My honest opinion on the state of this game

Community General Discussion
1

Hello everyone,

I recently resubbed after two years off ( as soon as I understood how azerite gear worked, I was out) and I came back for some pre-patch madness. I haven’t been following the development of this game until last week but oh boy…wtf
I’ve played this game since vanilla and I at least tried every expansion. I can’t for the life of me understand the direction of this game and why they continue to shoot themselves in the foot with their game design choices. This covenant system is a terrible idea that is going to backfire…makes no sense at all when it comes to casual players. I’m glad they decided to take more time to fix many of the issues with beta but its not enough. I remember a time where I could create a character and progress in both pvp and pve simultaneously without feeling sub optimal in one of the two. No matter which covenant I chose, I will be sub optimal in something just because someone else picked a covenant that is better for that type of content. Video games are all about feeling good while playing it, and there is nothing good about feeling like you just handicaped yourself for no other reason than blizzard says this is how it is. I guess the days where I could hop on a raid, get off a few hours later, put on my resiliance gear and go do arena are over and I should just stick with one piece of content…what terrible game design. Breaks my heart to see the trajectory this game is taking.

Sincerely yours,

a player who loves warcraft.

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SystemLands is going to fail badly, unless the story and content are on point.

The covenant and conduit’s are going to be globally hated, just like azerite armor and corruption. And the criticism is right there in their face, it’s like they are blind or something.

The covenant’s are literally just azerite armor with a shiny new ribbon on them…
Do they think we are oblivious?

First time in my life I think WoW might actually go to the point of no return and die completely.

People have said this every expansion since the games existence, but I always brushed it off. However I feel like it might become a reality.

They failed to hit the mark in BFA and I’m afraid a second bad expansion in a row might put the nail in the coffin.

You have top twitch streamer’s talking about the consideration of quitting the game all together. You see them gradually starting to play other games and WoW less and less.

Viewer base is a huge contributing factor in success for video games now a days. This isn’t wrath when streaming didn’t exist. Influencers can kill a game now a days by themselves if they are big enough.

I hope it doesn’t happen, I have so much of my life invested into this game. You can say that is sad or whatever. However I have always been the type to stick to a couple games, and master them. I have so many memory’s with friends and family both in this game.

Let’s hope it’s not the end… Who knows maybe ion will smoke some crack and get arrested or something so we can get new representation. Wishful thinking. Seems like he already is anyways.

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No it won’t.

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I loved warcraft since the original rts games and wow was such a big part of my teenage years. I have loved this game for 15 years and I honestly can’t remember a time where a big portion of the playerbase is sounding off the alarm on an expansion that hasn’t even been released yet because they know its so bad in how they are implementing their progression systems. Just sad… I always ask myself this question every time an expansion comes out. Did the players ask for this? Who asked for azerite? who asked for corruptions? who asked for covenants in the state that they are? Nobody. Yet blizzard keeps creating their own problems.

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Legion?

BfA?

Mists of Pandaria?

If you’ve been around for 15 years, you should know this is par for the course. We won’t really know the final result until we have Shadowlands on our computers and ready to play.

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PLEASE just give us resilience back Blizzard. COME ON DAWG I can’t be doing dragonslaying content 24 7

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That is the problem right there. Yes, you can have good intuition on how something is going to turn out before even seeing the end result, and with shadowlands we can literally see what they are doing. I know you are smart enough to do this because everyone does every day. I’ll give you an example. If I told you I was going to cook pasta but the sauce was going to made from dog turds, you know that is not going to be good. You don’t need to see the end result, how I cooked it, or what else I put on there. Its going to be bad… I know shadowlands is going to be bad based on how the systems work and I can’t wait until its released to sound off the alarm on this.

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Yes I have to agree with Olfen here. People do this constantly.

However as a player who is also critical but also not insane. I don’t know about SL, and clearly most people’s feedback on BFA was not good. There will always be a handful that like every expansion but overall it didn’t appeal to most.

SL in theory sounds amazing. When we got the first trailer and news of the expansion I was ecstatic. However as the months and weeks have gone by, I keep getting less and less excited for it.

They keep making changes that don’t make any sense and are completely oblivious of what the player’s want or enjoy.

Or when they do finally make a good change, which they do sometimes do. It takes way way to long to become a reality…

For example Legion Artifacts, so many people were beyond frustrated this expansion because they would end up with weapons they couldn’t use their legion appearances on.

Why did it take 3 years to change that??? Why??? The community clearly heavily favored the option to be able to use them across your class, especially after so many put so much time into mage tower.

Or then they make changes everyone dislikes across the board too. Like how they are destroying Legion Legendary’s. Nobody want’s that, some might not care, but some really do care. People like being able to buy them for alts, or use them on their mains for timewalking. Why just destroy them?

Want to know why because they are lazy and a ton of SL Legendary’s are going to be so similar to the Legion Legendary’s that they don’t want people to see it. They are literally throwing a wool over people’s eyes… This is how pety we are going to get treated?

People have literally decade’s in this company. The feedback is all there for them to read and process. The playerbase isn’t hiding, yet they constantly are.

We report bugs, glitches, balance problems. They ignore it…

I’m personally tired of feeling like my opinion doesn’t matter. I understand trying new things, but Blizzard constantly has the problem of not knowing when to hit the breaks and instead just keeps driving until they crash into a wall. It’s a huge problem.

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And if you’re going into something expecting to hate it, chances are that you’re going to hate it regardless of how good/bad it might be. You’ve clearly decided how you’re going to feel, so it seems pointless to try and argue this any further.

The idea that you can determine if something is bad before you’ve even had a chance to play it is baffling to me, especially when the game was delayed to change and balance those very things you’re talking about. A beta only reveals so much, and there have been cries about WoW being ruined within every beta for this game. While some of those complaints were definitely right about some things (I’ll concede that BfA’s azerite and HoA were mediocre renditions of Legion artifacts), more often than not we just don’t really know what to expect.

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There is a problem though. We see balance problems everywhere, mainly because of covenant’s. Some classes are to the point 30 percent of their dps is covenant, and the balance between them and across classes is erratic.

We see them stall and postpone the release. However we aren’t seeing very much in the way of balance at all.

We just keep seeing them add new annoying weird things that nobody is really inclined to like…

I have been playing beta and so far I am not impressed. So could you at least rule out the people play testing the game that don’t like it so far. I feel like that’s fair game at that point. I am one of them.

If you aren’t critical of them before the game releases as well. How can you be mad at them later. If you just simply stand back and wait for a plate of poop, guess what you’re getting… a plate of poop my friend… a plate of poop.

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I love how I give you a clear example of how you don’t need to see and end product to know its bad, and you are baffled as to how anyone could predict how bad something is going to be without trying it. But ok, I see those type of people are out there and I guess there is nothing I can do about it. It is what it is. I guess we will find out when it comes out. This is the same company that released warcraft refunded, I really can’t understand how much more proof people need that this company is making bad decisions when it comes to their games.

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You can make whatever arguments you want, but at the end of the day you can’t judge something that doesn’t yet exist in its final form.

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I was pumped for Shadowlands but after the garbage that is this buggy unbalanced prepatch i just don’t know anymore. Makes me not even want to bother with Shadownlands.

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Yes you can.

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Vanilla,BC and Wrath was based off D&D core values. All those people are gone. What we have now running game development is Dragonball z, anime and super hero movie tropes. You can also factor in unbelievable story telling and over the top heroes and villains “Milked” to maximum effect even at the cost of the characters soul.

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I do think its important to clarify what people think of as casual.

For me Casual is probably you do LFR max for raiding and maybe like +5s as your max level dungeons. Not that Casual players have to do dungeons/raiding, just what I envision. Some people only RP, and I would consider that casual. Overall, for most people covenant choice will probably come down to a mixture of what you want and what is “good” (based off information you either look up or get trickled down, and the choice won’t feel bad unless you make it feel bad.

I don’t think the Covenants/Conduits are close to Azerite Armor and corruption. Covenant abilities themselves won’t have the RNG involved with AA or Corruption, and also won’t be lockedout behind weekly activities. Conduits will buff abilities, essentially the Legion Relic system, these are better than AA IMO because while there will be some clear winners at least it isnt strapped to the armor and has tons of RNG. If anyone wasnt aware, conduits can be somewhat farmed:

I won’t ask you to click on WoWhead if you are concerned for malware, but essentially an NPC will allow you to turn in currency and RNG a conduit you don’t have. RNG is still involved, but you can farm the currency through activities, rares, dailies, etc. in the Maw and work towards Conduits you arent getting naturally. That in itself is leaps and bounds better than how we had to pray to RNG for corruptions initially, we already have a failsafe so to speak.

Anyway, everyone think what they will of SL. I already feel like its shoring up some issues seen in Legion/BFA involving potential RNG by adding vendors at the start and having confirmed content where to get the things you need.

As for this level/stat squish, I feel like this is what some people wanted but many others didn’t care about and will be probably a worse problem. Many either strange or buggy interactions involving old content already with the level squish, and for “casuals” I would say this is the most glaring issue right now, not picking a covenant.

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To me, the problem is the whole borrowed power system. We grind to get everything leveled up and come next xpac, it’s all gone. If anything, there should be something like a permanent 1% increase of some stat for every borrowed power system we max out as a reward for the time and effort we put into this game. But, the reality is we shouldn’t have the borrowed power system at all and just work on enhancing the classes without it.

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The level squish alone is an absolute disaster. Never in all my years of playing MMOs have I seen a change that was so janky in MMO.

I just don’t think they have much talent left on their team anymore. This game used to be a game made by gamers for gamers. I dunno what it is today.

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I, too, miss resilience. I know some people complained about getting wrecked in PvP with their PvE gear. But, to me, it was a rite of passage. Everyone had to get wrecked at first to get their decent PvP gear (I remember in Cata, you could buy/craft the Bloodied sets to get by). But after a few BG’s or arenas, you’d have enough honor points to get a decent set. I think that was the last time PvP had any semblance of “balance”… even thought it was far from perfect. At least then it had some distinction, and not a “one-size-fits-all” approach they seem bent on doing now.

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Spaces… paragraphs…

“ Hello everyone,

I recently resubbed after two years off ( as soon as I understood how azerite gear worked, I was out) and I came back for some pre-patch madness. I haven’t been following the development of this game until last week but oh boy…wtf

I’ve played this game since vanilla and I at least tried every expansion. I can’t for the life of me understand the direction of this game and why they continue to shoot themselves in the foot with their game design choices.

This covenant system is a terrible idea that is going to backfire…makes no sense at all when it comes to casual players. I’m glad they decided to take more time to fix many of the issues with beta but its not enough. No matter which covenant I chose, I will be sub optimal in something just because someone else picked a covenant that is better for that type of content.

I remember a time where I could create a character and progress in both pvp and pve simultaneously without feeling sub optimal in one of the two.

I guess the days where I could hop on a raid, get off a few hours later, put on my resiliance gear and go do arena are over and I should just stick with one piece of content…

Video games are all about feeling good while playing it, and there is nothing good about feeling like you just handicaped yourself for no other reason than blizzard says this is how it is.

What terrible game design. Breaks my heart to see the trajectory this game is taking.

Sincerely yours,

a player who loves warcraft.”

Don’t you think it’s more inviting to a reader? :slight_smile:

Anyways, it’s not so bad if you imagine the covenant choice as permanent as your class.

I think Blizz sneakily wants you to make same class different covenant alts so you’re playing more. :man_shrugging: