If history teaches you anything

Community General Discussion
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The development cycles for expansions take a long time. People need to get it through their heads that when we first saw mission tables in WoD they were already being put into the design of Legion.

When Ion had decided to not have flight in any future expansion (a decision that was changed by Blizzard after people quit in large numbers), the development team working on Legion already had their orders to not do QA testing for flight.

Another expansion has been released and we still don’t have flight, we still have other terrible systems like layered RNG and time gates.

It’s about time that Blizzard took to heart things that are detrimental to this game.

Layered RNG takes away player choice. Choice is central to an RPG of any worth.

Bring back flight at max level. Your continued extension of time gates, and crappy things like releasing raids one month after announcement to extend subs an additional month is really a horrible business practice.

If you want to keep mythic plus in the game, don’t have it attached to gear progression. Timers don’t belong in RPGs, this isn’t an eSport. Bring back badges and let people choose. Again…notice that ‘choice’ word and how important it is.

Finally, stop saying that you’ve done a bad job in communicating and that you’re trying to fix it. You aren’t trying to fix it at all. Your Q&A sessions aren’t anything more than handpicked questions that allow Ion and Lore to look longingly into each others eyes and pat each other on the back for how wonderful they are.

If you want people to really believe your trying to change, start changing. Your actions have to start to coincide with your words and your words need to have meaning to the players.

I don’t hold the development team responsible for every decision made, I realize that we all have jobs to do and sometimes our marching orders aren’t of our making. But in the end, after 3 expansions and the continuance of some of these systems, it seems like you’re either tone deaf, or you’re willingly ignoring things that aren’t good for the game.

It’s time for a big slice of humble pie here. Go back to MoP and copy what was done after 5.2. Use that as a starting point for the next expansion. Your time is running out on this. It’s much harder to keep people than attract new ones, and the people you need to keep are getting tired of telling you what is wrong.

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Yes. If Blizz could use MoP’s patch 5.2 as the standard for what future expansions should look like, and build from there, I think the game would be a lot healthier. I won’t say The Thunder King is the best patch ever released in WoW, but I think its model is one that Blizzard could reliably keep defaulting back to and we would be satisfied.

Unfortunately there seems to be some team B in charge of following up every good expansion with a bad expansion.

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With what activision is doing to Blizzard now, I dont think there is a A team any more. BFA is going to be as good as we get from now on , and things will probably only get worse. They have to focus their resources and talent on NEw games. And activision wants a new game every year to increase stock prices.

The best thing that could happen to this game would be if the IP was sold to another company who could devote more to it. That will never happen but thats what it will take to save wow. Even Classic will fail to save it it as people will play for acouple months for nostalgia and then quit.

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My secret hope is:

/tinfoil hat

Now that he’s retired, Mike Morhaime will look for investors to buy back Blizzard from Activision.

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This is impossible. Blizzard and Activision are the same company. The only way Blizzard breaks free is if the parent company Activision-Blizzard decides to spin them off into a seperate entity.

Also, I hate the Q&A’s. I’d rather have a weekly blue post of things they are actively working on or at least looking at. I don’t even need dates, just let us know what they are listening to.

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Blizzard did a fine job getting several millions of people into the game.

Activision has done a find job pushing them away.

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Or better yet, have the CMs reply to serious discussions and get information from the team for the key issues being discussed.

Rather than talk about their favorite kind of muffin or whatever garbage they gravitate towards, OR BEING COMBATIVE WHEN THEY DO RESPOND- why not actually try to help us out?

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If history teaches us anything, it’s that we do not learn from history.

It’s just that simple …

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I’m not sure that is true.

Blizzard was originally owned by a company called CUC software, who sold them to Havas, who were aquired by Vivendi. That means that Vivendi owned Blizzard.

In 07-08 Vivendi Games and Activision merged. Despite the fact that Vivendi was the controlling shareholder, they renamed the two merged companies Activision-Blizzard because those are two of the most recognizable names in gaming today. Activision later bought out the controlling interest in Vivendi, making them the parent of the organization.

In short, Activision owns Blizzard, they aren’t peers under the same umbrella as far as actual ownership goes.

Is that correct? If not please correct me, I’m not above learning, and I don’t want to say untrue things.

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They know all this, OP. They don’t care. They are so lost in their corporate think-tank world they have no clue why their products and stock are failing. Their solution is to give a new chief accountant a $15 million sign-on bonus to solve all their problems.

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Since he’s worth over a billion dollars at this point, I’d imagine he’s ready to forget all about this mess and enjoy his life. I wouldn’t bet the farm on that happening.

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There, I changed it to what you really meant to say. Because buying flight at max level is NOT going to come back.

What’s time-gated at the moment? The war campaign is time-gated, yeah. But it’s almost over. People seem to be confusing time gates with content gates. The two are very different.

Raids starting later has been a thing since Mists of Pandaria. They started doing it because of a few things:

  1. People would blow throw all the leveling content to get to max as fast as possible to start dungeon grinding for gear and then jump into the raid. Most of the time they were not even bothering to read the quest text.
  2. It puts the World First race, something we created as a community, on equal footing. A lot of guilds in the past like Ensidia and Paragon had players who only played WoW. It was a serious disadvantage to those players/guilds with equal skill but who had outside concerns. This way everyone has the same length of time to get prepared for the raid, a week in the raid, and then the race to World First is on.

All the timers do is block you from going up a level. You’re not deprived gear or anything. Your key just gets downgraded a level and you have to do it again to push that particular key.

We never had any choice back when we did have badges. We didn’t have 3-4 sets of gear to choose from to buy with badges. With the old tier armor the exception, we had one piece of gear usually. Two in case of a split caster class like Paladin and Druid.

I’ll agree with you there. One question I like to submit to those things, and the last one I submitted it to was for Blizzcon, is “You’ve repeatedly expressed a desire for improved communication. Do you feel you’ve made progress for this goal? And if not, what things are you considering to make that progress?”

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You’re not wrong, depending on what you mean by “Activision”. There is Activision Blizzard and Activision Publishing Inc. Activision Publishing are partnered with Blizzard Entertainment, and both those companies are owned by Activision Blizzard. The problem is that this causes a lot of confusion.

So Activision Publishing and Blizzard Entertainment are “peers” under the parent company of Activision Blizzard.

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I did not mean removal of flight. It’s okay for you to disagree, but I’d never say to remove it. They tried that and it failed, and won’t repeat that again.

Everything is time gated. How much rep can you gain per faction today? How many world quests do you get to complete? These are all time gates.

That doesn’t have anything to do with gating raid content 1 month after a patch.

If you think releasing content is based on a world first mentality, you’d be wrong.

Perhaps you need to read it again. M+ being an output for gear is bad to begin with. Go back to challenge mode for fun things. Keep gear out of it, it’s the wrong place for it.

Choice also means you have a choice in the gear you want, between items, not just variances of the items themselves. You’ve created an argument that fits your definition, instead of what the word really means.

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Removal of Pathfinder == Removal of Flight

Depends on which World Quests are up as they constantly cycle in and out. And there’s only 24 hours in a day so even if you could rep grind in dungeons until your eyes bleed like we did back in BC/Wrath, you’d still be “time gated” under your definition.

So in other words you want them to go back to pushing out raids with patches? It will not accomplish much since a) they’d push back the patch itself a month and b) you’d be dealing with bugs in the patch the night the raid opened up rather than actually raiding.

So you’re made Blizzard offered people who do not necessarily like to raid challenging content that rewards them too? If you don’t like that, don’t do that content. Quit demanding Blizzard force people play the way you think they should. You only get that right when you pay their subscription.

And Challenge Modes are a one-and-done thing. M+ is infinite. Blizzard designed the system to theoretically scale to infinity.

No, I was pointing out those were stop-gap pieces. That was also under a loot system that did not favor the player like we do now.

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No matter how many times you say that, it’s not a true statement. It is 100% your opinion.

I happen to remember a time in the game that had flight and no pathfinder. That is factual.

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Exactly… that’s the PAST. Not anymore. If Blizzard had their way it would be gone forever. So they compromised with us players. We get to keep flight Pathfinder was what we had to accept. The vast majority of us accepted that.

If you don’t that’s your issue. But if we go back on the deal, Blizzard is free to remove flight period.

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Ion was not in charge of development during Warlords of Draenor, Tom Chilton was. Ion didn’t get the role until after Legion launched. And no, you’re wrong. I’ve studied game development, I know game developers in the industry, and while timetables are long, individual decisions are not made that early. The decision to not have flight in WoD was made before testers saw any zone, because the expansion was designed from the ground up to not have it available. Future expansions such as Legion and BFA, did not have those same decisions made for them, so as the zones were being developed, they were designed with flight in mind.

The rest of your post is as flawed as your opening, sorry to say. I feel like I probably should expand on it, but if I did I’d be here all day.

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I love it when people use a word like compromise without knowing what the word even meant.

Who negotiated this compromise on behalf of the players?

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com·pro·mise
/ˈkämprəˌmīz/

noun: compromise ; plural noun: compromises
an agreement or a settlement of a dispute that is reached by each side making concessions.

No negotiation was made. Blizzard compromised on their want for no flight period and offered us temporary periods without it. We compromised on having flight at max level and to engage in certain pieces of content, the vast majority of which you accomplish simply playing the game in order to keep flight.

Don’t like it? Quit.