It’s 7 AM and I haven’t slept.
Trolling is the least of my concerns right now. Lol.
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Greeeeeat so they’re likely going to resort to consoles and mobile with WoW to milk it then.
I really wish we could do pet battles on mobile.
Try watching some of those cottagecore videos on youtube or my favorite Korean cooking channels. W Table is a very relaxing one with no talking. Or if you want to get historical you can watch some Townsends videos.
A company has the right to make money however it sees fit. Until your fully paying their bills. You got no say in it, OP. If you think you got a better monster, then open your own software company and pull off what Blizzard and Microsoft has over the years and prove them wrong in how they run their business.
OH FOR THE LOVE OF---- microsoft is very hands off with it’s management of subsidiary gaming companies. you would know this if you took ONE LOOK at how they manage age of empires definitive edition which is published by them. people really need to stop spreading this misinformation and these threads should frankly be considered borderline trolling at this point.
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Doesn’t look like Phil Spencer intends to be very hands off of WoW and Blizzard at all from an above comment:
No they aren’t. Blizzard went the microtransaction route because they designed their games to be about initial sales after the merger with Activision, then realized without a long term plan to keep people enthralled they will quit thus they need something else to milk them while they can.
This began in MoP specifically with WoW when Blizzard said they were trying to go for an approach that allowed players to consume all the content, quit, come back for the new stuff, quit again and repeat on a loop. This caused people to quit caring about the game and was why less and less people returned to the game over time like this, and the game itself was not offering them anything to justify continuous play during droughts.
Because of that, subscriber counts got worse and worse, so Blizzard could no longer brag about their player counts, so they switched to “other, more meaningful metrics” after Q2 of 2015 when they had to explain how they went from bragging WoD had 10 million subscribers again to having 5.6 million in just three months, then fell down to 5.1 or 5.2 million the quarter after. This created their obsession with MAUs and profitability above all else because that looked better to the shareholders because they only understand money. If you think the token being added to the game was for anything other than puffing up the bottom line for their quarter reports and instead think it’s actually some stupid nonsense about “Well players who can’t play a lot can now have gold because Blizzard cares about them!” then I don’t know what to tell you aside from the fact the yellow text is going to your head.
Blizzard focuses on these kinds of practices to pad the bottom line for two reasons, shareholders, and because the competent developers left this company long ago. We wouldn’t be seeing this kind of crap if these developers could design games people wanted to play for long periods of time and go back to using those metrics. Instead they hype something up with a huge level of astroturfing, milk players as much as they can before the hype wears off and brag about how much money they made to the shareholders.
The developers care only about keeping their jobs, the shareholders care only about returns on their investment, and neither of these parties cares at all about customers actually enjoying the product. The closest you’ll get to this is when they pay it lip service in their biannual “We’re sorry, we screwed up, we’ll do better because we care about making the best game we can” speeches with WoW like they’ve been doing since 2014.
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What specifically was changed with MoP to enable people to quit, come back, quit, etc. as you put it that wasn’t already part of the game in Cata and Wrath?
Because they are all very similar where you play the latest raid and then use the catchup systems to be able to play the latest raid.
Blizzard recognized the need for catchup systems as early as vanilla with updating the dungeon loot tables and adding T0.5, and easier 20 mans with better gear.
With Isle of Queladanas and badge gear being on par with T6 gear.
The first WoW microtransaction was ironically during Wrath as well.
If you read the statement, Microsoft’s primary focus for mobile is cloud gaming to allow people to play full fledged console games on their phone, which is very different from normal mobile games that are usually shallow experiences loaded with micro transactions.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, I would be shocked if any subscription based game ever goes to Game Pass. The most we could hope for I think is either free expansion access for Game Pass members, or a small sub discount.
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It wasn’t a specific change, it was an attitude that Blizzard was taking on because players were wondering what happened to the game because it used to be something where there was always things to do and MoP felt like a “resub once every 3-4 months, indulge patch, quit, come back later” thing and that was a blue post saying they were taking that approach and feeling it out.
Which, don’t get me wrong. There is literally nothing wrong with this approach. I praise FFXIV for having the exact same approach so I can’t logically knock WoW for having it in the past. The problem is the lessons they chose to take from it because they just ended up getting lazy in their content delivery as far as scope of patches and things to do, then had a kneejerk reaction to trying it in late MoP/WoD when they decided to make the game insanely chore focused that now you feel punished early on in a patch if you dare to miss a day or two because you’re now just behind everyone else.
It works well in FFXIV because you aren’t punished for it nearly to the degree that you are in WoW. In XIV gear only matters to see the content if you’re doing Savage very early into a tier release, and that is just tomestones as well as fighting the bosses. There are no like daily quests that reward you with a belt that drastically increases your power. Dragonflight seems to be removing this mentality so it might go a lot better, guess people will have to see how it shakes out in the long term.
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Can you be more specific in the “always thing to do” in Wrath that wasn’t in MoP?
Calling it an “attitude” doesn’t translate well into specific design features which is why I’m asking for actual game changes you feel were different/worse.
You’re asking me for a specific case when I can’t describe a case with an attitude that exists in the design of something. In TBC and Wrath, as well as Vanilla almost anything you did no matter how pointless it ultimately was felt like it mattered to some degree and could lead to you saying the day was good. In Vanilla you could gank people in Searing Gorge for 8 hours, or Quel’danas in TBC and have a wonderful experience doing so. You could not do that in MoP, that mentality actually did start to deteriorate with Wrath but it wasn’t basically nuked from existence until they decided honor is just pointless around Cataclysm.
That’s why a lot of people who played Wrath can speak fondly of it, but if you ask them for specifics it will sound like the current game, because on a systems standpoint it technically was, you beat a tier and had no reason to ever go back to it when the new one came out. Except there was still a lot of enjoyment to be had back then, especially redoing Ulduar to push for hardmodes because it wasn’t a complete snoozefest. Algalon was still something a lot of guilds with ICC gear pushed at downing and that was two tiers prior just because there was an epic feeling to that fight even then.
Now the game just lacks that feeling, the depth, the enjoyment of just playing the game and doing something. If you’re not spending your time in WoW doing the chores at the present you just feel awful, whereas TBC your only obligation after a point is raiding if you’re in a guild, but everything else outside of that you can just do on your own time because you wanted to, not because you had to, and it still felt interesting. I had fond memories of trashing Heroic dungeons in TBC when I was in tier 6 gear, I had ZERO purpose to do that, but I still had a good time with other players.
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When it comes down to nebulous feelings of things being “important” rather than being able to point to actual design features it seems to me it’s more players have changed. Which would make sense, it doesn’t give the same feeling when you keep doing the same things over and over (video games, hobbies, etc.).
The possibility of ganking for 8 hours still existed, but after years of doing something like that for pointless fun, well it’s not so fun anymore. And it’s not because of the game
I mean I have great early WoW memories, the friends I made, the RL friends that played at the time. Just learning all of the game world, all the zones, all the quests. It was amazing. Then the first expansion, that was a brand new experience to get an expansion. Now an “expansion” is old news, we have had so many there isn’t a lot of excitement.
A short essay about the blurring lines between console and mobile game markets would not be helped by bringing the giant monster of complexity that is WoW into the discussion.
I have a few concerns about the future of WoW going forward, but not getting tagged into this particular discussion isn’t one of them.
damn you confuse me lol.
youre the worst troll ive ever seen but sometimes you actually drop gems like this.
interesting character. good on you!
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I know, right? I mean, $90 million in annual subscription revenue is okay, but I wouldn’t want it in my house.
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there’s a big difference between “X seems reasonable” and “X is going to happen”
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Old Blizzard has been gone for AGES now lol what’s going on in this thread?