Is Blizzard Actually Committed To Player Housing?

Community General Discussion
1

After hearing the news that blizzard is ending future pet battle support it has me worried. How can we be so sure they won’t end support for player housing in a few years, if it doesn’t have the engagement they are looking for?

If you are someone who loves pet battles, the recent news must be devastating. Straight up removing battle functionality from new pets. What if 7 or so years from now, they do the same to housing, and the dedicated players who still engage the system are out of luck? I want to get invested in housing, but im worried it will get thrown out a few expansions from now.

Will blizzard actually commit to the feature? Atleast give us a guaranteed number of years we can expect content updates no matter what? Tell us how long you plan to support new features before considering slowing down updates for them. If Blizzard made a 10 year commitment to pet battles, no one would have been upset that they remove them 13 years later because it went on longer than what was promised.

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Yes they are committed.

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I tend to separate the systems in my mind. The housing system is different from the pet battle system, which is different from the appearance collecting system, which is different from the profession system. For all of the time and effort that has been put into making housing work and all of the different areas that it’s going to branch out into it it will certainly have a larger reach than pet battles have in the past. Don’t mistake me, my main account has more than 1250 unique pets and climbing, and I enjoy collecting and battling regularly.

4

The comparison to player housing vs battle pets is not even close. Player housing is gonna be huge and is huge in various other games. I would argue that the effort that went into creating housing is waaaay more effort that was put into battle pets in its entirety.

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It has nothing to do with engagement, but design choices.

Remember when we had Garrisons and how they talked about making this a long time project? Millions loved Garrisons, yet it was not developed further past release. Legion was a raid or die expansion, there was no place anymore for housing and social features so they cut the investment into this part of the game shortly after release.

Same could happen with the expansion after Midnight and housing receives the same treatment like transmogging. New furniture here and there, some shop items to buy but any new features? Most likely not…

To expect that we at one point have a garden for food harvesting, an entire new crafting experience similar to survival games, or a profession tied to housing is very unlikely.

We will just get cosmetic updates, but that´s going to be it, I am afraid. That being said, it´s more than what we have now…

Edit:

M+ has about the same engagement like pet battles, yet M+ is not removed. It´s really not about engagement, but what the developers and game designers want WOW to look like, which again is about cost efficancy and max income for the company.

M+ content costs like no money, you just turn a few knobs more right than for LFR / heroic dungeons. You don´t need to develop new stories, graphics, or AI - it´s all just a copy of what is there already.

But pet battles, every new pet requires a new design, you need to balance pets to each other, you must place quest NPC´s, it´s a lot more work so they get rid of it.

6

Pet battle had a support ? for what exactly ?!?!?

YOu mean when they realize that they can only sell expansion if they put the war into warcraft and not under house craft ?

I am sure you dont expect most of the wow players to play Roblox right ?

7

Why do you guys want them to keep committing resources to systems that nobody uses? I mean, all 7 people who love pet battles are probably really sad about it, but you can’t spend time and money making content for just 7 people. That’s the way it works.

Gotta focus on the stuff that’s going to have a better cost/benefit ratio for more people. If someday housing becomes wildly unpopular and no one engages in it, I hope they do scrap it in favor of content people actually want.

8

They are still putting in battle pets. From the last post I read.

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Implying that they commit resources to pet battles :dracthyr_hehe:

They haven’t increased pet levels since they were launched as a feature. They stopped making pet battle dungeons. The people who have been engaging with it from the start probably don’t have anything left to do so of course player engagement is down the drain.

11

this is a monumentally silly post…

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Unless I am mistaken, I believe this is referring to the pet battle PVP opportunities. I would love to see an option like follower dungeons for pet battles where you can actually battle NPCs and their team the same way we do with the current pet battle trainers. It would essentially be a solo queue where you would select your team ahead of time and then the same way you would initiate battle looking for another human in this case, you would simply look for a computer match.

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The hardest part is getting the system right and it seems like they have done that.

The items we’re to use in our home is what the devs use to place in environments so any new assets they create will be compatible with player housing for us to buy or achieve or get lucky on drops.

Most of the heavy lifting is done (or will be by Midnight launch).

14

Great, now walk it all the way back to the start:

Why have they been putting less and less into them over time?

I’ll give you a hint, I already explained it.

15

This is really simple. Blizzard is part of Microsoft which is a corporation. In corporations, only one thing matters and that is making profit so your stock price increases. The one thing all corporations have in common is: Nothing else matters. So:

If housing increases revenue over cost, it says.
If housing increases cost over revenue, it goes.

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Housing always has engagement. What may dwindle is participation in their stupid neighborhood junk. And then they just stop forcing neighborhood junk.

There’s no such thing. Decos are decos. They’re easy assets.

17

I don’t do the PVP stuff. Never have. I just collect the pets, do the quests, and level my pets. However, if making PVP more interesting for others increases activity that go ahead with that.

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That seems to be the only area they’re truly focusing on. The alpha response that was referenced in this post was very clear that pet battles would continue in midnight just as they always have been and that there will also be some new and interesting ways to obtain battle pets. So it doesn’t look like anything is really changing except maybe the PVP system that surrounds that one weekly quest where you have to win five matches against another person. Apparently the data suggests that very few players ever actually take it.

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19

Yeah. I don’t take the quest. Just take advantage of the buff if I have pets to level. I also don’t do the weekly PVP, Mythic+, or Timewalking quests either.

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20

The only one I seem to take regularly would be the one for time walking. I have no desire to do the mythic plus or the PVP ones either. In fact, I would say I’ve done the time walking one regularly and I’ve done the pet battle one about five times maybe.