Blizzard,
What on earth is going on with you?
I have to ask, do you hate us for the sake of hating us? The whole classic lifecycle has been barely passable as a playable service for OCE players. Is your market research fundamentally broken? Are you getting the right sample sizes and testing groups for said research? Because it doesn’t seem like it.
- Only 1 PVP server on Launch, with a 2nd and 3rd coming some hours after Launch. I feel seriously bad for anyone who rolled on Felstriker.
- The constant layering/unlayering issues Arugal has faced, especially during Phase 5
- The extended pre-patch maintenance which affected Arugal longer than any other server
- Now, we learn we’ll be lumped in with a US battle group in TBC
- All this, with an increase in sub fees in the not too distant past
This doesn’t include the issues with TBC Classic which affect everyone, most notably the small time frame after the announcements between launch and prepatch, and a REDUCED prepatch experience from the original game after being told we’d have time to level alts to 60 (Which I guess you did if you had gold to pay mages to sit in dungeons for 10 hours a day). The whole honor situation, cross realm raid groups for the first few days - the list goes on. It’s clear this was not ready for launch.
The feedback from your players is loud and clear on these issues, yet still, you seem to steam ahead and want to constantly shove these terrible design choices down our throats. These aren’t minor things either - these are things which are actively ruining the experience for a great many people. I can overlook a lot of things, but this is starting to portray a pretty concerning pattern in how you treat both the Classic and OCE communities.
TBC Launch is on Wednesday for us. Melbourne, Australia has gone into lockdown so there will be a vast increase in traffic for OCE realms on this day. I sincerely hope you are prepared for that. Because I’ll be honest, TBC classic is the last leg for me - I’ve been playing on and off since Vanilla very regularly and been pretty faithful as a customer. I already dropped retail. If this is unplayable on launch and poor design decisions continue, I’m happy to move to FFXIV and not look back. At least their devs listen to and talk to their community. I’m sure I’m not the only player sitting on that edge. In before the trolls say “bye”.
I worry and raise my concerns, because like I said earlier, prepatch itself was a half baked product with tons of issues and terrible execution. With full launch less than a week out, we haven’t seen anything promising to suggest this will be a good gameplay experience.
A few things need to happen moving forward, or I imagine you’ll have a dead game by the end of the year.
- OCE needs to remain it’s own battle group Until such time queues make the experience unplayable. Arena players should quite frankly not be merged at all. (This has now been resolved)
- This launch experience needs to be smooth. For all servers, especially this week for OCE.
- You need to ensure that Arugal in particular is monitored for stability. There’s a history of server performance problems which suggest we know this is going to be a problem.
I sincerely hope you take this to heart. I’ve enjoyed WoW for a long time. It’s becoming very unenjoyable - retail was already dead to me, and it worries me that TBCC is headed down that path as well.
Lion
