we would have always done those things if we had the capability.
the motives stay the same, only the means change.
Old Blizzard was a lawsuit waiting to happen. I miss the fun times I had playing D2 and vanilla. But I don’t miss old Blizzard and would never go back to those days either.
The question earlier was how people have changed. What gamers would have/could have done… Mm. I’d almost be inclined to agree to an extent. But…
Once upon a time, cellphones couldn’t handle games. Then, after time and tech improvements, they could. Eventually the concept of mobile games came into being.
But gamers didn’t change once those mobile games came into being? Once microtransactions came into existence?
i was playing Snake on my Nokia cell phone before I was playing WoW.
It came out in 1997.
I remember helping stress test wacraft III on IRC with blizzard people. It truly was gamers making games for gamers. RIP
MMORPGs belonged to a niche group of gamers.
then mainstream joined in.
I claim that it is the mainstream that is changing, while the core niche remains roughly the same.
truly, we have no visibility because of the mainstream being on top of the niche group, but there is a clear demand for oldschool games, as seen from the success of things like Games Done Quick streams. And websites like GoG.com.
the mainstream is forever shifting. the core audience of MMORPGs is not the mainstream, in fact it plays MMORPGs to avoid the mainstream.
An unfortunate question to ask, is - how much does the niche you mention matter?
Specifically: consider how much success mobile has had.
Gamers 100% have.
Maybe not the topic you were aiming for, but today’s gamers optimize the fun out of absolutely everything. It’s the default if multiplayer is involved to go look up what’s best or “meta” before you even start. No one wants to answer questions about the game, at best they chuck a third party link at you, at worst they just get rid of you because “you should know this already”.
You can purposefully put your head in the sand, but it will just result in a poor social experience as everyone around you will be frustrated at your poor performance and lack of knowledge (unless you’ve specifically built a community around putting your head in the sand that’s large enough to do the content without pulling in regular players).
There’s really no going back to the way things used to be. There’s never gonna be another “Golden Warthog” type of phenomenon. Everything about every popular game is known within weeks of it launching, if not months BEFORE launching (as is the case with long-running games like WoW that have people datamining upcoming things well before they go live).
Efficiency is king now and that is absolutely a change.
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one thing I miss about old Blizzard is the GM’s we get to talk to when we open tickets. I even had a GM popup in front of me and turn me into a cat! 
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I don’t mind if the GMs don’t RP and Appear in-game and stuff, but I do mind that they essentially just don’t exist at all anymore.
You put in a ticket, you never log out, you won’t get a live response. You’ll get a web ticket response no matter what, likely with a canned copy paste sending you to WoWhead despite the issue having nothing to do with an item or quest. So then you have to re-open the ticket and reiterate the exact same issue to get someone to take a 2nd look at it another day later instead of just resolving it on the spot when you and the CS rep were both available at the same time.
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the response system is sooo bad! I remember opening a ticket on my warlock about the “Circlet of Faith” asking if the halo appearance is still a thing because I could not see it when I looked at it in the dressing room. (I was going to buy it on the BMAH)
I got a reply saying, “So I see you have a question about the Plagueheart Circlet”…I was like…what? Had to wait another 24 hours just to correct him >.<
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they are the ones who keep the game from collapsing when the bandwagon starts snowballing. They are the ones unaffected when there’s twitter drama and #BoycottActivision nonsense.
@Ventorath: I assure you I can play my way just fine in the semi-hardcore scene. There’s tons of casual guilds out there that don’t care if you’re not doing the efficient stuff. The trade-off is progression, but with so many different difficulty modes, the tradeoff is acceptable.
I doubt I’ll ever have a CE.
I’m not interested in doing what it takes to get one.
I’m fine without one.
Are you still wanting to put forward the idea that gamers haven’t changed?
yes
gamers haven’t changed. gaming industry tourists have changed. i retain my opinion that one subgroup is where you see the change.
looks at all the mobile game money
looks at all the entitlement topics in the forums
You sure about that? Companies follow the money trends. Rare do they make them.
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I guess so, but then again, I know I didn’t change one bit.
I miss the old blizzard too. I wish the old original developers would come back to WoW. I’m kinda sad now remembering all to good times in early WoW.
Games became extremely popular, those of us from the 90s and early 2000s are unfortunately not the main demographic and games/companies have changed accordingly. No longer are the tastes and principles that were staples back then matter much anymore. Game design has definitely suffered because now it’s all about making money and no longer about vision.
Bandwagon companies do that.
Good companies stick to just making good games. Sucker Punch Productions, CD Projekt Red, Santa Monica Studio, Rockstar, Nintendo.
Can you not play windowed or something? Or does sc2 not have that option?