So I never played Plunderstorm personally (and never will) but I happened to watch a few videos from WoW content creators weighting in on the controversy that this whole thing generated and saw footage of it in the background.
The assets for the abilities you can get look spectacular and as I long time Arcane Mage who has been asking for updates to our existing spell VFX I was very upset to see them do exactly that for this new game mode that has nothing to do with WoW itself and is completely separate and self contained.
Why couldn’t they give us those newer and updated assets in retail instead??? The “Mana Sphere” ability in particular looks like a straight up better version of Arcane Orb that uses the assets from the Queen Azshara raid encounter in BfA. I would kill to have that on retail!
There are so many other assets like that which have existed in the game for years but have not been available to players and instead are just wasted on NPCs. Now they finally decided to give us access to those assets but in this stupid and temporary game mode. Honestly, I am furious!
Did you notice that in the warlock hellcaller hero talents it literally namedrops the lore sources? And how the particle effects for a lot of classes are better or more pronounced than ours? Heck the vanilla frost bolt animation had explosions that scaled with mob size and comparatively current fb animations are no where near as large. Whoever is managing this class only puts effort in where required. Except our tier. Generally our tier looks good.
You’re understandably furious. I’m not at all surprised.
Yeah! And other trees too. Individual talents are named after lore figures and even themed around them like the DK tree with the horsemen of the apocalypse from Naxx. Meanwhile we get… magical splinters, oh my (best read in George Takei’s voice)!
I haven’t played much at all lately. I did play two plunderstorm rounds and decided to cut my losses and either pop back in for Season4, or maybe not at all until Warthins, or maybe just not ever again.
I’m not mad about assets, though I do hear your oft-repeated point about visual flare. I think what made me a little agitated (enough to bail on the game for now) is that they take their developer’s time away from THE game and turn it toward making a new mini-game/one-off seasonal event…or whatever Plunderstorm is supposed to be.
What I see in it, is them saying “yea we don’t like WOW either, so let’s make something different, something fun!”
My guess is THE game is not much fun to work on. High effort, low reward, driven by weak vision, stuck on old hardware, stuck with old systems, new content strapped onto/piled onto old content and it never works right (bugs) and is never “finished” either. And all the while working for a company without identity (sold to Activation and then sold to Microsoft), where the passion and energy and purpose died years ago.
As a player, and specifically arcane mage player, I just feel the lack of attention and effort and for now, I am off to other things.
My prediction for WOW since Microsoft is the new boss, is WOW gets the axe within 3 years, and WOW2 (or whatever they want to call the follow up) gets green lit. New Hardware/new engine/modern graphics/simplified controls/quicker play/improved systems and much more appealing/accessible to new players. Free to play or on the game pass, with a ton more micro-transaction options for cosmetics/etc.
Ooof! Yeah I feel you. Although in this case I think it was more a question of forcing e-sportification and streaming down player’s throats more than anything else. Though I definitely agree that the passion seems to have dried up a long time ago.
That said, MMOs are a giant undertaking and virtually all of the MMOs ever created have either failed or are currently on life support, except WoW that is. I think there is a concerted effort in the industry right now to try and tie everything in with streaming and e-sports because that’s where the advertising money is and it’s a whole other market that they can tap into.
Unfortunately, MMOs just aren’t a good fit for that and their continued attempts to force it are only to the detriment of the game. They’ve already driven away huge swathes of the playerbase and I am afraid it’s only going to get worse (virtually no one I played WoW with back in the Vanilla days still plays, not even on Classic). That’s why Riot pulled their MMO. I think they’re waiting to see which way the MMO genre goes before they commit one way or the other. Blizzard’s attempts to make WoW streaming friendly is either going to end up finally destroying it or will fundamentally change the genre, in my view for the worst.
At the end of the day, do we actually know how big the Plunderstorm team was? It could’ve been a relatively small group of people - and it could’ve been a group of people who are completely new and have 0 experience with WoW proper (who wouldn’t have produced much, if any, worthwhile content in that timeframe). It’s essentially a new mini-game that isn’t beholden to any of the old / archaic / intricate design that the rest of WoW has, meaning you wouldn’t need a wide range of knowledge or skills to make it from scratch. Just some help from the design team to make sure everything is the right flavor.
Besides, it seems pretty clear from their statements that it was, overall, a test. One that they consider to be a success. It’s been implied that we’ll be getting more of these special events as time goes on - and it’s possible that those events might correlate more strongly to the rest of the game.
But in order to be sure that a dedicated “special events team” is worth creating, they need to prove that it’s worth it to do those special events. Plunderstorm isn’t my jam - but despite the voices (my own included) arguing that Blizzard’s time would’ve been better spent elsewhere, I think there’s a fair amount of players who enjoyed it. And it proved that it’s doable and potentially repeatable.
Plunderstorm may not have been what we wanted right now, but it there’s a possibility that its existence - and success (or at least “not failure”) - could pave the way for something more interesting down the line.
I’ve seen a lot of discussion and speculation over on the general forum regarding this and the one that strikes me as the most plausible is that the idea of Plunderstorm was originally created back in BfA as a special event meant to spice up the monotony of the Battlefronts but never saw the light of day because of how unpopular they proved to be with the playerbase at the time. This explains so much, from the pirate theme, to why it’s taking place in the Arathi Highlands of all places, and even why they were so determined to ignore all the criticism this time around.
And that worries me profoundly because it most definitely was not a success as far as most players were concerned. WoW is not a predominantly PvP game and never was so a battle royale feature makes very little sense. But it sure is streamable and easily e-sportified. And therein lies the concern that they’re increasingly making a game for an audience other than long time WoW players.
I don’t want to be dramatic and say that “we’ve been left behind” but it definitely feels that way sometimes (quite often actually, at least since Legion). But then again maybe we’ve just outgrown it. /shrug
I don’t care much for PvP, but my experience with vanilla wow many years ago was pretty heavy in the PvP department. I’m not going to argue this point, but I disagree with you. Wow has always had some pretty heavy PvP elements in it by design.
That said, a battle royale seems like low-hanging fruit in the “let’s make a minigame” department. I’d be willing to bet that most people who play wow are familiar with the concept, so it shouldn’t be hard to get players to try it (enjoy is a different story). If Blizzard wanted to try to see if they were capable of creating a Wow-inspired minigame, a battle royale feels like an easy way to try it.
Once players are familiar with the concept of “here’s our short term special event minigame” it’ll be easier to make some that are a bit more complicated or tied more closely to the actual MMO. But you need to prove it works first.
And it was heavily implied by Holly Longdale that the next “experiment” is PvE focused.
And what’s wrong with that? I enjoy watching my fair share of content creators, but personally I don’t find WoW content to be that interesting. Maybe I’m too familiar with the game. Maybe the parts that are most “streamable” aren’t interesting to me. But what’s wrong with finding ways to make it more streamable?
I don’t much care for watching e-sports (probably because I’m not big into PvP games as a whole), but I would think that a successful esports circuit for almost any game would bring more to a game than it would sacrifice.
That’s true but Vanilla was a very different case. I also PvPed frequently and I hate PvP but back then it was a completely different animal.
Nothing is wrong with it if they can do it in a way that doesn’t compromise the integrity of the game and that doesn’t feel forced. Plunderstorm didn’t meet either of those criteria. Not to mention that it was essentially a completely different standalone game that just happened to use WoW assets. I guarantee you that if it did not have that pseudo battlepass attached to it almost none of the PvE players would have ever given it a try.
PvP, to a greater extend than PvE, is its own reward where the emphasis isn’t on acquiring rewards but rather on testing your mettle against other players. If you’re only participating in PvP content as a means to an end rather than the journey itself you’re sure to have a terrible time. And that’s exactly what happened to so many people who felt like they were little more than fodder for the hardcore PvPers and were only there to shorten queue times.
And of course the other major piece of this is how they use the interest, advertising revenues, and new subscriptions that a successful e-sportification can bring to the game. By all indications there is absolutely zero desire to channel any of those proceeds back into the game to make it better and every indication that it’s only intended to benefit the shareholders.
Yeah, /sigh I made a post about it on the official thread for the “event” which I will link below. I am really frustrated with these. First they announced we will be getting another fated season, then the Plunderstorm debacle, now this thing which is basically a sped up version of Chromie Time Mists with a few recolored mounts and transmogs dangled about to lure people in.
Each of these things taken individually is already troubling but when you take them together it shows you a trend that’s even worse. They’ve basically taken the seasonal gameplay concept from A-RPGs and are actively applying it to WoW which is an MMO. And they’re not only doing this during content droughts, they’re creating the droughts by choosing to give us this rehashed old content instead of something new. Some people will say they’re doing it to give themselves more time to work on the next expansion but that’s just an excuse and we all know it.
Yea, I’m done for a while. I’ll peak back in when S4 starts, but based on what I saw on the PTR, I’m not even much interested in that, so maybe I come back when WWT starts, idk, or just move on altogether, no harm there.