“Please give us your requests!” was the most grating thing I’ve ever heard at a Blizzcon/interview, and I’ve put up with “the horde is waiting for you” and Cannibal Corpse.
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Blizzard’s excuse is that it’s not an, “accurate” metric for the game’s health and success. The only reason they did this was the free fall in WoD causing subs to reach a record low, and there’s very little reason to believe there was ever enough for them to feel confident about reporting it - outside of doubling active subs with Classic, of course.
Blizzard’s metric is… apparently not MAU or playtime, but with their design for the last several years and decisions all signs point to that being their sole metric.
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The fact Blizzard had no idea what the players wanted - ranging from small things to the long, long constant requests for specific things that were rather large (like less time gating, or less busy work, or fewer punishments for decisions…), and acted like player requests were ever heard by Blizzard…
Yeah. So many big names have left specifically mentioning the corporatization of the company, and people still believe what Blizzard says.
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The developers know what players want. They just don’t care.
It’s not “corporatization”. They just have developers with massive egos who live in an ivory tower. The devs don’t care if the company makes money, their sole concern is that they get to have their way.
That’s not a “corporate” thing. I’m sure that corporate would be delighted to have more customers and more revenue. But the developers DON’T care.
People need to stop giving the dev team a free pass and blaming “activision” or whatever. As if any of the corporate bigwigs have the slightest idea what kinds of things the dev team is doing to the game.
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Square Enix is a big company, but Final Fantasy devs seem to mostly listen to their playerbase.
How these devs act is getting exhausting.
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Actually devs know what players want. But giving us that would interfere with their amazing master plan which they, though they know it contains features that players would hate, are convinced that we can be duped into believing the mistakes of the past were actually right™. And we’ll get used to not having fun and grow to enjoy not getting stuff they think we don’t deserve.
Beta feedback can’t change basic planning issues. They should know what players are willing to pay for. If they ignore that, they deserve to fall hard.
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Im just using up my 10 tokens on my army of 50’s to farm the old MOP mounts once and for all. Didnt even buy Systemlands, bought the snow mount and a couple of pets instead, but i want those damn mounts so I can “finish” WOW.
You are right, the game changed, but it never was “my” or “our” game; it was always activisions.
I honestly think that was directed at the big-name streamers and raiding guilds.
9.1 seems to be more of a concept at this point, and the dev team wants to make sure that this expac continues to be tailored to the streamers and raiders.
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Basing your game around people who literally don’t have jobs. : )
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I honestly don’t believe that they do - at least, not well enough and not at a level where they can get these things changed. Those at the highest level have no desire to please the players, and that much has been shown for years. But I believe the core devs just don’t have the will or energy to try and understand player concerns.
We had to have a CM compile a master list of player concerns and complaints after all. Then they fired him and stole his work.
They said corporatization because it took weeks of meetings with business and financial people to get anything changed or done. True gamers and people passionate about the game ceased to make the decisions, and purely business and money oriented people took control - conveniently, this started shortly after Activision’s merger. It’s kind of funny the head dev right now is a lawyer.
My belief is that the big names want security. They don’t want wild shakeups and to do things that are seen as risks. But I could be wrong.
I’m not giving the people in charge a pass. I’ll give the lower devs a pass who have no ability to sway anything, though.
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After I finish my old PvP achieves I’ll go back to farming gold so I can try for those old mounts again - I have two. Maybe some 20’s pvp. Unless they honestly create an equivalent to wod PvP gearing, which I’m doubting they will, I really have no reason to buy the expansion.
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Well, I’ll absolutely agree with this. The devs we interact with are the most arrogant, out of touch, and ridiculously condescending I’ve ever seen. I wonder how nobody above them sees this.
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Oh yeah, that is the height of arrogance. Even shocked Lore there. But, honestly, I think there are moments in more recent videos that are worse.
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OMG! I honestly thought when players spoke of this moment, they exaggerated Lore’s reaction but that’s word for word accurate. Crazy.
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Oh, no, it’s absolutely remembered clearly by Warlocks who played at that time and by people who frequently refer to it as one of the most clear instances of arrogance and condescension from Blizzard.
They gutted one of the most unique (if not the most unique) specs ever made in this game in favour of a terrible maintenance, bland spec that was played by almost no one for ages - if at all now.
Rather than raise every other class/spec to the Warlock’s level - especially Demonology - they gutted all three.
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That’s basically all WOD was. The arrogance of Ion on full display.
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“How much can we trim and phone in before the playerbase notices, and complains” the expansion.
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A publicly traded corporation wouldn’t respond (rise to the bait) unless it affected the stock price or the c-suite. Otherwise, at most they’d say they disagree with the research report.
When Blizzard used to release sub numbers, they didn’t have to worry about share price. Were people really tracking Vivendi stock based on WoW? Digital was a small part of the Vivendi conglomerate back then.
Modern era Blizzard wants people to focus on corporate metrics like revenues, player engagement, etc. Iow, something they have more direct control over. Sell more pets. Roll out a six month sub deal for a free mount. Generate more WoW token sales. Bring back a retro game. Stuff like that.
The current wow situation is like this.
You send your buddy with a car to the store with 15 bucks to get some beer for your Superbowl party and he comes back with Mikes Hard Lemonade.
You tell him… “dude… we wanted beer. What the hell? Nobody wanted that.”
He tells you “Try it, You’ll like it. It’s so much better than what you wanted.”
You try it and you immediately hate it. So you tell him to get some beer before the game starts. You give him another 15 bucks and he drives down to the market a second time.
He comes back with STRAWBERRY mikes hard lemonade and says “See, it’s different now! It’s now way better than what you wanted.” And… of course it’s terrible. So the games already started and your kind of stuck with it now. You try the new one and also immediately hate it. Now your friends at the party hear that your friend Fred Finch in apartment 14 down the hall has beer so they start leaving to watch the game there.
As they leave you yell “No, don’t go down to 14, I promise things will be better soon” and some of them stay, but about 41% of your friends either abandon you for the great party at 14 or just leave to do other things.
At half time you explain to your buddy that he HAS to get it right this time. If you don’t have beer the whole party will fall apart. You tell him it doesn’t matter what kind… just regular normal beer. So he takes another 15 dollars and makes another run. Everyone at your party is waiting on the beer. Texts and videos are on snapchat and facebook of the great party down the hall in 14. A few more leave but some of them feel they just have too much time invested in your party and decide to stick it out.
Your buddy gets back and puts a brown paper bag on the table. Everyone runs up expecting a budweiser or busch… at this point nobody even cares, even some PBR would work…
…And he pulls out a pack of Mikes Hard Black Cherry Lemonade.
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