Those tweets are a big yikes. Yikes from the person tweeting I mean, not Blizzard.
Theorycrafters are NOT part of the game design team. They are a data-source to provide information to Blizzard, which Blizzard devs will act upon if they so choose. When theorycrafters start dictating game design, it isn’t a wonder why Blizzard would shut those posts down and make it clear who is making the decisions. And no, asserting that you are in charge when you are in charge isn’t being a “man child”. What’s childish is running to twitter and stirring up drama because the devs won’t do exactly what you do.
Give your feedback, and then Blizzard will decide what to do with it. That’s just how it is. You give your feedback for how you feel, and maybe what you think, but dictating what must be done is what is extremely childish.
It seems weird to complain about this when people loved tier sets back in the day. The cosmetic being tied to the power contextualized the cosmetic. Having full tier 3 wandering around town, you knew what they meant. It wasn’t just a cute outfit, but it said something about the person wearing it.
Same with Covenants. You see a guy in a Venthyr mog, and you know that guy is a Venthyr, and he’s going to be able to do Venthyr-things.
Also, you know people have rolled and played classes that aren’t not S-tier because they like that specific class, right? Not everyone chases optimal power all the time. If the gap is big enough it will motivate less hardcore players to reroll, and you see that in classes where the gap between the first best Covenant and the second best Covenant are large, but in classes where 1st and 2nd are small, for instance Shaman with Necrolord vs Venthyr, you see plenty of people making off-meta picks, just like they do with classes.
This idea that people will always play the 100% most optimal setup is simply wrong. It is wrong. Wrong. There is a balancing point where many people will choose alternate options if the choices are “close enough”. Covenants are at the moment just a balancing issue, not something somehow fundamentally wrong or something we’ve never seen before.
Blizzard can make Covenants work. And considering how stale the game was getting, I think it is worth doing something fresh and new. Shadowlands was the biggest expansion launch in close to a decade, people were obviously hyped about this system.