Anyone remember the days when this game was good and support was real? Here’s what I mean by that:
When this game was first released and even for a long time after, blizzard cared about the community and its players. Suggestions were taken into consideration, broken mechanics were fixed, GM tickets were answered by real people in real conversations.
What we have today is nothing short of a dumpster fire. The monthly subscription has continued to rise while the quality of the game has continued to decrease. Just recently Blizzard decided to wreck the server economies, M+ dungeons specifically Upper and Lower are gravly overtuned with no acknowledgemnet. Quest are broken and when GM tickets are submitted you are given a 7 day wait time only to recive an automated response that is completely unrelated to the issue at had. It’s just trash, straight up trash. Maybe we should get back to basic instead of playing the cubical games all time time. Just a thought.
While I agree that some things are frustratingly bad right now, I don’t get this part. Well, the quality part I definitely do, but the monthly subscription? I’ve paid the same that I paid 17 years ago.
I also honestly believe the bulk of their team right now is desperately trying to make Dragonflight good that they abandoned Shadowlands, much like what happened in the final months of WoD when they basically pulled the plug on that expansion.
Kara has been nerfed (although it may need another) and the economy thing should actually benefit players in the long term. I do agree about Customer Support though, its infuriating the lengths they make players go through to get in contact with a real person.
Honestly, between trying to release Dragonflight and dealing with their internal fiasco outside of the development teams, it’s asking to much to expect quality. The game is 16 years old. One of the oldest, if not the oldest, MMO’s on the market and a ‘staple’ name for the most part. Blizzard has become so accustomed to WoW just generating them money that they often don’t even think about improving its QoL or trying to lift it out of the (well-earned) reputation it has gotten for having an incredibly toxic community. Instead, they inadvertently and sometimes deliberately foster that community through their actions.
Like other businesses, they don’t want to pay people - so that’s why GM tickets are answered so slowly (they don’t want to pay to hire more GM’s to answer tickets faster). Because the game is 16 years old, the code is a nightmarish spaghetti monster from the stars that desperately needs a WoW 2.0 to straighten everything out and update the engine. Even their cinematic cutscenes - which are usually top-tier - have diminished in favor of the cartoony cutscenes we get now with terrible lip sync and animations.
Honestly, if they put even a quarter of the manpower and effort they devote to other projects into improving and enhancing WoW, the game would probably be able to bounce back to much better sub numbers and active players.
My apologies, I didn’t continue my thought here. Correct, the actual monthly cost has not increased; however blizzard has made it abundantly clear that money is their end goal. Look at all the thing they sell in the shop, transmogs, transfers, race changes, etc. It’s a nickle and dime game. It’s not what it used to be in that aspect. I do fully understand that blizzard is a business, but there is no denying that they are making more money now than they were in the golden days. Even with the additional income, the support has contined to decrease.
I understand your points and your frustration, and honestly I do agree that support is lacking. And I also agree that Blizzard priorities money first and foremost, we’ve even seen that the store supplements for lower subs.
I will say WoW still manages to have the least egregious store of any MMO. The prices are ridiculous (and I honestly don’t buy their “the prices are high to dissuade people from using them” excuse anymore) but the actual store itself is so barebones compared to so many other games that I personally can’t look at it and view it as overly negative. But that’s just me.
Edit to address something else:
I have to disagree with this. They’ve done the muppet mouths (which are awful) to add more cutscenes into the game, but we also had the pre rendered cutscenes like Sylvanas vs. Tyrande which was absolutely of equivalent quality.
In fact, the 9.2.5 cutscenes that were done with fully in-game and lip synced models showed that the animation department is probably one of the only groups that has actively pushed to improve their part of the game. More than anything, I have immense amount of respect for Terran Gregory and believe he’s one of the only folks still at Blizzard who has the passion to still work on the game and it actually shows in what he produces.
I can only imagine what the source code looks like. As someone who does coding, I would guess that Blizzard had continued to just keep bolting on more code vs rewrite original code to imporve the overall quality.
That’s exactly what happened. They’ve even pointed out in the past that some things they could not change were due to the code being so tangled that changing it would break too many other things.
If that was ever in doubt…you don’t understand how businesses operate.
I knew that this was their goal when they didn’t give me vanilla for free and then had the nerve to ask for a monthly subscription fee.
I’m not sure about that. It is true that they are making more from “net engagements” or micro-transaction than they ever have before…but I highly doubt that they are making more overall than they did from sub fees in Wraith when they reached their highest concurrent player mark.
How many broken quests have you encountered? Played since…well a long time and maybe submitted one ticket. The other few times I was going to submit one, I found the answer online.
Just seems odd to me there are people out there constantly submitting tickets on the same account for new and various game reasons.
I’ve played since the original beta. I couldn’t even begin to count the overall quest issues I’ve experienced. With that said, I will give Blizzard the credit and say that with the last few expansions, this particular issue has become much better but has not been resolved. The reason I have a problem with this is due to the extensive amount of time these game patches are in Beta. These issues are identified in Beta and they still make it to the Production enviornment. That’s now how that’s supposed to work. Again, I also understand it’s not a 1:1 tranlastion from Beta to Production; however, there are obviously glaring issues that make it across.
This could be fixed by limitiing the content that avaliable in beta. Only allow people to play that which needs to be tested. The idea of a Beta is not to give anyone and everyone a max level character and let them be run free. It’s to debug and find issues associated with the content that’s about to be played.
