Shadowlands Benched for TBC

Community General Discussion
1

How do you feel about Blizzard devoting all resources gathered from your support of Shadowlands, and using them to drive up profits from new customers through The Burning Crusade - Classic?

I for one am upset that I paid for Shadowlands and got such a time gated content puddle, only to find out that they won’t even get around to begin fixing it, until whatever disaster TBC turns out to be at release, is stable.

That could be a very long time. August could be a generous assumption!

And even then. The next update isn’t very promising.

Yo dawg, we heard you liked the maw.

Is Blizzard doing a Seppuku?

45 Likes
2

I’m pretty sure blizzard just have to load the damn thing off a hard drive and work some back end crap

You can thank them laying off staff for your bad quality and poorly time managed content

41 Likes
3

Based on what exactly?

Did the Classic release interfere with BFA, like at all?

7 Likes
4

You’re right. BFA was chock full of content and one of the highest rated most well recieved expansions by the community, of all time.

Good example.

22 Likes
5

Jokes aside BFA is starting to stand in a better light as the game continues to go unfixed. You had fun mechanics, challenging class gameplay, better balance (besides sub rogue) etc etc. SL has boring mechanics that don’t change the way you play at all, classes are the same, but with different magical damage to attacks, balance is off the charts, gear disparity makes the game unplayable, at this point raiderio has killed the mythic+ scene (can’t forget what slaughtered it the first place with no loot).

IMO BFA > SL, would rather spend hrs wiping on N’zoth to continue playing this mess that blizzard devs won’t fix (or even look at their forums lol)

18 Likes
6

It’s almost like accommodating IP pirates or splitting an MMO’s player-base is bad.

I thought DaoC and SW: Galaxies couldn’t be beat in terms of bad ideas, yet here we are…

I’m willing to give Blizzard some leniency due to Covid-19, but I knew they’d dote on Classic and eventually BC (and no doubt Wrath in time) to the complete detriment of the live game. That was why I was against Classic Servers at all. The million dollar question is if they stop at Cataclysm, or if they decide at that point to allow Cataclysm people to move back to Retail, violating their original word to keep the stuff from Vanilla in Vanilla.

Cause if they do that, they have no excuse not to let Retail Players play and quest and raid the Classic Game world via Chromie Time, and they damn well better re-add all the dungeons and raids they’ve removed over the years like original Sunken Temple, Scholomance Original, ZG 20, and Naxx 40.

Frankly? I dunno about the rest of you, but I am getting mightily sick of this unequal treatment, and screw the White Knights who said “this won’t happen”. It is. It has. It will continue to, because they are trying to turn it like first rate fools into the second coming of WoW. But it won’t work because the company is engaging in the same tactics, but people are 17 years wiser now.

The real test will be how Diablo IV sells, or any future MMO they make. If it flops like Star Wars: Solo did, maybe that will shake things enough to get the tone-deaf bullcrap to end. I mean I am thankful for all the good times I’ve had in WoW, but you know what pisses me off?

The fact that this game could easily be kicking FFXIV’s Eorzean — up and down the internet if they made some intelligent decisions where it dealt with story, raiding, gearing, and omg Gathering Professions. Why no catch up for them?

Prioritizing a pack of self-serving elitist jerks will not make this game palatable to the players. It will however drive them away. We need someone up-top to get that and take steps to shift priorities away from Mythic Raiders and to things like RP, Story, Transmog, Customizations etc. That is where the money can and will be made.

Don’t take my words the wrong way either. I mean I totally get that with Covid, and the fact the expansions are likely on a Hard Drive it’s easier to maintain probably; but that doesn’t mean the people who actually are still doing retail should be given such a lack of developer time. We’re headed for a real reckoning and I don’t think people will be smiles and sunshine at the Next Blizzcon that is not virtual. More likely to be very angry like the Diablo Immortal announcement.

30 Likes
7

What’s sad is you can practically see the future of WoW within the history of EQ2.

All the way down to Blizzard hiring the person who has been in charge of EQ2 all along, Holly “Windstalker” Longdale, to head up the “Classic” department.

EQ2 now is a perpetual loop of TLE, store bought throwaway items to make TLE more bearable time and time again such as exp pots, mounts, bags, etc.

What’s hilarious is that after a certain expansion, everyone stops playing, because from there on out it became p2w craptastic low budget small indie company content expansions.

EQ2 retail currently is a cesspool of pay to win players. Even to be considered for entry level raids you would need to have purchased the $150 collectors expansion which comes with the mount that gives you stat bonuses. Huge stat bonuses. More stats than even your entire armor and weapons give you at first.

On top of that there is rng systems like gems and adornments and mercenaries for mission tables that can only be gotten from loot crates.
Basically, to be able to do end game content, you have to pay hundreds of dollars.

Before that, EQ2 even launched the first player store, wherw you can sell any item in the game for cash via the Auction House.

They invented “Kronos” aka the WoW token as well. WoW simply followed suit. EQ2 literally does these things out of necessity to keep a dying game running.

WoW is copying them purely driven by greed and seeing others make money by asking players to pay money for things that previously would have been considered heretical and absolutely cancerous in the gaming culture.

I see this happening in wow. Especially with them poaching the person who succeeded at churning their game into a near-dead life support cow coupled with a fanatical small following of lemmings to continue financing them even after the game had died long ago.

At this point I’m just waiting on them to hire John Smedley to really crash this puppy into the ground with the most furious failures imaginable a la Star Wars Galaxies.

18 Likes
8

-turns arm into cannon and blasts Viseriôn-

We do not utter that name on these forums. Show some class. This is still WoW after all.

…For now.

7 Likes
9

lol. Enjoy attunement

4 Likes
10

True…

I should have never uttered the dark lords name.

I will give myself one thousand lashings and burn 100 holocrons for my short comings.

4 Likes
11

I have to be honest, I’m a bit upset that we keep running into similar issues with the “retail” version of the game while older versions of the game are met with great fanfare and seem to do well. There’s a certain something those games have that the new version does not and I don’t think it is merely nostalgia.

10 Likes
12

How are the shelving SL? They are doing the same thing as with Classic and trying to get bonus money, only this time they are trying to incorporate boosts to get people in the Expansion they actually care for.

I’m probably not playing BC (small chance with friends), but to be honest I don’t really care about the long journey just to get to BC, I would just want to be in BC. As far as I know no significant changes other than this are going in.

Doubtful it will be that resource intensive, the work is already done. You will still pay the sub to get in BC, and as an added bonus (not completely sure on this) you can’t earn tokens in non retail, so unless these people actually have retail gold they will be getting an actual sub.

2 Likes
13

Question. Will players have to pay or buy access to BC Classic? I am curious because most people ‘bought’ BC back in 2006, and if that is the case (I doubt it is but then… they did just fire all those people and gib the 30 day sub option… ) I’d be curious on the ethical aspect of double dipping like that.

1 Like
14

They already announced store bought Classic BC mounts, The Warp Stalker so far, and other packages coming but yet to be announced, just last week.

1 Like
15

They are just doing what makes best financial sense. Classic is more popular than retail, look at google search trends and see for yourself.

6 Likes
16

You don’t need to cover your whole body in tinfoil to block the mind control rays.

3 Likes
17

It’s true. I don’t doubt it one bit.

But history repeats itself.

WoW is “choosing” to go down the same path as retail EQ2…

Rather than embracing what made the old content so memorable…

WoW isn’t in the same state as EQ2… they could still easily turn things around. I’m not sure why they would choose to steer a game towards a very dim path unless their goal was some form of Seppuku.

To wash their hands of this game and perhaps go full force into other IP. Where chasing a timeline and subs isnt the profit model. Maybe turn and burn games like CoD instead?

Call me crazy, but I have seen it before.
SOE wanted out and we got Star Wars Galaxies CU and NGE and Cascade in short order. It was so successful the SWG director got promoted to head up the entire company after he literally drove the ship into the planet on purpose.

It seems like game companies have some perception that they can’t visibly destroy their own product for fear of backlash from Class Action Lawsuits and such(or something). But if they engineer it’s demise in such a way that it seems like they were trying to “make the game better” by making it horrendous, then no one is the wiser.

People will still blame them, but they won’t be marching out in droves to sue them for purposefuly destroying something they had invested so much time and money into over the years.

Simply because they just don’t feel excited about doing it anymore.

5 Likes
18

At this point the WoW title is just being milked for max profit on min expense. They can easily stretch this out for another 10 yrs.

7 Likes
19

Stop with this over dramatic fake outrage.

Entitled children just all over GD.

11 Likes
20

So I provided an actual reason for why I am upset and you’re just tired of hearing what you don’t want to hear.

Define “fake outrage”.

8 Likes