- The active playerbase isn’t all that active on the forums, since, you know, they are playing the game - a lot of ‘social media’ and ‘forum’ complaints aren’t stuff that folks care about
- Most of the complaints have always been and will always be folks nitpicking about this or that or another, and you can always turn something into a negative, and if you even for a moment consider the positive elements of it, you get called a fanboy, a chill, or any myriad of other elements to that
Sorry but if your estimation of “Blizzard doesn’t listen to its playerbase because of forum complaints”, then you’ll always be miserable because that’s the only thing you’ll find on social media in relation to Blizzard, regardless of whatever they do
I mean c’mon, when folks start to make the charity pets into negatives because they are crystal clear in their communication (at people’s request as well) then that got turned to a negative as well
And this kinda proves the point ultimately
Honestly, the setup for SL wasn’t good but they could’ve done something good with it, but folks had no interest in it, so they scrapped what they had planned and moved the majority of the team to the next expansion
MMOs takes time to develop, and with the development time of WoW it means that when folks complained about AP in Legion, we got a slimmed down version of it in BFA, still didn’t work out, so they went with an ‘in general’ system in BFA with covenants and as folks had been asking for ‘meaningful choices’, they revisited choices like “Aldor or Scryer” from TBC and made covenants that - didn’t work out since folks didn’t want to have meaningful choices tied to their characters in this way
So, what are they doing in DF? They are taking every lesson they have learned from the past 3 expansions and turning it into two different systems:
- Cosmetic dragon riding
- Overhauling professions with ‘meaningful’ talent trees
Both of these have been viewed with interest and excitement because they have been listening to what folks have been saying, even if it takes time to develop the systems required to build these things
When folks started going off on the covenants in the SL Alpha, at that point it was too late - SL was shipping with covenants and powers tied to them because one couldn’t rework the entire expansion in that short of a time period, that’s just the nature of modern MMO development and gaming; I don’t like it, but I know about it, so I don’t get as badly affected by it
At the end of the day, this is a game - you don’t like it, then don’t play it
Offer fair criticism and critique but don’t go overboard, but ultimately the problem is that this isn’t an easy thing to explain en masse because negativity spreads faster than positivity, especially when you can just post a meme such as “Fun detected, nerf it” and everyone who likes negativity gets a kick from it, whereas longer explanations such as these can explain everything but…
You can’t make a meme out of it, that shows why and how someone is wrong, and why something is a good thing, when it requires more of a complicated and complex understanding of how system interact with each others
Its entirely fair to not be hyped for DF, but, the idea of “They failed these times ergo I am not hyped” is disingenuous at best - BFA and SL did have successes, but they can’t be quantified within’ a meme, thus’ they can’t be seen as having any successes or positive elements to it
Heck, Legion was easily one of if not WoW’s best expansion to date, but folks just think of Legion in terms of a “Savior” and not with its own serious issues, and when folks mention its role either as a savior or its flaws, it always boils down to meme:ification of it