Just look at the forums and you’ll see hundreds, if not thousands of players asking how obvious Q/A bugs or fixes weren’t listened to or made it past Beta or were flat out left unaddressed.
Take for instance, the classic “Blizzard polish”, where 10 years ago, Blizzard was like where Apple was now. Highly refined, sleek and well optimized and simple enough to play but hard to master to a point a baby could pick up wow on a potato and play. While a person could invest years into maximizing and perfecting their character and minmaxxing for that 99th percentile.
You could log into WoTLK, and just be addicted to the game spending hours in dalaran dancing with the people, doing your daily heroic and weekly raid and thinking about all the tier you could buy with your valor tokens.
Then you could just go sail around flying for hours over Northrend marveling at the beautiful design while you and 40 other people all met at the ICC Dungeon hub where you could meet people to ICC and run dungeons from Halls of Reflection, Pit of Saron, and the forge of souls. You could meet hundreds of people playing, the game was simple, it was fun, and it was the pinnacle of wow’s golden age and subs.
It seemed like, most everyone loved the Blizz we had back then. They listened and went the extra mile to make everyone happy, GMs would pop into raids and cheer on teams as they went around going through loot drop fixes. Nowadays, it feels like modern Blizzard-Activixon goes out of their way to ignore player feedback, from denying account bound 8.2 essences to adding more unpopular systems with corrupted gear and forcing unpopular mechagnomes into the game. And when players hate the mechanics, they double down on forcing stuff that people don’t like and sub numbers dead dive. What gives?
What happened to blizz? How did they screw up so badly. Do you think shadowlands will be different, another legion, or do you wait and remain optimistic blizzard might learn from their mistakes and turn around? Or will they just double down on wildly unpopular ideas in the death throes of a empire?
It’s not as simple as some imagine - they are a big business, with 19385029 voices, opinions, feed back coming every which way. The team changed several times so you don’t really have the same team in Wotlk that you have now.
They are human and have ego’s of their own.
The current team is realizing big flaws that happened - their main problem is they don’t simply change it right there and then but let it ride it’s course. They keep the problem, layer a band aid fix ontop of that so it’s a compounding problem that gets out of hand.
Shadowlands will be different, but will not be as different I BELIEVE as some are led to believe.
Legion had LOTS of time for development, testing etc and the benefit of everyone comparing it to WoD… Shadowlands not so much. Shadowlands also is offering much less content, trying to bank on it’s ‘‘replayability’’ which I am not holding out hope for since I’ve seen time and time again that their skill for implementation is lackluster.
They are in a lose-lose situation of finding balances to wanting to keep everyone happy. At the end of the day… if this was a sports team, the GM, Coach, President would all be fired if it was up to me, lol.
I’d be stunned if it’s really thousands of players on these forums. Most of the truly whiny threads are populated by the same people time and time again and have been for years; people who exist for no reason other than to slam the game on a message board.
Wait… don’t they just implement things as they like regardless of what the majority of the player base claims would be great for the game? I don’t think they try to keep anyone happy at all.
The bandaid fixes are part of the problem, but I think they’re currently working with a bad core design philosophy. They aren’t seeking replayability due to fun factor, but rather treadmills that will keep players sufficiently occupied so that the dev team can deliver less content. If they can perfect making everything a time-sink system or infinitely replayable treadmill, they can really just slap a new coat of paint on the existing systems and call it a new expansion.
I agree… that is a big issue and until they see how it’s affecting the game. Nothing seemingly will change if the same band of merry-men are leading the charge of this game.
I think Acti-Blizz isn’t confident enough to try to just make a great expansion that will keep people engaged through fun gameplay. So instead they throw in gambling and limited time tactics to try to bait people to keep playing every day.
+100% This. The experience playing back in say WoTLK-WoD felt wildly different every single expac, like they were always trying to re-invent the wheel after coming across the crux of massive public popularity. At first it was to try and keep things fresh, but then it started to feel like people were getting burntout and they were making grinds and timegates not to be fun for the players, but force you to play. 30-50 days to get all reputations to revered and tortolian seeker rep. 30-50 more days to grind your main 3 essences. Then another 40 days to grind out exalted with Mechagon at 1k a day, After you finished that, it doesn’t even transfer at all to your other specs or alts.
It’s just treadmills after treadmills after treadmills and it’s incredibly tedious and chore filled content that doesn’t test or improve your skills. Mythics are fun, grinding 28 flipping essences at timegated rates for a r3 essence isn’t…
Exactly, when you see them saying they designed outta fear… it’s clear they aren’t confident in player retaining - and are doubling down on things like seasons… exclusive stuff… hamster wheels of various rep, grinds, collector habits that are drip fed or have a VERY low drop chance.
Really slamming a game they love? hmmm, they are genuine issues they have with this game, and Blizzards attitude “”" Don’t you have a phone “”" speaks volumes sorry, its their way or the highway, and plenty of people are taking the highway now which isn’t good for the game. People like you insinuating that expressing what they feel is whining well no wonder this game is going down the toilet big time its insulting sorry. Enjoy playing a game that once thrived to going down the toilet been flushed by those people you say are whining.
I’m not sure what dead no fun server you are on but this is happening literally every single time I log into my characters to check my AH items in Stormwind.
It’s just people bullcrapping in trade chat and screwing around in the square at all hours.
The best of the old guard left a long time ago, so of course it is declining. Modern day blizzard culture, to me, gives the impression quality distant on their priority lists. Pandering to their own seems to be a higher priority. Writers live in a bubble and when things get boo’d at blizzcon they double down on those things.
Doesn’t it seem like oftentimes, if you ask say 1000 people of a million that the same popular sentiments don’t echo through?
I went through a couple of bgs over on korraks on a alt the other day. Numerous people were noticing how badly designed the event was. Horde caps the first bunker etc with very little pushback, while IBT could be solo defended by a 6k hp boomkin in stealth just blasting people off the cliff and interupting any cc on the 170k hp commander adds.
It bleeds into bugged pve as well, remember when the ragnaros event launched? Hundreds of players were stuck due to a game breaking bug, where you’d be chain stunned and locked and actually warped outside of the game making the event unwinnable. And even if you did manage to still do it, your mount could be reset and not show up in the next login that wouldn’t be fixed for days, how could such a game breaking bug make it past any qa team esp for a 15th aniversary event with a whole palooza ready?
It just doesn’t seem like it’s even a Third rate indie game anymore, but a heavily bugged and the kind of quality you’d get from their own knockoff expecting ligation and a lawsuit 3 months later with pump and dump design.
Blizzard and WoW have grown to be a massive franchise over the years, with that means more personalities and players. The only real indicator of player happiness is the bottom line: numbers. Because, let’s face it, plenty of neckbeards sit all day on the forums making thread after thread about their particular gripes.
Of course Blizzard is listening. The problem is that the tiresome void’s (forums, fansites, communities, Twitch/YouTube “Personalities” etc) goal post is always changing. With the answer to one problem, ten more “problems” pop up. If you pay attention to history, lore, patches, etc, you see that Blizz lays groundwork to make changes that are necessary. It just doesn’t all happen overnight. You know why? Because that’s how you get buggy, crummy garbage that MORE people complain about.
