What went wrong with BfA and how to fix it

Community General Discussion
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Listening to the community is a great start. However since it can be difficult and time consuming to parse the constructive feedback from the trolling, I have taken a sampling of feedback from a recent thread (Give 1 Reason why BfA is your Least Favorite Expansion) and summarized the community impressions by rank:

(Source: .us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/give-1-reason-why-bfa-is-your-least-favorite-expansion/59605)

PRIMARY CONCERNS:

Class Design (ability pruning, loss of legendaries w/no replacement, lack of class flavor, some classes still not even viable, boring Azurite system, GCD, gold cost to respec, etc.)
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Story Design (lazy faction war focus, abandonment of classic lore, simplistic “good vs. evil” theme, ham fisted ‘horde is evil faction,’ Sylvanas character depth destroyed, marketing to aggression, etc.)
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Timegating causing boredom & frustration (especially on allied races and flying), emphasis on rep grinds, tedium, etc.
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Overemphasis on RNG grind for progression (lack of unique tier/class gear for raids, feels lazy, etc.)
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Not up to Blizzard quality standards (many bugs, push to mobile fad, copy/paste previous iterations with no innovation, Actiblizzard chasing finance metrics over customer satisfaction, etc.)
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RUNNER-UP CONCERNS:

Negativity of forums and youtube/Twitch content creators, lack of constructive feedback, group think, etc.
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Lack of xmogs/class gear appearance diversity (all plate looks the same, etc.)
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Islands/Warfronts boring/badly implemented
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Professions (high mat cost, BoP crafted items, etc.)
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No PVP gear/vendors
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Mythic+ focus (overtuned, lack of reward, takes focus away from other areas most want)
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World quests not rewarding
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Marked the end of Legion
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Warmode (especially locking previous class flavor spells behind PVP)
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Mission table not rewarding (mainly not enough gold)
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Forced to play according to someone else’ idea of why WoW was popular
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Allied races feel rushed, lack attention to detail, lorebreaking (no high elves, etc.)
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Forced to run dungeons for quest/profession progression
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Friends all quit, server empty
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Level scaling diminishing sense of progression
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Obviously some of these feed into each other but I feel this is an accurate summation of the opinions and reasoning expressed by the community.

Taking this as a guide, I personally feel the most important things Blizzard could do to turn this around would be:

  1. Add back pruned legendary abilities, class flavor, and spells locked behind PVP to a Heart of Azeroth system that combines the best of old talent trees and the legendary progression system. Remove gold cost for gear respecs. Reconsider some of the GCD changes. Make finally getting the many classes/specs you postponed working on to an actually viable and FUN state a top priority.

  2. Drop the focus on simplistic faction war story and hire some actually talented writers, or let the ones you have actually write according to the WoW lore instead of pandering to some dark age ‘good vs. evil’ aggression metric you think will sell more tokens. Stop trying to marginalize the RPG aspect of the game (which is why it achieved great success in the first place) to pander to vocal PVP minorities, diminishing both aspects of the game in the process. Stop ruining great characters (Sylvanas, etc.) for the sake of a shallow faction war focus.

  3. Stop letting Activision finance metrics dictate your game design. Clearly these cookie cutter business metrics are completely out of touch with the reality of the majority of paying customers. One size does NOT fit all.

  4. Do the previous and the need to emphasis frustrating gimmicks like RNG and time gating to shore up lack of content won’t be such a problem, because having an actual story beyond a lobotomized faction war will flesh out all of the other systems with a sense of meaning that makes doing the content more worthwhile from the player perspective.

The last 4 are just my personal opinion on how to improve the indicated problem areas. What do you think?

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Stop letting Activision finance metrics dictate your game design.

They dont.

Never have and this meme is getting old.

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I would just like to emphasize, most of the OP is a summary of MANY different opinions from literally hundreds of posts/players. It is inevitable people will disagree with some of these or have different opinions, but if possible I would prefer to avoid discussing these differences here and focus on suggestions of how to improve the current state of the game.

I do encourage people to visit the source thread for these metrics and post any such difference of opinions there.

As for the part that was in response to my personal opinions, I am not sure I understand you when you say “give them all of us.”

As for whether Activision finance metrics are dictating game design, that is again a matter of opinion but I would put forward that if it were not the case, there would not be such conflict with the community, we would not have a shallow faction war story that is perhaps the lowest point of WoW lore in the game’s history, and shortcuts like timegating and RNG would not have become the focus of game design.

Clearly these things HAVE happened and I do believe it is for a reason, and certainly not because it is what the majority of customers wanted. If not finance imposing it’s ideas of what the game should become, then what?

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As for whether Activision finance metrics are dictating game design, that is again a matter of opinion but I would put forward that if it were not the case, there would not be such conflict with the community, we would not have a shallow faction war story that is perhaps the lowest point of WoW lore in the game’s history, and shortcuts like timegating and RNG would not have become the focus of game design.

Nebulos

I cant be any more clear than to say that a CM came onto these forums and FLATLY stated for a fact that Activision does not dictate game design.

I cannot make you change your mind, nor would I try, only to tell you what has been said and by whom.

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Add back pruned legendary abilities, class flavor, and spells locked behind PVP to a Heart of Azeroth system that combines the best of old talent trees and the legendary progression system.

I am sorry, i misread this. Upon review, I retract my earlier comment. Also apologies.

I agree with the idea.

By the way, on the faction war story, I draw your attention to what we have seen so far is the opening stages…believe me, when this train gets started, the faction war will be the LEAST of our problems.

We are indeed in deep trouble.

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I am willing to assume for the sake of the argument this is the case. I also would like to clarify that a faction war story in and of itself does not have to be boring and two dimensional. Some things they could do to improve on the ‘horde is evil, Sylvanas just wants to destroy all life and everyone just mindlessly obeys her’ theme we have going:

  1. What does Sylvanas actually even want?
  2. If it is to grow the ranks of the Forsaken as she repeatedly claims, how exactly does she imagine just killing lots of things will accomplish that (remember they must ACCEPT the ‘gift.’)
  3. Why does no one seem to remember the WORLD IS DYING? Why are we attempting to weaponize the planet’s blood? How does smashing each other with big powerful sticks do anything to solve the fact we are ALL doomed if the planet dies?
  4. What is the role of the Old Gods in this, other than a handful of cultists with a tentacle fetish? Do the Old Gods want the world to die? Are they manipulating these faction leaders to that end, to get them to destroy themselves?
  5. What happened to Velen and the Draenei literally having a giant spaceship? Might that not serve as a deterrent for constant conflict? Are they off establishing colonies on other worlds in case ours dies? Will we ever see them?!?
  6. Where the hell is Thrall?
  7. Why is there no 5th column sub-factions? Where are racial ‘leaders’ weighing in on the agenda? ("The Sin’Dorei are no one’s puppets, Banshee!") Why is one character from one race from one faction literally being allowed to dictate the plot for the entire known universe, particularly when, for all intents and purposes, it appears we are to assume she just wants to “kill all the things” for the sake of it?

In summary: Less emphasis on aggression for the sake of it, more attention to lore.

EDIT: I am willing to consider the story has not unfolded yet, but I do think that 6 months is a bit long to get past some of the more mundane aspects of the faction war. We will just have to wait and see.

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You can add draconian transmog rules to your list as well

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Getting back to “the story is still unfolding” it is worth mentioning that the new cinematics and introduction of the new raid were actually pretty awesome.

I mean sure you can always pick apart “why’d they do this” and “why not just that” but from a pure entertainment perspective, I have to say I didn’t hate it.

Also there ARE some really decent quality content creators out there not jumping on the “rage, swear, bash, and blame” negativity train and making really cool stuff to coincide with all this, despite the general climate of… unfriendliness lately? Which I must say is quite refreshing.

Taliesin & Evitel Do Games for example did one of my recent favorites and have a lot of great stuff:

Combined with some big news on Wowhead and elsewhere from the devs that some pretty significant changes to areas of concern ARE in the works, and I am not willing to count Blizzard out quite yet on BfA.

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Disagree. I don’t care that they pruned classes or what not because there is only so much space to add abilities on your bars.

However, I feel like the class/spec flow could have been better but I get that they are trying new things out.

Personally, if the classes played the way they did in MoP, I’d be content, even without all the added abilities. I loved the rotations of each of the classes back then and I loved how they all worked.

My only gripe was that there was only dual spec back then so I didn’t get the chance to try out more specs at the time.

Disagree.

I like the premise that the expansion is built on. It is world of warcraft and I’m always interested in seeing how the two factions interact.

My only issue is the amount of story that is released at a given time. The story is released so slowly that it’s like a sentence of a book being released at time rather than a chapter.

This makes the story feel like it hasn’t been fleshed out well enough.

I would agree with this and I think this ties into the reason behind all the time-gating.

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I agree with this, and didn’t mean to suggest they just add back the SAME abilities they took away verbatim. Some of the new class changes like Demonology I actually enjoy quite a lot.

The problem as I have experienced it is that there were a lot of VISUAL effects and “class feel” type stuff that got lost with the legendary weapons, and it hit some classes much more than others. Affliction in particular from the classes I play, though I understand it puts out good numbers in raids, the play style and visuals (or lack thereof) just doesn’t quite do it for me anymore. I get the impression there are several such cases. The idea Ion recently put forward about having the ability to spec into the HoA would potentially allow a lot of freedom to customize some of that back in.

Assuming they don’t mess up and lock it behind raiding or other specific content which should be reserved for unique mogs and mounts and not core class mechanics IMHO, which is a huge mistake I feel they made with PVP-specific abilities.

I hope you end up being right about your point here of the story just unfolding slowly. I do enjoy Jaina’s character for the most part, and the death Loa, and Talan’ji. There are other cool characters as well, Cyrus because he was the Nord in the first tavern in the original Morrowind, the Wildhammer dwarf guy, lots of the trolls because the personality and voice acting is just cool, the pirate dude, Talia, lots of decent lore characters left over from Legion with potential…

I just think if they want to do a faction war story where one side is disproportionally the totally over-the-top aggressor, they need to get more into how power struggles actually unfold in those scenarios. I guess they are sort of doing some of that with the Saurfang/Bain arc, but I haven’t gotten far enough on Horde side to see it yet.

Still it seems rather unbelievable to me that the Blood Elves in particular would just quietly go along with an undead queen and her armies of raised minions simply annihilating civilizations on a whim out of spite when her initial Malfurian assassination shock and awe plot didn’t quite work out. After what happened to Silvermoon not all that long ago with Arthas you would think such an act would stir some doubt or discontent among Sin’Dorei, even if Sylvanas herself doesn’t remember that is where she actually came from. But they have basically been non-entities this entire expansion (and most of the last, actually).

I get that people wanna PVP but at some point you sort of have to see more rational minds prevail and recognize that look, we’re not talking total disarmament or world peace forever here, but we really need to at least stop the arms RACE long enough to deal with the whole “entire planet is dying” situation. Like a UN summit set our dark age warmongering on the backburner long enough to make sure we all don’t go extinct type deal.

Also there has to be something more than just a flesh wound going on with that giant sword sticking out of the planet, even if it’s KENETIC power was drained, like a demon seed of the dark Titan reincarnating or corrupting Azeroth’s soul somehow, or otherwise leaving something of itself behind that is changing the energy of the world in a subtle way (leading to all the insane hyper-aggression and power madness).

It seems the planet may be a sort of ‘channel’ or dimensional plane in itself where we need to somehow effect the physical, symbolic removal of the intruding influence in order to change the station back to the familiar timeline. Eventually some cosmic aid from the pantheon or another Titan might be needed to assist in this, but there may be more overlap than just the power madness between the planet’s soul and the minds and spirits of the individuals incarnated on it…

Perhaps the story of the Battle for Azeroth could end up being in part the story of these many individuals each overcoming their own symbolic wounds instead of being forever defined by them, not by force but by CHOICE, and that this inner reflection and transcendence is what ends up being necessary to prepare the planet soul not to perish from the shock of forced extraction of the outward influence that is killing her?

I am looking at you, Sylvanas.

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I agree, some classes need updated visuals. Affliction is my favorite warlock spec, has been since vanilla but it lacks visuals. Demo looks cool with all of the portals popping out and stuff but I like the DoT playstyle.

Well, I think Blizzard knows that they can’t have one faction win over the other because that would create heavy discontent. I sort of feel like they’re building one side as heavily immoral so that it lessens the impact when the other side does something equally as questionable:

“Yeah, we did X but you guys burned the tree”

Personally, I want to see development with Jaina, Greymane, Anduin, Baine, Saurfang, Zekhan (Zappyboi), Gelbin Mekkatorque, Sylvanas, Nathanos, Talanji, Rokhan, Vol’jin, Alleria, and Bwonsamdi.

Lots of interesting characters and like you mentioned, there’s the whole sword in Azeroth ordeal that has not gone away yet.

There is a lot of story to be fleshed out but it’s being done excruciatingly slow. One sentence at a time, referencing my metaphor.

This causes people to be unhappy because the bits we do get, don’t have answers in them. Then it takes months for us to get another slice of the story.

I’m going to reserve my judgement when the last bit of story is released to decide whether I’m truly unhappy with the way the story was fleshed out.

1 Like
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Blizzard needs to take a page from the Nintendo book and learn to scrap things that are not working out correctly or as intended. Much like Nintendo scrapped their Metroid Prime 4 progress so should Blizzard have scrapped BfA and went back to the drawing board as well.

Ya people want content. Well people want Metroid Prime 4 as well. When you communicate with people and tell them you are not happy with your product and can do better. You might be surprised how much time people are willing to wait for a better product.

Honestly, other then the incredible job done by the art department and the raid content almost 90% of the rest of the content in BfA should have been scrapped and back to the drawing board. Even Mythic Plus. You can have difficult rewarding content that doesn’t need to come down to beating a timer. You get rid of that and you will suddenly start seeing a lot less people ditching out on groups. It can still be hard. You should still be able to progress to the next level. Just slower.

Then Island Expeditions…… What a missed opportunity those are. Again all about a timer instead of having fun engaging content. I mean if you actually try to go for special things more often then not especially in the harder difficulties it actually costs you a victory. How is that fun? It isn’t!

The world quests… I don’t know but they seem to be missing something. They just feel like a list of daily chores. Not something fun to go out and do. Maybe they are just deluded by this horrible new reward system.

Ya too much loot, far too often, from too many sources, and it makes most of it feel worthless or disappointing. Which totally out weighs any possible feeling of excitement.

Whatever system they are using to base their game design decisions on isn’t working out too well. Honestly after listening to what Ion had to say if I didn’t feel like I had so much invested in this game from 14yrs of playing I would have walked away already. Even he is so disconnected with us the players it is hilarious. Obviously there is a reason WoW’s player base is 1/5th if that of what it was at it’s peak. Meaning the game and the older systems were better.

Ion what your doing now isn’t working. Scrap it, change it, and if it still doesn’t work. Do it again. I want to belief they have it in themselves to deliver us great content but when we start looking more forward to the past and Classic then what is to come in BfA. That should be a red flag and I don’t think they care.