I still go through the interviews on mmo champ before I go to rant about politics and looking at the last one I don’t really know if even the dev team understands how to make wow interesting anymore.
They keep talking about fixing azerite while at the same time keeping artifact power. They reference tbc without seeming to know what happened in tbc…
They admit that the audience is fractured but they don’t talk about uniting it in any way.
Is bfa just treated as a lost cause as they try to rush out the next expansion at this point?
I think Belluar worded it best: the dev team don’t look at developing to make the game fun, they look at developing to solve any particular problem they believe exists.
Azerite Armor wasn’t made up as a new fun idea, but rather a solution to how much people didn’t like grinding AP for traits for example.
Honestly, I’ve seen several articles in the last few months where they’ve been told to cut costs. Combine that with all the pruning and other dumbing down of this game to appeal to the e-sport crowd and it’s no wonder it feels like they’re lost
Failure of this magnitude is a tsunami on the horizon. You know it’s there but it seems so far away that it doesn’t matter. Some people mind their business completely unaware of the horizon. Others prepare silently to not alarm others.
Well, that tsunami appeared on the horizon exactly 5 years ago when WoD landed. WoD ushered in most of these ill-designed features the game now has. Simpler classes, simpler loot, solo-driven progress everywhere.
As the tsunami gets closer you see people reacting differently. More people are preparing for their exit and others still plod along completely unaware of the coming disaster.
The tsunami in this scenario is the client. Us. We’ve known since its inception that this design iteration of WoW was garbage. We’ve been interfacing with it directly for years. Unfortunately the director and his band of designers have been on the other side of the zone plodding merrily along as though there was no tsunami. Little by little coworkers and managers have been packing up to leave as more and more of them realize the current situation is a mess. Nobody is really prepared to address the client and these Q&A sessions have been commonly joked as “We hear you” as the tsunami gets closer and the roar of its impact imminent.
Welp, that tsunami has arrived. BFA is the third iteration of this design direction and people loathe it. They are so tired of world quests, solo-driven gameplay, the maze of “complexity” in loot and the awful personal loot design.
From here who knows what happens. Losing this many customers is never good for a company but one thing I hope the management at Blizzard understands is that loss of this magnitude cannot be summarized in BFA. It can only be summarized in the history of these decisions dating all the way back to 5 or 6 years ago.
Hence why in the second major patch of the expansion they are changing one of the expansions core features to be less stupid.
It doesn’t change the fact that everything else is dumb as hell and, as stated, looks like they were designed to solve a problem + keep people playing instead of fun.
Azerite armor solved the problem of grinding AP because once you had a certain level, you were good. Then because they didn’t even consider how this system could be fun they added all the stupid restrictions on how to obtain the armor as to avoid us getting too powerful too quickly.
Problem is the solution is a repeat of the problem. Instead of grinding AP for traits we grind Azerite and to be honest at least the AP grind at the start gave us an active ability to use where as the Azerite pieces have more passives then a goup of 1960’s hippies sitting around a fire singing Kumbaya
There’s a large part of the vocal minority that wants wow to be grindy and slow like a real descendent of Everquest (granted Everquest was more griindy). Where you’d wear gray shoulders and blue pants for months on end, and where chancing upon a purple should take real effort. Where exploration mattered, and LFG doesn’t exist. Where people need to make real connections and reputations to run content like dungeons and raids. Where the world feels vast, and there’s always something to do.
Contrarily, a massive part of the silent majority that drives microtransactions are voicing their satisfaction with QoL improvements like LFG and quick queue rewards that rain gear. Where participation trophies exist, and logging in is half the effort. Where people don’t have time to make hard choices and build online relationships, and every face in the game is just another anonymous body to throw at content in a bid to reap easy rewards.
Classic comes out soon, and I want to be able to experience it. I like the novelty of the idea, of going back to what it means to be a true MMO. Realistically, I won’t have the time to play it at all, and will probably abandon the game around level 14 (experience from private servers and running with friends).
I think the devs are simply unable to find a decent middle ground, and thus cater to the majority that voice their opinion with their wallets. Upon implementation of things that aren’t MMO features and just make the game throw gear at you, people seem to stay subbed…and keep playing? Why not run with numbers on a spreadsheet, and keep making WoW more and more casual? Yes there are dissidents on every platform that regret what WoW has become, but if it isn’t affecting the monthly active user numbers greatly, do they care?
Is it worth risking their title to make the game less casual if they drive away subs?
The WoW devs just aren’t going to take risks. This is why people say vote with your wallets. All my irl friends have done so, and I am still subbed - unfortunately irl problems make it so that I need a distraction. But my friends are right - we really should be voting with our wallets.
I think this is a myth. I disbelieve that the people who are restricted to an hour a day are representative of the majority.
Rather I think their participation metrics make it appear as though this is the reality when it isn’t. People allocate time where the game requires it. Not the other way around. If for example someone only dedicates an hour a day to playing that’s because Blizzard designed the game to maximize 1 hour of play per day. Dailies for example directly drive this metric. If dailies didn’t exist and people could grind their eyes out playing 20 hours a day till exalted then their participation metrics would be very different.
Basically this boogeyman they created for themselves. I suggest considering the scenario of someone with RL responsibilities. They probably won’t even log in Mon-Friday but you must know they would log in Saturday and Sunday or whatever days are free days. Meaning they would log a lot more hours on those days off than 1 hour every day.
Yes I think that basically sums it up. I wanted BfA to do well, defended it for 3-4 weeks then stopped playing, joined FFXIV, and the community are amazing as is the game. No more money for anything Blizz until they find a way to reconnect to what it is that makes a good game and community.
Whats funny is that if EQ (especially their TLP servers) just had LFG or didnt require real connections, there is no way I would be playing WoW right now. I like EQ’s classes better. I like their deity system. I like their world better. I just cant solo there.
I will be trying one of their new TLP servers when it comes online and if the casual one lets me finally level in that game not sure when I will be back to WoW. Maybe for Classic. IDK
Call me pessimistic but I don’t think the game will move in a positive direction until Ion is replaced. He seems to have a real low opinion of the playerbase and insists that the game has to be dumbed down as much as humanly possible to keep us poor stupid players from making a “wrong” decision.
The devs aren’t designing this game to be fun, engaging, and rewarding anymore. I’m not sure if they just don’t know how to make it fun but they want to control and funnel players down the “one correct path”.
![:rofl:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/rofl.png?v=6" ":rofl:")