Blizzard has the capability of perfectly balancing the game using AI and micro-patches, but prefers FOTM existing in the patch cycle because it keeps people invested by rerolling/regearing and trying new things.
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People like you are the reason why the game is a toxic cesspool of negativity.
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Any items, especially holiday items, that have less than a 10% drop chance are just the devs trolling the players and seeing how many people they can trick into doing lackluster content.
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The world is flat, that’s why we can’t travel to the other side, the globes are all lies!
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SoD is a testing ground for new class specs in future expansions
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The tinker class is still yet to be released.
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Professions “break,” such as when they turned off Enchanting multiple times, on purpose so that people who are given the heads up can make gold because they are unable to make it otherwise.
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The devs make the game THEY want to play (they are so passionate about blizzard they are willing to accept below market wages and extremely unfavourable working conditions/practices - i.e hardcore gamers) … then are continually surprised that their decisions and designs only align with a small portion of the player base and are constantly having to walk back choices.
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This sounds really accurate as everyone I’ve ever met quit after Wrath.
I’m convinced 90% of gamers are playing Fortnite
Also, every expansion is following the latest Marvel/DC/Big movie release
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I know this is silly but sometimes I think that people who work at Blizzard don’t just do it out of a passion for creating fantasy worlds but are doing it to make money.
I know.
Crazy, right?
Quotes below from Allen Adham (Blizzard Co-Founder):
“What was so beautiful about the early days was we didn’t know anything about gaming,” Adham explains. “And so, we had budgets with no strings attached. That gave us the opportunity then, to do what we wanted for Warcraft and Warcraft II.” Warcraft was born from a shared love of a single PC game – a ground-breaking effort that all but singlehandedly created a new genre. “Dune II from Westwood was absolutely the inspiration for Warcraft,” Adham confirms. “We played it any chance we got and thought it was among the best games we’d ever played. So then, of course, we immediately wanted to do something similar but with Orcs and battle-axes and put our own spin on it.”
DOSBox SVN, CPU speed: 3000 cycles, Frameskip 0, Program: DUNE2 (archive.org)
But even during all that growth, certain things remained the same. “The secret to our success is simple,” Adham says, “we play a lot of games ourselves”. This shared passion wasn’t just about being entertained or the fun of a social experience with family, co-workers, and friends – it was also about learning, taking stock, and dreaming.
“When we play a game that we really enjoy, if we see greatness in it with opportunities to improve, to put our own spin on it, and to take that gameplay and meaningfully advance the state of play, that’s when we get really excited,” Adham explains. “With almost every one of our games, you can point to another game that was the inspiration. If you look at World of Warcraft, you could point to Ultima Online, Everquest. And we played Everquest for a year, all day, every day before we started working on World of Warcraft.”
“WoW’s success made me incredibly proud. It also made me very happy as a gamer. I played World of Warcraft every day for about a decade.”
Allen Adham’s return to Blizz in 2016 would also see him come face to face with World of Warcraft, a game that he was instrumental in creating but over time had made the transition to fan.
“When I came back, I gave a talk to the World of Warcraft team,” Adham concludes, “I stood in front of a team of 300 people and I said, ‘I’ll bet you that I have more achievement points than anyone in the room. If anyone has more achievement points than I do, stand up.’ At the time I had something crazy like 22,000 achievement points. And, one person stood up. It was only one out of 300. Turns out it was an engineer that coded the achievement system. Even though I was told they were a die-hard player, I feel that maybe that wasn’t a genuine number.”
Nah.
What I said above is just a conspiracy theory.
I think they have always done it out of a passion for gaming. I’m sure there are exceptions of course - but IMO passion still rules the day.
The money is just a (really really) nice bonus 
Allen Adham - Senior Vice President - Blizzard Entertainment | LinkedIn
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I think a time-based mage healer spec would be cool honestly.
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Pretty much this tbh.
I feel like they make something that’s more casual oriented and then get surprised when there’s backlash all of a sudden because someone did the new event on 60 characters or spent 48 hours grinding hyperspawning mobs in a corner to level up or grind rep.
Though after this many years they should probably stop being surprised lol
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My theory is that during the test server, certain classes are pushed to the forefront for that upcoming content patch purely to drive level Boosts, and to capitalize on the powergamers who will pull out VISA to get their meta-class ready for the next patch…
In the words of a game designer I met decades ago at Warhammer World: Imbalance always sells; balance looks pretty - but never sells
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I think the changes in seasonal PvP sets reflect the decline in Blizzard’s optimism and enthusiasm for solo shuffle, and some of the cool raid set colors were probably originally supposed to be for PvP
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That the Pandaren are not wise or kind, they’re planning to take over the universe and make us all to be slaves.
This wouldn’t surprise me in the least. Look what he have now on retail:
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Multiple servers connected, due to declining membership.
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Layers upon layers making it difficult to tell if anyone is even standing in front of you.
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Grouping that heavilly relies on spec sheets with very little communication expected with reputations nearly phased out over the years.
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Blizzard’s own Bot system nearly ready to rollout. I imagine a lot of testing had to be done to get them to the point where we were introduced to them last month.
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$$$?
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The Dev are “real people” as opposed to AI creations made by the super computer that secretly runs the world!
I think WoD and Legion were released out of order… swapped, in order to get WoD out closer to the (intended) release date of the Warcraft movie, because the theme of the expansion played into the theme of the movie.
I think this is why WoD was kind of bare, while Legion was loaded.
It didn’t exactly work though, because the movie was delayed.
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Cough… Like the corporate demanding MAU metric design, and devs have to play along.
Raid lockouts, weekly vault, new meaningful choice profession skill point timegate, the concept of pvp rating inflation, etc.
To be fair, I’m pretty sure the hyper focus on MAU metric is just fancy talk for how effective their sunk cost fallacy farming of players is with making things feel like a mobile game chore they have to login to, so they value pay to avoid playing via tokens or boosts at a later date. Almost every single time, there’s some hidden “fall behind” mechanic like missing a lockout, skill point, or vault, that does not allow makeups in order to penalize not time sinking yourself, which is utilized to force player valuation of the game by corporate.
MAU is not a metric measuring fun or meaningful fulfillment, it’s a metric of chore’ing the game to steer people into sunk cost fallacy.
I’m 100% sure ABK corporate is aware of what exactly MAU is, and why they’re forcing it so hard, and forcing everyone below to play politics with it. It’s got the same stink of freemium mobile game c-suits.
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If you look at the actual bots that are already in the game (the Island Expedition and Comp Stomp bots) they don’t act much like actual players at all
Also any group content I pug, people are far too petty and too willing to give up on the first wipe to possibly be bots. I was in a normal Amirdrassil that didn’t wipe on anything except Fyrakk, and then after that one shaman dropped group and in the time he was allowed to stay in the instance he pulled two more times which caused two more wipes (I hope this is a reportable offense because I reported him for this), then more people left.
We still killed the boss shortly after but I’m perpetually amazed at how many absolute babies play this game. Bots wouldn’t behave like this unless they were programmed to grief you to be more realistic
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