Don't think about how YOU WANT players to approach the game, think about THEM approaching it

This has been one of the worst shifts of design philosophy in recent memory.

You launched Shadowlands with the Covenant restrictions on swapping them around, saying that it would be crucial to experience Shadowlands through the lens of the Covenant of your choice, masquerading it as “meaningful”. Turns out, players are just mad that you are artifically limiting what people are good at.

You launched Shadowlands with Conduit Energy being a thing, with the premise that you want to cut out min-max culture from the game. Turns out that nobody liked Conduit Energy, because both casuals and hardcore players couldn’t freely experiment as they wanted, and they were artifically punished for trying to play different specs.

Honestly, I’m just going to skip examples. I already went out of my way to explain why your systems in the last several years were poorly received in a lot of my posts - but I do think that blatantly pointing it out is important, until you get the message.

As an analogy. Imagine you go to a nice restaurant, hungry for some food. You look at the menu, and you order a nice 30cm italian pizza. But when it arrives, your pizza has white caviar, rotten salad, an unidentifiable cheese, coffee beans, broken shards of glass and someone’s tissue paper on it - oh and the crust is removed, and it’s undercooked. When you ask the waiter “Yo dude the hell?” they respond with “Well, we took a unique twist on our pizza here, since we thought it’d be an interesting new way, a new lens through which our customers will get to experience the delight of a pizza.”

But what you just tasted is so horrendously disgusting that you can’t even get to the toilet in time. You get food poisoning, you’re still hungry, and you just wasted a bunch of money. A year later, the restaurant decides to remove the broken shards of glass from the pizza recipe, because it turns out, no one likes glass in their pizza, quoting: “The recipe simply has not played out the way we hoped it would.”

To get to the point. When you design a system, stop thinking about what you want the players to do. Think about how the players WILL experience it.

243 Likes

Legiondaries vendor
Azerite Traits
Azerite Essences
Corruption Vendor
Conduit Energy

This isn’t a full list, but they’re examples of systems that were either asked for and later implemented, or had identified issues early in testing that still shipped.

I’m going to add to Prosident’s statement.

Think about how players will experience it, but also think about what will hold them back from fully experiencing it. If that something is RNG, then there should be a way - even if that way is difficult - to obtain it without RNG

55 Likes

Im pretty sure he means that people were giving feedback that these were things that should have launched or been changed on release instead of after the fact when people are already leaving because they are sick of not getting A or B and after a few months or a few patches they finally get it.

29 Likes