Prepatch is proof that you listen to wrong feedback

No it goes for everyone. The setting of the game is that you are a hero, and they asked for your help. The lore of the game and setting is telling you it is a threat and things are getting bad. What someone rps the char does not matter to the world setting itself. The core set rules is there for what is going on.

By giving players the choice to ignore it. Not only does it goes against the world settings of what is going on, but because you can no longer end up as a victim. Because players pick to Ignore it. That goes against the settings of the game, it is also bad Role play as well. It is like, playing VTM and ignore the world settings. Lets see how far it gets you.

The world setting right now is the scourge, that is set by the lore…one of the biggest threats we had. Is causing problems, and because Blizzard limits it because people did not want to be “griefed”. It ruins the story, the settings, and giving players the freedom to ignore a doomsday world not only takes away from what a MMORPG is. It is just bad rp all around.

In life you don’t always have a choice. So it makes no sense you have one now with the settings giving now.

I don’t have much to add other than the fact ive been playing Assasins Creed Valhalla nonstop since 2 days ago…

Amazing game

Well, I hate to tell you this. But all signs point to “we defeat the Scourge” or at the very least manage to hold it off, since you’re saying lore dictates.

So. People survive. And there’s an insinuation there that it may not reach some people after all.

You killed your own argument. Well, until the following expac tells us otherwise.

Well if nothing else, it proves that they probably should just tell us to stuff our ideas and stop paying attention to the horrible stuff suggested around here.

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Yeah well, I don’t PvP so I won’t be turning on war mode. Oh well. Less for me to do then.

It’s been explained to you repeatedly that the warmode version is nerfed.

I see this often in this thread. People have the illusion of choice in the game. You don’t. Whatever blizzard does, youll accept. You’re leveraging the fact that this event in particular conveniences you rather than not. You come in the thread dismissing otheres opinions and the very essence of what type of game wow is.

Get off your high horse with “my $15” crap.

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Just imagine that, the Scourge is like: “may we have your consent to launch an invasion to eliminate all life on Azeroth”.

Karens and whiny soccer moms who want to never be inconvenienced by developing story is why this game is in the gutter it has ended up in.

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I spent most of my playtime defending towns. Hours spent just babysitting crossroads.

It was a blast. I felt like a pally… new event is meh

No. I don’t PvP. Me -vs- the swarm is completely different than Me -vs- the alliance with the swarm buzzing around dying to cleave.

20:1 this was done so that they could get more into WM to justify it existing.

As a professional ganker/griefer, I’m highly disappointed in this patches direction.

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It’s a shame that the crybabies got their way. I would’ve enjoyed “griefing” them as they call it but what can you do? Feels like Legion will be the last decent pre-patch event because of people like that. If you want a game where you don’t want to be bothered by other players, then go play Skyrim or something. If you can’t handle a couple of weeks of not being able to sit in SW or Orgrimmar all day then maybe you should find a new hobby.

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Just. Like. Wrath.

Except Shadowlands isn’t Wrath. Wrath happened 12 years ago. It’s already been done before.

If this was a repeat of the Wrath event, the level of whinging and complaining about how, “Blizzard is so lazy, they can’t even come up with original content for the prepatch! I already did this in 2008! Why can’t we have something new! OMG I’m going to become Laura Palmer and die of boredom! Waaah!”would be exponentially worse than this thread, and likely be 80% of the content here on this forum.

Least you’re honest.

Ya know, I was holding back on making a response but I feel I need to express my opinion as well. Buckle up, this is a long one.

Especially with the title you posted, honestly, I have to agree to a degree. It makes me very curious where Blizzard pulls their feedback from. I know people are going to say “the whiners on the forums” or something along those linesbut I feel like this goes deeper as the forums represent such a small fraction of the player base.

I want to switch gears for a moment and talk about another Blizzard game because I feel it is relevant to this pre-patch.

Warcraft III: Reforged

To put it bluntly, the only Blizzard game I have ever refunded because it was absolutely NOT what was promised. More curious, however, was the fact that their resposne was, paraphrasing it mind you…

“We got feedback that players did not want a reforged experience and so we rolled it back to a more vanilla experience.”

Who ever asked for that? To this day I still think about that statement because NONE of the boards I frequent that would talk about the game ever gave that feedback. On top of that, look at the games player and critic reviews, they dictate quite the opposite in that players DID want a Reforged experience, they felt they were pitched a reforged experience, then sold something that was not what was promised.

I bring this up because, while it is true that people did complain on these forums and the PTR forums about this event, there were more posters saying that they did NOT want a nerfed event. In fact, the pre-patch event got quite a bit of feedback ranging from the lackluster rewards, weak week 1 quest line, and frustration when the event was so heavily nerfed on the PTR that falling 10 yards instantly killed you as a Zombie. Yes, the complainers existed but there were more people posting how much they hated this and did not want a nerfed event.

I brought up Warcraft III: Reforged for this reason.

Now, since that time as well another thing had become public in the existence of a secret feedback sub-forums. (Btw, I have never had access to such a forum personally so I can’t comment on what exists in there so the following is purely speculative) I have to wonder how much something like this may have been discussed in those secret forums or if perhaps Blizzard keeps taking bad feedback from these secret forums we never see. The only reason I even speculate on this is because of Warcraft III: Reforged and how no public forums seemed to align with Blizzard’s statement and now there is this situation. Again, from my observance the “anti-nerf” posts outnumbered the “nerf” posts.

This really bums me out honestly and, while I want to wait for week 2 before passing a hard judgement I do have to say that so far this has to be my least favorite Pre-Expansion event in my ~16 years of playing this game for so many reasons.

It does not feel like the scourge are a threat!

  • There are no invasions currently happening even though the lore states, clearly, this should be the most deadly invasion. If we ever lost the Lich King it was stated Azeroth would be facing an apocalyptic threat!
  • Icecrown enemies are jokes and easily dispatched to the point that it feels like we are the invaders slowly pushing our way into the doorway instead of the other way around. Except for Forgemaster. The fact he has his ice dot that stacks but lacks his Saronite to hide behind to drop stacks makes him a bit more deadly than the other rares.

The rewards do not feel meaningful.

  • Admittedly they are decent in terms of catch up stuff for alts, I will say that.
  • Aside from gearing alts the pre-expansion gear hold pretty much no visual/collector value. ~5 years from now I doubt I will remember which warfront armor set was the special pre-expansion event armor. Compare that to the WotLK Zombie Invasion or even the more recent Legion pre-expansion event with 4 entirely unique sets and weapons.
  • A chance at a bag that is 2 slots larger than the biggest crafted bags should not be the most exciting loot from a pre-expansion event.

The story feels a bit weak

  • To start, and referencing my first set of points on it feeling like the scourge poses no threat, aside from the very first questline to check out zones near our capitals all the quests take place in ICC (Minus Blightcaller) Again, it feels less like we are being invaded and more like we caught the Jailer with his pants down. I feel like we are a bigger threat to him than he, or the maw, are to Azeroth.
  • The story feels like its being drawn out with week one really not accomplishing or build up much of anything. Week one really just feels like not much is happening at all aside from beating up on enemies. There is minimal maw presence and it does not feel well explained why the rares (old scourge bosses) are coming back and its hard to tell if the threat is the scourge or the maw right now.

Gameplay isn’t engaging or exciting

  • For the last several days I have sat in Icecrown with a windows stopwatch going, tabbed out of wow and playing other games only to tab back in every 20 minutes to kill the next rare.
  • There is nothing exciting to do, the daily quests are uninteresting and very average at best. “Go kill frost whelps that are just randomly flying back and forth in the same location they have always been.” or *“Go place these bombs near super weak enemies for reasons.” Nothing feels exciting or like we are countering an apocalypse level invasion. It feels like we are picking on undead minding their own business who could never hope to stand a chance against us.
  • Its overly focused in one zone instead of feeling like a world wide threat. Outside of Icecrown nothing is going on. Even Scourge Invasion 1.0 (Vanilla Nax) and 2.0 (WotLK) had actual invasions happening around the world and 2.0 had the city invasions and events happening like Thrall vs Garrosh in the Arena. It felt like there was real world building AND things to actually go and do.

I know a few people are saying “GIve Blizzard some slack, Covid happened and its been rough” and here is the thing, I would. If Blizzard needed more time then I would have supported it! Delay the pre-patch, delay the game, make sure it’s finished and of Blizzard quality before it goes out! I get it, Covid happened (is happening) and it’s been a real curve adapting to those circumstances. I absolutely get it. Pushing out a product, however, that feels incomplete like this does no one any good! Once it’s out like this then it can’t be taken back, the damage is done and it paints a very negative picture on the game as a whole!

Something like this pre-patch does nothing to soothe the worries of how Shadowlands is going to turn out and the negative experience and outlook created from it is going to carry forward into the expansion.

I want to use an example by first mentioning a quote. Now, last time I used this quote someone wittled down my entire post to “You don’t understand the quite/missused it!” No, I understand the context perfectly fine however I personally believe it is entirely relevant to this day and STILL has context and meaning in our modern gaming atmosphere.

“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” ~Shigeru Miyamoto

To give an example, take a game like “No Man’s Sky” A game that was hyped to heck and back and promised so much and delivered hardly any of what was promised. It had a horrible launch and even though the game is now in a state where everything that was originally promised is in it, and it is a pretty good game now, the game never recovered from this and has pretty much drifted into obscurity.

I will give another example but one that ended with a happy ending. Final Fantasy XIV v1.0. Now, there are plenty of good documentaries out there on this game that can tell the story better than I can summarize in this post but I will give a very, very, very abridged telling. Hot off the massive success of FFXI the team went into creating the next installment and, as admitted by the staff, many in the team viewed themselves as being infallible, there was a lack of organization, no research was was done in the current state of the market, and even before launching the general vibes were “This game is going to crash, hard…” and it did just that with being reviewed as horrible.

However, in the case of FFXIV they re-organized the development teams and reassessed their assets and began work on an entirely new FFXIV while trying to fix what they could with the original version because they knew they couldn’t fix it entirely. In the end they they released an entirely new FFXIV after shutting down the old servers and managed to find great success. In fact members of the team even recount taking lessons from WoW (at the time) and applying it to this new FFXIV and were met with huge success and very positive reviews. Now FFXIV is one of the big three MMO’s on the market alongside WoW and ESO (Depending on who you ask, some mention GW2)

I point these out because I wanted to make a point. Having a bad launch/release has a massive impact on a game. It can leave it in ruins most the time. FFXIV luckily had an entire franchise supporting it which, honestly, probably helped quite a bit in making a comeback. WoW is also quite the franchise with years of built up quality work, however I have to ask how long that will be enough after WoD, BFA, and now this pre-patch as well as worries already going into Shadowlands.

I would be lying if I didn’t admit I was worried with the direction WoW is going in. I will say Shadowlands has a lot of good going for it (Seriously guys, Torghast is great fun~) but its also got its own worries and just like with the complainers for the pre-patch, the anti 1%ers have vilified those who are pointing out the flaws in Shadowlands and have twisted them into some kind of boogymen. Personally, I have my predictions of what the forums will be flooded with once Shadowlands hits and people have had a bit of time to play around with it. It’s not an outright bad expansion but there are some bad, stubborn, decisions in my opinion.

Anyway, I am getting a bit off topic.

TL;DR - Yeah, I agree with the general consensus. This is not a good Pre-Patch event and leaves me greatly disappointed. It also fuels worries about Shadowlands moving forward as well as just where feedback is being taken from and from who. I really think everything should have been delayed longer. I get the hunger for more content but what does it matter if it’s not at the expected Blizzard quality.

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God, this event is proof that AoC needs to be released.

It was a good read.

The thing is for me…Pre patch events are a celebration. It is suppose to be our reward, our…unique event that celebrates a new page being turned.

I got into wow because of the prepatch, I started in wrath. My husband tried to get me into wow since classic but I was too much into Ultima Online.

The scourge invasion holds a place in my heart because of how epic it look. I got the game because of it.

So to me…It bothers me more than it should that we are not going out with a bang. That the scourge invasion feels weaker than the Iron Horde.

This pre patch feels lazy, and feels like they have no pride at all in the work or the history of the game. That worries me going forward.

I’m sure the start of the expansion will be great. It always is, Start of BFA was good also. It was the content patches, going forward that things went downhill. If they don’t take pride in the lore and history of the scourge. What does that say about the future of shadowlands?

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Yeah but people keep voting the moron woman in despite her chasing jobs away from her consituents.

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I wonder why alliance don’t go play on warmode then…

Many reasons why. As someone who does not enjoy pvp. Playing as a ghoul and doing this has more impact on story for me than warmode. (that and it is a temp thing with this event. )

Your ghoul form still scaled off ilvl. High ilvl people would be the ones killing people.