The meaningful choice tied to covenants should be the aesthetic and altered story choices of each faction. Permanently tying your power and ability to do endgame content to the system is going to punish players, making them pick between certain types of content they look forward to in the endgame, only to have it shift with different patches.
Honestly, I think Blizzard’s best option, to appease both, would be to have your abilities based on your faction for leveling. Once you unlock the World Quests and do the “uniting blank” quest, it should open up to swap the abilities, since, you should have the backing of every covenant by that point, as I understand it. You are all on the same side, so, no reason not to work together to the fullest.
Personnaly I get wanting to lock story decisions, but there’s no reason to lock power behind them in an mmorpg other than wanting to feel the oldschool problems the game had. And it’s hypocrite moreover to claim that you won’t be able to switch (or basicly claim that they are great because they’re locked) when we already know that you will be able we just don’t know how much it will cost and how long will be time constraints.
If anything story-wise, the first meaningful choices they should lock in that would make sense is race and factions. A covenant is just a small rep that will be gone after Shadowlands.
But with what we know this seems more like a paid choices like race and factions are right now, they even compared to switching them to respecing azerith. It’s just an added cost to wanting to play how you want. This part doesn’t bring any value to the game.
In BFA, everyone did quit. Well not everyone, but blizz went from ‘biggest preorder sales numbers ever’ to sub-3mil in like record time.
BFA launched as a poopshow. Like Timbo, I also main shaman. When i saw that even in 8.1 there were no/minimal changes, and 2/3 of our specs were poop… i was out.
Azerite was trash. Islands were trash. Warfronts were so trash that i think they were literally abandoned? Weren’t there extra warfronts announced that they flat-out didn’t release?
Shamans were largely trash. Demo/destro locks were trash. No warriors or beartanks to be found anywhere, lol.
BFA has been absolutely the biggest case of Blizz doing something a certain way, then finally improving/changing long after the ship has sailed.
There is no reason we need to wait until 9.1.5 or 9.3 or whenever for them to realize that it was dumb to lock unique powers/abilities/mobilities into a very difficult to change system. It was trash for azerite. It will be trash if this happens.
Yes BFA was worse than before, the only thing that saved wow was Classic like superdata proved with the wow population having doubled since then or something like that.
If you want to extrapolate numbers from raiding be my guess, we can’t know the perfect numbers but we can have educated guesses, which is better than just being a contrarian.
Well there’s no absolute truth, if for you those are not satisfying there’s nothign I can do. But you can’t claim that the numbers I provided are false they are real, they’re just not sub numbers. But if anything it prove a decline in raiding after the first patch often happen, and should happen statistically. The question is more how big.
sub numbers were what he was talking about. He wasn’t talking about raid stats, pvp stats, faction stats, or even pet battle stats. He was talking about sub numbers.
Yes and I have no claim to his argument. But clearly they aren’t doing great without Classic wow like Superdata leaked basicly. And I think that conclusion is good enough.
And for the data (and the methodology) behind the massive drop in subs when the expansion launched as an utter dumpster fire, you’d have to look at the research done by the makers of WeakAuras:
That would be a good place to begin. Their method for obtaining their data was immediately patched out of the Blizz api, without ever getting any confirm/deny statements from Blizz.
Ok that’s the effort I’ll do for you at 3am on a Tuesday. Care to have any conversation about anything else in my post? Or just a pick-and-choose trashcan?
No one had real time to figure out how bad Azerite was.
At least we’re capable of giving feedback on this system.
It’s not being shoved down our throats a week before beta ended and it was finalized for retail.
Yes some people debated those numbers, basicly that would be the lowest number since we can’t confirm it’s all the sub number. So it would be fair to say it’s between 3.2-and something else.
At the same time, they would never confirm true sub numbers. Main reason being it’s bad for marketing to show a number that only goes down, they prefer MAUs. A number they can calculate how they want since being an active users could have many meanings.
