No, I don’t accept terrible service. If I don’t like the service I’m receiving for a product I am spending my time and money on I take my time and money elsewhere. That’s how it works in the real world.
What engagement metrics? You mean the MAU? MAU = monthly active user. It doesn’t matter if you log in for 10 seconds or log in for 100 hours that month, you’re counted as 1 MAU per account you log in on. Stop making stuff up.
So if you genuinely like a product or service but there is one part you really don’t like and wish they’d change, you don’t voice your opinion? You just drop the product/service and say oh well?
I intend to play the story in Shadowlands simply because the art teams never disappoint. If at the time I complete the story, flying is not available I will unsubscribe. That is the extent of “making stuff up”. I won’t patronize a business that insists on providing a substandard experience. I get that folks want everyone to play the game exactly like they do “or else”, but I am not interested in fighting terrain designed explicitly to slow me down, mobs designed to slow me down or time gates designed to slow me down. Either I play at my pace or I don’t play at all anymore.
Maybe I have just gotten too old to enjoy every second of the game being curated, but I seem to remember much more player agency right up to the point where Ion took over.
I hope you enjoy your gaming experience Caevan, no sarcasm or ill intent there, but it just doesn’t seem like the game is being designed and run for folks who don’t want to login and run dailies until they puke, then log off for the day any longer.
I’ve seen this sentiment used by several different people here lately and it confuses me to no end. This game would have absolutely no players left if we all quit as soon as we found something we didn’t like.
The list of things I don’t like about the game are extensive, but so is the list of things I absolutely love. Neither of those is relevant to what I am willing to tolerate.
Being shoved into a skinner box designed purely to gate time and effort to up the time played metric at the expense of player satisfaction is that line for me unfortunately.
And it doesn’t seem like something they’re willing to budge on, despite being fully aware that we don’t like it, since he defended pathfinder even as he was being booed by the crowd at Blizzcon.
Something has to give given that there will be four patchfinders with shadowlands which is not sustainable and with the level squish doesn’t make sense. The devs in separate interviews have stated they don’t know how flight will work in shadowlands as the four zones are separate. In other words they are still in the early stages of development and nothing is set in stone.
When your most die-hard “purchase a ticket and make a trip in the real world” fans are booing your choices, it’s time to swallow your cathedral sized ego and reevaluate your design directions.
I doubt he is that self-aware though.
It would certainly help!
It’s entirely possible it’s not actually up to him, and it’s someone above him that’s forcing all of these timegates and RNG on us to help extend the life of their content(or attempt to). But it could be his idea too, who knows. Whoever it is, they’re dragging the game down into a hole it may not come back out of. Once you’ve ruined your goodwill with certain customers, they won’t return.
Id settle for this, i really miss those tabards
It is though. That’s exactly what we have today. World Quests reset along with the emmisary cache every 24 hours. Not all in unison but the point is the 24 hour lockout is basically limiting how much rep you can get at once.
The only distinction here is instead of the lockout being tied to quests it would be on the rep itself. So that would unlock the ability for the devs to add rep tabards / banners / turn ins and a lot of other choices with regards to getting rep without having to worry about spam runs. Everyone gets what they want here.
I don’t think World Quests ever accomplished the goal they were intended to solve. That being getting people out in the world interacting with each other. I think the average World Quest run involves a rather anonymous and trivial A->B->C->D ordeal that is neither dynamic nor challenging. It’s not mysterious, it’s not tremendous and therefore not fascinating. It does nothing to improve the world it exists in.
I get people enjoy them because it allows them to progress outside of group content which is fine. I think the game should have deep progression paths in everything we do. That being Arenas or raids or way down to archaeology and pet battles. All of these should be valid ways to progress your character.
The worst outcome is what we have now. Where some people who like WQs do them and everyone else suffers them or quits. Clearly forcing people to play a part of the game they don’t enjoy is a bad idea.
In my mind it should boil down to choice. The more choice the game offers in your RPG escapades the better off the game is and the more popular it’ll be. Whether you prefer to trade all day or do arenas, or do battlegrounds or do archaeology or whatever the game offers as a form of gameplay. All of these would be rewarding. Even world quests if people prefer doing that.
Well ive said it before but i still believe hes living in an echo chamber and anything negative tends to be ignored
To be fair, he is surrounded by raid loggers, plays with raid loggers and has never expressed any interest in the game outside of end-game raiding. You don’t need flight when your whole gameplay experience revolves around logging and and getting summoned to the raid then logging out.
I think its a difference in perspectives and Ion long ago lost sight of what most people enjoy in a game simply because it is not what he enjoys. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing.
True a lot of it has to do with pleasing his executive overlords but yes this is HIS game and were supposed to like everything he does
Great! Then don’t wear one.
Dumping Pathfinder would end complaints about Pathfinder overnight.
Open world rep grinding in Cataclysm was a total crapshow, largely because the developers leaned so hard on tabards they didn’t bother to make dailies for some of the factions. I’m not convinced they wouldn’t do something that blindlingly stupid again given the chance, as it would be a great way to prop up waning dungeon content attendance.
Making a new system that doesn’t need to exist in order to fix a problem caused by another system that doesn’t need to exist is a lot more trouble than just turning flight on at level cap like it used to be.
There’s a lot of fallacies about corporate overlords. The CEO doesn’t decide what gets put into the game. Directors and lead designers do. The stakeholders do. The CEO can certainly pressure the team to get things done on time but what goes into the product is largely decided by the team.
What we’re doing is the developer vision of what the game ought to be. Maybe not a complete vision, to be fair to them there are certainly time constraints. But with the time allotted this is what we get. When I consider World Quests for example I think time constraints have a lot to do with them being underwhelming.
Though what can be criticized is the design and the priority of the design. Rep tabards take almost no time to implement. World Quests take way more time. In this sense it could be argued that ambition got the better of them. They wanted a grander design than simple rep tabards but in the end it wasn’t what the players wanted. And this can also cover other things like garrisons. Sometimes what they want for the game doesn’t match up to what we want and precious resources are squandered.
That’s how I see it anyway. I think a reevaluation of design principles, what the RPG is supposed to be and how important player choice is in that experience all need to happen.
I can see it now : Shadowlands will have rep tabards…available at revered.
Options need to be balanced. Why do people fail to understand this?
If we installed an NPC that handed players 1million gold whenever they asked for it, they could still make gold through other means in the game. But the option to use the NPC to acquire gold would be overpowering and ultimately what the majority of players would resort to when in need of more gold. It’s plain to see.
Options need to be balanced, you can’t have something 10x more effective or efficient than it’s peers and call it an “option”. It overshadows everything else, and becomes a question of “Do I want to intentionally disadvantage myself?” rather than picking between equivalent means for pursuing the same ends A) 7 apples a week vs B) 1 apple a day.