Seeing all these useless portal rooms and banners hanging without portals in front just looks wack. Looks less like we’ve packed up and moved on from these zones and more like some dude removed all the portals to up that /played metric.
I dunno man. I’m not really buying it.
I agree, removing the portals was silly, but I really wish we would stop with the
as it’s nothing more than an overused buzzword and inapplicable in 99% of the cases it is used in… like the OP. A few seconds/minutes played time is not going to add up to be what you claim.
Agreed.
While they certainly use time-invested and engagement metrics, people act like these are so primitive as to only observe the total time spent in game period.
In practice, engagement metrics are used across multiple industries and track a wide variety of activities and how the activity is approached or completed. It’s not just how long you engage, but what you engage and how you engage.
We need to stop pretending that the bottom line is “just five more minutes”.
Exactly. I just roll my eyes every time I see something like this, even when I agree with what they are complaining about.
Yes. The city of mages should be the portal capital of Azeroth. Removing them, from the city, did remove a RPG aspect.
Well portal locations based on old expansions didn’t seem to be the most immersive. More like a memory game.
There should be a portal room in EVERY MAJOR CITY.
What the much vaunted “engagement metrics” fail to measure, though, is WHY people engage. Blizzard can make something like Timeless Isle that’s chock full of time-consuming things that give people various types of progress in the game, then see everyone using it and assume everyone loves that form of game design. When in reality there was nowhere else to go for 14 months of content drought.
“Engagement” also doesn’t measure whether the customer ENJOYED the content. Hence all those web sites with auto-play videos that we leap to shut down and use add-ons to try to stop, but the advertisers see that all these people are “engaging” with the “content” because it’s being shoved down their throats.
Same for Netflix, which uses auto-play everywhere and shrinks the end credits down to a pea to force more advertising at you because “engagement”. They reportedly measure how long you linger on an auto-play video to measure how “engaged” you are then give you recommendations based on your engagement rather than what you actually watch. That’s why you can spend half a year watching romantic comedies and still get recommendations for war movies.
Game developers should be taking “engagement metrics” with a grain of salt, and try LISTENING for a change.
This.
I guarantee you that everyone in the industry knows precisely how much we hate those intrusive advertisements. That, specific example, is a situation where they don’t care whether we like it, only whether or not it’s “effective” in getting the image into our mind.
To be clear, I never said that engagement metrics could be the only thing you pay attention to. I simply said that they’re not nearly as useless as people want to portray them.
It’s all well and good to say that you can’t just look at how often people do something and say they enjoy it. That’s very true, but it misses the fact that any developer, creator, etc, anywhere, is going to be looking at multiple avenues of interest.
The whole “MAU” and “Engagement Metrics” fad typically argues that that’s all they use, which is so nearly certain to be false that we would need proof that they do not use additional metrics.
The reason they’re so often mentioned by people is because Blizzard itself uses them as benchmarks for their games’ performance in their reports to shareholders. It can’t be surprising that in a world where shareholder profits rule above everything else including product quality - as a general rule of business - people would presume Blizzard would place a great deal of importance on them when designing their game systems.
“Making the world feel bigger” and feel-good stuff like that won’t be why portals went away. It will have been done for a more practical reason, with increased play time and “engagement” likely to have been high on the list. Because shareholders.
I think they should develop a pet mage that we can summon and they would offer us ports to major cities of our choice.
Vivienne from the Garrison would be up for the job, I’m sure. She used to DPS like a boss, too ![:wink:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=6" ":wink:")
Right, but things like “we see enjoyment in these activities” aren’t useful to investors. That’s my point. Yes, you see those metrics, but “fun” isn’t a metric, which is why you never see it on any investor report.
Assuming that they don’t try to keep track of that in other ways, just because they don’t report it to investors, is like saying that I don’t eat for flavor because I only report to my doctor the nutrition aspect of my diet.
Yes! That girl kicked butt, man I miss her!
![:beers:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/beers.png?v=6" ":beers:")
/cheers
Really:
1,000,000 players x 20 seconds extra time played a day = 20,000,000 seconds
20,000,000 seconds / 60 seconds a min = 333,333.33 minutes a day
333,333.33 / 60 min in a hour = 5,555.55 hours a day extra played
5,555.55 x 7 days in a week = 38,888.88 hours extra played a week
5,555.55 x 30 days in a month = 166,666.5 hours a month
Seems to me 20 seconds extra adds up to quite a bit each week/month.
Arguably it’s much faster to get around now than ever before. If I wanted to get to Shatrath or Dalaran in Northrend, I’d have to take a boat or the dark portal, sit on a windrider for 5 minutes.
Much faster with portals to every where in Stormwind or Orgrimmar for the Horde.
Never been faster to get around for me than now.
Do i have proof…nope but a hunch and someone thats owns a business now nothing like blizzard…thats for sure only have 10 employees…
But i am guessing 80% of a service oriented company (a game ) they base a lot on what will get players to stay subed and MAU
Nay, there should be a portal every 10 feet! Why should I have to take the time to travel from the front of the ship where the mission table is to the back where the Captain sends you to the other continent?
The whole thing remains mind-meltingly stupid on every conceivable level.
I have to look from a view of immersion from different sides of human experience.
-One ,being a physical world form .Yes, I am losing this because less of the world I see when I’m in a city.
-Two,social world form,If I can’t travel I can’t meet people across the world nor be with them doing dungeons and raids.
-Three intellectual world view,can’t study what I can’t see nor try something new on.
I would say ,yes it ruin it ,yet it did pack us in one area to make it feel we are immersed.