Perhaps if every dev a manditory 15+ hours/week of actually playing the game they’d have a better idea of what is and isn’t fun. Any time they spend in wow would be made up for in not making horrible content like IEs and Warfronts.
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Stopped reading, right there.
You know, very good and well, that it is not just an issue of ‘an extra minute’: being forced to spend several minutes to fly to points, that used to take only a few seconds by portal, will add HOURS to the MAU.
Especially with Blizzard’s attempts to force us into a few core areas i.e., the faction capitols, which will make going to outlying areas all the more time-consuming.
flips hair
P.S.
Average portal time: 40-60 seconds (depending on lag)
Average flight time: 3-5 minutes (depending on destination)
and that’s each time you use them. Add up the times and you easily see the bloat.
Tell Blizzard we aren’t buying it.
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Yeah because they ALWAYS do that: they are experts at ‘admitting’, then returning some single feature so the peasants will cheer for the masters.
Then they go on, and 90% of what the devs wanted stays butchered.
They do this every time.
Flips hair
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Actually, there IS a way to measure fun! Indeed, Blizzard did it for years and they prospered!
How many people are playing the game? You know,…
Subscriptions.
Wonder why they stopped doing that?
Flips hair
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Prove it.
People ALWAYS play a game because they enjoy it: there is absolutely no other real reason to PLAY something.
Flips hair, sips tea and goes back to the game
Yeah, island expeditions. The concept of infinitely repeatable content that doesn’t have long queue times sounds okay on paper, but storyless scenarios that devolve into trash mob speedruns get old fast.
As initially pitched at Blizzcon, these things were supposed to be a unique experience every time you played them. In reality, if you’ve played one, you’ve pretty much played them all.
It also didn’t help that they weren’t properly QA’d at launch (why on earth did Blizzard cut QA jobs? BfA is the buggiest xpac I’ve ever seen; I’m terrified to see what is going on with 9.x). The first time I found a portal on an island and went inside, there were no mobs to fight and I ended up falling into an infinite abyss after climbing a stairway that apparently went nowhere.
The initial “fix” to island expeditions really showed that Ion didn’t have a good grasp on what was really wrong with BfA. When your solution to fixing a game mode is “let’s up the rewards so people will engage in the game mode more,” and not, “let’s take this mode offline until we actually find a way to make them fun to play” (as you sort of suggested in your post) you know the game is in trouble.
As far as warfronts… the problem is, you have the setup for a fun game mode and it’s absolutely wasted as a weekly/biweekly skill-free loot distribution mechanism. If you want to look for a strong suggestion that BfA was shoved out the door in an unfinished state by accountants, think about the fact that warfronts weren’t even released until about a month after BFA’s official launch, and even after that, this is all we got.
Warfronts needed an optional PVP mode. That’s all. There must have been a dev meeting at some point where somebody raised a hand and recommended this. That person deserves a promotion. Please listen to that person more.
BfA needed more time in order to make it fun, and for whatever reason, Blizzard’s philosophy of “when it’s ready” was not observed this time around. There’s too much playing just for the sake of getting loot, and not enough playing because it’s fun to play.
I hope someday Activision hires accountants who grew up playing video games.
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If Blizzard would take more time to talk to their customers then we wouldn’t be glued to every source of information they do give out. Lack of communication is why there is such a big distrust in blizzard.
They remain hush hush and only really talk to shareholders how about things are handled. It makes them seem incredibly shady and their actions back it up.
It’s why I fleshed out my opinion on it and yeah I agree. But at the end of the day, unfortunately more factors are considered and it comes down to it being;
A. The team being given a time frame possibly.
B. The lead designers are not fully accepting of the fact that their idea’s are poor or not fully tested to realize that they do not work in the grand scheme of things.
There is no direction in the game - only to cater to a broad audience but doing everything very poorly instead of working to the strengths.
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The problem with Ion’s metrics is that he designs to his metrics. It’s like teaching to the test.
I used to be a teacher. Game design really isn’t unlike teaching in that we want to measure both fun and learning but we can’t. We can’t because human beings can’t be measured in some simplistic way. We are way too complicated.
Blizzard needs to really listen. Respectfully. There is no shortcut to reaching human beings through teaching or game design. You have to pay attention to the human beings you are trying to reach.
Metrics are a useful tool only for fine-tuning. You can’t use them for the guts of what you do.
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I think you’re focusing too much on them saying, “fun” and not realizing they are just giving lip service to minimize damages. They know very well BFA isn’t fun.
He argues to the letter, on everything…there’s not much point in engaging…here I stopped responding to him immediately because he’s literally clinging to the fact that ‘MAU’ (in his use) directly refers to number of active users, not the metrics that define that, and flying or not doesn’t increase the ‘number of players’.
You and I are on the same page, he’s just looking to be ‘right’ about syntax.
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two things failed with this-
a) they had this concept for high level AI on the opposing team ‘that acted like real players’ when they were pitching these at the Blizzcon reveal that of course never materialized and has been completely unmentioned ever since
b) from the Ion-view Game Designer level, this was supposed to be content that people played endlessly ad nauseum but they didn’t bother to give it any actual reason to do so…the adjustments needed to the drop chances right away clearly indicated they for some unknown reason thought people would be playing these non-stop 24/7 but I can’t find any player feedback that would have ever suggested that to them reasonably.
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what BFA content is being pulled? Oh right… nothing.
Something most people including Devs, don’t understand; many players also create their own ‘fun’ inside MMOs. Not designed or created by Devs, created by players themselves.
Many of the things in Wow originally came from players, playing outside the amusement rides. They were then expanded and made part of the ride.
There was a time that the Devs and the marketing team understood this:
“I’m a Shaman, what’s your game?”
You won’t find that using a metric.
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I agree. One of the big problems with current WoW is that CRZ and sharding make it incredibly difficult for what you’re describing to actually happen. So now the content gaps feel even worse, because there’s nothing player-generated to fill them.
(I don’t think Classic is going to be better, either – they keep dancing around exactly how much sharding is going to be in there when the only acceptable answer for how much sharding should be in an MMO is none)
It’s sad to think that Activision Blizzard just had its best financial quarter ever and they couldn’t spend some of that money to figure out how to configure an MMO world in a way that doesn’t artificially separate the players who are supposed to be in the same game world.
When your game feels like a 14-year-old Destiny prototype, it’s hard to keep logging in and playing. Better, newer versions of the thing WoW is now already exist in 2019. I’d wager the majority of the people who still play WoW on a regular basis either do it for the friends they’ve made along the way, or for the attachment to the characters they played back in better times.
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“some other metrics” sounds like they don’t even use them. Otherwise you would think they’d be more specific.