What if Blizz *wants* an average expansion?

Community General Discussion
1

This is a new idea: What if Blizzard wants WoW to be less than perfect. If they released something as good as TBC, their other games would look bad. New, casual WoW is designed to be played with other Blizzard games! It makes them more money if you sub to WoW and buy skins in Overwatch. Duh! This isn’t CD Red: Blizzard won’t make more money by giving you all they have.

2

… wut? :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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I really would like an average expansion because this one is awful.

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They are at the point in product cycle where it might make more sense to cash out on the good name then to try and keep it going.

Evidence that this might be where they’re going is the loss of PvP servers and flight, which could be driven by the desire to save money. Flight requires large open world designs. PvP requires faction specific leveling areas. Both cost more money.

And Uldir. If there is any internal metric on the cost per boss to develop an instance, Uldir is probably the cheapest by a long shot.

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That’s what I’ve been saying. The next expansion will be fantastic compared to BfA lol.

6

What??

Making the next expansion the greatest ever won’t matter if the one previous is miserable to play through, and ends up driving people away.

Also this^

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World PVP was added to PVE servers, and made optional on PVP servers. NOTHING was removed from the game by eliminating the PVP/PVE server difference. Instead BOTH kinds of servers allow BOTH choices.

There has never been a “loss of flight”. What are you talking about? For 3 expansions, since 2014, the rules have been “flying in 3/4 of each expansion (in the new zones), but not in the first 1/4 (6 months)”. So the BFA zones were designed for flying.

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     BfA        WoD    Other Expansions  Vanilla
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They are incompetent boobs at Actiblizzard. They are more concerned with what is profitable than what’s popular. They are fresh out of ideas, with an empty bottle of polish.

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I don’t think it’s anything that interesting. I actually think what is going on is stunningly normal and dull:

  1. Too many people promoted above their talent level in management.

  2. A decision to streamline and cut costs post MoP in pretty stupid ways.

  3. An exodus of talent as Blizzard moved from big, epic games to smaller games.

  4. A really stunning lack of understanding of players who do not do progressive raiding or Mythic + (that would be most players).

  5. A shrinking player-base that is no longer propping the company up with free web content and fan-created buzz and community feeling like it once did (that is what happens when a company loses customer goodwill).

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11

This is below average.

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12

Its plain and simple. They are releasing things, and changing things to keep them fresh. While they try to come up with things that they think sound interesting
and exciting. Thats just it, THEY think will be interesting. Sometimes they
hit it out of the park, sometimes they strike out.

But just as with any artist, writer, developer, director, or anything else.
They make things using their ideas, hoping we the fans will like it.
Sometimes we do, sometimes we dont.

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Keep in mind that when a company decides to downsize and “encourage” excess employees to leave by reducing pay, random personnel layoffs, and/or benefit cuts, it is the competent ones with good job prospects who leave. The ones who stay until the bitter end are the incompetent ones who couldn’t get a job elsewhere.

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14

I don’t think they want an average expansion; it feels more like theres 2 teams making expansions and one team is just really bad compared to the other.
1 team who made MoP and Legion and the other team that made WoD and BFA.

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15

People were saying this when Cata, MoP and WoD came out- yet we ended up with MoP and Legion both being great xpacs.

Them making it bad so OW or HotS look better makes no sense- OW in particular has an utterly different playerbase.

Them making BfA bad so they can justify dropping their MMO so they can put more time into making a battle royale or mobile games (and thus, more money) is more believable.

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They got a long way to go to make BFA “average”.

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what do you think you are playing now?..ok bfa is less then average

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Generally that’s true. But since you have not established that those things are happening at Blizz…

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[quote=“Veskr, post:9, topic:35823”] They are incompetent boobs at Actiblizzard. They are more concerned with what is profitable than what’s popular.
[/quote]

Who? Who is incompetent at this large corporation? Or are you inventing a fantasy “person” who is all of Blizzard. No company of 300+ people is as smart as 1 person, or acts like 1 person.

The dev team has no interest at all in profit. They don’t even see the numbers. They eagerly welcome suggestions from players. They ARE players.

The financial team cares about the profit, the competition, the MMO market and what attracts new players. The provide direction at a high level, but they don’t know the game at the detail level. They are NOT players.

If you are going to insult someone (“incompetent boob”) at least figure out WHO you are insulting. If you can’t tell the difference between software devs and business experts, you are not a competent insulter.

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The “financial team” (Activision) owns and operates their development team.
If you’re going to shill for Activision at least know who you’re shilling for.

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