Nah, it’s just every gamedev under the sun essentially wants to have their cake and eat it too. Timegate and FOMO burning galore. Many people want meaningful grinds with player agency, which a game like WoW does not provide, as per current content at least.
What games like WoW do is farm player sunk cost fallacy like mobile games. The other thing is that the most established player in the industry is the one that “wins out” for this kind of model, which is why so many others fail.
You would win the bet. This game barely gets any new players at all. Even if they are willing to try it they get pushed out.
Isn’t there a whole new people chat channel? Then guilds and communities available in game?
I will die on this hill.
The moment the devs decided to design, tune, package and promote the game for and around “professional gamers” and esports was the beginning of the end. It literally corrupted the game on every level.
Centering the content for a very small % of the playerbase, instead of the large majority, the try hards, the casuals and any possible new players is and was a HUGE mistake. All to make a few extra dollars from streamers and social media. Greed and profits over quality and entertainment.
Time for the new raid? Make sure you spend a few hours beta testing and studying videos, memorizing tactics and positioning. Check those spreadsheets for optimal min/maxing.
GTFO! This ain’t school… fools… or a job. Games were and are supposed to be FUN. Blizzard lost the plot the moment they put Ion in charge. We are all living with that massive FAIL.
This is another part of it, I was actually kind of thinking about it myself earlier. A big issue with the way WoW is designed is that it’s focused on trying to keep people playing, rather than try to entice new players. After all, when the choice is between someone who is already paying month to month, and someone who might sub one month and then quit because it’s just not for them, what makes more sense to target from a business perspective?
This has the unfortunate side effect of making active players feel like they have to play or else fall behind, and new players feel like they shouldn’t even bother because they’re already permanently behind. Essentially, the developers accept stagnation (the people already paying will continue to do so) in order to not risk decay (inviting new players that may not stick around)
Ahh yes, the most inviting of all games with the most inviting of all communities. How inviting. 
/s
I wouldn’t know, and I can only assume it’s about as effective as the novice network is in FF14 (that is to say, not at all)
You mean when they gave us 4 levels of raid with only one for the top end, instead of 1 level of raid that casuals never saw in vanilla?
Or did you mean when they added infinite dungeon difficulties so everyone could find their sweet spot and still get appropriate rewards, with 1 esports event that’s not even on live servers?
The amount of content that’s specific for the hardcore crowd is tiny compared to everything else.
But they don’t design and tune that content around normal, they do however design and tune it around mythic, despite the fact that the smallest player % plays at that level.
Yet normal, heroic, and even LFR remain able to be cleared by their respective intended audiences with little issue.
They don’t so you are safe.
Every tier blizzard designs 1-2 bosses of 1 difficulty only that is “esport” level and then nerfs it hard in a month or so.
Every other boss and every other difficulty isn’t even close, and no dungeon difficulty is anywhere close except pushing the edge of an infinite scaling difficulty that must happen because math.
I could not disagree more with this.
WOW does mostly tailor it´s content to the young crowds, or why do we have all those time trials, leaderboards, mini games & events…? Blizz is rushing new content all the time, but it has no depth at all and only serves as a quick fun to those needed. Call it the Esports Generation if you like, however the original Esports of the late 90s and early 2000s were nothing like that.
Raiding for 4 hours to get no rewards was pretty common, just like playing Warsong for 3 hours and lose. Todays esports gen, can´t deal with that that is why we have this fast paced content now, where you need 20-30 minutes mostly and be done with it.
The current generation of gamers, does have the attention span of a gold fish. They are unwilling to learn something, unwilling to socialize or invest in a friendship / guild. Either they are rewarded immediately, or they complain and the kick button is their best friend to remove “obstacles” in their way.
What you are refering to are casuals and players new to WOW, but those do come in all sizes and shapes. We have 50 years old casuals just like 20 years old and they are all treated very badly in this game.
And guess what, I blame the young generation mostly for that.
Who cares?!?! Blizzard has done so much worse and they are still here. They will whine and cry about the beer being more expensive but they still wont do some where new.
I’ve been playing this game for at least 15 years now and I can tell you, its been getting progressively more complicated and elitist for no apparent reason. The game mechanics and rotations are ridiculously overcomplicated, progressing in current content is impossible without using a billion add-ons and websites like raidbot and raiderio, etc. The game used to be much more accessible.
Considering I’ve lost my slot in a raid night to someone who sounds and acts like a 8 year old child… they do. I’ve lost my spot in a guild because of that same child, some players throw oddly childish tantrums in parties, I’ve seen threads here where people are demanding Blizz tone down the game for their children… children that shouldn’t play this game but do exist and it saddens me to see it.
I consider myself as “starting” at the end of BFA, season 4. However I made some characters and was a very casual player back in WOTK for about 2 months.
I agree with the OP on a lot of points here.
To Blizzard’s credit, I don’t think this is intentional. If the game were more friendly to new players there would be a LOT more profit. If the player base doubled their profits would also basically double – I don’t think server costs are a huge factor in how much profit they make.
Also I do think they recognize this and are trying to make things better. But I think one of the major things they need to address is the rudeness of people to unskilled players. Everyone starts out somewhere and when I was first learning the game (in BFA) people were incredibly rude. This seemed unmitigated by Blizzard. If I didn’t have friends I was playing with at the time I probably would have quit.
I mean it doesn’t bother me personally if someone is toxic to me, because I know it’s caused by the “rush rush rush” mentality, given to the game by Blizzard themselves. The game is revolved around rushing to end game, and anything that is a hinderance (new players) in the way of that rush end goal is going to spark toxicity. It’s 100% blizzard’s fault here, they KNOW for a fact that the game’s playerbase are there for years, they aren’t generating revenue from new people picking up the game and playing, its so blatant. I know I sound like a broken record typing this but the argument has basically no flaws no matter how you look at it
They really need to just do a massive reset/revamp on the game, every feature completely reworked and changed to suit the modern era. Create an area where players can go to access their old items so players feel like they haven’t “lost” anything.
I’m not saying it’s not Blizzard’s fault. I’m saying to their credit they are trying to improve things. Of course they are responsible, it is their game.
I think one of the biggest improvements they made is follower dungeons, for example. They need to keep working on stuff like that since follower dungeons seem really accessible to new players. I can see myself using them to learn a new spec for example.
I do think that they tried to do this with Dragonflight. I agree with the idea behind this but I’m not sure in practice changing -everything- makes sense. For example, I consider targeting in this game to be an artificial challenge because it is such a design flaw that simply targeting the mob you want to kick etc is so difficult.
And in dragonflight they tried to address that with Action Targeting. I don’t use it, but I appreciate the effort.
Nobody will miss a crappy targeting system if a better one is introduced.
One thing I had to learn when I first started playing is that sometimes the issues in the game are because of a decision, but most of the time it is because they only have so many people working on the game
To me, I don’t think everything needs to change. I think they need one visionary designer to make it all cohesive.
I think this would be appealing to old and new players alike simply by being a better game. When there is a really fantastic movie out old and young people alike go to see it and enjoy it.
Same here, I think Blizzard needs to move away from corporate control and instead be under creative control. From there annoyances can be changed, and the good parts can be kept.
Have you ever played classic era? I suggest you try. It is weirdly so much better than retail IMO
I’ll try Classic. I wish i got into it right when it dropped but I was playing my month of the crap show that was BFA and it just turned me off for a while until SL dropped and my experience that I posted has been from then to now. Sometimes I wish i played back in Vanilla it seemed like such a crazy time reading stories here lol