You would think that they would have learned from Fallout 76 but then Wolfestein Youngblood happened
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Not at all surprised. Money spent through microtransactions is the majority of their revenue at this point as a company.
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And the only thing they care about now
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This is something that always bothered me. I’ve been playing the mage class for 15 years, mostly because the play style hasn’t changed THAT much. It’s mostly kiting, avoiding, and hitting hard. Its a very fun play style, and sometimes when they expand on it like the did for fire in cata/mop it can strike gold. Now I look at some of the stuff I’ve lost over the years, and then think about the classes that straight up get distorted into something else entirely and I count my blessings that the most I have to deal with is a missing ability here or and the occasional head scratching change like tying our armors to our barriers. I hear “things need to be kept fresh” and I think why? There are people out there that really love playing a class, you don’t need to keep messing with people’s classes just to appease the types that can never sit still.
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The game became way too automated and safe. There’s no sense of exploration or community or danger.
You just see markers on the map, plan out the fastest route, go do it in a few minutes and go to the next marker. Alternatively, you can run around in circles waiting in a queue lobby to get teleported to an instanced area with strangers you won’t talk to and you’ll never talk to again, who are also immediately disposable and replaceable if they so much as walk in a manner you don’t approve of.
You have absolutely nothing to fear while out in the world anymore… everything scales to your level and you can take on groups of mobs at a time without so much as a hint of danger. You can run across the entire map at your level with zero danger and throw yourself chesticle first at 99% of the mobs you encounter along the way, no matter if they’re normal, elite or rare spawns.
You’re rewarded for just about anything and everything… getting loot has lost it’s meaning in this game since it’s just an endless ladder covered in RNG titanforged delusions of grandeur.
The game is a theme park now… and at a theme park all you do is run from one ride to another, trying to squeeze out as much STUFF as you can while you’re there with doing as little effort as possible and talking to no one except the people you went there with.
That’s what went wrong.
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Really good explanation
+1
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Bobby Kotick:
The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.
Bobby Kotick:
…have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million franchises
Bobby Kotick:
If it was left to me, I would raise the prices even further.
Bobby Kotick:
take all the fun out of making video games.
It feels like that leading up to and during Wrath, they made changes with a chisel in an effort to keep things fresh.
Starting with Cataclysm? They switched to a sledgehammer.
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Yea I remember looking at new abilities and thinking ‘oh I can’t wait to see what I got’. Now its ‘uh oh what’d they fudge with this time’. Now I know they can’t keep making new abilities, but at the same time there’s no need to call in the demolition team.
I see a lot of people put the blame solely on activision, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I’m sure there’s been SOME influence, but I don’t think getting rid of activision would magically make things better.
I think it more has to do with a mindset. WoW has become somewhat of a giant, there is a significantly bigger team working on it than there was for classic. And with that bloat, you tend to make sacrifices. Namely, things for the sake of streamlining production. When your pet project needs to get approved by 10 different layers of authentication, you have to start changing the way you work, otherwise you’ll never be finished. You have to start thinking in terms of spreadsheets and statistics, because just playing around with it until it feels just right wont fly anymore. There are project deadlines and scores of other departments that need to look at your work.
Essentially, it comes down to Blizzard being TOO successful. They can’t really behave the way they used to anymore, it’s too costly. Mind, I’m not really defending Blizzard here. I think this is in large part because of how they decided to structure their workforce and manage the game. It’s a hard problem to tackle, for sure, but I think it would be worth the effort if we could return to a point where Blizzard was designing based on what they really genuinely love.
…Then again, the excuse they made for Diablo Immortal was that they all loved playing pokemon go in the office. So…maybe it’s just the people they’re hiring these days?
agree that the founders had a completely different design goal than Ion and his diablo devs
i.e. they designed for ‘fun’ more than anything else, something they themselves enjoyed
now we’ve got an entire team basically testing our timegating and grind limits for the smallest possible rewards and slot machine design to make it take longer for us
but hey at least Ion can brag that he is increasing micros while consistently lowering subs with every xpac he’s in charge of
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Mass appeal happened.
mass appeal would mean subs went up
after the design changes in Legion/BfA they’ve gone down immensely, but micros have gone up tremendously
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Pretty much
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WoW is a business model and always has been. The model has evolved to keep up with the evolution of gamers over the years. The old model was not sustainable. They look for consistency quarter to quarter.
Vanilla was super time gated, you just don’t even realize it. Everything from traveling, to downtime drinking/eating every few mobs, to the slow grinds for everything, the slow gearing in raids, you name it.
At the cost of the experience, the game right now is doing everything in its power to make things take longer so players are forced to sub for longer
They could get the same and even better results if they made the game great again rather than forcing you to play longer
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You really think “making the game great again” is that simple? The game is still great - better or worse depending on Your perspective and your wants for the game. Do you actually think the game devs are Not trying to put out the best game they can?
The game has ALWAYS been about making you sub longer - that’s the raisen d’erte for mmorpgs. Keeping you playing, paying longer. Don’t act like that some evil ploy by Blizzard. Plus nobody is Forcing you to play, at all.
Get real.
Doesnt look like they are even trying
Yes by making YOU want to play, not this garbage methods like time gating everything and RNG on everything that just straight up forces you to wait longer and sub for longer because you must
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Your opinion vs. my opinion.
Of course they’re trying - they keep putting in new content and creating new zones and keep working on future releases years in advance. That’s what trying consists of. Do you even have a job?
There’s no Forcing involved. I play because I like this game - liked it since 2005 continuously. Sure there were lull times when I ran off to play other games but that’s reality. Nothing NOTHING will keep your interest at the high intense level 24/7 for 15 years straight.
You don’t “must” do Anything. Get that through your head and then you can make some rational posts.
Like what would constitute a “great game” that you would pay for and play forever? Not talking about the male propensity to repeat the same game/movie/etc. multiple times. What are your suggestions to make this game great again? That’s the discussion for GD, not ragging on the devs forcing you to play.
I love store mounts… add more!!