That is the point. The player base knee jerk’d with their feedback about stars or ev and blizzard caved. The player-base did not take into consideration dmg per point of corruption, the scaling of the cloak, budget, or ease of acquisition pre-vendor or what would happen once a vendor was added.
They only cared about damage meters. They asked for balance at that specific moment in time, completely ignoring the long term consequences. And now those same players complain about those consequences.
Yep, the problems with corruptions only an extension of problems that were already pre-existing within the game since WoD or at the very least Legion, where passive effects were simply mathematically always superior to more thoughtful ways to play the game. Its something Ion himself acknowledged (at least about BFA) in an SL interview and something he mentioned they specifically want to move on from.
Corruptions just weren’t interesting for the most part as they were just other passively occurring stats or effects on top of an already steep pile of passively occurring effects (most BIS talents were the passive ones, Azerites traits were passive and Essences were also mostly passive).
I’m not surprised that they have or had a special forum for theory crafters.
They probably do some of the hardest if not the hardest testing of the game.
What surprises me is how Blizz disregards some of the input from them especially seeing how the current game director Ion is probably one of the original theory crafters of WoW.
Not surprised. This stuff goes on irl in nearly every profession.
With that said I this is my opinion…
I think the thing that troubled me the most when watching the video is not the fact that there exist a secret feedback forum that the regular player base is not a part of, or the discord for blizzard to talk to youtube or twitchtv content creators, but the fact that the person coming forward was saying that Blizzard is not listening and degrading or belittling even these few secret elect.
If that’s how they feel about the ones that they do contact and talk with then how do they feel about the rest of the player base who’s voice is these regular forums?
Thing is , this special forum was made for people to give them feed back and when it wasn’t feedback they wanted to hear they kind of changed their tune.
The problem is that the players shouldn’t have to take into consideration any of that. Especially when a key issue preventing players from even thinking about that was the OTHER major problem behind corruptions, which was implementation.
Implementation is 99% of the problems that developers have in this game. It’s rarely about balance, and more about accessibility to endure the balance.
Because developers ignore implementation, players then run to the balance corner, because it is the only corner they have.
Corruptions were blatantly disproportionate and imbalanced and given the horrible implementation, the only quick fix WAS to nerf them to the ground, which in fact never fully happened.
You can only care about damage meters when you can’t control anything else.
Acquisition of corruptions did more damage to the patch than the effect corruptions had on statistics and performance.
That was a band-aid as they aren’t allowed to do any major mechanical changes mid-expansion anymore, let alone mid-patch.
The fact people moved to raw stats corruptions when these got nerfed is a good testament to that. They were just all passive effects so the only right answer was to pick the best one mathematically, whatever form it took.
I for one don’t care about secret forums or any information I can’t verify the authenticity of.
All that forum showed is that the devs ignore everyone, including the people who are actually qualified to provide detailed feedback about stuff.
This special forum was one they set up to communicate and get the opinions of the various class /spec and content theory crafters.
There is an old saying . If you really don’t want another person’s opinion then don’t ask for it.
By making forums like that along with the Alpha/Beta and PTR forums guess what they are asking for it and need to realize not all opinions are going to march lock step with their ideas.
Maybe, just maybe, the complaints are about how badly implemented the Corruption system was overall and how little if any testing was done.
Doesn’t really seem to matter anyway, since the majority of these Covenant/Conduit systems seem to be tested and approved internally.
Not a good way to do business but if anyone is at the height of arrogance It’d be the schmucks working at Blizzard.
One of the things discussed on the streamers video was some Shadowlands changes being implemented. Basically Warriors are the lowest DPS right now at 50 and at 60 with a legendary they will do even less DPS than current 50.
So they were pointing out the secret forums were not getting much done in the form of having our feedback listened too either.
my eyes just rolled so far back into my head they almost fell out.
The “secret forum” was, to the best of my knowledge, for the class theory crafters to have a place to discuss things and provide feedback unmuddied by joe casual (ie… you and I) throwing our 2c in and mucking up discussions.
nothing wrong with that. frankly, I think it’s a good thing.
But on the other hand, the existence of a forum such as that doesn’t mean that blizz was in any way obligated to take the feedback as gospel and implement any suggestions/changes that came out of it.
I have money on a discord that has streamers and devs on it. I think forums are just old hat now. Almost newspaper worthy
This is twice now this quote was pulled out of context to state the obvious - for some reason. I wasn’t even discussing the secret forum in particular. Whatever. A nice, fresh reminder why I avoided this place for 10 years. Done with this thread.
The second part though is just because you are requesting feedback it does not mean that you have to immediately change things based on it.
People will always be emotional about things that effect their class/spec/race/playstyle preference however the change might actually be good on the whole there is just a niche group for which the change is negative.
All the changes made by the devs have very obvious purposes, for example the water change means that you cannot take a quick sip while running to the next pack you have to make a decision about when to spend an extended time recovering mana, coupled with the addition of mana to dps skills it is obviously trying to increase the mana management of healer classes. This change could be good or bad (I lack sufficient data to be sure either way) but there is a method and reason behind it. It might make the healer minigame more engaging or might in some cases put a hard cap on fight lengths.
Well, it’s secret for a reason, it helps gather all the good feedback in one place and all the useless feedback cough the fifty void elf, blood elf, high elf and demon hunter player threads cough. It’s just a shame that they stopped listening to that feedback resulting in actual issues in game.
Or slow people down so they play longer