I have been recently working this character through Legion stuff. When I started about the time all this began, Legion Dalaran was becoming a ghost town. Over that time though, more and more people have been coming back to this area and now Legion Dalaran is teeming with players. A bit more so than Boredalus.
So people are back despite the portals at the center only working for intended quests. But I am sure there are some that have quests in their log just for the portals.
An old IT joke:
Q: How many developers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Two. One kick everyone out of the room and lock the door, and another to plaster over it and make it look like the room never existed in the first place.
If I were Blizzard, I’d set up some kind of variable reward system whereby the content done the LEAST had the best chance to be the most profitable, just to encourage people to get out of ruts and try different stuff because the same thing over and over would have profoundly diminishing rewards.
Have to wonder where they’ve been spending all their money on since wod then…
A question I have literally asked here for years. In any other field, people who lose their employer this much money are fired. Apparently in actiblizz, they encourage this kind of poor job performance. I guess I should have applied for lead dev years ago: like watcher I have zero experience in the field, just played the game, and just have opinions on how it should be run.
I’d be a natural lead dev!
Though I couldn’t arrogantly dismiss the concerns of the playerbase for years, have a single minded focus on my “vision” while the players continued to leave en masse, and continuously manage to pull off that bored/arrogant look every time I was caught on camera.
I hope those aren’t pre-requisites…
Sort of like when the dev team during wrath realized they made a stinker with oculus, and gave people an obscene amount of rewards for actually sticking around and finishing?
Or when the rewards for doing tank and heals actually contained awesome rewards, like rare mounts and stuff?
But that was the old dev team, not the current one…
I 100% agree. This is not about making sure the people have a feel for the world. The game is designed to be in the expansion zone almost exclusively. This is a petty fight for Blizzard to pick which just wastes peoples time. Another example is the world bosses that you can only kill once a week. Why do they have a long respawn timer? it just wastes peoples time for something they can only do once a week.
What they don’t seem to comprehend is, that in a state where they are bleeding subs, that doubling-down on dumb ideas is a “digging your way out of a hole” approach.
People are leaving. Instead of tidying up all those jobs that were raised in WoD, improve the game.
Make it so I can instantly teleport to any dungeon/raid from where I am, and have it teleport me back to a known location (like the Death Knight’s Death Gate ability).
Make it so my Water Strider has permanent water walking and cannot get other equipment.
Let me roll a new Allied race without restriction.
When you add new races or classes, add new character slots so that I don’t have to delete a toon to make a new one.
When you make an Azerite power overpowered and nerf it, give me a free Azerite item, as you know I will have to change it.
When I change specs, let my Azerite power change to the power I’ve chosen for the spec.
Let me choose the Island Expeditions to do, so that I can target the object I’m farming.
None of the above suggestions bring any harm to anyone in game, all of them would provide benefit to at least some people in game. I thought of all of this as I play the game.
If Blizzard devs played the game, they too would have a list that makes sense. Unfortunately, every change is some good, some bad, and in a state where people are leaving the game in droves, this doesn’t make for better sales next expansion.
There’s a lot of truth here. As I was reading this, it made me realize how out of touch the dev team really is. I know that’s a phrase I’ve used a lot here and elsewhere…but it really sank in while I read your post.
Honestly, playing this release is like eating at a steakhouse designed bottom up by a lifelong vegan. There’s one huge problem with that: they have no idea what a steakhouse is like, and would have zero idea what appeals to people who eat at them. Sure, they know people who eat steak and eat at steakhouses…but it’s not the same. The reverse would also hold true: you wouldn’t want your all new vegan place designed bottom up by someone who was a lifelong meatatarian (live with it, it’s a real word :P).
These devs CLAIM they play the game…but it’s clear they really don’t. From the obvious and really easy lore gaffes that watcher makes nearly every time he opens his mouth, to the design decisions that are clearly made by people who spend more time watching other people play (or more likely, KNOW people who play the game)…but PLAY the game?!
Not likely…at least, not the same way that players do.
It shows itself in nearly every design aspect of the game any more.
And it’s sad, because none of us want wow to fail. We’ve been saying this since they started making these bad calls in wod, continued making them in legion, continue making them in bfa…and for the foreseeable future, will keep making them. And more players will leave the game as a result.
The whole time, they’ll play the old “never saw that coming” line.
I’m actually okay with the notion of epic classes/races having to be unlocked. It’s nice to get an actual desirable REWARD for effort expended.
The reward should be the heritage armor.
I haven’t yet been even slightly motivated to unlock any of the heritage armor.
But, mostly because I spend most of my time on my Goblin and they’d all be useless to him.
I agree with you. When you create a barrier to entry you need to understand that although people can overcome that barrier, many people just couldn’t be bothered.
If I wanted to bring new and returning people in to the game, then I would offer them something that entices them to come, with an objective that keeps them around.
They could have achieved this by annoucing things in a set manner:
Something that provides a statement that “you can do this later to speed it up, but if you want it now, go level one up”.
We have a bunch of toy hearthstones available now - no need to waste bag space.
Pity Blizzard didn’t make these useful and revitalize the game by giving us the ability to set each toy hearthstone to where we choose.
Of course then we’d have whiners jumping in, grizzling: “It’s not fair! You have an advantage over me because you can hearth anywhere and I’m too lazy to get these things for myself!”
(I’ve spent too long reading the water strider thread today.)
don’t overuse portals between locations in the world”. Too many eliminations of the distances between places can diminish a sense of the world having a meaningful size.
Because nothing maintains the sense of a world having a meaningful size like not only giving people no reason to travel around the world but also punishing them for doing so.
The word you are looking for is either CARNIVORE or OMNIVORE. Those two words exist, have actual meanings and are known and understood.
Vegan specifies a group of people who have chosen not to eat meat for purely humanitarian reasons. It also carries a certain degree of self righteousness in both directions depending on who the speaker is.
Nitpick: there are other reasons aside from “purely humanitarian reasons” to avoid meat, eggs, honey and milk products.
My allergies and intolerances rule a lot of that out. And my gut is much much happier when I stick to a vegan diet. I cheat and eat fish or fowl sometimes, but usually regret it after.
Vegan simply means a person who does not eat foods of animal origin.
Some may choose that diet for humanitarian reasons, but they are no more vegan than those who choose it for health, religious, taste preference or financial reasons.
Not all vegans are “self righteous”.
I was vegan for years without anyone else even knowing, because what I choose to eat is my business and what you choose to eat is yours. Don’t judge people of any kind on the noisy, obnoxious ones when you have no way of knowing of the ones who just quietly, unobtrusively, do their own thing.
Every last person at blizzard should have to complete every emissary, a mythic+ key, the weekly event quest, and the weekly island progress bar, EVERY WEEK if they want a paycheck. Anonymously. All PUGs. No GM powers. And be required to complete all new story content, get all new reps to exalted and path finder within a month of new content being released on live. And if no new content is released that month, they have to catch an alt up instead. And Max out their crafting/gathering professions.
There would be glorious blood of mutiny and rebellion in the halls of blizzard if they tried foisting another heinously bad, unavoidable “turtle made it to the water” WQ on us.
Sound like an idea that way they would know how the players feel.In the long run they wouldn’t do it only the raids.
“Let them walk”-Aluneth
![:joy:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/joy.png?v=6" ":joy:")
![:rofl:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/rofl.png?v=6" ":rofl:")
When I read this I thought the same thing! Way too much time over in that thread! But you’re correct, people would complain.
Personally, I don’t expect to get transported instantly to where ever I am going. But I would like to be close.
The portals in New Dalaran did this and people enjoyed that freedom!
I like this idea, but would add… not using Raider IO as that would help them see actual results of their decisions and not a skewed version.
Oh definitely. No ADD-ONS at all.
You <-----------------------
pretend that line circled the earth a few times
-----------------> the point, and the joke.
Largely about people with no experience and/or background designing a product that people who thoroughly enjoy it use. Or worse, people with an a diametrically opposed worldview designing it.
Not that they’d design things to spite people (one would hope…but a petty one would, and it such a person’s moves would be obvious in their demeanor and attitude towards their customers when those customers pointed out mistakes the owner, designer, and staff made)…but that such people who held such opposing viewpoints would literally know nothing about how to reach their target market and would more than likely do things that would drive them away.
I remember one of the devs (not sure if they were actually connected to the pet battle content or not) famously said during wod how much they loved pet battles…but they had no intention of grinding out the necessary battles for the garrison statue. Some lame excuse was given (“not having time” I believe). Talk about a double standard.
What’s good for us should be good for them…but then again, only us customers are supposed to be “immersed” in all their “vision.” While they sit in the ivory tower.