I believe it was (wow)Crendor that said it: Blizzard tells you how to have fun.
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The ideas that there is malicious or ill intent from blizzard devs is pretty ridiculous. I understand and share frustrations but letās be real. There are only so many devs qualified to work on this old complicated code and now are spread way way thin with new retail release, panda retail thing, cataclysm classic and sod. Blizzard has always taken more time than usual to release content even before so many versions. Yes they could hire more devs but in this market who knows maybe they are trying and they canāt onboard fast enough. Or maybe Microsoft wonāt let them hire more.
As for what gets priority now thatās a different matter. Some of those decisions are not coming from devs. They are coming from marketing and management. Iterations of wow that have micro transactions probably take priority.
I love this version of wow despite some of the failed experiments. I think it has great potential. But I also see a split player base that sometimes pathetically attack other versions they donāt like and terrible timing from blizzard. I am being patient because I want phase 4 to be great. I can hang out at the pool until then.
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I feel for you running a guild through all of this, I wouldnāt want to deal with it.
When a guild lasts a while there are always ebbs and flows and this is a pretty big ebb, encouraging a transient player base for sure isnāt good for raiding guilds where the saying is āraid or dieā. IMO guilds or similar are the most important part of an MMORPG.
So yeah good job in doing what you can and I get why youād make this thread.
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at lvl 45? big doubt.
youre taking this way too serious lol
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It is. Iāve said for weeks they have nothing but contempt for the playerbase. When you objectify the customer, you better come prepared with a blemishless product. Unfortunately thatās not something SoD product folks or devs can boast.
I started 1-2 days into P1 and ended 1 week into P3. The dramatic quality shift from mid-P1 down to P3 is a huge turn off. This isnāt about any one change or implement; this is an overwhelming implementation failure for what was conceptually an excellent, unrivalled ingenious. Itās far too late now. By the metrics this thing is near 10% of its peak popularity pre-cash cow status (1st-3rd week January). Thereās no restoring the original novelty that attracted long-gone players. Personally Iād rather invest the time into a new herb garden and FF14.
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cool strawman 
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There was more to my statement but good strawman.
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Problem is, many thought SoD was going to be a mainline product when itās really just a side project.
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Thereās no animosity under the surface. Itās p4. People will come back in August as they always do during this same cycle we see every expansion. Blizzard sees one thingā¦ Dollars.
SoD and Classic are literally just a side gig for them and itās hilarious how many people canāt understand that.
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why should anyone read more of your statement when it starts with a disingenous strawman
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Its not that people donāt understand, itās that we hope. Marketed as Classic+ is a big statement to make and got people hyped.
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yes, we hope beyond all reason, we hopeā¦
Day by day hope moves closer to cope
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How would you have wanted runes to be discovered?
If they were drops in a dungeon people would have complained.
If they came from rep grinds people would have complained.
People often have voiced that they want reasons to revisit some of the last traveled places to make the world feel alive and this seems to have been at least an attempt by blizzard to answer that.
I get the vibe that many people in this thread are just outright negative and would complain no matter how SoD was done.
I agree there are some criticisms you can have of Sod but overall itās been a positive experience and Iām looking forward to level 60.
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I think people wanted to go to places and do full quest hubs or expand on untold storylines etc. Not run around the world in the most inconvenient way to do 1 quest here, talk to a person 30mins away there in order to get their bis item for the phase or their blanket.
Frankly, if incursions werenāt the repeatable mess they are and were just a new area added to do one time, would have been more closely aligned to what I would have imagined new leveling content to be tbh.
This is hindsight, but I think if runes were just new spells, Devs would have a much eaiser time not having to give every class the ~same number of new abilities in each slot. They could have just added an number of extra things that made sense.
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While Blizzard did describe SoD as a ācrazy experimentā, I think we are in a fool me once type scenario.
The next iteration needs to be an all in āfeature completeā Classic+ release or else they should leave the concept alone and stick with what they are doing with Cataclysm.
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I can somewhat agree about having to travel a bit too much for some runes, but overall the rune system has been perfectly implemented. Some of the runes have been absolutely fantastic to acquire, many have been fairly easy, and the way they work as a sort of auxiliary talent system tied to your gear is basically perfect.
I do agree on incursions though. They can go.
Really they need to do smaller number of servers with 2 rulesets. Also cut off the associated forums to people who play one or the other to stop the boiling crab zero sum issue we have as a community.
Ex - You canāt like SoD because that means we donāt get Era!
I 100% agree that it felt like the devs dropped SoD hard to do other work. It was very very noticeable. I stopped logging in and switched to EQ2ās origin server. It may end up sucking too, but Iām just not feeling P3 and P4. My guild went into stasis.
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Yeah I enjoy the runes generally. As I said, I think the commitment to provide all classes the same number of runes is the challenge. Because they committed to doing it via the new system, they got roped into having to come up with many many more runes than were likely needed to keep people happy. And frankly, this led to (at least in terms of mages which is all I know) many runes being unused outside of niche situations or unusable altogether.