I achieved all the challenge skins for the classes I played (DK, DH, Palli) back during the ToS raid tier before the first round of nerfs, and prior to Argus in September of 2017.
During Legion I can say with clear certainty that the mage tower was indeed challenging, with the Paladin PROT skin alone taking me at least 50 attempts to get (it was the hardest tank challenge of the day). There was a real sense of clear progression in the challenge (very different to the 9.15), in that once you overcame one hurdle, you were mostly able to navigate it again in lead up to the next one. Each progressive stage in the challenge was to some degree punishing, but gave you a decent margin for errors, to consistently get up to the stage where you failed and continue to master the oncoming mechanic whilst developing the muscle memory and stress management of the encounter.
Following a successful completion of the Prot Paladin challenge, I was able to complete my other toons challenge skins for tanking within 10 pulls of each attempt being that the mechanics were more or less very similar (of course each tank challenge was slightly different). This is important as it implies a balance of the challenge and the transferability of skillset.
9.15 Live Mage Tower though?
IF you look at vintage footage of the Mage Tower Challenges during Legion in the ToS raid tier and compare the rate of dropping health, progress, and time to the 9.15 PTR, they are more in line with each other. If you however compare that vintage footage with the 9.15 live version, its glaringly obvious that something is very IMBA.
Why did Blizzard clearly OVERTUNE everything at the last minute?
It wasn’t something spontaneous and has to do with choosing business metrics over community engagement.
- CHALLENGING CONTENT
Challenge and Elitism are very different things.
Challenge infers that a situation/encounter will be difficult, but you can continually grow at a reasonable pace and get eventually succeed. An example of challenging is getting your Keystone Master. On average in a season, the percentage of players that achieve KSM is approx. 14% of the total player base. This falls into the category of “challenging” as on average more than 85% of people don’t achieve it and comes closer to the life/age old 80/20 rule.
Now, beyond challenge is elite. One would classify elite in WOW as the seasonal Gladiator title where only 0.5% attain it (interestingly the Challenger PVP title is attainable by 35% of all players – just consider this). The Gladiator title implies that you have well and truly gotgud at the game and sit apart from all others. This is great for those players, but this kind of content is not what most participants play a game for.
- PROMOTION OF CONTENT
When Blizzard does a general promotion of content, it is implied that it will cater to and is something that most of the community will be able to participate and succeed in. For example, the promotion of new dungeons, raids, and world zones that take centre stage in a patch or expansion. They’ve always done this.
What they don’t put as much emphasis into is going through Gladiator or KSM rewards (separate threads to their active promotion) because these don’t generally apply to most of the player base as something, they are likely to attain. Why is the above relevant?
The Mage tower has been the front and centrepiece of 9.15. It is the “carrot” they were waving in front of a waning player base to try to get them to return and/or stay. To heavily promote a feature that presently tuned fits more into the category of elite, is a gross misstep in judgment and misleading. IF you don’t intend for a reasonable amount of people to succeed in the challenge (especially since this is not the first time you’ve implemented this), don’t make it the centrepiece of everyone’s attention. It’s deceitful marketing.
- BUSINESS METRICS
The release of the Mage tower for December is not a coincidence. It is effectively the end of the US financial year, and final reporting quarter of 2021 where organisations go all out to make their books and numbers “look good”.
When sales (subscriptions) are falling, or dismal and corporate players need to justify their pay/division/business case/bonus and one of the tools abused most is metrics of usage and engagement. It implies that If product “engagement” is up, then by extension should lead to further sales revenue. In a gaming software environment, however, it isn’t difficult to create “engagement” as you control the content.
For example, if you want to force people to “engage” with the game, you can implement systems that a player MUST participate in (seem familiar?) if they want to generally progress, otherwise, the core end game (which can be awesome) is not something players can equally participate in. The implemented systems aren’t required in any way necessary or integral to the core gameplay, they can just be an artificial layer of requirement.
Further, beyond this, you can compound systems upon systems to create crazy time syncs that forces participants who are largely invested, to commit more and more time to inflate “engagement”. In a gaming sense, this more likely equates to player fatigue than further revenue, but the lead developers know that they grey hairs aren’t aware of this since it has a different nuance in software to conventional products.
The result of the above is developers and game designers that are creating content to artificially pump “engagement” time loops to justify jobs, pay rises from their governance at the expense of those players who are supporting them with the $$$ (Think of any ineffective government), instead of doing the job of creating genuinely enjoyable and engaging experiences. When this becomes the paradigm for a gaming studio, inevitably something gives (and has very much so with the decline from more than 15 million active subs to allegedly less than 2 million).
This is unfortunately what most commonly happens when a company becomes big corporate listed. The internal operations become rife with metrics and justifications for positions and budgets all the way up the chain, making it about the menial tasks and politics instead of the first principles of making great products that consumers will want and support. Simply put, they’re out of touch because they’ve forgotten real hunger and the fundamental work that is required to put a meal up.
- THE RESULT
I’ve highlighted the first 3 main factors in hope of shedding insight into how we, the player base community are knowingly being manipulated and treated as hamsters on a wheel (an unsatisfying one at that).
Like all populations, there are those who love running on that wheel and excel at it, and that’s great for them. However, most of us aren’t interested in being them and paying with time and real money to be placed on this process of structurally decaying tuning and polishing their products for them. We’re tired of being in the loop of wilful over tunning in knowing inevitable anticipation of community backlash and re-tunning to drag out content life cycles.
What this current live Mage Tower experience highlights as a spectator and participant is that:
- Blizzard are still not genuinely ready to listen to their community
- Blizzard doesn’t genuinely care about the player experience or community
- Game systems implemented are philosophically designed for the purpose of time syncs to satisfy developer “engagement” metrics in lieu of meaningful game design
HOW COULD THEY HAVE GONE DIFFERENTLY ABOUT THIS?
The same way as always. Blizzard could have listened to feedback during the PTR which is and had always been provided by veterans and advocates of their products, instead of always doing the “YEAH NAH, we’re going to take it in this direction”, only inevitably to U-TURN later when player fatigue reaches its limits to tell us “we’re listening now”.
With the ever-declining numbers, Blizzard needs to understand that generally the community is wise to their false/fake empathy loops and to just focus on making good gaming experiences.
IS IT LIKELY?
I sure hope so! Unfortunately, too much of what Blizzard has done points to otherwise as decisions are left up to/made by those that hand out the paycheques/bonuses and those who receive them no longer have the backbone anymore to stand up and say, “I think that’s a terrible business decision”.
In the end/conclusion REAL change in the form of making appropriately tuned and enjoyably engaging content is what Blizzard need to refocus on, not PR management, delaying tactics or metric accumulation.
PS. To all the Blizzard fanboys and elites that will inevitably give their feedback, I’m genuinely glad for and envious you still enjoy and are fulfilled by this game, and I hope it continues for you. But how many of you would it require to keep the franchise going, and are there enough of you to do it?
