This topic again, A perspective from two friends playing some pvp and talking about things

Community General Discussion
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Hello guys !

Hey @Blizzard, recently a friend and I spent some game time playing some PvP on different characters…

…AAAAND we were talking while we were in the queue…

The complaint was the same, as always:

  • Hunter sets are horrible;
  • There are certain attack animations, even today, that don’t make sense;
  • Why not just make an elf race, based on Blood Elf, that doesn’t have that weird waist posture;
  • Where’s the rest of the allied races’ customizations?;

So…We debated a lot about the lack of “customizations” in the game.

But don’t get me wrong, @Blizzard, the trading post is a great addition, we see the sets and improvements you make, but it’s still… very limited, from a certain point of view.

This Isn’t about general customizations…

At the point we’re at, we should have at least Ogres, Mok’Nathal, Vrykul, Gnolls (which are more recent), and the most debatable ones - Centaurs and Nagas - as playable races.

We spent hours talking about these subjects, such as animations, races, items, and it doesn’t make sense. There are things we understand about the direction of the game, but there are other decisions (or the lack of them) that are hard to understand, even to this day.

Every reason we had about why Blizzard didn’t make a certain race playable fell apart when a quick, easy, and plausible justification came up in the conversation.

Nagas could have the same disguise spell as the Dracthyr… Centaurs could simply have Pegasus wings as a way to fly, being a race that doesn’t need to actually mount mounts – “Oh, but players who are mount collectors will complain” – just play with another race. Done, that’s Simple. “But i want to play with a CENTAUR using my pink blue red dragon” - you can’t. That’s it. OR > disguise form. Done.

We don’t need to complicate things…

There are so many easy and short answers to “problems” that could exist, it borders on absurdity how there are so many races in this game but we simply can’t use them.

And here comes another problem :

Okay, you don’t want to add new races? Not even harder-to-create races? Then why the lack of focus on the current races? We need to remember the amount of hairstyles the Zandalari trolls have, skin colors, tattoo types, the lack of beards for Blood Elves (come on, we have a goatee beard on B.E but no full beards? seriously ?? )… You added 2 hairstyles and 3 collors for the DarkSpear female troll and think that’s enough?

I understand the focus on thematic sets - on bringing items to the trading post, but honestly? There’s still a lot of customization missing… It’s a big company, it doesn’t make sense the lack of significant customizations that are missing in all the current races…

About me and my friend…this will be something that repeats itself forever – we pay 1-2 months of subscription, we play some PvP, grab a set from some class that’s interesting, stop playing for months… Why?
The game needs more exciting content.
From giving us the ability to play with more races to adding interesting types of activities in the game.

It’s already clear that we (me and my friend) don’t like to farm (whether it’s gold or professions) – we simply enjoy jumping into PvP and PLAYING, playing, having fun, without the pressure of having to do ‘repetitive quests’ that looks like a second day-job.

It should be like this for all game content. If you were to create a new race, my favorite – Centaur – you know what I would do? Try to collect all the Xmog items I can for him. From old dungeons/raids to world bosses, whether they’re old or new, or PvP…I would do all activities that involve direct content, where I can just hit things and have fun doing it

And what about when i got all xmogs that i want ? There should just be activities where I can use this race as much as possible, like… You’re adding player housing, there could be guild housing with wars between guilds. There could be more world bosses, more delves (also, about delves, I think they are fantastic, it’s a recent addition that makes sense).

So…

We wanted more races, more customizations within the race, not just sets, we wanted to see Blizzard make some radical changes to the game…

Every time we’re in queue and walk around, for example, in the Centaur clans’ villages in Ohn’ahran Plains, we’re left wondering what the heck happened with Blizzard to make so many customizations for them and…just stopped there. They even fixed the story about them not having issues with the Tauren anymore.

C’mon you just bring Highmountain taurens out of nowhere…OUT OF NOWHERE…

When we see a Gnoll, a Naga, any “cool” race, we end up debating until we conclude that Blizzard has a very strange sense of direction for the game.

This strange direction, where, for example, we had places like Crossroads, Thousand Needles, Howling Fjord, Tirisfal Glades, big locations, you know? Wide, beautiful areas… and then suddenly they destroy Crossroads and make maps with tight, tiny corridors, ISLANDS, like…what ? Or they show us beautiful races and leave them forgotten in time… it’s WAY too weird.

And there are other issues still going on today, look at this:

A request from shamans that they ignore:

An update they did after everyone bought the sword on the Trading Post:

I gave these two examples above – one is about shamans wanting to use one-handed swords, not just axes/hammers.

The other is about a gigantic sword, which would theoretically be a Vrykul treasure, that they simply reduced to half its size, turning it into a very ridiculous item. Everyone bought the sword because it was massive, and then… they changed it AFTER the addition.

HEY @BLIZZARD THE SWORD IS CALLED GREAAATSWORD NOT DELICATED SWORD…

Anyway, you know what will happen now?

My friend and I will grab our set, play some delves or whatever else, and then move on to other games… because our interest fades when we start thinking about what Blizzard doesn’t do, and we’re left with a feeling of abandonment from them.

“Oh, but they created the trading post” – it’s not enough , I can’t quite express this feeling… but we still feel like they could deliver double, triple, or even more content.

So @blizzard…that’s it.

I’m leaving here , again, our opinion, hope someone at Blizz reads it…

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WAY too long to read…yawn…

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Beat me to it!

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There is no reasonable ‘should’ for any of those races as it has been explained ad nauseam why ogres, vrykul, centaurs and naga are not playable races.

And the whole situation with the dracthyr and its visage form just highlighted all the problems.

Yet each of those races, other than the gnolls, would all need work-arounds which by definition complicates things.

As for the gnolls, which races are played the most?

It’s not the ugly races.

And the player base is constant crying out for the ugly races to be made prettier, closer to human or elven, ect so why would Blizzard waste the money on introducing a new playable race when the players are either going to ignore it or complain about it not being another flavor of exotic human.

You need to take a serious look at the economics of your requests.

That is not to say I don’t want to play any of those races. I have wanted to play a Naga since I first saw one and every time I play thru Vashj’ir and get to be a Naga during that one questline, I want to play one even more.

But I understand there are just too many hurdles to make it a playable races (not to mention to absurdity of have a water-based race adventuring up on land).

Or that I wouldn’t like to see more customization options for each race (as long as they fit with that race’s aesthetic) because I would. I have a whole general wish list (ie faces and make-up separated) as well as a list for each individual race (ie add three happy smiling faces to gnomes).

But I understand customizations, unlike the endgame treadmill, do not keep players playing so it makes sense Blizzard is investing their resources in things like M+ and Delves.

So next time you and your friend are chatting about this, add ‘cost and return’ into the discussion.

And look at your own game play. After all, if you aren’t willing to stay subbed to farm transmog long term for the playable races you already play, why in the world would Blizzard believe you are going to stay subbed to farm the same transmog for a new race?

They have abandoned a lot of us along the way.

For me, the only thing this game still has going for it is the World. Goodness knows Blizzard has ruined the game’s immersiveness, story, role-play features, ect

But it’s not personal, it’s business.

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What I meant by not complicating things was about not complicating the motivation in the lore or mechanics of how they would work.

(Actually, I created a topic just about a very amateur lore of how new races, variants, etc., could exist in this world of Azeroth… using the lore of the Void Lords that we have now)

I understand, as a programmer (my job) , how coding this would be difficult, and artistically speaking, there would indeed be work to produce such skeletons. But impossible? No. As for the economy part, I’ll talk later about my (or our, since my friend and I discussed this a lot) opinion on it.

I don’t agree with the idea of ugly races. I understand that the more beautiful ones are the most played, but there is an audience for all of them.

When they improved the graphics of the Tauren’s hair and body, the number of players using Tauren increased a lot. It’s also all about how they polish the game’s art.

If you mean that economically, adding new races wouldn’t bring profit to the company… well, doing nothing doesn’t bring any profit either. I took my example and that of my friend, who only renews the subscription when there is an interesting set to farm… and of course, when we miss it (lol).

Currently, playing delves is fun, but the game, in our opinion, has been ruined because changes aren’t happening on a large scale. As I said, new expansions take place on islands, races that exist in the game never see the light of day as playable, they took years and years to decide on player housing… it’s all very slow, and our perspective seems to be that they only do something when they realize they’re reaching some kind of “end of the line”.

I highly doubt that mobilizing the team to create some skeletons, which will obviously take time, followed by some art and finally a few tests, which will take months to complete, won’t bring any profit.

It would definitely be a huge draw and would likely bring players, maybe even for a long time (maybe, but I’m quite optimistic about it).

I’ll bring up another economic aspect that I think is interesting to mention here:

I have at least 3 friends who don’t play WoW because they don’t like paying a monthly subscription for one game. If WoW were on GamePass, they would pay for the GamePass to have access to the range of games available, and then they would play with me and the friend I usually duo with. In other words… economically speaking, every area has its advantage IF it’s well exploited.

I agree, but it’s a two-way street. There can’t be delves without character customization, meaning character screen, sets, perks, etc… There can’t be customizations for characters/environments without some dungeon, scenario, PvP, etc…

So, it’s something that depends on the other. The trading post itself is a mechanic I like – I can complete the scores by playing various aspects of the game, not just one or two…

That’s why, if they did anything focused on customization, it would retain players for a while. FOR A WHILE, because this is something that can never stop.

Obviously, this is the opinion of two players talking, as I’m mentioning, and there will be “gaps” or “flaws” but they are honest opinions, like you said, you’ve always wanted to play as a Naga…

I see it this way:

If Blizz added options like, a slimmer and more muscular orcs like the Blademaster from the original WC3… if they made Tauren stand a little more upright, not so hunched forward… if they added at least 5-10 more hairstyles for each race, and about 5 more beard styles for races with fewer options – just this alone would attract a lot of players’ attention for a while, I believe.

Imagine if they added 3-4 original races, not just reskins, like Gnolls, Nagas, Centaurs, Ogres… you would at least have the guarantee of a large number of players testing these new possibilities for a while

Maybe I wasn’t very clear, what I meant is the following – whenever we farm various Xmogs, whether in old dungeons, or a mount with a low drop rate, or we get tired of PvP, delves, or any activity we’re doing, we’re left with a feeling of “man, Blizz could have improved this, or that…” And that’s when the PERSONAL frustration kicks in, and we stop playing to go do something else, and it takes us months to come back.

I personally come back if I miss it, or if I see a new Xmog I haven’t gotten (so…xmogs are my personnal interest), or if I want to get something old after getting frustrated with the drop rate.

The endgame activities that truly keep us hooked, in our isolated case, are PvP and delves (nowadays) – I also enjoy going to old raids to farm and do certain content for fun, but it doesn’t go much beyond that.

So, I mentioned that what would excite me would be having new races precisely to give me more motivation to go after Xmogs, play with a different fantasy in mind, etc… Would it last a long time? It would depend a lot on the combination of visuals + activities.

Visuals matter… the race matters… but within PvP, delve, world, etc… and I sincerely hope that player housing brings unique delves depending on where we place it, as well as activities to unlock things in them being fun and not boring.

In other words, I care about new races just as much as I care about new activities or fun activities to use this new races/customizations in.

Do you know where I spent time with this friend and another one we have in common? Sons of the Forest… and you know how WoW could benefit from Sons of the Forest? Basically everything. From cutting our own wood to mining our own stone, to having vast possibilities for customization… and each region having its advantages, etc…

But you know what I really think? That Blizzard won’t do this. And they definitely won’t think about new customizations.

To sum it up – everything they deliver, in our view, is limited compared to what it could be.

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Bro and his friend played PvP and discussed issues with the game. His main complaints include the lack of customization, outdated attack animations, and the limited variety of playable races. He argues that Blizzard could easily add races like Ogres, Vrykul, Gnolls, Centaurs, and Nagas, providing simple solutions to potential problems.

He also criticizes the lack of focus on improving existing races, pointing out missing features like beards for Blood Elves and limited hairstyles for certain races. While he appreciates additions like the Trading Post and Delves, he feels the game lacks engaging content and meaningful updates.

He does PvP without grinding, and he wish for more exciting activities, like guild wars and world bosses, and stuff. He feels frustrated by Blizzard’s design choices, such as shrinking a large sword after its release and ignoring requests like letting shamans use one-handed swords.

Ultimately, he believes Blizzard could deliver much more content and feel a sense of abandonment, leading them to play other games once they exhaust the current offerings.

Keep things short and simple. :+1:

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Not ‘easily,’ but considering Blizzard size, it’s possible.

Other than that, besides the shamans’ request for one-handed swords – there was also a problem with a change they made for the WORSE on an item (varlajar greatsword) from the trading post.

But, nice resume.

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I think you are on to something. I’d definitely play a centaur. Especially if it had wings. That sounds so cool.

There are issues with races…or lack there of. Hairstyles are very limited on some of them and I would love tattoos on every race. Kul Turan could have traditional sailor tattoos, like a huge ship on the guys chest or ladies back. That would be awesome.

Thank you for sharing. It was a good read.

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Click bait :rofl: I thought this was going yo be about pvp.

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