I’ve been mulling this over for a while, because I almost feel crippled in expressing what I’m about to say because of the environment that’s been cultivated, so the only way to do it is to acknowledge that two things can be true at the same time.
We can like that the devs are reiterating that they are listening and learning, are delighted and excited, and are humanizing themselves to avoid the “ivory tower” approach of past “administrations” of WoW. It’s refreshing and I want to encourage it.
They’re doing “experiments” in plain view of a community that is telling them reasonable things that they’d like addressed. You can say you’re listening, and you can try to “be our pals” with your public facing personas, but no one asked for WoW fortnite, yet DID ask for… I don’t know, innocuous example is troll beards, extreme example is player housing, and in the middle we still have a game with an outdated set of limitations in the form class and race combos.
We have this “don’t kick the puppy, you wouldn’t kick the puppy would you” face to the dev team, which … is nice in its way, but there are still valid frustrations. I like what I’m seeing from Holly Longdale and other faces of this new, approachable WoW dev team, but like… the reasonable wishlists are embarrassingly old and long while they try to tell us “you like fortnite don’t you?” It was a big risk, but I can tell you a game that all the WoW players have in common… it’s WoW.
I don’t know, I’m not trying to kick the puppy, but I’m still frustrated. It’s so embarrassing how behind the industry WoW is on some fronts. Like are we really going to set up “Paladins for all” with the Tyr’s guard and just leave Dragonflight with paladins being this special class that we can’t trust every race to have? Are we really updating all these cities and still leaving housing as something that WoW just can’t do? Are Trolls really unable to grow beards? Do follower dungeons make ANY sense to not be cross faction when guilds already are? Come on now. Housing IS a big ask… for a new MMO, but all the others… there’s no excuse.
If they have time for Plunderstorm, they have time to fill out the options for more and diverse character concepts. Am I crazy to think that? I’m not even entering the game balance arena, that’s a whole other ball of wax that I do credit as being complex, I am mostly just talking character expression, and world “ownership.” Am I asking too much?
Anyway, puppies please don’t feel kicked, I’m just so tired.
This argument is just never going to make sense to me. No one asked for pet battles or dynamic flying, but these things have been great additions to wow. Sure, a lot of us, including myself, have been asking for player housing. Sure, a lot of other mmos have it, but not all of those mmos do it right or in a fun way. I’d rather let blizzard cook on something that could be fun, give us stuff we ask for, and maybe stuff we aren’t asking for.
I don’t think you’re crazy for wanting something added in wow, but I just think maybe you’re not seeing the big picture. When you zoom the issue out, you see that oh ok, another whole team did plunderstorm that isn’t connected to the main wow team. Other team is working on the next patch another team is working on x y and z etc. Dsnoozer left, we have Chris back, i think we just gotta let them cook for a bit.
But they were additions to WoW, not distractions that required me to log into an entirely different client to interact with, and play a generic character whose name was never meant to be a character name!
I’m aware that I sound like “blahblah PVE got this but no new battleground, what even is team management” guy, but that’s not the the angle I’m taking. I’m seeing sweeping things happen (like plunderstorm) while the foundation of the base game is still (subjectively) “incomplete” with gaping holes in character customization and race/class combos. I know “dev time” isn’t a hose that one points at this or that thing, but I’ve/we’ve been “letting them cook” now for almost 20 years.
Measuring our patience for basic “this is an MMORPG” features in whole expansions gets grating and hubristic after a while, you know?
Like, the thing that spawned this post today was a sense of “welp, don’t see Paladins for all anywhere on the road map, it’s not an additional 10.2.6 thing, maybe next year! Guess the Tyr’s guard was a multi-expansion arc!” That’s just… it’s stupid!
I think the issue is what you want for the game to feel complete doesn’t match what is occurring.
This is likely why you feel dissatisfied.
I am looking forward to all classes/all races eventually but it is likely in TWW. DF is very much on the standby till then, with the exception of S4 and Timerunning Pandemonium.
You’re not crazy. One of the things that I think is being misunderstood is why Plunderstorm was made. It wasn’t just a bunch of devs that wanted to make something new and cool. That’s not how businesses work. Plunderstorm is a simple easy game to create and maintain. No class issues, no gear issues, only 6 abilities at a time, no dungeons, just one map… If they can make money releasing that type of content we’ll see more of it. Adding troll beards to WoW is probably a lot more costly than making all of Plunderstorm.
I don’t see any gaping holes in either. In fact, I see overabundance in both, to the point, that quite a few make no sense.
And, personally, I would rather they spent the resources in cleaning up the bugs in old content so the actual game is playable.
Neither having all classes for all races or a high amount of character customization are basic MMORPG features as neither are needed to play the game.
I really, really want housing but while I ask for it and describe what I am interested in (small, limited and evergreen), I am not crying for it because I know it will suck up a lot of resources, be niche and is unnecessary to the actual game.
There are already over 200 race/class combos. How overindulged are people that 200 is not enough?
Because it is never enough. The minute Blizzard does all races/all classes (which they said they are working on and have already added 19 since that declaration), folks will be crying for more races and more classes.
And let’s be honest here. This isn’t about supposed ‘basic features’ being unavailable. This is about you wanting some race/paladin combo that isn’t available yet and not wanting to wait for it, even though you must be aware putting more race/paladin combos in the game (like more race/shaman combos due to the totems and more race/druid combos due to the forms) is going to be more time-consuming than the race/class combos they have added in the last while so it is going to take longer.
I love what you said here, that’s basically it for me. I want WoW to be successful, that is the game I am here for, this other thing that is going away apparently doesn’t seem like a permanent improvement to WoW and there are many other clear wins that seem like less work. Flying in the Maw and Korthia, nerf BFA/legion raids significantly to be one-shot soloable at level 70+, remove flightstone cost on gear that requires crests, leveling dungeons for old dungeons 10-60 for example.
Blizzard shipping content occasionally that you don’t care for != Blizzard doesn’t listen to players.
Glad we could hear that up.
Blizz has been listening to players - in some cases they just ship things the community asked for, like red goat people (only reason I’m a goat people atm).
I think my biggest issue with Plunderstorm is honestly that it feels like WoW took a backseat to it. Even without the possibility of it costing a dev team, as people are saying that the team who made it is different from the team making WoW, retail is filled with frustrating, difficult-to-play-through UI bugs that came about as a direct result of PS. There has been no blue post (that I’ve seen, anyway) that even acknowledges these issues, and several downtimes-- counting the emergency downtimes following PS’s release-- that fixed balancing in PS, but did not even address the WoW bugs.
I personally love the idea of devs trying new features, and I don’t necessarily think we need to rush into race/class combos, player housing, etc. I do, however, think that there is something that needs to be said about the devs as a whole ignoring some pretty big bugs within their base game to such an extent that they won’t even give their players an acknowledgement of these issues, while continuously pushing out new fixes for said new, mini-game like feature.
Here once again we see the same mistake being made. A minority of “the community” enters notes in the forums. A minority of the forum people will start campaigning for a particular issue. And the mistake? That minority of a minority believes they speak for “the players”.
How on Earth do you know if any of that is what “the community” wants to hear. The vast majoriy of players never enter any notes, never make any requests.
And I like the “no one asked for” comment. Well people in forums campaining for anything are practically no one. They are a very small fraction of the player base.
How does anyone get the idea that a few hundred vocal people out of a million players represent “the community”? You don’t. The developers know you don’t. Many of “The players” know you don’t. Anyone who can do arithmetic knows you don’t.