Sunk cost fallacy design. It’s on purpose to get people to value pay to avoid playing and so the FOMO burn hurts on microtransactions like the bruto they put up in the store.
The game design is identical to that of mobile games in trying to psychologically steer players into becoming card swipe whales. It’s not designed for fun or meaningful progression, it’s designed to bait you into unfulfilling brick walls that you find out too late aren’t worth it and you wasted too much time going nowhere, in the hopes you’ll card swipe for tokens, boosts, or that rare fomo.
You aren’t choosing ANYTHING. Covenants were objectively more choice. Greater customization of your gameplay experience. You didn’t enjoy them, that’s fine but youre objectively wrong if you think that hero talents which offer zero choice, are more choice than covenant abilities which offered four choices.
Meaningful choices are kind of bad for business. As a player, if you make the wrong choice and can’t change it, that is pretty meaningful… but what it could easily mean is that you decide to spend your money on another game.
Ultimately, Blizzard had to make the meaningful choice of undoing the meaningful choices. I suspect that the finances of the situation made that choice for them.
They won’t deviate from the same old treadmill. It gets boring.
In games like diablo when you have season play, at least they throw some OP crap at you so you feel like a God for 3 months. In WoW, it is just the same thing over and over. I honestly don’t know how people do raiding 10-20 weeks and not want to gouge their eyes out.
Even when they let people switch, that didn’t make the choice less meaningful than Hero Talents.
Y’all keep harping on the thing that changed, and that I haven’t once defended, as a strawman for the fact that Covenants were better hero specs than Hero specs are.
The covenants at least had a story, a quest to set out on, then finally learning your talents. Hero talents are the most lazy crap blizzard has done yet. And they still can’t get it right.
i got bored of df within 2 weeks and p much quit the entire time.
sl was 2months b4 i moved to classic, and here is abt the same.
game just only fun for like a month or so. im just back to classic n playin other games
Yeah theres a huge lack of content. It feels like 3 months of dev time and not a year or more being put into it.
Combine that with the toxic and elitist attitudes going all the way down to raid finder ( lol ) and mythic+ dungeons being 99 percent of what they consider their “content” plus the once a week heroic raid ( we dont talk about mythic raids) and the dev team straight up admitting that many of the recent mythic kills were using bugs and exploits…well, theres just no coming back from that. The sanctity of the season’s competitive scene is broken and now everyone is just by default assumed to have paid or exploited for whatever they got.
I would say thats absolutely proven given that they “pulled the ripchord” part way thru SL and nobody cared. And they released Hero Talents and nobody cares about those either.
Ill say again. The worst part of Shadowlands was the timegatting.
I’m not judging what was/is better gameplay between the two systems (that was not my intention) because it is largely a matter of opinion.
I was more poking fun at the fact that making “permanent” character choices in a long-term game like WoW will be a bad idea almost every time. That’s why I kept harping on the word “meaningful”… as it had a meaningful effect on both the players and the revenue of the company.
I disagree - this is entirely Dev driven, there’s an interview Nagurra did recently with the Devs, they straight up made these changes because they want to.
Each single individual change can be discussed individually and some definitely have positive merit, the problem is the entirety of them lumped together resulted in a poor player experience. People are OVER IT. 6 weeks in and the guild/friends list is barren.
It’s widely unanimous amongst my subjective experience that people are not having a good time this season. Friends, guildies, pugs, everyone is begrudgingly going keys.
As Growl put it, we hope they look beyond the number of keys done to understand player sentiment in keys. Players will sludge through them to fill their vault and get gear because it’s an MMO. The reality is, this is the worst season of M+ to date.
This is where I’m at too and I think it’s also the problem. I’m not gonna go on a tirade about how we’re older and wows different and blah blah blah. I will say though what I’m running into is really like wow for the gameplay and setting and all there is in it but I’m ready for another game. I want it to be wow, but it’s just not doing it for me anymore
Then your opinion adds little to the conversation. Because I was arguing that exact thing. I’m sorry if you are a really big Preach fan, or think that he would never do things just for money, but you coming in to talk about how you think there’s no room in RPGs for unchangeable decisions has NOTHING to do with the mechanical design of covenant abilities vs hero specs.