I’ve been seeing a lot of whinging, moaning & groaning as a majority with no solid ideas to replicate the ideal that it was aimed for - as well as H.E.A.P.S of people belittle others ideas or fun aspects to add for the game in terms of lore, roleplay or otherwise etc with the responses ’It won’t be fair to {Insert Opposing Faction} !' or whether it’s:
Demonising the Horde
Demonising a race, within given faction for merely being in it.
People stating Alliance are too pretentious, and have enough (Essentially demonising the Alliance vise-versa party).
Saying it shouldn’t happen til {Completely unrelated subject} happens.
Or merely stating it’s ridiculous / Or trolls invading.
Why can’t people post more ideas that they’d like to see in the game in terms of gameplay to replace X thing people are angered about - instead of purely throwing salt & abuse?
Or perhaps instead of belittling others ideas - build upon such ideas & threads and say 'For {Insert Opposing Faction} they could do {Similar transaction, both fair & reasonable storyline and gameplay-wise} ! ', even building a compromise of such ideas, or thread topic.
I see a lot of the community is really toxic lately and it’s saddening.
What happened to all the fun jokes, block-building ideas of fun, old or new ideas to portray & inspire? I see a few time-to-time sure, but it’s very rare now.
Because Blizzard has made it clear that they don’t listen to ideas. For the most part they only respond when there’s mass outrage over something and it greatly affects their revenue. They made that part clear with the flying incident in WoD.
Suggestions and ideas just fall into a pit of trash, Blizzard is way past the point to where they cared about the community feedback, so now the forums are just people complaining since there is no reason to put effort into giving an idea.
A good example would be checking the class forums, plenty of people make suggestions on how to help make their class more fun, engaging and effective trying as much as they can to keep within the game’s balance, but nope, Blizzard just gives the odd 5% plus damage and call it the day.
In short, Blizzard don’t care for suggestions anymore so people don’t try to give them their ideas.
If they didn’t listen to ideas, we wouldn’t have Vanilla coming out. Nor would we have had server-mixed Battlegrounds. Or Illidan wouldn’t had been braught back. They ask time to time in questionnaire videos, and ideas time to time they show they’ve seen & heard the responses and are working on it.
If enough of the community pitch in their expression or excitement about something, Blizzard have made it clear they do listen to ideas and act on it.
But people complained since Cata that they wanted Classic back. Blizz’ first response to months of threads that “we don’t have the code for it anymore so it’s impossible” to try and shut down the concept. It worked for a little while. Then the complaints came back and they were even louder the second time around. Nobody took “it’s impossible” for an answer. Fastforward to the end of Legion and they finally say “okay okay, -fine-.”
That’s not listening to ideas, that’s caving to community pressure.
edit I will concede, though, that there were a lot of ideas about how to do it inside all the complaining lol
I whole heartedly disagree. And I’m in the boat that they’re only doing the Vanilla thing because Retail isn’t doing great. Do I have numbers or proof of this? Nope. Only speculation from watching what has been going on in the last few years and my own perspective.
But if they were listening we would have PvP vendors back in the game.
If they were listening we’d have a forging system that also gives players the opportunity to upgrade their gear if they weren’t so lucky.
If they were listening they wouldn’t have lied to me and my realm when we made a mass plea to not remove World Defense because they wanted to go the CRZ route.
If they were listening they would’ve tried to focus more on creating proper server community instead of trying to simulate it with things like CRZ, Phasing and Sharding.
If they were listening they wouldn’t have removed the choice for guilds to have Master Loot for their raid teams or would have removed the trading restrictions so that teams can actually function like teams.
If they were listening they wouldn’t have removed the 3 chest system when you do good in M+.
If they were listening we wouldn’t have an expansion where the RNG is worse than ever.
If they were listening we wouldn’t have gotten yet another AP system after Legion.
The list goes on, and on and on. There are major faults with the current expansion and it’s all an accumulation of Blizzard not listening to players over the years.
True they don’t listen all the time but hunters did get Hati back after we lost our awesome artifacts remember #savehati and #hunters4hati.
Many players hunters and non hunters asked for him to return and they did listen giving him back through a quest granted was too short but we got the good boy back.
Blizzard: “Hey, we are going to do the thing.”
Players: “Yeah, you probably shouldn’t do the thing.”
Blizzard: “Cool, but we’re still going to do the thing.”
Players: Everyone hates the thing
Blizzard Next Expansion: “We probably shouldn’t have done the thing.”
Players: facepalm
This. There were plenty of very, very good ideas during beta testing, and almost none of it (though I suspect it was actually none, period) was listened to. And it wasn’t big stuff like entire class redesigns, it was small QoL changes that would make specs feel smoother and more complete, or small changes like character reaction to make story lines more believable and cohesive. I guess there’s my almost - Tyrande during Darkshore required fans to practically write it out for them.
The devs are building their own game, for them only. If we like it, that’s a plus, but they haven’t been interested in player enjoyment for a long time.
It’s a cycle, during the early days of an expansion things are wide eyed and optimistic. People share ideas and try to nudge Blizzard in the right direction.
As month after month flies by and nothing changes (or takes an obscenely long time to change) people grow jaded and believe Blizzard will never listen to them. Thus leads to complaints and anger.
Especially after we are told in like, 8.0 that there will be no sweeping class design changes. Specifically after Shaman were promised in Beta just that.
From cata on they stopped listening and just kept spread-sheeting game design. Nothing we say matters until after the fact and even then they only go so far. Quality is not the primary driver and hasnt been for a long time.
I think Blizzard just doesn’t care what we think unless it either cost them money. Or if what is suggested will make them money. I agree that the only reason Classic was actually done was they saw private servers were taking their customers. When the number of customers fell below a certian point. They needed to bring them back. So they brought back Classic. They saw a potential to make money.
Didn’t it all start when they tried to shut down that super popular private server with a CND order that the playerbase exploded and they were forced into a negotiating position? I remember reading an announcement that Blizz was talking with the operators of that server but that was so so long ago.
i think in regards to classic servers it was more along the lines of “here is a group of people who arent currently paying us to play vanilla”
and i feel that Illidan can back for a nostalgia boost to bring players back.
maybe im cynical but i feel the only time they pull their finger out is when they realise they can gouge money from people for it.
i feel allied races fall into this, people wanted more customization options, things like more troll tribes and dwarf clans options for example, and we got them. but to make use of these new options require leveling new toons or race changing.
