If you’re used to PoE don’t even bother with the D4 changes. None of it was meaningful toward the endgame. Just better for more casual players.
It’s essentially everything more hardcore players told them they should do week 1 of launch that should’ve been there at launch with gear and helltides/w bosses/NMDs/etc. for a better leveling experience when most of the casual players were saying ‘you can’t complain about xyz because you no lifed the game’.
They have to actually work on it and have something to release it.
What do you think is more important? SoD that gives them a subscription from the players or Cata where they get a subscription AND can start selling microtransactions that will likely make more money than all the SoD and Cata subs combined?
Both? Wasn’t the peak above 500k players for SoD? $50m-$70m per year in subs won’t pay for a designer/manager, a handful of devs, and a QA person or two salaries with significant profits leftover?
We don’t know what the actual number of players are and likely never will. We can speculate by looking through logs but that just tells us how many unique characters raided and is a poor metric to use when comparing phase 1, where so many people raided with tons of alts, to other phases.
As for is it worth it for them to hire more people and invest in these products, that is a question for Blizzard to answer. The real things we are testing with classic atm is not so much game design but how cheap can they go on supporting their products while still making money off us, the customer.
Shareholders are only interested in one thing: YoY profit.
WoW reached sub saturation long ago. So now the only way to achieve that ‘YoY profit’ is to run with as few personnel as possible.
If they don’t. The shareholders will fire the board, replace the CEO, and demand the ‘new team’ make them more money or be fired, too.
We already know the answer to this… Skeleton crews to minimize loss of subs without care for quality of maximizing subs…
You mean Microsoft?
(Activision)-Blizzard may still have a Board; it should still have a CEO. Either way, Shareholders of Microsoft can force a vote to replace key leadership within a company if they feel those members are not ‘doing their best’ to ‘ensure the company operates profitably’.
…though, with Microsoft, I doubt the shareholders would get to that point as Microsoft would have long-ago fired Blizzard’s ‘upper management’ and installed their own to “right the ship” of a floundering studio they own.
i got a level 100 necro, 100 druid, 100 sorc and climbing up a 78 barb (finally got 2 ubers funny they dropped while on the barb - starless sky and turials mights chest) lol
i love that i can go from 1 to 100 in under 4 hours
Necro minion build looks crazy
Hard cope imo
They’re still trying to figure out how to insert Holy Power, rage normalization and focus for hunters into vanilla wow
With the size team they have, and the timeframe they have, none of this is happening. The lead dev has even said they have abandoned the notion of rage normalization for SoD.