I agree with the first point minus the part where the gearing and simming bleeds over into raiding. If you mythic raid and are not playing optimally then you are trolling as far as the community is concerned. It is sad because playing optimal builds for the mid/softcore guilds and having the right covenant abilities is not going to make or break your mythic clears. The mid/softcore community perceive things that way though and it is sad.
For your second point, I think in a perfect world the covenant abilities would be balanced and their would be clear up/downsides to each one with good ways to augment the abilities. I do not trust blizzard’s ability to balance the systems introduced by them. I played outlaw rogue at the beginning of legion. Remember when blizzard went on record and said they would not push major nerfs to any artifact weapon after the xpack launch? Remember when they gutted outlaw rogues a month into the expansion by nerfing the trait that caused run through to do more damage by 2% per point and every mythic raiding rogue had to reroll since that nerf stacked up to 12% with weapon relics?
I have absolutely no trust that blizz is going to balance the abilities. I would rather they stopped wasting time pretending that they can and just open up the system and focus their time on making the game better and more fun.
The problem with your argument is that it is based upon the belief that blizzard is “punishing” you for wanting to play optimally in each aspect of the game. Jared’s statement is based upon the belief that an RPG should have choices that the player has to balance, not free reign to flip between them at the drop of a hat. Just because you think the covenants design is “bad” doesn’t mean everyone else does.
Please don’t assume what I intended. My point was exactly what I said it was. Blizzard is making people choose what types content they do for the first time in the history of the game. That is punishment. Never before have they actively sabotaged people that wanted to PvE or PvP for doing the other.
Moreover… Ion flat out said it in the interview with Preach. It’s not only intended: It’s by design.
That’s not game design, that’s community. I strongly disagree with any idea that the game should be designed around the community. Please don’t misunderstand: bad things are always bad regardless of who calls it out, but the community is notoriously toxic and schizophrenic.
I don’t trust Blizzard’s ability to balance either. However, I think they should be held accountable for their failures, not given an easy way out so that their inability to balance can just be safely ignored and instead of two dead talents in a row, we have three dead Covenants in an xpac where they’re a major feature.
I think we can both very much agree that the problem is Blizzard sucking, not that commitment is bad? Or else there should be an equivalent outcry that we can’t swap classes, races, factions, etc, at the drop of a hat. I want Blizzard to be forced to balance, not throw their hands up and let the system be terrible.
Ignoring WoW’s community for a moment… I’d suggest you re-evaluate that. Mane6 briefly thought the same thing… then they realized their community wasn’t who they thought it was (it was far far more casual) and had to adjust. If you ignore your community… you are destined to be Wildstar.
Good luck in your quest. The classes have never been balanced, the specs have never been balanced, the talent trees within those specs have never been balanced, trinkets have never been balanced, Azerite was never balanced, and corruption has never been balanced.
Seriously, I wish you luck, I really do.
Just to add to be somewhat future proof: the covenant abilities will never be balanced, the conduits will never be balanced, and the legendaries will never be balanced.
Everything you’ve said is fair and true. My answer, though, is that I’m not going to be playing if Blizzard fails that hard. I don’t think screaming at a company for creating a game I don’t enjoy is the answer, playing something else is.
There’s a bit of a difference. Designing with your community in mind is important, but systems shouldn’t be built around them. For instance; Riot designing around the League of Legends meta, imo, does significant damage to the game.
The gameplay systems of WoW seem pretty well set up to me. Something like M+ is accessible to any audience, but it’s also infinitely scaling so that the most casual to the most hardcore can play the system. If the highest you can go is +2, you still get to do it, and hopefully it’s fun for you, but you can also push the key infinitely high if that crazy challenge is something you want.
That’s more what I mean. If M+ was designed around the community, it could look more like Island Expeditions (we can agree those were a total flop, right?) where they’re very casual accessible, but dead and boring outside of that group. Mythic raiding could be on the opposite end, but that was more of a problematic Vanilla design philosophy. All raids were only accessible to a tiny portion of the playerbase, and they’ve since made them much more widely accessible through difficulty settings and LFR.
Design with the community in mind, but not around them. I hope this wasn’t too much of a rambling mess-- I’m typing on a phone while working-- but I’d be happy to clarify or expand on anything if I wasn’t clear!
I get what you’re saying. That clarification is significantly different to my reading from what you originally wrote… I do wonder if blizz has misjudged their community this time though. Maybe the community I see here on the forums, in the beta forums, and on reddit doesn’t reflect the community at large. Because the consensus of those communities while definitely not unified… is not positive at the moment.
If that’s the case I’m very worried where and what is Blizz using to drive that decision. As I said in my original post in this thread: I don’t think they are clueless… but I cannot figure out for the life of me what’s driving these decisions. Quite a few seem directly contrary to WoW’s core design philosophy that has held strong since vanilla.
I just do not think Blizz will be able to get this down. I want this game to be good, but I have 0 trust for blizz in its current state to be able to execute on the promises made (as far as balancing is concerned).
The community has never been pro-Blizzard. You can look at any spot in time, and almost any conversation has been against whatever Blizzard was doing at the time. A large part of this is you’re not very likely to praise something you like, you’re just going to sit back and enjoy it.
I’m not saying most people are for the changes, just that that’s always been the case as far as the community goes.
The design philosophy has changed a lot since Vanilla. Changing specs used to be a pretty painful affair. I honestly think this is Blizzard trying to step back a bit due to how successful Classic was, where it was a much more punishing game in general.
I am curious what consistent design philosophies you think are being challenged by the systems proposed for Shadowlands, though?
If they were in tune with what the players want, then they’d realize theres a lot of people that are interested in it like options and freedom to choose what to do when they want to do it.
As a mid core person, they try so hard to inconvenience the high end but then make it tolerable for some of the low end and restrict for… reasons? “mUh ChOices MaTtEr”
They keep going against the high end and make it more unfun for them in ways, which trickles down to the rest of us, which is annoying. I guess they don’t like what the high end min-max does to the rest of the community so they figure going after that is the most effective.
I can be considered indecisive, but it seems annoying that if I like one soulbind and want to use it for multiple specs, I can’t. my other specs gets the scraps of the “inferior” or less fun conduits. some just seem straight up bad for the ones you can’t switch out for other specs. Then there’s some that the spec abilities just feel bad for some, but good for others. As someone that likes to play all of my specs on my mains, this isn’t something I’m looking forward to. My DK ,I love playing all 3 specs, more so frost DK and blood. Some of the abilities are just TERRIBLE for tanks, but great for dps and vice versa and I like to have the fun abilities OR at least the fun conduits. same for some of my pure DPS classes. They keep wanting to inconvenience playing another spec.
I guess as long as they let me have fun on multiple specs and classes, I’m fine. I like variety. Maybe i’m feeling more spoiled by other MMO’s that let you be really alt friendly, like WoW used to be. MoP was the start of “not as alt friendly” but I could at least play all my specs moderately. Legion didn’t even like me playing multiple specs for awhile.
The core one is WoW is a Casual game. That’s probably the most disturbing one to see changed. I’m seeing this in just the sheer number of systems and the punishment for death that exceeds gold and rez sickness (if you take that). That’s a real first for WoW… we’ve never lost anything more than gold for dying and that’s a major shift in tone for the game. It takes it a lot closer to the hardcore EQ etc.
Shadowlands is not a casual’s expansion… or even an RP expansion. It’s a hardcore players expansion.
It was brought to my attention in another place that the systems as currently designed are disastrous for RP-PVP for example. RP wise many of those players want to go with specific covenants, but would be force into taking covenants they don’t want if they want to be even remotely competitive for PvP. So the RP and the PVP that they enjoy… and tie very tightly together are now in firm conflict.
Weird. If you aren’t having fun why are you still actively playing? Usually if I am not enjoying something I stop doing it and if it is something I am paying for then I cancel my sub and move on.
Blizzard has placed itself at odds with the community since day 1. They made it quite clear they don’t care what the player base thinks. So as a result, the community has been very anti-blizzard.
I don’t think this is as big of a deal as people make it out to be. The number of choices (to a point!) don’t matter as long as there’s no wrong choice. As a bit of a silly example: Prot Warrior is the best choice for a tank. Hunter pet is the wrong choice. Everything in between falls in a spectrum of power, but they are viable.
As a less silly example, Vengeance DH has to take the Spirit Bomb talent. Everything else on that row isn’t just “not the best”, it’s wrong. They don’t even fall on the spectrum of viability.
I haven’t seen this, what do you mean?
This seems like a player perception and community issue, not a system issue. I’m curious and could be convinced otherwise with specifics, though.
I’m not going to argue that, but I will say they’ve kept this game going for, what, 15 years? So either they have the most masochistic community in existence, or they’re not as bad as the most vocal parts make them out to be. Not defending them or saying they’re amazing, just maybe not the actual devil.
Right now… there are extremely right choices… and extremely wrong choices according to the beta forums. It’s very class dependent but it can be the difference between being viable and being LFR/meme bad territory.
I wish this was the case, but please look at the forums… it’s not that simple, some of the soulbinds are literally “it might be better if you didn’t bother” territory.
I’m well aware… right now my main is a DH that I tank extensively on. I’m lucky that venthyr works for both specs but most aren’t that lucky. RP wise I’m pissed because I wanted to go night-fae but they are in meme bad territory right now.
If you die in the maw you lose half your anima.
Not really, PvP is the most competitive portion of the game, even a 1% difference makes a massive result there. So a 5-10% difference which is the spread on most covenants in the best case right now… is just devastating.
For privacy reasons I’ll leave the person who mentioned it to me out of it. If they see this they are welcome to jump in. Just let it suffice that for RP reasons this would be a major blow to them as they are alliance and would be de-facto forced into maldraxxus… to the point they’d rather quit than make that RP choice.
I really do think this will be a hardcore expansion. Blizz has made it less approachable, added more systems. Made things harder to understand. And made it easier for people to discriminate. It literally does nothing that Ion said it’s supposed to do.
Their motivations are obvious… Less work and more money. Period. They shottily reskin & rename, or crudely do crap without fully thinking it through to give the impression of changes. When in reality, they just want you to think its new and exciting so you’ll buy it. Time gating, rep gating, withholding flying, etc is all ways to slow people down… The slower people go, the longer they gotta play, the longer they play, the longer they subscribe. Instead of thinking of ways to introduce quality content & more of it, they think of ways to have you repeat the same quests over & over & over & over.
