Well, there’s a reason I tend to play WoW for a few months at a time with years-long breaks in between.
… no idea how anyone can even stomach doing 8 delves a week on a regular basis. I may end up doing that a bit for the overcharged mount, but then I’ll likely would have seen more than enough of the delves for a LOOOOOOOOOONG time.
Well, the “multiple versions of every fire spell” at least explains their reasoning somewhat… but I think we can go 1-2 customizations per class without too much trouble.
The quirk with green fire is that it’s mostly just a palette swap, relatively low effort duplication aside from adjusting the specific tones/hues to not look like garbage. If they stick to just palette swaps, there’s no excuse for more of them.
Actual unique animations could be a challenge, but it could simply change result in some staggered updates between the base class animations and the optional customizations.
And of course… I think we can be reasonable and say that Blizz doesn’t need to add them for all classes at the same time.
How is it difficult and stressful on the team? I genuinely ask this since last I recalled the art team went above and beyond with armor recolors and a new body texture for Void Elves in Legion that got shot down when it was proposed, said armor visuals included Void themed heritage armor for the Lightforged if memory serves.
New specs would be cool though, give Demon Hunters that missing third spec, that could even be Void themed as well.
And I know that I had to wait a while between the new red fire Animations and the green versions of those same animations, which suggests that there’s a technical challenge to it.
You would think it’s just a simple case of putting the textures on photoshop and messing with the hue wheel, but apparently not.
They lied… they do that a lot… its a PR thing… they get a high volume of requests for a thing but they just don’t actually want to do it… rather than be honest with us about that, the PR department thinks its better for them to deflect the issue by claiming it to be more effort than its worth, thus making our requests look like we’re just being petty for wanting it.
In reality, it takes less than a minute to recolor the spell effects… the most complicated part of the whole process is adding in the coding for a visual effect swap, which once its been done once is just a matter of copy paste the function to each new spell and then hook in the correct assets… all-in-all it would take them like 5 extra minutes…
Thats 100% because they were being lazy when they made the new assets and didn’t want to put in a few extra minutes for a set of color swaps. Then when we all called them out on it, they just didn’t want to do it, so they put it on the back burner and worked on other things for a while before eventually comming back to it.
OK, so you make 1 change in game lets say… artist messes with textures for say 3 hours, goes to get it approved, no do this, back & forth, ok done. Next morning, so it goes into the actual game the game files get recompiled, well if you don’t know, that takes a lot of CPU power, so that’s a lot of time when a computer(s) do nothing but compile. Now we are at 2 days. It goes to the PTR - people comment, Blizz says no, not messing with it, we spent too much time on it, and I agree
Things are a lot different inside a game studio than just, “swap colors & send it out,” but it is really easy to armchair quaterback and say its an easy fix
That’s what I’m saying throughout the thread though.
I don’t understand how it works. I’m not in there. From the outside I can’t see what’s so difficult about it.
But Blizzard said that they regret it because it was too much effort. I see no reason for them to lie about that. I see no reason for Blizzard to deny us a cool thing just because. If it was that easy, they would do it. Because doing easy things to please the customers is a good way to make money.
I don’t understand why it’s so hard. I’m neither a game dev, nor a corporate worker. But I don’t need to understand why it’s hard, I just need to understand that Blizzard communicated that it isn’t worth doing it. That’s why I know it’s not gonna happen.
I can tell you for a fact, they aren’t messing with it for 3 hours… what’s actually happening, is they make the adjustments over a couple minutes, make a half dozen or so alternatives, and then work on the 20 other projects they were assigned that day, then submit it all for approval as a batch after maybe 3 hours of work… the recolor itself took only a few minutes.
I tried to ask for this at least 15 times across several characters on here…it never goes well. For some reason the idea of adding more visual effects seems to just make the average forums goer irrationally enraged.
I personally would LOVE to have GREEN ARCANE MAGE spells to go with my cool green crystal sets…
They’ve already done some of this, for example, with monk glyphs and I believe druid glyphs, although there’s multiple classes where this would be fantastic:
Paladin - holy spells could be gold, red, or white
Priest - holy spells could be gold or white
Monk - ALL of their spells could be one of the four color variants - white, teal, red, gold
Mage - Frost could be white or blue or teal, fire could be red, orange or gold, and arcane could be purple/blue/teal or something.
The big argument used to be PVP (like so many BS arguments) but that’s no longer something I think anyone truly cares about, so now it’s about what’s able to generate revenue. And these ideas, unless tied into something that drives expansion purchases, or tokens, simply isn’t going to happen. So if you want it to happen, convince Blizz you will pay for it, or forget about it.
When they say “too much work to be worth it”, that’s what they mean.
The ultimate reasoning as to why thy don’t do it, and why they would lie to us about how difficult it is, isn’t very complicated… it takes time away from working on other projects. These simple recolors, while desired by the community don’t make them any extra money… the way they see it, they could spend 5 minutes doing a set of recolors for spell effects, or… they could us the same 5 minutes to make a recolor of a mount or armor set for a new FOMO event… which one will make them
more money? The answer, the FOMO event…
When they said “it wasn’t worth it” they meant it very literally… as in it didn’t make them more money… ultimately they spent way more time and effort on the quest line for it than anything… and now they have an extra minute or two for every new fire based warlock spell to add a green version… and adding it didn’t do anything to entice players to resubscribe for a month… it was just time spent on an update relatively few actually cared about… mainly because warlock was an unpopular class…
To be fair, it makes sense. They can’t just do a color palette swap, because they then need to test the new color combinations for visual clarity and readability on the user side of things.
I mean, I don’t know, but with all of the modern tools, tinting Orange to Green should be harder than a mouse click and getting the texture named correctly.
Everything introduced to the game explodes its complexity, cosmetics aren’t alone in this. Probably a reason we don’t have many glyphs as well.