep them running.
Keep a Vanilla Classic server for the people stuck in the past, and maybe the occasional Remix for the mid-expansion lull, but everything else is just wasted dev time.
You think you do, but you don’t rang truer than most people want to admit.
Nah there’s a ton of people playing it and it’s basically free. Plus it’s a ton of free advertising on social media. You just don’t understand how things work. Retail is bad because it’s being run by untalented DEI hires, but you’re not supposed to say that.
The last time I said that I had gotten temporarily kicked out of the game and then they claim they don’t hire based on dei and don’t have lgbt focused team. Yet there’s clear evidence right there in plain sight.
So I would be very careful on how we word stuff cause someone will get offended and report stuff he/she doesn’t like.
Less than 15K in Vanilla Classic and only around 50K in MoP btw
It’s not. You’re paying the same sub as the rest of us.
Saying something is ‘free advertising’ is the death knell of straw reaching. That’s how I know that the last straw has been grasped, like sticking ‘etc.’ on to imply more points when you’ve only provided one.
So for the price of a server team and small support staff (zero development costs), they get by your estimates 65k subs and players (plus shop) and hardcore has great social media reach. What’s the problem? What resources do you think they’re diverting? The teams who develop new content aren’t the same as the guys who run the servers. There’s practically no support necessary either because basically every bug has been ironed out already.
lol