Do explain.
Wow is definitely hurting.
Like Jalen, I came back to SL for the pvp. Heard of the direction they were going with SL from BFA with pvp, bringing back the vendor, etc. and it piqued my interest.
The season started off with quite a bang and it was, for the most part pretty great because everyone was on equal footing for the first few weeks. As people have historically done, when they hit their threshold to safely secure their season title, they sit the rest of the season out, pick up a same or new class alt for another shot at titles/fun or engage with different content. Except this season. This season has offered a power disparity in pvp unlike any season before it and gave a lot of high end players cause to make same class alts and take what used to be rather niche, boosting, and make it mainstream. Add on-top of that, the ridiculous length that this season has played on for.
By comparison not much boosting existed in the past because getting a green/low-exp player over a rating hurdle for a title reward required a whole hell of a lot more effort than getting them to 14,16,18 or 2100 this season. Boosting isn’t the source of the problem or necessarily a huge problem that is difficult to solve.
With the re-introduction to the pvp vendor, Blizzard took one step forward and two steps back. By including both a ranking grind on honor & conquest gear in addition to massive power disparity between honor & conquest gear at their respective max ranks, in addition to mEaNiNgFuL covenant 1 global shot choice, in addition to ridiculous legendary ability/synergy.
Reasonable suggestion upon suggestion upon suggestion have been made and discussed ad nauseum. Holinka recently confirmed for many people that they’re 1) not listening and 2) don’t understand their own game. Hence the doubling down on horrible design choices. If one were to take a look around, this is pretty much apparent in many if not most aspects with SL as a whole, both from feedback they received in alpha to the feedback they’ve been receiving in 9.1 ptr. The amount of systems they’ve created for a player to have to jump through are too complex because they all have to be counterbalanced around each other. Blizzard has a history of never being able to admit fault in their design, and it doesn’t help that they have been unwilling for a very long time to share design intention, apart from valid testing feedback clearly falling on deaf ears.
9.1 may very well indeed be one of the most content slim x.1 patches the game will have gotten in a while. I implore everyone to spend a decent chunk of time on the ptr for themselves to see for themself. The covenant campaigns are even more rushed than the first nine chapters. Korthia is lacking and only exists as another currency grind. It’s perceived as a catch-up but it doesn’t actually play like one. The changes to Choretrash, while a slight improvement, still leave it deserving of its name. I guess M+ is still whatever for people who get a thrill for speed running. And pvp pretty much resumes in the same horrible state it has been left in since March. New players/alts/rerolls will already be left behind on patch day for season 2. Anyone who isn’t 226 right now is in for a bad time, especially for casual pvp. So if raid logging is your thing, you perhaps got the best roll of the dice.
It’s primarily a design direction & philosophy problem. Maybe Activision shares some blame due to lack of talent at Blizz, but in many ways this one step forward, two steps back when paired with an unwillingness to listen to testing feedback, a massive amount of publicly displayed ignorance about your games own systems & how players approach them during the last three interviews, and an emphasis on prolonging many aspects of casual content via various gates & riddling them with systems that all point to a folly effort of fostering a higher play-time/MAU metric without any iota or awareness that it blands the current content, burns people out, and turns many away for long term or for good.
Blizzard didn’t create a “beast” of an MMO. They created an MMO off of the hype of the WC3 game and games such as EQ, UO, and RS. What led people to it over EQ and UO, and even RS is it was far more forgiving, and casual. The casual factor is the only thing that Blizzard has pioneered into MMORPGs. Everything else they “innovated” has been done by another one previously. What kept them dominant over the years is the sunk cost fallacy. People will continue to play over other games because they don’t want to lose things in which they have thrown years of work.