I 100% agree with your statement that a content creator is just one vote. But I personally think about the “who” part of the discussion. It’s not the value of how many people this person in question counts for but what their background is as a player. If I were to come out and make a thread about how bad PvP gearing is, it’s not going to hold as much weight as when someone like this does it.
For those that don’t know that is Venruki. He’s one of the hosts for the arena tournaments that lead up to the Blizzcon Championships.
Am I saying that everyone needs to kneel down whenever someone like him says anything? No. But I think it’s important to listen to players who are well seasoned, very skilled or have played the game since Vanilla. Which I’m not stating anyone that didn’t has no opinion. But it’s important to step back, understand who is talking and then try and form an opinion based what was said.
I try to sit back and listen to what everyone has to say. And I can be snarky at times when posting on GD. But the #1 thing I always try to do is hit on topics and discussions with players that don’t quite agree with me. Not to be confrontational, but to try and understand where they’re coming from and why.
Now on to titanforging. The thing that was thrown out by…Taliesin I think? Was that in a discussion that they had with Blizzard was that they wanted to do away with titanforging but they have nothing they can think of to replace it with.
I don’t agree with titanforging because of all the layers of RNG there is to it. And that includes sockets and tertiary stats. I haven’t had a sense of excitement in gear progression for quite some time because I always knew that there was going to be a better version of what I could get if I got lucky with a titanforge. But back when I started in Wrath I was a complete noob. And when I got my hands on the bow from the 2nd boss I knew that it was going to be my weapon for quite some time and I felt happy about it.
It’s why I play games like Monster Hunter: World. I can go in and kill the monster. But the only RNG that comes from him is whether or not I get the pieces I’m looking for when carving up the corpse for materials. Same in WoW. I can go in and kill the boss multiple times. But the moment the item I’m looking for or had some form of anticipation for dropping well…drops, then my heart skips a beat. It’s the same when a rare mount drops.
I didn’t have to worry about silly things like all the possibilities of what can happen when forging is there. The mount dropped. There was no “is it the right color” or something silly like that. The only RNG involved was it dropping.
I also have a hard time with believing that there’s a majority that have been enjoying these systems in the game. Because, and I know this is going to sound like a lot of other people, Classic is coming out. And for them to pour as many resources into recreating old content along side with the 800 employees getting let go, I have to wonder if things have been okay. But if they aren’t they’re not going to tell us.
All I have is speculation at the end of the day. Which I have to draw on multiple sources like players, interviews, content creators, streamers, top players, casuals, forums, Reddit ect. ect.
In my personal opinion, I think they’re just running low on ideas or they’re being choked out by the top guys who expect them to meet certain metrics instead of trying to focus on making fun and engaging content while keeping player interest high.