almost every patch since wod launch seems to be disliked by the masses and mostly for good reason.pruning of abilities, borrowed power after borrowed power, really bland class design, severe lack of balance changes, almost 0 communication about their intentions , some specs just feel bad to play and sit in limbo for giant stretches of time, and honestly i could go on and on.
This company makes so much money while firing people by the dozen and still seems to get outpaced in quantity and quality of content by most other mmos of and reasonable size. they charge $40-$60 for an expansion, $15 a month, mounts for $25, faction and server transfers for 25-30 bucks a pop, they sell wow tokens for $20. they just get you coming and going and i just feel with all that we deserve more from them. I look at these other mmos i play from time to time and there is always dev+ community interaction a back and forth on changes and what the players want. they put out just as much if not more content and in a lot of cases higher quality and more longevity. we have the same specs dominating pve and pvp for MONTHS on end and only get real changes every major patch.
I feel like blizz has dropped the ball mostly since wod minus a few things and instead of accepting it and interacting with us and talking about possible solutions they just bury their head in the sand and keep doing more of the same which obviously isnt working. perfect example is a super nice post by revlol about pvp gearing that is currently sitting at 19.8k views and 839 comments . its one of the highest viewed threads if not the highest ive seen on the forums and it doesnt have 1 single blue post in it. i find it unacceptable even more so because we are almost 8 months into a patch its the same specs that are overtuned.
So what do you guys think it is ? do you think the management is that bad ? inexperienced devs ? flat out bad devs ? i mean all the old timers are leaving by the handful there has to be a reason. it does feel like activision has sucked the soul out of blizzard a little but you c ant blame the quality of the content and complete lack of community interaction entirely on that can you?
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I don’t think the game designers are bad at all.
I think the actual arena combat is unique and better than pvp i’ve played in any other game. Same with dungeons and raid (not quite as unique or exciting, but still good).
I think the issue comes from management where the game designers are incredibly few in number and their actual ability to make changes/influence are not there.
There has been an undeniable shift towards “mobile game” systems that artificially timegate progression in all areas that is almost certainly from the top-down and for shareholder concerns and not the wishes of the game devs themselves.
I’m sure the devs genuinely want to make the game “better”; it’s not like they don’t see feedback/opinions, they just only have so much time to make changes and are constantly blocked by management.
Also, wow’s strength isn’t in its depth, but its width: It doesn’t have the best anything (except maybe pvp; it’s honestly so amazing conceptually), but it has a good bit of everything.
That being said, this creates a huge problem because what makes one person happy makes two others upset and this occurs all the time in every situation; the devs are always fighting an uphill battle.
I think the problems stem from management cutting costs and corners at every opportunity: They dont make changes or address feedback or show any transparency.
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like i pointed out revs thread has nearly 20k views and almost 1k replies in it and not 1 single blue post in the thread. i just cannot understand how it so hard for them to pop in and say ahh yes i can see why you have a problem with it. it took me 15 seconds to type this response
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Honest it is both. These ideas they have are bad. All these systems are really bad ideas. I’ve never seen so many consecutive bad ideas like this in a game.
Also management is to blame because they are late on literally everything. They had to pull in Overwatch 2 devs just to get Shadowlands to ship. Blizzard as a company lacks the agility to adapt. Other games are producing content while Blizzard is struggling to do anything right. Honestly a full takeover by Activision and the removal of devs from WoW would be welcome at this point
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They believe that gear progression (ilvl scaling with rating) is one of the main underpinnings to an RPG. They’re not going to implement every idea from the community unfortunately
Wow is just like the US. It is in a state of “managed decline” where those in charge act powerless to stop the incoming catastrophe, but in reality just fundamentally support the elements that lead to the decline. Whether that be because of ideological or monetary reasons or both.
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they just seem to create a problem and then try and fix it the next patch but completely miss the point on why it was a problem in the first place. and in a lot of cases over recent years they tried to fix a problem that didnt even exist and created one
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Literally the proposed PVP gearing changes; “fixing” a problem that doesn’t exist while entirely ignoring the actual problems.
I disagree; I think covenants, islands, torghast, legendaries are all great ideas. It’s the execution that’s awful.
If you could swap covenants like talents they’d be SO MUCH FUN. I would love to be able to Nfae in pve, venthyr in M+, and kyrian/necro in pvp depending on MU.
They’re also visually distinct and fun to play around with… but people can’t “play around” with them, because they’re gated so harshly.
Islands and torghast had neat ideas “smaller group/individual content that’s got fun elements with some variability so its different everytime to encourage replayability”. The issues there were that they were “mandatory” for the WORST part of power progression (not awarding gear itself, but parts of gear/legendaries/ap) so they just feel like a chore more than a thing for fun. Since they ARE required for chore aspects, but dont have any competition (rating) or progressive reward (gear), they feel more annoying than something I’d want to do solo/with friends. I’m there because I have to, so I wouldn’t go even if I wanted to.
Part of that is on the devs, but that seems more to me like a management issue pushing their agenda. I could be wrong, though.
Where are you getting this idea from?
In regards to the rest of your post, I think it’s a bit presumptuous for us, as outside players, to act as if we know anything at all about Blizzard’s inner workings.
Well somehow WoW is still #1 mmo. I’ve no idea how. The game is a ghost town at this point.
Probably just lack of good competition which changes within the next year
if any other mmo had the last 6 years wow had they would be dead
Well when we have people debating if Shadowlands is worse than WoD, I’d say this expansion and the next year will be nothing but disappointment
Pretty sure FF14 has surpassed it in subs. ESO probably has as well. At the rate Blizzard is going New World will out before 9.1.
Blizzard seems to be more committed to classic right now than they are retail which I think is a mistake. At any rate WoW hasn’t been the “best” MMO in quite some time. It was just popular like McDonald’s. But it isn’t even that popular anymore.
Gamers have changed. Single player progression is more important than “mythic raiding” and the WoW devs have completely lost touch with today’s players. Doing the same thing week in and week out hoping for some item to drop is boring. Gamers want CONTENT. And Blizzard hasn’t delivered good content in years.
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i mean the only argument that needs to be made is that an mmo the size of wow doesnt have a class design team nor a pvp team
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I don’t even think raiders are happy. They’re all playing FF14 or something. Not sure who Blizzard caters to anymore. The balance has been atrocious for 7 months too. I expect little to change going forward
Maybe cater to boosters
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But what they do seem to have is a large team dedicated to extending a trickle of poor content as long as possible and emphasizing token sales and account services transactions.
wow’s problem is ur mom
I’m wondering if they’ve given up at this point. With all the new MMO’s coming out, and even FF14 expansion later this year, blizzard has nothing to offer.
Maybe trying to cut their losses
They have given up on balancing. They aren’t even trying. They want you to reroll every single patch so you play for longer and buy more tokens. Then when they have milked you as much as they can they will completely change the “meta” and do it again next patch.
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