Consumers>Shareholders

Community General Discussion
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I understand the logic that companies exist to make money and i agree but i believe that the ones who carry the game should be the ones playing it and not the ones jumping in the pot for profit and then leaving the pot when it gets hot.

If blizz would instead poll consumers and not take so many blindshots with design choices/recommendations by investors we would have a much better game.

Heres a few things consumers never asked for:

-Random gutting of addons(i agree with the choice but it isnt clear if all are on the same boat as me)

-Removing the Usefulness of Garrisons and making them irrelevant(Imagine if housing was advertised as midnight-only and then you see the issue with gutting garrisons and removing its relevance completely instead of fixing it)

-Completely ignoring the lil niche that pet battling was filling and instead not including it in Midnight

-Adding bots in content both pve(Follower Dungeons) and pvp(future pvp mode and CompStomp) rather than just making a better user experience for casuals learning the ropes.

I could keep going but theres 20yrs over things to go over.

If blizz would stop removing on a whim and adding on a whim, They could then poll us and get better at what works and know the better next-step option due to player feedback, instead of relying on ppl not playing the game(shareholders/investors) or content creators testing the ptr making bad takes and pretending its the community opinion

I would even say the forums are largely ignored and the forums wont represent most consumers aswell, the polls/feedback choices would

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I doubt investors have any say at all in the design of WoW. The company is a black box to most of them. They don’t care how the sausage is made as long as it gets made. If there is a short fall in output, they replace the head chef.

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You might be right, I just think some decisions are so spontaneous and dumb that it has to be an individual whos never played the game but wants a quick buck from some strategy that worked outside of gaming

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I should probably ignore this thread, but I’ll bite.

The decisions you’ve mentioned have nothing to do with shareholders. Those decisions don’t actively make more money. If the want to increase revenue, they’ll throw a new horse recolor on the shop and make $25 million in an hour.

The add-on restrictions are (according to the developera) entirely because the developers felt they couldn’t design cool things because we would just suck the fun/strategy out of it with an automation (again, that’s just what they’ve said. You may think that’s insane and it very well might be). Blizzard failed to keep the UI modernized for 15 years and now they’re trying to catch up. No shareholders. This isn’t some “gotta make a mobile game” nonsense.

Garrisons weren’t gutted. They were designed with the intent of being abandoned because that’s how most features were designed during that era of the game. It’s not shareholders; it’s developer convenience. They were scared that they’d have to maintain things forever, so they started locking content into specific expansions instead of building evergreen systems. Garrisons are far from the only casualty of this policy. There’s the Pandaria farm, Class order halls, Warfronts, Island Expeditions, Covenants, Artifact weapons, and more. They built a lot of cool features that could have been permanent parts of the core gameplay and improved over time. Instead, they designed them to be thrown away.

Pet battling is not dead. You are misinformed.

Bots for players who don’t want to try learning with real people are a good addition. Humans often have little patience. I’m sure there are some other solutions to encouraging friendly group play, but the bots in their own are just a useful inclusion. I like being able to enter a Follower Dungeon and just explore the space instead of rushing to the end. I also like the Raids being part of the story that I can complete on my own instead of needing to watch a cutscene on YouTube to avoid spoilers for the end.

Edit: (Accidentally posted too soon :melting_face:)

The devs have told us they make decisions based on data. Data shows a lot of solo players, so we got solo content.

Sometimes raw data can be misleading, so hopefully they have some folks making some decisions that contradict the data sometimes. It’s something they’ll never get right 100% of the time.

But it’s not shareholders.

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Wait till you read about their current president. She’s quite something…

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Sup loners. Hows the discussion going? Lol

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Ya the best way for getting players ready to interact with content is completely blindsiding them with the community they’ll be engaging with, The follower dungeons dont replicate what doing content with players will actually feel like.

That sounds like a problem for those dependent on addons, Not the devs, the simple fix for devs is reducing cognitive load and making those addons useless instead of restricting them or limiting information, again im heavily against addons but this decision was admittedly made on a whim and not with some informed research/outlook in advance

Blizzard isnt putting resources towards pet battling in the new xpac, Some even say its just vanity in midnight, No new pets either. You are misinformed and a google search wouldve helped you immensely. Noone said its dead either, You didnt read what i said

Ya this answers itself. Garrisons did get gutted in many ways(granted some ways were removing exploits) Garrisons were completely useless instead of being fixed or worked on further(and alot of ppl enjoyed it) You also cant just say “Well in that era of the game they didnt want to make any content last for developer convenience” Cause we have many things from even vanilla wow that are still being used today and completely relevant to do for the niche they fill, SOME things werent designed to last but thats also an anti-consumer practice to remove the relevance of things they paid for or make the things they paid for entirely cosmetic or useless

You also say the decisions i mentioned have nothing to do with shareholders but lack evidence to say the contrary. Makes 0 sense. I wouldnt say all the choices i mentioned are strictly due to shareholders but it still highlights content the community loved and engaged in that they didnt know would be irrelevant which is why i mentioned Housing, if that was a midnight-only feature ppl would be fuming

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People love to over simplify things and dismiss blizz’s choices as “only for stockholders money” but all their design decisions are more complicated than that and do have many factors

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The cognitive load is the challenge though.

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I would agree but its been publicly announced the pruning on addons and classes was entirely random and last second lol so who knows how many other decisions this is also the case for

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I feel Garrisons was meant to be an evergreen feature. Your Garrison in AU Draenor was meant to be abandoned, yes, but they think they intended for players to build a new Garrison every expansion.

Unfortunately, Garrisons was introduced in one of the most problematic expansions in WoW’s history and got a very bad reception. Blizzard also screwed up the design by not properly balancing the utility of the Garrison with other parts of the game.*

* Housing I think they will have an easier time. The Garrison is effectively an entire town - similar to Roman Legion encampments which civilian traders often visited to trade with the soldiers. Our houses are just that, residential houses, and won’t compete with cities - the rule of thumb is everything trade related (with PCs or NPCs) should be in the city, everything else can be in houses.

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Here is the thing, no one that owns stock in Blizzard outside of the company is telling them period what to do in WoW. Only ones that are, are the players and are the actual staff within the company that its their responsibility to do so.

Not every player in WoW has good take on the game and what is best for the game long term or its future. What one player loves another hates. When any player starts to think the way they play is the only thing that matters and that Blizzard need to only cater to their enjoyment. This is where the player themself is lying to themselves just how important they really are in the grand scheme of things.

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This doesnt matter on a larger scale, a few contrarians or hardcore players will have lower input volumes than the broad majority of casuals with honest feedback/polling so it would actually be better for the game

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Consumers know nothing about game design philosophy. There’s feedback on specifics, which is what they pay attention to, but no one should be polled on how the game is designed.

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As been said many of the players that play WoW are clueless as to what is best for the game in the long run, they live in their own little bubble.

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Don’t kid yourself, it’s all about making money.

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Most players are clueless about the fundamentals they like the most? Most the players have been playing for YEARS, I think they know what they like and dont like by now

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Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. (1919) begs to differ. Publicly traded companies are literally bound by law to place shareholders above all other concerns.

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What law is this?

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Centuries of common law, backed by rulings such as Dodge v. Ford Motor Co (1919), and laws such as the Model Business Corporation Act and the Delaware General Corporation Act.