WARNING - LONG RANTY POST (Read fully before you comment)
I’m not mad at the state of this game, you have to care to be mad, and I want to care, but I can’t because I’m just…so…disappointed…
I have played this game for a long time at varying levels of play from total casual to high end mythic raiding. I’ve known the game has been going downhill for a long time but have managed to find ways to stay engaged and have fun despite it. That being said, the 8.3 launch has completely drained my desire to play this game, which frankly sucks, as I was extremely excited to play the patch.
I would like to refrain from this post being a whiny rant as much as possible so I will try to focus on high level issues and try to propose well thought out solutions in an attempt to make this constructive. But who are we kidding, I’m here to complain because this has gone too far.
Problem #1 - Bugs, bugs bugs
I have spent the past 8 weeks preparing for 8.3 to play the game in 2 ways. First and foremost I had the intention of raiding Mythic with my new guild and secondly (but still very importantly) I am farming for a brutosaur before it gets removed. I invested a huge amount of time in the weeks leading up to patch day to maximize my character and maximize my profits when 8.3 dropped. More specifically my plan was to be ahead on reps on my alt with inscription to sell contracts before anyone else could.
So you can imagine the level of frustration to find out that not only is the auction house completely broken and that I’ve lost thousands of gold (actual amount still unknown), but that Blizzard has managed to allow a bug into the game that allows people to exploit the daily quest reset. This essentially means I’m thousands of rep behind on getting my contracts essentially killing weeks worth of prep, farming and planning.
The final nail in the coffin, is that blizzard has also messed up horrific visions so that I’m a week behind on corrupted gear on both my toons because of the loot bugs. So essentially both ways that I was looking forward to playing the game in have been completely ruined for me in the new patch. I honestly don’t even feel like being logged in to the game right now because I can’t do anything I want. It’s day 3 of a new patch in case anyone is counting…a little early for patch fatigue but this is actually a joke at this stage.
Okay, so I promised some analysis and thoughts right? Well this one should be fairly obvious, but Blizzard…you can’t release the game in this state, you just can’t. Delay it if you have to, because this is just embarrassing. You expect people to invest their time and energy into this game to play it, and yet you have 0 respect for that time. And if the team at blizzard isn’t embarrassed by this, I don’t even know what to say anymore, especially considering the 800 QC staff they fired earlier this year…that sure isn’t looking like such a great move anymore. You want a solution? It’s called testing. If it’s not ready don’t release it. This game costs more than almost anything on the market, after 15 years I think it’s fair to expect some consistency.
How am I supposed to be motivated to play the game in this state?
Problem #2 - Titanforging is still in the game
I had a friend come back to the game recently, previous mythic raider, I asked him why he came back for 8.3 and his literal answer was “cus they removed titanforging.”
RNG driven reward systems for core character progression are a poison to this game. I was initially excited to see TF leave the game for a replacement system such as corruption until I learned about its acquisition method, and sure enough it’s playing out in the first couple days of the patch already. People are high rolling BiS corruption gear and it’s simming as high as 25k dps just for the corruption trait for some classes. It can randomly drop off any gear and It’s just not fun unless you happen to be the 1/10,000 who gets a good roll early on in the patch, but how on earth can anyone think this is good game design. Sure it will get nerfed a bit, but the core issue still remains, there is no way to focus on your gear acquisition and so much RNG leaves you feeling like you’ve never accomplished anything in game, and simultaneously removes the joy of when you do get a new piece of loot unless it OMEGAFORGES. Oh not to mention that it makes killing later, harder bosses in the game less worthwhile creating intense pressure on guilds due to mid-tier burn out once people are mostly BiS (just praying for forges) and progression slows. It’s almost like if the good loot isn’t on the later bosses people don’t want to push them…I thought after 15 years that would’ve been kinda obvious by now.
The worst part though, is how it disincentivizes players from actually improving oneself in the game. Why would anyone who isn’t currently good enough to raid heroic want to put themselves through the difficulty of learning the game and trying to raid heroic/mythic if they can get comparable gear from just doing world quests and eventually getting titanforges. So, casuals get bored of the game faster because they have little incentive to engage with the game, people with the same ilvl as me do 50% of the dmg I do because they have no idea how to play their class so it makes guild/raid recruitment an absolute nightmare and people who push the content in the game and try to play high end content get pissed off because your character’s performance is tied to a slot machine. Once again, it’s just. not. fun. and everyone is losing.
I LOVE the m+ system, but the problem that blizzard currently faces is that with it in the game there are too many areas to acquire gear too easily. The result is that they feel they need to put a Titanforging type system in game, or everyone would have BiS in 3 weeks except for a couple late tier mythic raid pieces. When you think about it from this perspective, you realize that Blizzard is doing this to artificially extend the life of their content, but again the problem with this logic is that it only really extends it at the top end for people who are really pushing things to the limits creating burn out and dissatisfaction with the game.
So how do we solve this? It’s actually pretty simple really:
M+/Raiding need seperate progression paths and TF/WF needs to be removed. M+/Raiding gear should have some overlap, but also separate clearly defined goals to work towards on both paths. This means that hardcore players would still be rewarded for taking the effort to participate in both systems, but would allow players that only want to focus one 1 type of content to feel tangibly more powerful by doing only the type of content they like and not feeling super behind when doing that content if they didn’t participate in the other type of content.
A great way to do this would be to have seperate tier sets (remember those?) for each type of content with the m+ tier sets only working in a dungeon environment and the raid tier sets only working in a raid setting. A similar type of thing could be done for pvp as well. Ideally the set would have 6 pieces with 3 tiers of upgrades to make sure a significant portion of each gear set was locked to each type of content. This gear should be on a tangible progression system that is worked towards on a daily or weekly basis similar to residuum - no rng involved.
Problem #3 - The Alt problem
In a recent dev Q&A Ion said something along the lines of “we feel it’s really important for people to be able to jump back into the game and be able to play current content regardless of if they took a break last tier and are behind on progression.” They’ve also previously said they want the game to be relatively alt friendly.
It’s pretty clear they use this to justify a lot of their current design decisions (think upgrading ilvl on wq’s, heroic dungeons, etc. to remove the need to clear old raid content). It’s not my favorite system as I think it’s too casual friendly, HOWEVER, I understand WHY they have chosen to make this decision. The problem is when they say one thing and then do the exact opposite. Welcome to the essence system. I can’t believe with the current state of the game that blizz is digging their heels in on this one…really? It’s like they’re trying to provoke the playerbase. We’re preparing for a pretty significant content drought heading into Shadowlands, so an interesting thing to do would be to play on several toons to stay busy, but I can tell you that there is literally a 0% chance I’m farming blood of the enemy on my alts.
I don’t even think they need to be account bound, but there needs to be a way to double or triple the progression on your alt toons.
The problem here is that blizzard can’t commit to either way. Either make the game alt friendly properly so that people can expect to play them (which is probably how it should be at this stage of the game) OR make the game like classic where it’s very clear if you create a new toon you are going to need to grind from scratch and it’s going to be a long hard road to get your alt completed. They are currently hanging out somewhere in the middle and are managing to make everyone mad.
I guess as I final note I just want to say that I truly want this game to be good, I really do, but it’s just not right now. To be honest I barely scratched the surface here, each one of these topics could have a much deeper dive into just how bad they are for the health of the game. The sad thing is that BFA has/had a lot of potential, but it’s problems are pretty much all self inflicted by Blizzard. They really just are out of touch with what playing their game is like at the moment and its a real shame.
I was optimistic about Shadowlands after Blizzcon, I heard some of the right things, but after seeing 8.3’s launch and direction I realized that Blizzard hasn’t really changed and to be honest, this was the perfect opportunity to start putting some of what they said was coming in shadowlands into action early (why do we need to wait a year for basic changes that could’ve been put into bfa 6 months ago). And instead we get a sloppy, unfinished, buggy excuse for a patch.
Blizz I really hope you can get this game sorted out ASAP, because it’s a mess, you should be embarrassed, and I don’t know how much longer I can stay subbed to a game where it’s clear you’re not developing the game for the playerbase.
