Actually, they do, but so do the ones that want DR. THat is the issue, some seem to think they represent the entire playerbase when they only represent, at worst, just themselves and, at best, a portion or fraction of the player base (note this can be quite a large portion/fraction, but it ill never be the full amount)
1 Like
It is a flip of the switch and we have seen them reduce patchfinder requirements many times. But this time I think it is should be the end.
Turn the page from the dark era of WoW into a new brighter future.
TWW should be a blank, fresh start.
6 Likes
Sadly, we might not get this till a WoW II. but would you really object to pathfinder remaining as something that was just for a cosmetic reward, not required for flight or anything, just a cosmetic for those that want to do it or want the cosmetic?
Not all of us are toxic. That is why there are some of us that encourage a positive WoW community and experience.
The problem is BlizZard has done two mistakes!
- Let a toxic few run amok years on end on BlizZardâs platforms
- Poor or little communication.
Poor communication or communication from third party websites shows a vote of no confidence over what they are projecting as their vision or their design paradigm.
The old BlizZard was loud and proud about who they were and their vision on their forums, and platforms.
They set the industry standard of being direct with communication and did not let toxicity over flow against those less abled or those unable to have a voice.
I know this because I was here during the greatness of it all and that was a great time to participate on the forums and theory craft.
Current Patchfinder requirements are not congruent with the design paradigm they are pushing with TWW. That is the problem that many people have had an epiphany with. You have one team communicating that design should be this way and then another team from BlizZard saying no this is how it is going to be.
If BlizZard canât be on the same page about design goals then there is no reason for PF to exist.
6 Likes
What anyone wants, all anyone wants, in all the billions of forum posts: competent, intelligent, meaningful game design, when it will actually add value to the game.
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TWW represents a McExpansion, served up because Blizzard wants cash infusion. It does not represent anything else. They WANT you to be excited because itâs a new opportunity to play ChoreGame.exe, where you will sub and buy a box for the privilege, making them wealthy so you can do more mindless tasks some of us have been doing for 20 years at this point.
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The main issue is arbitrary design choices being made for the sake of having something new to put out. âDo we need to make changesâ no one asked, as they pushed the button on the expansion extruder, this time setting the quantity from 1 to 3. âIs anyone asking for an expansion?â says no one at Blizzard HQ, silently hoping this expansion is the last time they have to Crunch Time for Wow. Nope. Theyâve gone ahead and Pre Announced two more. Surprised we canât already pre order them.
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This game represents a long term time investment. Nothing Blizzard does represents the long term, especially when it comes to the time players spend. This is counterintuitive to people trying to spend their time in a meaningful way. I log in on Monday before patch, Iâm busy queueing for LFR, trying to get some of the pieces I donât have, next I plan on pvping for some conquest. If I donât know, not in the loop, SUDDENLY my game and everything I am able to do with my time, is going to change, the very next day. Because Patch.
Not because something meaningful and excited is being added to the game. But because the next Cash Grab has been Extruded and is Now Ready to begin collection from the players. Before you say something stupid such as âsounds like you donât like wowâ or âmaybe itâs time to take a break, come back when you donât feel this way.â
If your sales pitch on a 20 year old game is for me to ignore it until nostalgia creeps in and gets me to come back, forgetting all the garbage that Blizzard Factually Pumps Out Each Expansion, Dutifully And Without Critical Thinking Skills, then I hate to inform you, but youâre misinformed.
Thatâs not a product I want. I donât need to play to a new cap, do a bunch of âget me to the capâ questing. I donât need to run any new expansion themed dungeon content, or any loot pinata raids. I have already spent time playing this game. Copious amounts of time.
What I need as a veteran, is for that time to be respected, honored, valued, and CONTIUE TO BE AVAIALBLE AS LONG AS I WANT TO PLAY IT, within the game I am paying $15 a month for. What that means for the devs: you could sit around the office collecting paychecks and putting out zero new content.
Everything from the number of concurrent players, to the way they engage the content, to the value they have for it, will only go up from the floor we are at right now. This is rock bottom, between expansions with more Extruder Slop waiting to be played. You can RP all you want to and evoke a sense of value for your time spend in TWW.
I challenge you to do the same for anything you have done in the past. When you discover not only is that experience now wholly different than when you did it, but that it no longer represents a meaningful opportunity to future players, simply because itâs been displaced by more new content ad infinitum, New Content In This Game Is Produced To Be Disposable.
I am here to play evergreen content only, from now on. Until that exists in this game, Blizzard is the McDonalds of game devs. You will get no $$ from me.
4 Likes
I couldnât have expressed myself any better than this. I agree with all of what you just said. Thank you.
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Only in some states, and only certain medical conditions.
But businesses are unambiguously allowed to not allow people back for past behavior, and report trespassing if they return.
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Businesses are allowed to follow the laws and report tresspassers meeting the burden of a tresspasser. The rules are different for a place of business than a private residence, and tend to vary slightly from city/state. For example, I have a reasonable expectation to be in a place of business that has public facing access during posted business hours.
You cannot trespass someone without cause, from a place that is open to the public. If you cause a problem then try to trespass someone, thatâs a court case you are going to lose. Every time.
If you involve police, and someone gets killed, that was the result of your poor judgement. Maybe just let a guy pee, next time.
And just to prove a point, hereâs the WA state law on bathroom use in a business.
A retail establishment with an employee restroom must allow any customer to use the restroom during normal business hours if:
- Three or more employees of the retail establishment are working when the customer requests to use the restroom.
- The retail establishment doesnât normally make a restroom available to the public.
- The employee restroom is reasonably safe and isnât located where providing access would create an obvious health or safety risk to the customer.
- Customer access to the employee restroom doesnât pose a security risk to the business or its employees.
2 Likes
I can agree with this, but there is one issue: what adds value to the game for me, might take it away from you, what adds value to the game for you, might take it away from me, etc. The best any thing can do is likely add value to some/most but not take it away from any.
That is what some over look, WoW still has thousands, if not millions, of players, who is to say what each one values in the game? Like I donât consider the game a chore if it makes me do things like pathfinder, as I would be doing them anyway.
I find value in pathfinder, not as a lock for any kind of flight, but as something that rewards people for exploring and doing the main storyline. It is due to that that I am pushing more and more for make pathfinder just an achievement that rewards some cosmetic thing, or ig it has to be useful, make it reward the map toy for the content (the one you use and auto fill in the map and flightpoints on alts).
If we are talking about specific traits of a game that you enjoy, or we are talking about the specific aspects of the game that appeal to you, draw you in, sure.
Instead, Iâm trying to be as objective as possible. There has never been a person who logs in, sees a brand new set of content, then decides based on the existence of new content alone, they should purchase the current expansion and some game time.
RATHER: Every single person who logs in, makes a decision based on how far removed from their memory the game has become, VS how much time and effort they have to then spend reorienting to the game.
When the amount of reorientation becomes too great, Players Stay Unsubbed, Donât Buy The Expac, and become âun-trackable metrics.â Then you have a bunch of clueless new players inflating participation metrics, giving the devs the false impression they did a great job this expansion.
Meanwhile untrackable metrics, such as people who really donât feel like Blizzard is doing anything meaningful with Wow, people who really canât be bothered to pay for the privilege of being disappointed anymore, become angry when People like Metzen get on a stage and tell us ânow is the time to come homeâ punctuated by âwe heard you, we are adding evergreen to the game.â
Same folks who mentioned âclassic +â at Blizzcon, got so many playersâ hopes up, only to dash them against the rocks of SOD. SoD only exists because they want to see what players are willing to engage with, and it turns out, players are willing to engage with a lot of terrible content under the premise of hoping itâs the thing theyâve been asking for.
SoD wasnât even classic. It wasnât even sticking around permanently. Two things immediately disqualifying it from being Classic +
When you want to add something new to the game, you need to ask yourself the following question: âWhat does this do to improve the game, while preserving the game?â If your answer includes any amount of âX is going away to make room for Yâ you are on the wrong path, in the wrong field, and you should resign immediately.
The entire reason D4 is such a dismal failure of a game is because they have left the majority of development up to the seasons team and pinned all their end-game content on seasonal game play. Doubling down on that with next expansion.
Another game I paid $100 for, believing Blizzard was releasing a quality Diablo game. Instead, itâs still an unfinished mess, with Diablo Immortal being a better representation of a diablo game, Gacha and all.
On that note, Diablo Immortal is a shining example of how to update a game without ruining your game. New content is added 1-3 times a month, and none if it displaces anything else. How is it that game can update/add new content without power creep, without making old content bad/irrelevant.
How is it that people can still log in and support that game with millions of dollars in revenue as a free to play game, when the content itself can be just a skin on a battle pass refresh? Yet Wow devs need to spend hundreds of millions on an expansion so youâll play it for a month?
Do you not see how awful a disconnect there really is?
1 Like
I am one of those that benefits from the money spent on development, as I will play for the full time I have game time.
Just a wild guess, but it might have something to do with the kind of game, and what works for that, as far as updating goes, does not work for a game like WoW, yet some developers from say Diablo get placed on the WoW team and donât adjust.
It is not that I canât see it, but I also have to ask how does it affect me? I am one that is almost always finding something to do in WoW, be it crafting, exploring, running old content for mogs or achievements I did not get when content was current, etc.
However, I can still remember a time in WoW that the progression, for almost everyone, was:
- hit max level
- gear up in the tier 1 expansion raids (MC/ZG/AQ20)
- gear up in the tier 2 raids (Ony/BWL/AQ40)
- repeat for each tier of raid
Unfortunately, knowing new/better stuff will always be coming, devalues any current time I could spend getting stuff. Devalues it because⊠Once I spent the time, I will⊠Replace all items with better items. I could⊠Spend Less Time⊠Get the better gear items later with SAME effort, and skip the worse items.
Do you understand? Bigger picture, usually 4 seasons to an expansion, Can wait til 4th season, catch up mechanics, end up same power level as everyone who trudged through 3 previous seasons, without the same effort. Can save money too. Can wait til season 4 to buy the expansion half off and then probably sell a bunch of wow classic gold for a few months of game time, long enough to gear up and then get bored (Getting bored because the grind stops being fun day 2 and and thatâs really the only thing there is. Grind).
Or, in this case, can skip the first two expansions, first 3 seaons of the 3rd, and then maybe theyâll sunset the game after that and let it just be what it is.
I mean, D4 is the same kind of game as Diablo Immortal. D4 is suffering from the same mistakes as Wow, for exactly the same reasons. They literally tried to release a diablo MMO disguised as a phone game, got a bunch of backlash about gacha, then the game settled down, nothing significant has been changed or updated, and the thing is raking in record numbers against the likes of D4.
Contrasted to the abysmal launch, refund epidemic, and streamer fall off of D4. Steam currently shows 5090 players right now on D4. Not even nailing the Massively in the Multiplayer Online part of the Genre.
Wish I could post the numbers for Diablo Immortal, where they arenât relying on seasonal updates to bring significant improvements to the game. Thatâs actually how D4 has been going. Season 4 was loot reword update, making loot useable and good at endgame, enabling progression.
I canât remember anything significant for season 5, but season 6 features an expansion! We get to pay Blizzard $40 for Season 6! Innovation!
Honestly, I wish they would have spent another year developing D4 to be a complete game, scrapped seasons, and then released it when the Game Was Ready, like they used to release anything. Must have lost that whole Soon TM trademark to some other, better studio.
Yes, you can run old content for mogs, can do exploration, ect. What you canât do, is experience that content at level the way it was designed to be experienced, because itâs been diminished to the point of not being difficult content, especially for an end game player. You can do Timewalking, which is about as close to âat levelâ as you can get, but itâs at your level, instead of the level the content was designed at.
Theyâve also taken creative liberties with some of the time walking content, and none of it is raiding stuff. So thatâs still just faceroll ez mode content, which USED to be the pinnacle of achievement in Wow. If I were a hardcore raider, and I saw people walking through something I had spent potentially months doing with a group of people, dedicating our time and coordination, that would bother me.
Greatly. In order to avoid that, I care very little about raiding. Canât value an activity that will literally only last for a few months before itâs replaced by a different version of the same thing, like produce at the grocery store.
2 Likes
They should do the same thing for both forms of flight.
They are just trying to force everyone into skyriding.
Nope, not gonna do it Blizzard.
Not planning to play the expansion at all.
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See, this is where I stand out, I am more about the journey/world, the gear i get is just a stepping stone to progress into the next area. Not saying your method is wrong, if it is what you prioritize, but take those that do what you do but donât cancil subs and you have one of Blizzardâs preferred customers.
Only thing I tend to miss out, when it is current, is mythic raids, and often Heroic is challenging enough for me/my group. Often, what I go back to do achievement wise, is the hardest difficulty of the raids.
I am by no means Hardcore, but the way I see it is I either donât care what others have or I take solace in the fact I did it first/when it was current.
For people with physical disabilities - or even people that may need to answer the door (or take a quick bio break, or break up a fight between kids) while playing in hostile territory, dragon-riding is unhelpful.
10 Likes
Blizzard prefers everyone stays subbed and concurrent sub counts increase, indefinitely. Thatâs not even remotely realistic even if Wow were a game deserving of âbest gameâ title. Whatâs more realistic: they scale back content generation, focus on a smaller target audience, âpeople who want to play their gameâ rather than ânew playersâ and then stop trying to fix an unbroken clock.
Thatâs the magic recipe for long term, sustainable, Line Go Up growth. Ask any company thatâs been around longer than Blizzard, who is stable and consistent. LEGO is a great example. Despite all the additions and IP licenses, I can dig my 30 year old lego out of the attic and they work with the new bricks.
Wow, on the other hand, is Mega Blocks where every piece is a custom piece that doesnât even have the trademark nub. You lose a piece or miss out on a part of the instruction, might as well give up and go find another activity. Oh, and good luck using any of those blocks with other kinds of building sets.
I care about the continued relevance of the activity, no matter the age. Think of it as game preservation. Every version of Wow prior to TWW is now gone, with very little actual game preserved. You can quest and do some of the dungeons, but good luck experiencing the arbitrary/forced content release cadence, good luck getting a group to progress through any of that with you.
You know, the entire point of an MMO? Rule #2 of industry best practices: If your MMO is better as single player, you arenât developing an MMO.
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Thatâs unfortunately true. Iâve noticed that as I set up talents, keybinds, etc. on my lowbie alts. The toggle to disable skyriding is not available on my lvl 11-19 alts.
It isnât clear according to the spell book on those alts when Iâll be able to learn steady flight and disable skyriding. I wish they would clarify in the spell book which riding skill enables steady flight so that I can level my lowbie alts high enough that I never have to use skyriding on them again (since the pathfinder achieves are account-wide). Iâll speed through TWW pathfinder on my main so that none of my alts ever have to see the vigor circles or skyriding hotbar ever again.
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I have a little more for you: You will have to level to 70 to completely unlock those skyriding skills, and I believe level 30 is when you can start steady flight.
Another disappointing change: When you enter dragon isles, the glyphs they had for you to collect to unlock your dragon skills? No longer work. They donât let you earn the skills the same way players did it prior to TWW.
Instead, you collect those glyphs⊠and nothing happens. SO while you USED to be able to level up your skyriding right at the start of getting it by gathering up all the glyphs, you cannot do that anymore.
Another L for bad game design.
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Sadly, I feel this is what a lot of players pushed WoW into being. We had quite a few players that got busted socially (ninja looters, griefers, etc) and those that suffered at the hands of such wanted ways to avoid them. In addition, a lot wanted to run older content or progress like it was in vanilla, but, like you said, had issues finding groups.
In short, while Blizzard is not innocent here, we do have to lay some of the blame of the state of the game on players in general as well as while Blizzard could have incentivized running old content as a group, someone would likely complain about being âforcedâ to run older content.
That is a bummer. Thank you for letting me know.
3 Likes