I mean… he’s not wrong… you are being a bit crappy leaving your group like that… unfortunately… he’s being very naive thinking that peoples morals are going to hold in game in 2021.
Just how it is when you massively increase accessibility and convenience across the board while maintaining complete anonymity.
I mean… the game director of FFXIV overtly tells people to unsubscribe if they’ve run out of content they enjoy, and encourages them to check back in the future. They don’t design the game to arbitrarily take you an extra six months for 40 minutes worth of content to wring that subscription fee out of you. That is respecting your time.
They design the game for twenty years in a way that increasingly downplays community goals and emphasizes personal progression. Then when players prioritize that personal progression over the community, they’re all like:
Yup. Exactly that.
So your saying personal individuality isn’t important for a game but community is more important? That means everything important isn’t and shouldn’t be involved with the players.That’s like shooting your own foot imho,say good bye to transmogs welcome to the soldier outfit.
Both are necessary.
Balance is required.
The GV is one of the worst aspects of SL and really shows how out of touch Blizzard has become.
It’s not only that there are grinds and dailies. WoW has always had grinds. The problem is that the SL grinds aren’t opt-in for a reward. You are actively punished with substantially lower character power if you opt out. Blizzard has moved away from offering carrots like Netherdrakes to using sticks like closed soulbind slots and legendaries that should have just been a new row of talents to force players into grinding specific activities. Is it any wonder players are leaving?
Yeah, the post was basically because we don’t receive any blue post or info regarding how they take on consideration some systems and player behaviour, he’s right about people leaving will be see as antisocial…etc but people always look up for the best way to do things, i just found out that you can avoid being dismount on the path to the Korhia portal but going in a specific way, people even min-max that kind of stuff 
I don’t hate the guys at system group, i just feel they need some training on player behaviour .
They’re just doing Parasitic designs since a long time ago. check from min 8 for WoW examples, really good video
They are designing the game for the imaginary playerbase they think they deserve.
While I do agree with the point of being disrespectful. On the other end of the stick they did this too themselves. If they want players to stay until the end, then their option was to out all legendary powers at the final boss. That way they have to clear to it to have e a chance at it. Yet they didn’t and this is the consequence of that.
So instead of attacking us they could look at the consequences of their systems that are failing. Then make improvements to them, over being a double down Betty and saying it’s not my fault, it’s your fault.
Blizzard have not had any focus on the social elements of the game and spend way too long focusing on the economical… this might be because you have the boys club in charge or an ex lawyer steering the ship (in a very analytical way that takes most of the feeling out of the game).
When you queue up to a dungeon that automatically teleports you to it, forms a group for you, offers only text based communication, requires the minimalist of interaction or utility in the group - tank, dps, heals (and often tank is optional in level up content) - its not conducive to social gameplay… there are no humanising aspects “rate your enjoyment of the party” or “here is 1000 anima you cant have it yourself but who do you want to allocate it to in your group”, stats on how many times you have grouped up with the random players etc.
Blizzard don’t do a good job of anything except locking in subs - which is finally starting to lose them subs. Ion going go back to encounter design would be a good start. Reaching out the big name content creators and getting them involved in the design process would probably be a good idea… they have an audience and subsequently on aggregate can accurately represent a large portion of the playerbase.
Above all eat some humble pie, admit whats gone wrong and show us how you are moving forward. Narratively, game content wise and development wise.
I think they’re going to have to hit rock bottom before they can begin to consider that there is anything wrong beyond unreasonable expectations of the playerbase. We can say they brought this on themselves. Until they accept there are real problems they can’t begin to address them.
This is actually quite profound!
Imagine playing a complex board game just to get it over with as fast as possible. somehow, they have lost sight of what a good, engaging, fun, game is.
Its almost cliché and you can phrase it however you want but it really is about the journey not the destination.
Still to this day (and I did it last year a few times) I get a kick out of doing the Tealan/Tirion fordring questline in EPL in classic… I don’t do it for the rewards and I don’t do it for the xp (there are certainly way better xp/hour quests to do)… I do it because its just a god dam fun questline to do.
I mean initially it sux, go kill ~90 mobs, but then it gets more interesting go find some artefact’s and learn what happened to this hermit, ultimately go infiltrate the fr(&(& scarlet cathedral the most crap your pants hostile place in the game by that point and cherry on top the ending of escorting Tealan out of that zone, his end and Tirion turning up just a fraction too late… thats how you make content blizz.
Compare it to the Maw (literally the entire zone of the maw)… a repetitive find the dots collect the things storiless bland void. Ok you meet venari… some ethereal who are they? why is she opposing the jailer? why is she helping us? whats going on… Oh I died exploring/trying to find cool things and now half my stygia is gone… I probably shouldnt deviate from just following the dots then… it doesn’t matter anyway this zone probably wont be in next content patch, oh look dailies to do here the one zone you cant fly in how fun.
I am just praying that new world is good and can shake wow to its core to force them to evaluate what works and what doesnt, what needs fixing and stop making the game they want to make (Ion literally quoted as saying “well thats just not the game we want to make” in referencing covenants and getting rid of restrictions) and start making the game for the players again.
It is about the journey, and not the destination; but Blizz is making the journey horrible so they can up their “time played” metric. They don’t seem to understand that time played is a great metric IF people are playing because they’re having fun; not because Blizz engineered the game to make it take more time to do anything you need to do to get to the stuff that’s fun.
The metric they use is MAUs Monthly Active Users… from a management perspective, they literally do not care about player satisfaction/engagement or playtime they care if you are subbed (have been active over the month). This is why the design follows that principal and also why investors are now demanding answers.
As players we are ground 0 and get the picture first, investors only get the news quarterly but blizzard does not answer to us they answer to investors… this is why mobile is the direction and esports was something they tried to crack.
Would of been a very interesting course for blizzard to list instead of be acquired (as the company could have continued its quality first approach, with profitability being second) but the founders cashed out instead.
Not sure what you’re saying here. MAU is their principal metric, as it fairly directly translates into income; however, they also measure “engagement” by “hours played” or “daily time spent” presumably because the the investors think it measures how much the players like the game and how likely the players are to keep playing. And it is a good metric - if Blizzard wasn’t engineering the game to increase the time it takes to do everything.
I disagree. They keep all this data and analyze it internally. They only release MAU info. But subscription numbers totally matter. It doesn’t matter if they are making more money now because of store sales if the playerbase is dramatically shrinking. You don’t think they’d be selling more tokens if there were still 6 million subscribers? People who quit don’t buy tokens for carries or anything else.
They track participation in new content and make adjustments if they aren’t meeting their goals.
Prime example: Horrific visions. They were supposed to keep everybody busy throughout the content drought for the entirety of BfA. Did they? A lot of people who were planning on getting and farming them on all their alts got fewer than they planned on and leveled up only their main. A lot of people came back after taking a break until 8.3, checked it out, and left immediately. The content was supposed to be mandatory. It was supposed to inspire casuals to git gud, do this hard content, and get addicted to competition.
What happened was a lot of people decided it was completely optional. Within a week Blizzard had posted a video on “how to get your cloak”, as though the only reason anybody wasn’t already farming horrific visions hard was that they had no idea how to get it. They posted a “poll” thread in the forums where anybody could have their level 10 alts could vote that every alt had their cloak up to date.
They were already showering casuals with 50% corrupted gear, which unlike the PTR, where all corrupted gear could be cleansed by anyone without the cloak, could not be cleansed until after getting the cloak, running horrific visions, and then doing a quest to unlock the procedure.
I had 2 level 117’s get corrupted gear. I figure that’s not a coincidence, since none of my characters hung out in leveling content rather than just level up. What was a level 117 with a piece of +35 239 corrupted gear supposed to do with it? Corrupted gear was an effective nerf to casual gearing, since it made much of the gear they received unusable.
People still weren’t doing enough horrific visions to get participation up enough to reach their goals, so now they removed the ability of alts without the cloak to buy essences. I was so impressed I moved my characters out of BfA. They’re still in old content, which actually does nothing to help them demonstrate how successful their new content is.
Now that I’m off the hamsterwheel I’ll probably never get back on. So yeah. They’re addicted to their spreadsheets, databases, and reports. Don’t kid yourself. Subscriptions matter. Every person who bought the expansion intending to play throughout but left within a week is a big loss.
Ya that’s the typical move from those who have power. “Oh, this is an issue stemming from the individual end.” Never, “We failed as designers of the game.”
Something I’ve been thinking about lately; why, is the reward system, tied to ‘random’ of whatever you want to do? Wouldn’t it make more sense, to let people choose what they want to do for a reward also? Like, you don’t need to only reward people who play random dungeons or BGs.
And another thing; why, is there not a rated queue system, instead of the LFG finder nightmare situation. They’ve automated everything, but they make those who don’t want to form their own groups suffer for it. Idk man; stinks.
Ideally, good loot should be on every boss. Rewarding encounters make them fun. The issue comes into play when it comes to the entire MMo Aspect of the game. There will always be anti-social jerks. MMo’s in particular reward you for being an anti-social jerk. It’s just more efficient being a jerk then it is being the team player. That is why systems in MMo’s need to be put in place to ensure anti-social behavior isn’t rewarded. Sadly these systems all make for a less fun game. It’s really not a great place to be in for any developer. It’s why if I got into the industry I’d never make a MMo.