Is blizz's game design declining?

Triple AAA Budgets, Triple AAA Profits to investment, player satisfaction takes a backseeeeat toooo grindding and hours played everyone! Ever hear about how cookie clicker was one of the most fulfilling games of all time? :roll_eyes:

There is literally zero risk in making content that 100% of the population can do with minimal effort. A risk would have been if they made warfronts pvp only.

The sinking boat for a 6mo sub, rank 4 essences, anniversary mounts, the AH longboi mount, M+ season rewards in 8.3, etc.

So you think Blizzard is tried to make fun, engaging content in BFA and not just design systems around getting people to log in every day/week? Ok…

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I’d say a lot of work is now subcontracted out. So you’ll see a drop in quality, more bugs, longer bugfix turnaround.

But think of the profits Blizzard is making subcontracting that work to Asia, the shareholders will be thrilled!

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Yeah doesn’t it all as a player just come across as a polar inverse to WoD? WoD had great content, but no content to do, good pvp with vendors, but no patches for months, the famed selfie camera and twitter integration patch was the only patch outside of the daily zone and Hellfire citadel while Legion was in development and WoD was definitely sacrificed to give Legion a good debut. And for what it’s worth, i like the story art and the cinema but like a michael bay movie i don’t watch it for the characters chosen as the main lead and i’d rather have Jack Sparrow as the main focus of Pirates of the Carribean, not Will featureless protagonist if a show stealer pops into the scene. Let Cinema Lich king Bolivar have his moments, summon a couple dragons, and unleash the bells and whistles, etc!

The game isn’t designed to be fun anymore. It’s designed to manipulate the playerbase. Endless grinds to keep you p(l)aying. Even core features of the game like flying are now just time-gated and put behind a pointless series of grinds just so you have to keep playing to get to what players actually enjoy. Whereas in the past Blizz just gave players these new fun features and said ‘Have a good time!’.

They have no faith in players to play their game just for the fun of it. The entire experience is designed to manipulate players into daily chores to ‘get to the good stuff’. In the short-term it worked for a while. In the long-term players get burnt out when they realize the game isn’t fun anymore…it’s just a job. And we’re seeing now players coming to that realization and fleeing in droves.

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GCD Changes, yes.
Yes.

old Blizzard:

Games for Gamers by Gamers
“you’ll get it when its ready”

current Blizzard:
Games for shareholders
‘we’ll fix it after launch… eventually… maybe’

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Just because feedback is given doesn’t mean they have to use it. Listening and agreeing aren’t the same thing.

The forums don’t represent the playerbase.

Source? Some players hate them some players like them.

Apple products are garbage that thermal throttle and don’t allow users to fix their own hardware problems.

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Something to keep in mind, Over the course of the game there’s been over 100 million unique subscribers. So you’re right, there’s probably not 1000’s of players complaining on these forums. It’s because close to 100 million of them just gave up on the game.

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Idk blizzard is a company and I am sure they look at the forums but also take a good look at their sales. People are buying subs and pre orders and pets, mounts, boosts etc… idk if it was me and I saw sales in the green I wouldnt think my company was failing the masses

To easy to fudge numbers. I would really like to know what the numbers would be if Classic and Retail were split.

at what point was the feedback positive?

i can recall nothing but hate for MoP… but once it was over, everyone decided it was OK.

prior to release, the forum was flooded with “kung-fu panda is for babies and will be the death of wow”.

The only 2 problems I really have with BFA is alt unfriendliness and how it feels like Island expeditions and warfronts kinda feel abandoned.

I’ve been really enjoying BFA., Holy paladin is a lot of fun and this is the first expansion I’ve given M+ ago and it’s been great.

I’m torn about PvP because although I do enjoy having my gear effect my performance in PvP (I did not enjoy templates) I feel like gearing up for PvP is obtuse and if you don’t want to do PvE content (I dont mind it, personally) then the grind is real and painful.

I think the games in a good place right now, personally and I’m looking forward to Shadowlands.

I honestly think blizz should chill on huge changes every expansion, I hope the level cap stays 60 forever, and they find a new way for us to feel like we are progressing without just adding higher ilvls until they have to reset it again.

There still is plenty of polish, if not more than there ever was… You’re just choosing to deny it.

That’s a ridiculous and unrealistic model to design around when the vast majority of players are casual.

You were time gated on valor. As for dancing around, you can still do that just fine.

It was bland and the landscape was overscaled to make it take longer to go from point A to B. There was very little in variety on the way. Nothing in Northrend can hold even the slightest candle, designwise, to Nazjatar.

It was also the MMO bubble that burst shortly after. Tons joined, played for a bit and then moved on.

The forums have been plagued with negative feedback since they first opened. You just don’t remember that… There was NONSTOP complaining here during Wrath, but you wouldn’t know because you were probably a kid then that was too lazy to read forums.

You do realize that Activision took over during Wrath development, right? They agreed to a merger in 2007 and almost a year later, Wrath came out…

Classic is a no cost version of retail tho, those numbers dont matter

The fantasy you’ve built in your head and this thread is less interesting than WoTLK actually was and far less engaging than the game design currently is.

What are you, a 40 year old 'yeeeer can’t understand a game unless yeeeer played asteroiiddss!", it seemed like plenty a good time and WoTLK still goes on strong in memories and in a lot of places where people recall great times with it alongside Legion as some of the best expansions while WoD is always firmly placed at the bottom. Is anyone out here actually excited for broken boss encounters, imbalanced and neglected pvp, ugly allied races such as the Mechagnomes and corrupted gear to replace titanforging with something worse?

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Class design in WotLk was miles better than BFA. The flaw in WotLK was the variance in DPS but that is the same problem with BFA.

The key is that classes in WotLK were a lot more fun to play than BFA. BFA is fisher price class design. BFA is almost as simple as vanilla and even then vanilla classes still had their utility which allowed nuanced play. But even BFA lack this.

Game design overall is declining because they are cutting corners by giving less and less and using the same formula over and over of gambling and FOMO.

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WotLK was an okay expansion, especially as my Paladin but you have some serious rose tinted goggles going on.

The current retail version of WoW is better than wrath in literally every way EXCEPT maybe I liked the villian more in wrath. The dungeons are better, the loot is better, the raids are better.

There is more to do now than in wrath by a long shot, especially as far as more casual play goes. The PvP is MUCH MUCH more balanced than in wrath, although I don’t enjoy the current arena metas, at least every class is viable.

Some systems in current wow are annoying, especially if you have a lot of alts but to act like we’d all be better off playing WotLK is absurd.

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