Haha, I’ve mained a DK for a few expansions. In Legion it was awesome to play blood and unholy, my fiance still mains a frost dk. I miss when dk’s felt like a hero class. Blood can still heal somewhat good for raids but I seem to heal a lot more as vengence or prot pally for m+.
Classic can’t sustain itself if they don’t have “locked” servers. They would be genuinely dead since nobody could do anything in a conventional manner.
Retail just doesn’t have the talent behind it anymore. If any care once went into this game its been gone for a loooong time. Whether its the designers fault or whoever delegates resources between dev departments is not for us to know…at least not in our lifetimes as by the time Blizz could be potentially wither away into dust for all the ex employers/employees to spill out all their secrets we’d be too old to care.
I do genuinely believe they try to cater to every audience. (All age brackets) This is something that is hard to achieve.
I read a couple of posts in this thread with numbers about raid participation. I have been arguing for months that Blizzard did this to themselves.
Requirements, upon requirements to even participate and remain relevant on the meters. These are walls. Stonewalled. Blockage. No entry. Your done. Fin.
With next to no reward for even jumping through these hoops. Don’t even get to look cool now with Tier armor (class sets). Item level? Just go do a Mythic keystone. Might even end up with a even better piece of gear.
They have done this to themselves. Too much work for no reward. With Shadowlands I been worried we will experience more of the same. Jump through systems (hoops) to be relevant and ACTUALLY participate in a raid.
Speaking of hoops they wanted to make a keys a grind to even enter Torghast at one point and time. (Currency to enter) That made me genuinely concerned that they were possibly out of touch as thread title says. So now you don’t have to worry about being degraded for not performing well. From not participating in Massive systems/hoops to grind. No you just literally get blocked off. From even trying content.
So just typing out all these paragraphs, does this environment or gameplay sound enticing and friendly? Probably not and I would imagine very discouraging from even wanting to bother to try it out. Or keep playing the game.
As for new players they are trying to address that in Shadowlands. While repelling all the other audience from many different years. Even if you get the new players actually interested in the game and keep them playing (retention)… which might be harder with the Vine and Tiktok gen.
Still end game affects everyone and it should be a pretty important priority. Hopefully they address raiding being more relevant as it always was in this game. (BFA changed this) They added Torghast for additional challenge. They still refuse to do much for PVP, which is very much endgame content.
As for people that keep pressing Classic is the answer. Regression never is and you constantly will have to more forward. Life goes on, video games will go on…so if Blizzard doesn’t want to become totally irrelevant and slowly bleed out, until it’s a husk. Which they have been doing for a while. Trust me it can get worse. They would need to take steps to remain as relevant and consumer friendly as possible. Instead of the opposite, which to be honest is what we are accustomed to. Less and less people seem more intolerant of this overtime and numbers would confirm this.
Edit: I wanted to add I think they have been trying to address that issue at the end of this expansion. (coming across as more engaging.) With more interviews with our fellow players. Also added incentives. (Bonuses) It’s just a bit late in the game. So hopefully they can stay consistent with that, when the new expansion launches. So a larger audience feels welcomed.
Only small nitpick is I do hear people complaining they don’t feel they are being listened to for stuff about beta. Which again gives the wrong impression. So hopefully they are able to listen to a couple more suggestions.
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What do you mean by that? Are you saying they’d have to introduce phasing so there’s enough resources/mobs to kill?
I keep saying they need to hire D&D fans to fix WoW. They keep failing to understand the formula that made classic so great. I personally think it was the ultra nerdy table top guys that made WoW great and with each expansion they’ve eroded that was so great about the vanilla game.
With them throwing their values out of the window to chase ever increasing profits and bow to the Chinese market they’ve begun to self censor much like everyone else posting online these days, if you dare speak anything that’s counter to mob rule these days you’re depersoned and your livelihood is taken away. I’m so tired of the woke movement and drones demanding your obedience and blindly accepting things without questioning narratives.
RANT
Sadly activsionblizzard has sided with radical nuts lately spamming BLM everywhere (in cod MW, and their live streams) without reading their mission statements like how they want to destroy family units, killing over 900 cops in their riots and doing over half a billion in property damages.
I fear the pendulum will swing violently the other way and these radicals will find themselves being persecuted next. This could end up destroying activisionblizzard, the NBA and other companies here because average people do not support fringe ideologies.
END RANT
Great post. I agree with everything. The only problems is that the core audience is
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We could have a game that offers challenges when doing quests and engaging with the world. Making everything scalable kills any sense of progress that could be made by getting better and harder to acquire gear.
Maybe this is a sign that MMO’s are dying since activisionblizzard wants to chase low hanging fruit to sell store mounts to, instead of making rewarding gameplay loops that aren’t mythic+ or tedious raiding experiences.
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Or it could just be the decline of WoW and the rise of other MMO’s that are starting to surpass it.
The current director used to be a raid designer. So they’re all about tedious scripted (PvE) grinds. Problem now is it’s not just the raids. This mindset is pervasive all over the world.
Suffice to say this is not an MMORPG. It’s something else. Must be funny to watch them sit bewildered at how pure P2P games like Fortnite continue to be far more popular by comparison.
The game has been dying since vanilla, just saying.
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I just wish there was more of a Blizz presence in both games.
Blizzard isn’t so much out of touch in the sense it doesn’t know us, so much as it doesn’t communicate in-game for timely support or respond to us paying members on the forum.
Maybe we are the angry bunch, but we in many ways are a microcosm of the larger player base.
We have elites, casuals, trolls, RPers, NEETS and weekend warriors on here.
Yup they are, shame one person could ruin such a awesome game, in such a short time.
Ingame support is obviously being overloaded due to lack of new employees, pay issues, working from home, Covid, etc. Plus, more people are playing online due to work lockdowns and stuff. I had a ticket open for over 48 hours before getting a response and it seems like an impossible task just to open one.
In regards to a lack of response. TBH, it’s kind of the only way the developers can keep their sanity. Nerds in general are very toxic in regards to video games + movies because being “ragey” and posting negative feedback is considered trendy. Majority of the time people don’t post constructive feedback or offer any useful feedback the developers can even use.
There’s also different avenues for them to post their info. Reddit, twitch, pod casts, streams, etc. Before all of this the WoW forums was the only place they could post any of this stuff.
My issue is when the game director or other important individual says that the company needs to get back in touch with the community and to listen to feedback.
It seems that talking to a streamer is as good as it gets now. Why do we even have this forum? Best I can fathom is if the MVPs notice something worthy of sending it up.
I like to think in some way all or most of our comments are read or glanced at. I post constructive stuff from time to time. I voice my frustration and troll too. The devs may never read here, but I come here more than I play.
Reading the forums gives me like the world view where I only have my casual play alone view. I know I would miss events or not know the bigger issues playing alone like I do.
Actually after 10 years their should been enough data to answer most question. Now why they are ignoring it is anther question. If not ignoring it then they just being oblivious to its base. Every modern company tracks its customer buying habits, needs and wants and then target it core products. Blizzard on other hand i have no clue what they are doing. The fact they keep changing game every expansions shows that their data analysis is not working as intended.
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It’s ruined? It’s still at the top of its genre. Methinks it may be ruined for you, and the minority of players that post upon these forums.
TJust because they don’t tell you what they’re implementing at every strp, doesn’t mean they don’t do customer research, because every business of this size does.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
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I didn’t get the feeling that the game was dying until Wrath. That’s when the rate of acceleration started declining fast and started being noticeable.
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WOD — was the most fun expansion
And flasks.