I hear a lot of people say that MoP was when abilities and the flow of the game felt right. Yet, since Cataclysm every class has had nearly every utility to remain “competitive” for an e-sports environment, expanding the number of buttons and complexity significantly. Since those expansions, many more abilities, buffs, and passives have been added that has made (at a competitive level) any sort of WoW esport completely unwatchable for 99% of the player base and (at a majority level) the game entirely confusing. This confusion for the majority of the player base (and for the optimization of the advanced players) is why WeakAuras and other addons were created.
It’s not a surprise that in Cataclysm, when all of the extra abilities and a lot of these problems were rolling out that player subscription numbers tanked. Everything just got too complicated and the nominal player was not having fun. Now Blizzard is in a situation where they can collect and see data from current players, even top raiding players, but it is difficult to collect feedback on people who have quit, aside from an exit survey that I’m sure nearly zero people fill out. It is my belief and preference that this game needs more new players, and so it is frustrating to me when (time and time again…) Blizzard chooses to deepen an existing problem instead of addressing to better restore the game.
Everything typed above was mostly in the headspace of PvE, raiding & dungeons. If we read it through the PvP lens, things are even more dire and dramatically poor. PvP is wholly too confusing and the amount of soft-cc and other passives that have made PvE confusing are entirely mystifying when you’re on the receiving end of it in PvP.
We can take even the most recent PvP tournament for example: (timestamped)
It is almost entirely unwatchable, aside from maybe just looking at health bars and them moving around, to understand what is going on. Even if you’re in the top 1% of PvP players, you can understand all the abilities and who has what, but at the end of the day there are an enumerable number of passives, gear decisions, and talent choices that make knowing what’s going on almost a mystery.
In the past, or in most games, having this criticism is met with “oh keep practicing” or some insinuation that you’re not good enough to handle hard content. Yet in WoW even the best players agree that it’s too complicated. Since we seem to be so deeply concerned with the feedback of the top 1% of players, here’s some feedback from Venruki and Pikaboo - some of the best PvP players in the game (timestamped)
Since that video was created two years ago, even more soft cc, abilities, and talents have entered the game. Yet, year-over-year, Blizzard has sidestepped the problem all whilst developing new class features that have deepened it.
So with all of this above history in mind, the esports craze, development, player (and top 1% player feedback), PvE, PvP… we get to today where the problem is finally acknowledged by Blizzard (through Ian) but instead of making an attempt to normalize and reduce bloat, they are making tools for us to manage it. This (to me) reads as a decision to not simplify the game and seems to ignore the true problem because of it - and that is frustrating and where some of the drama is coming from.
I’ll just say more bluntly what I’m feeling - MMORPGs do not make good esports and Blizzards insistence to make it one has killed the game for a majority of players. The majority of players are defined by the subscription numbers and culturally. Talk with any ex-WoW player off the street, or randomly select any previous player and they will tell you that they stopped playing in Cataclysm and it was because raiding was too complicated and that their class changed too much. Having the game more simplistic is enjoyable by a wider audience, as evidenced by the Classic WoW boom. Competitive players will always find their niche and find complications to leverage. Yet, Blizzard seems to have it backwards, where we design the game with the top content (mythic raiding, etc.) in mind and not for those players who have quit or are not in said content. The mistakes of Cataclysm have festered and lasted so long that we’ve reached a state of “that’s the way it’s always been” when it has not and we’ve just reached a critical crossroads where (yet again) the lead game designer has avoided the fact that this element of the game is cannibalizing itself - and there is no cure planned. Maybe if we feel the need to have one button aid, or our rotations explained to us in-game - the game is too complicated and needs redesign. The most popular esports are those that are easily understandable by audiences and people who do not play the game, if we insist on WoW esports then look no further than the massive success of Classic WoW duelling tournaments. These tournaments have over-quadruple the amount of viewership than the retail equivalent. Classic’s success is not driven by “hype” or “nostalgia” but because of the simple fact that it is simple and easy to understand and enjoy - and given that the player base is in their 30’s and 40’s… simple and easy to understand sells pretty well.
Totally agree with the “should” there, but “will” is a whole other story. If I’m a raid leader and members of my raid could obviously have a DPS increase, or even just navigate mechanics better, by having the rotation covered for them - I am likely to encourage players to use it as the easiest, least resistant solution. Would that be wrong of me? Yep! Is it likely to still happen to many raids in the game, totally.
One button raises the skill floor significantly to the point where if you’re learning and doing worse than someone with a garage door opener I imagine players will feel discouraged.