I think it’s important to be clear if the playerbase no longer sees eye to eye with the developers vision. Other games do this when significant changes happen to the game and it shows that the team cares about the feedback.
I’m sure you’ve been playing long enough to remember when Blizzard used to give developer feedback on changes, this radio silence is a very recent and new trend.
The vocal player-base has grown into a blob of negativity the last couple of years, nothing Blizzard can say or do will appease them. It’s not hard to see why there is little communication anymore.
It’s not for no reason Yesuna, Blizzard ask for a feedback so they can do a good job. They get endless amounts of feedback from the casuals on here and the 1% on the separate feedback forum. They got endless amounts of feedback from the beta (myself included) and you know how little got changed? People complained about conduit energy on beta and we’ve still got it.
People are fed up paying for a game monthly to be treated worse than F2P consumers.
This is actually such a blatant lie that I can’t even tell if you’re just lacking self-awareness or you really believe this.
Blizzard could do 5 changes immediately that would greatly appease “them”.
I posted this in another thread but the blatant “time-wasting” things that have been added this expansion are really dreadful.
To top it off the conduit lottery is happening AGAIN next patch. Why are these unique it makes NO SENSE?
Nah, you can’t make “them” as a whole happy. I’ve seen it happen a number of times where players will rant about wanting something but then when they get it they turn around and rant about that.
I remember the good old days when we had reforging. I got myself into trouble when I started linking a large number of quotes from players who wanted reforging gone but raged when it was gone. One could have done the same with the big masterloot debacle, or any other “big issue”.
I understand your position here and I know you can’t go against the grain, else you lose support for your own agenda, but you know as well as I do how full the forum is with posters like this. Same goes for “content creators”.
Lose support for my own agenda? What on earth are you talking about. I’m not hand-cuffed to any stand point that I wouldn’t gladly changed if convinced otherwise with facts. Trying to pigeon hole me into that corner is actually quite pathetic.
Blizzard appears to just not care anymore, a lot of the game feels like it’s just being shuffled along and leaving huge chunks of the game untouched. One of the top PvP guys made a great post today that is a huge problem that has not been even remotely addressed in five years.
https://twitter.com/dekeldeclan/status/1406922456607203329
You cant make everyone happy but you can try to appease some of your customers to make them happy. Right now they are not even trying. When Blizzard came out with “account wide essences” many were happy and praised them because they were finally heard. There is nothing they are doing for the players right now. Evidence below.
You don’t need to be a developer to be able to recognize coherent or incoherent design. Many of the systems they bring have clear issues a layman can see coming, case in point covenant balancing.
Covenants are locked so they have to be balanced against each other, but covenants give different benefits to different things so they literally can’t be balanced without breaking the designs that make them different. It was predictable when outliers got nuked from orbit in beta, and it was something that required minimal foresight to see.
I thought the goal was to make a good game, so why do they make so many questionable design decisions? It feels like they keep coming up with cool concepts then completely ignoring the detail work that would make the concepts shine. This is a company that was once famous for its polish, and now many designs are becoming more rough less diamond as they come in.
Yeah look at all the outraged people at such a stupid change!
Personally I can’t believe the community was overwhelmingly positive about a change that people were begging for over a year. Absolutely wild! Same thing happened with the corruption vendor.
But why though?
Why on earth did they add Domination gear on top of everything else, including having it raid only?
What are they possibly thinking this was a good idea? Not only do professions become more worthless, not only do alternative end games have inferior gear, but they didn’t even attempt to balance swing the abilities.
Once the wave of new games (Starfield, Elder Scrolls Six, Halo, Battlefield) come out people will be flocking from here in droves.
Lmao having Edyta against Yesuna, what a spectacular turn of events.
Welcome to the family Edyta.
The best part is you can be 100% sure Domination sockets will be a 9.1 feature only, and after the tier is over everyone will need to go back to their original legendary slot (If there is no tier slot in it).
I usually laugh at the raid or die posts but the domination sockets is pretty crazy. If you don’t have them they are a significant source of power and you will be missing it.
I agree that it’s an issue but I think many of us are guilty of being part of that problem at some point of our WoW time.
That’s exactly what they do.
I dislike FPS games, not everyone agrees with me. A good game is wildly a subjective opinion. We all like different things. There is no one-size-fits-all.
Many people play many games. Just because someone plays WoW doesn’t mean they cannot play a new game that comes out. It’s okay to do that.
Thing is, you want them to come back at some point. Tribalizing the player base in a single patch on top of everything just exacerbates the issue.
Once the ‘storyline’ of Korthia is over, expect a bigger drop off.
Once many players eat through a main chunk of the content there is always a drop off, it’s expected. Once many heroic raiders get aotc there is another drop off. That’s how it goes and has been for a long time.
Yesuna, doubling down on conduit energy, doubling down on covenants by bring out covenant only legendaries, doubling down on the maw, doubling down on Torghast and doubling down on the conduit lottery is absolutely not trying to appease the majority.
This is my biggest concern, exactly 9.1 content is there for non raiders? I mean I get a mythic raid so I’ll be happy but for those who don’t and won’t get access to domination sockets what exactly does 9.1 bring?
It’s more of the same and if you weren’t happy in 9.1 (which obviously a lot werent) this patch does nothing new.
But they won’t come back, is the point you’re missing.
Not until new content is added. If a player is interested in only casual content and story content then once they eat through that what should they stick around for? If they aren’t interested in progressive endgame gameplay then they don’t have a lot to look forward to in WoW, they never really have.
If there’s nothing to pursue outside of raiding, it doesn’t matter how good the new content will be.
Domination Gear and Gems is adding to this train wreck. Blizzard could’ve developed the Covenants better, but they decided ‘nah, Benthic gear was great, throw that into the pile. It should self-apply gasoline.’
Maybe. But its not hitting the mark. Many many guilds have left after this xpac. Many of the reasons have been listed on this thread and in separate forum topics. Its hard to keep track of them all. However this thread and many others like it have requested, asked nicely, asked rudely and asked neutrally for blizzard to relax on some of the covenant restrictions and have only heard A BIG FAT NO.
Blizzard has done this many times. Most recently with giving the alliance a horde race because so many people wanted them even though nearly as many people did not. Then before than azerite essences. Then before that Pathfinder and no flying.
My point is that Blizz is constantly taking hard line approaches on things where there is so much palpable desire from the fans that many do not feel heard at all and dismayed that the devs seemingly care more about their design philosophy than how to make the game fun for a broader audience.
What baffles me more is that we have seen their design philosophy change so many times in the last 15 years that we can find evidence of systems that worked and allowed the player to bring out all aspects of their class to the fullest potential. So its not that its impossible or completely out of the question. Its just hubris on the developer side. it At least it comes off like that.
In the end of the day I work too hard and too long to worry about WoW Devs trying to make the game less fun for me. I am a middle of the ground casual that normally gets AOTC and Keystone Master and then likes to roll alts. I dont want to do any of that for the first time in 10 years. I dont even want to play the game anymore and am just waiting for my sub time to run out. There are many reasons out there like the torghast grind, the maw intro, the covenant restrictions that hurt my other specs, etc.
I just want to have fun and this has so far not been fun for me. It does not feel good. It does not feel right. It hurts because I love my guild and friends in wow but we have all come to the same conclusion, wow is dead to us.
This has been so noticeable even on a small region like OCE.
Guilds lose 1-2 core players, they’re unable to find replacements for them and truthfully as a raid leader/recruitment person myself when you look at the amount of effort it is going to take to replace the said 1/2 people and what you’re getting out of the game - The very easy and honestly smarter decision is just to pack up shop.
Like what are you putting in effort trying to rebuild? So Blizzard can fleece time played metrics out of us while you pay them a monthly sub for the privilege?
Six months ago: “Shadowlands is undeniably much better than BFA ever was!”
Today: “I think I’m just going to run some Island Expeditions.”
It’s too late to pull that ripcord, but I hope they start thinking about surgical removal. Remove covenant lock, and let us experience the breadth of the content.