“It’s a heavy burden on the shoulders of our narrative team, of our encounter designers, to deliver something that’s been years and years and multiple expansions in the making,” World of Warcraft Game Director Ion Hazzikostas says. “Getting the chance to face off against a figure of her stature, people are going in expecting a lot.”
This is a false narrative that s been forced upon us. Those of us that wanted to fight Sylvanas already have. We invaded Undercity and killed her where she stood. We didn’t require a false narrative pushed down our throats in order to do this.
"I am looking forward to seeing the community discuss and dissect as they try to figure out what’s next for her. And what’s next for the Shadowlands as a whole.”
The fact that there IS something next for her is the problem. So many are tired of Sylvanas. A once beloved character has now become an icon of disgust, not due to anything her character has done in game, but simply because of her overuse. The fact that there is now a term, Sylvanas fatigue, underscores this.
“One of the great things about working on a live game like this and this iterative content cycle is that we can see what players are excited about, they’re confused about, want to learn more about, what preconceptions or ideas they have about the way things are going, and pivot to make sure that what we’re doing is going to hit the mark.”
If you actually had your thumb on the pulse of the community you would know what we are excited about and what we are bored with. But you’ve “pivoted” away from “hitting the mark” time and time again in regards to story telling and the use of systems. We are “confused” because YOU are confused. The question is why are you confused about what we want? You completely ignored the beta tester feedback on Torghast as a prime example, and you completely ignore the forums chatter. How can you expect to “hit that mark” when you refuse to acknowledge what that mark really is?
The problems with Torghast were not easily picked up in the beta because players on the beta were there to simply check out Torghast and didn’t have the specific goals in mind that come in a live environment.
There was literally tons of feedback from the PTR telling you Torghast was fun, and then you changed it practically last minute to the iteration that was released live, the one that everyone hates. Again, you missed the mark because you had no idea what the mark was because again you didn’t listen.
“We continue to expand the team and get as many resources as possible…"
But not in the area of in-house game testing obviously. Launching a release with major expansion features broken does not imply having “as many resources as possible” at your disposal.
“That closer look at the community in Classic and Burning Crusade informs some of our thinking about the modern game and how to recapture …as we think about the evolution of the social side of Shadowlands and beyond, is how we can reinforce and reintroduce the mechanisms that lead to the formation of new friendships…"
First of all bring back servers being servers. Remove LFG/LFR, cross server interaction. Meeting people in enclosed boundaries like real server communities fosters a community where people run in to each other again and again allowing for relationships, groups, and guilds to form. This doesn’t happen with LFG/LFR and cross-server interaction to any degree resembling how it worked in the early days before these systems were implemented.
“What that era and Classic and Burning Crusade lacked was interconnectivity and accessibility in a different sense…"
You just used your litigation attorney experience to double-talk your way out of understanding the real resolution. It’s that interconnectivity within the server that allowed for relationships to be built in game. Creating any larger interconnection through cross-server play waters down the pool, creating less chance of encountering that random player more than once that would potentially become a friend.
“We have pieces of it, things like our PVP ecosystem or Mythic Plus, a place where people add people to their friends list because they had a good experience running with them,” Ion says. “They do it again, do it repeatedly. And before you know it, this is a new friend."
That’s not how it works! And if you actually played WoW you would know this. People join LFG, they burn through the instance, and they leave. Rinse and repeat. Occasionally someone may make a lasting friendship through the current system but its the exception not the rule. You would know this if you played the game.
Remember at BlizzCons from years past Blizz employees would gush about their own characters, their own in game experiences, and what they as players would want to see in game? Think on that for a bit…