It’s not that they made a few bad decisions. WoW has been riddled by them for years.
It’s been the consecutive bad decisions that many players are complaining about.
Including me.
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To a point, however, I am sure that the developers are under a lot of pressure to meet specific metrics and that does influence how they develop content. A perfect example was the BFA launch.
The game was not ready to be launched, however, the marketing department had set up a huge event for the launch, so the developers had no choice but to launch a game that wasn’t ready.
This happens all the time in business. Take the ice cream cone event that McDonald’s held in 2017. People just needed to download their app and redeem the digital coupon for a free ice cream cone.
The app had been having issues and had never had a good stress test, but the marketing department had been advertising the event for weeks. In the end, the app crashed and people couldn’t redeem their digital coupons. The end results were tons of angry customers who only wanted their ice cream cone.
WoW is mostly old Diablo 3 devs now. All the good WoW devs we had before are on Overwatch, Hearthstone or they left Blizzard.
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It was an active decision to remove a lot of the artifact traits/abilities we had to make the Legion classes fun, it was an active decision to make azerite armor traits, one of the worst systems ever, a thing. Don’t even get me started on the abomination that is arcane right now.
I totally think Activision caused a lot of problems, but I refuse to pretend that Blizzard’s WoW team isn’t guilty for making some really boneheaded decisions.
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Who cares about them… I sure don’t
While obtuse, it’s also true. They’re employees hired by a corporation to work on something and are free to crap all over the legacy that made customers into longtime fans. These employees explicitly don’t care about the fandom itself, and likely talk about workplace-related issues at home rather than what the game’s fans think. Which is further why it’s completely acceptable to harangue those employees for the bad job they do at every opportunity: because it literally doesn’t matter.
Game development’s quite the vicious cycle when it comes to making the customer happy.
tl:dr, you don’t have to be a game designer to realize there’s a problem with a game.
You are correct, I don’t have a diploma that makes me a game design programmer. However, I’ve been playing games since the original version of Zork came out. I’ve been playing games since I got my first computer…an IBM PC. Not the XT or AT, the PC. And you know what? I’ve seen a lot of games crash and burn over the years, and a lot of them for what’s going on with WoW right now.
There are always going to be differences between various players of a certain game. Some like BFA, some don’t. I fall into the don’t category which is why I quit the game. But I liked MoP and some don’t so I’m cool with that. Heck, some people don’t even mind loot boxes, but there a lot of people that don’t. So…what someone thinks and what they don’t think is entirely subjective.
Right at this point of the expansion in Legion, my guild was happily playing Legion. But now at this point in BfA, roughly half of the guild is playing ESO (including the hubby) and roughly half of the guild is playing FF14, and the rest are game hopping, don’t you think there’s a little problem there?
I don’t care if you like BFA or not. In fact, I’m happy for you if you do like it. But saying that I don’t have the right to hate the game because I’m not a game expert, I take exception to that.
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Well it makes no sense.
Pepsi isnt going to keep making a drink that the majority of consumers are disgusted with. That’s common sense.
Why does Blizz keep doing the contrary?
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I’ve been against that mindset for a while. They might own the IP, but I think it’s a fair argument to say players have a vested interest in the game, especially those who have been around since Classic first launched.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens legally in the next 15-25 years with regards to consumers rights where they deal with virtual / digital property. It’s already a hot topic in China, and I expect it to become one in the USA too.
My big fear is that it’ll make MMOs too risky a venture for any company to design.
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Funny thing, when I read the topic I thought “oh like tauren mill!” You know, the devs playing one team and players playing the other team, both mixed of horde and alliance. That would be so fun lol.
Yes this is how the world of consumerism turns.
The argument that is being made more and more often (and which I frankly disagree with because it strips companies of necessary control over their intellectual property) is that because players have improved a basic account, they now have a vested interest, finances / virtual property in the game which have value.
The basic argument goes that by virtue of the time they expended on the account, (ie: the improvement of it beyond it’s basic nature and the assumption of it’s value, sentimental, and monetary) that said players have achieved a measure of ownership and thus are now being deprived of the right to enjoy their property when the Developers engage in decisions that the majority would consider detrimental and damaging to the player’s interests.
There was a weird case from China a while back where one dude actually hunted down a former guild mate, physically assaulted him, and then actually sued him for damage to his account in the form of selling some super rare game item. It was all things considered, baffling, horrifying and crazy all rolled into one.
Like I said earlier, I hate such a concept because if you gave players that sort of say or control, it could and would kill the desire for any developer to ever make a MMORPG, ever again. This is also a big part of why I am very concerned by Blizzard Balance and what it means for the future of gaming if more companies use such a system.
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Those same players are either eating their words now or longer play the game and jump on the bandwagon whatever the internet told them.
They have no choice, but to listen to those who are still with them. They’re marketing motto has been destroyed thanks to Blizzcon 2018. I’m glad this destruction is happening on them. They needed some sort of wake up call to come back to reality. You can’t stay in the money forever if you don’t have many followers to lead.
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I don’t think I could ever wish destruction as you say on Blizzard Entertainment. Call it Rose-Tinted Glasses, but I have too many good memories of late nights at So.Cal Renaissance Faire, and some of the best MTG games I’ve ever played, to truly wish anything bad on them.
That’s why it’s so painful to see this current course I suppose. Because I know what it was like, and how far off course things have gone. I do hope that whatever is causing these decisions to be made is stopped as soon as possible. As I said, this has been painful to watch.
At least you’ve found a group of people that you and your opinions can empathize with.
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for them wow classic was made. So they can ruin retail even harder. Dunno why. Silent casuals are probably worth it
They chose this route so they have themselves to blame for delving this far. Destruction of a company is a good valuable lesson to understand on what’s not accepted nor what should be followed. It’s a brutal wake up call to realization on their part. They need to ask themselves why did it go this way and how will they recover those they chased away.
Classic can do, but so much to gain something back. However once that energy burns out then what do they have left. They really need to think on what bring players to mmorpg universe. They need to see how ESO, GW2 and FFXIV does it since they’re WoW’s competitors. They copied some elements from WoW so I think WoW needs to do the same, but improvise on the concept.
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It’s a brutal assessment, but truth.