I still like Outland (except for Hellfire and Blade’s Edge) but it could use a cataclysm style glow up. They can leave all the quests the same, just have to make it not have n64 graphics where I can count the polygons with one hand.
2 Likes
See, whenever I show up, it’s “oh no hide the food” and “we don’t have enough resources to let him stay here again”. I got to exalted with both Aldor and Scryers because they united to keep me out of Shattrath.
I wonder if Warcraft 3 Reforged broke their Blizzard Kart custom map.
there is a genuinely fantastic idea right in their own game from 2016 and they haven’t tried to capitalize on it come on
1 Like
TBC could have had no story and greyscale zones with basic geometric shapes instead of actual structures and it would still be better as an MMO because of how the community functioned.
Not that there weren’t toxic people – go into an arena as rogue/disc vs a warlock/druid in a match that lasts over 2 hours, everyone’s guildmates making level 1s to whisper horrible things to you after the first half hour lol
But you still met so many more people just by playing. At least we have walkup on RP servers.
6 Likes
I mean, it did kind of suck in that if you made someone angry…They typically got back at you. On my old main on my original server Lightninghoof, I accidentally pulled that elite Swamp Strider just north of Cenarion in Zangermarsh from two Alliance players. They tried to kill me, failed…And then they used their Horde accounts to track me and came back on their 70s that had raid or max PVP gear and then camped me.
No biggie, I thought. Get their revenge and move on. But no, I had accidentally angered the TOP Alliance raiding and PVP guild on Lightninghoof at the time: Cadia. And they were as egotistical and arrogant as their name and reputation suggests.
I literally could not leave a city without them swooping in and camping me. This went on for weeks where the only time I ever got to play that character was in the wee morning hours server time.
On the flipside, it did force me to level up my first Mage, which I had a ton of fun on and soon became my main…But still, you don’t have to deal with that kind of harassment now. RP communities are the only ones that still exist and as much as it is a symptom of how badly the game is doing right now…I’m really glad that I don’t have to worry about the above issue anymore.
1 Like
I’ve seen too much behind the curtain to ever go back, I think. But that’s fine! One shouldn’t be too starry-eyed when it comes to corporations.
But if they want to win back some of my trust, to get me back to the point where I’m comfortable shelling out money for a Blizzard game because I know I’ll get a quality product, they’d need to do more than just release a quality expansion.
Overwatch 2, Diablo 4, the Diablo 2 remake, and the next WoW expac all being bangers would be a good starting point. Bonus if they take HotS off life support and give it the love it deserves by treating it like a video game and not an e-sports vehicle.
But since this thread is mostly focused on WoW, here’s some of the stuff I’d like to see them do if they want me to give them 15 of my hard-earned moneybucks a month:
- START listening to feedback (and ACT on it).
This is the 2nd expansion in a row in which Blizzard has pointedly ignored all of the feedback they’ve gotten from beta testers. I’m not even sure why they have betas that are open to the playerbase at this point, as they’re clearly not interested in hearing from the people who actually play their game.
Beta testers pointed out that Azerite Armor was an awkward, unintuitive, and overall unfun system that would be especially annoying for people who play multiple specs/roles, and offered up multiple ideas as to how it could be improved. To be fair, some of these ideas were eventually implemented into the game!
After several patches and months and months of people yelling at them on social media.
We’re now seeing the exact same scenario play out with Torghast, the Maw, Covenants, and Anima. All the negative things people are saying about these systems were ALREADY SAID by the people who tested them out.
- STOP treating your playerbase with sneering contempt.
Following from the point above, Blizzard needs to stop treating the playerbase like a bunch of drooling idiots who are out, specifically, to ruin Their Vision. Devs need to stop acting like auteurs, and community managers need to start actually engaging with the community. And no, ranting about how much you hate us on Twitter doesn’t count.
Now, to be fair, I kinda get it. To a degree. WoW’s playerbase can be and often is uniquely awful, but that’s because Blizzard has GONE OUT OF THEIR WAY to cultivate and nurture a uniquely awful community. Snarky devs and absent CMs aren’t going to fix that. In fact, they’ve been making it worse!
And on that note…
- Actually take some freaking steps to fix the cesspool YOU’VE created.
Blizzard, why the heck isn’t the n-word an immediate ban? Why are all the people I’ve reported for often violent homophobia and transphobia still walking around saying awful crap? Why is someone alt-hopping and creating new characters specifically to harass me seen as being my problem?
Step. Up. You. Lazy. A-holes.
Automated systems aren’t enough and they’re too open to abuse. Open up your big, fat wallet and hire people to start cleaning up the crap you’ve left to fester. Oh, and stop fanning the flames of ~faction pride~, because all it has ever led to is Alliance players getting verbally and physically harassed at BlizzCon.
- Some other stuff would be nice too, I guess.
Expanded customization, player housing, a world revamp, more LGBT rep (please no more gay ghosts for eff’s sake) , letting male characters wear earrings, all of that would be nice. But I don’t think it’s anywhere near as important as everything else I’ve listed.
13 Likes
Most mmos I’ve played aren’t like that anymore, interestingly. Group content is very much opt in. Which I might be in the unpopular opinion zone by saying… I actually kind of like it that way. I like being able to do solo stuff AND group stuff. Didn’t much like Classic when I gave it a go - it was too dependent on teamwork.
The irony being part of WoW’s success is compared to most MMOs, WoW had the easiest go of things in regards to being able to solo the content.
Honestly, of all MMOs I’ve played, the only one I actually enjoyed grouping in was City of Heroes…which really didn’t have traditional roles and you could go ham with any group composition and be fine.
4 Likes
It’s funny how that was, I’ve been chilling on some alts in Classic and whew compared to the current game it’s a lot tougher and more unforgiving. I just struggled for 30 minutes trying to kill some murlocs to mine a stupid node lmao
There’s something nice about classic that the main game is missing. I’m not interested in the end game so that’s fine but it’s stuff like, how the game is unforgiving. So leveling your professions matter more because those potions or enchantments or bombs (I’m an engineer) help you a lot more in this more difficult environment.
So I just take my time, sneaking around mining nodes, fishing and cooking foods that give me stat buffs to stack with random buff scrolls I found to give me a little bit more edge over those stupid murlocs surrounding that mining node I want.
2 Likes
Yeah it doesn’t really have much to do with group stuff. Community =/= group content.
I solo levelled in vanilla for the most part. But when you did want to run a dungeon, up until the first patch of WotLK (iirc), it was about interaction, running to the stone etc. Same goes for things like finding items you wanted, crafting. I actually miss the 2 AHs and having a neutral one as well. It felt more like an RPG.
One of my best rogue friends started as a rival, we’d engage in World PvP while doing Skyguard dailies… but sometimes, we’d help each other. Eventually, we fought side-by-side. And in Cata, he quit because the game he knew was gone.
WoW is from a different era tech-wise, too. It’s sort of “out of time” for what it is. I still had a flip phone back when WoW launched. Instagram didn’t exist until 6 years after WoW’s launch.
Nowadays, there are heaps more platforms for communication, making friends, RPing etc. Totally different landscape for gaming, social activity etc.
I think it affects how PC-based MMOs feel nowadays. WoW certainly hasn’t kept pace, innovation is expensive and just as risky as anything they’ve done.
3 Likes
If you’re playing a game for your friends that are also playing it, it isn’t a good game. At this point I can’t think of a single thing they could do that would undo my disdain.
Starting to actually listen to us as a community would be a start. It’s staggering looking at many other MMORPGs out there, but there isn’t a single one where I feel as much “directly disrespected” as I do with Blizzard.
We have basically been spoon-feeding them suggestions that would keep us engaged. We’ve asked for housing, mage towers, more spell effects/customization of spell effects and non-gimmick power progressions for almost four years now. It’s amazing with how much disdain Ion, Danuser and Lore treat us, regardless. Not only will they not do it, but they will make snide remarks in interviews about the issues we have been pointing out, tell us why their vision should be appreciated for what it is, and then even put “jokes” in the game about it at some point. “Our goal to make everyone Night Fae is almost finished!” Yeah, good one! Now how about you actually fix that issue instead of joking about it and saying you’re happy with Covenants…? Alternatively, maybe just don’t make it worse with Covenant legendaries?
It’s one thing not to listen to your customers, but it’s another to always think you just know better and treat them with cold disinterest and make jokes on their expense.
And if that wasn’t enough, they will go back on things they say in interviews within fourty-eight hours by now. Ion discussed in an interview how Torghast had to be nerfed (and was made worse pre-release) because it was tied to power progression and everyone had to be able to clear it for their legendaries. He acknowledged that having the sense of a “timer” can feel disheartening, even if the timer isn’t objectively a big deal. And we fought them tooth and nail to remove the torments that made Torghast a “GOGOGO!” run in beta, and they actually did.
What’s happening in 9.1?
Torments are back and (micro)timers are a thing now. The entire thing feels worse than it was in 9.0 for the sole reason of selling us on a skill tree to make it less annoying. I can only agree with Preach in his latest video - this is the literal opposite of where this feature should be going. You acknowledge timers aren’t fun and you acknowledge it had to be nerfed in difficulty because it was mandatory. And then you go and do the full opposite of a fix - you introduce timers once again and tie even more player power levels to it. They literally took something we all said doesn’t work in beta and re-added it six months later for…Light know’s why.
At this point what they would need to do to get my trust back is to just once - once - acknowledge the problem and offer a solution the community suggested in the same sentence. No snide remarks. No snarky comments. No “grand vision” nonsense. Just start working with your community. If something gets multiple 10k+ upvote threads across reddit and the forums, then maybe it is a problem and should be addressed ASAP.
5 Likes
Honest question here.
I remember a lot of positive feedback around their listening during the Shadowlands beta, and giving them praise for it myself. They were going to require a currency to get into Torghast, then they got rid of that. They were going to make conduits an inventory item, and they changed. (They said that they wanted to keep conduits as items that so conduits wouldn’t be an inventory nightmare, like… what? Whatever.) They were going to limit the number of changes you could make on your Soul Binds, but changed the system up somewhat.
It feels like they made a pointed effort to listen to player feedback during the Shadowlands beta. Is your concern that they didn’t go far enough, and things that players said would be bad and broken turned out to be bad and broken?
Can I see the source on this? I’m not doubting you. I just wanna see it.
Again, honest question. I’ve seen others post about this in this thread. Between FlynnShaw, the lesbian couple that got married in Shadows Rising, Pelagos, some lesbian kyrians and Venthyr, it seems like there has been a significant amount of LGBTQ+ representation added into the game as of late. I even know LGBTQ+ people who have said, for right or for wrong, they feel like there’s a bit of an oversaturation of LGBTQ+ representation in the game. What else needs to be done to have adequate LGBTQ+ representation in the game?
EDIT: I guess a lot of people in this thread have had similar concerns. Your post is just the one I’m picking on for convenience sake.
3 Likes
More worldbuilding on Azeroth and less reliance on borrowed powers in class design would be a great start, for sure. Let classes be classes again. Do not add spells only to make it clear that we’re soon going to lose these and shouldn’t get overly attached to them. More frequent PvE/PvP tuning would be good too. Slight, but consistent changes meant to bring all the classes to more or less equal levels of performance and viability.
I think another thing was back then, being a jerk had more consequences because server communities were still a thing. You usually got to know your server better and if someone was an a-hole or ninja looter people would stop grouping with them.
People still got away with being asssshats but the anonymity of LFG you don’t have the same repercussions of making your server hate you if you are totally obnoxious.
1 Like
They do need to go a little bigger when listening to feedback. How much they tweak an expansion system doesn’t matter that much when it is an expansion system that nobody asked for and nobody wants.
When choosing what features an expansion will have, they should listen to what players want. Was anyone asking to go to the afterlife and grind out a complicated rep system with vampires? No. Shadowlands didn’t offer any new features that people had been requesting except the chargen revamp, which was good but was unfortunately abandoned in a half-finished state.
Compare with, say, Legion, which took a fan-favorite character, resurrected him, added a new class which had been requested since vanilla, etc. It gave us a lot of stuff we had been asking for, and as such we were willing to overlook some of its downsides.
Classic is another good example. Years and years of “you think you do but you don’t” turned into a huge success when they just did what people asked for.
BfA would have been a lot better received if they just did the obvious things players wanted too. I liked the allied race system but its just plain weird that we got mechagnomes and fox people before we got high elves and ogres. Allied races are mostly cosmetic and it would have been such as easy way to curry favor with players by just doing the obvious, popular thing rather than doing the weird thing.
Obviously this doesn’t have much to do with betas, because I think Shadowlands was already a failed product in beta since it is so empty of good ideas (the only thing feedback could have improved was the new customization options). The best possible incarnation of covenants is still a fundamentally weak idea. But I hope at the earliest stages of the next expansion they are thinking about what players actually want as a new feature, not what psychologically manipulative endgame grind system Ion can cook up this time
7 Likes
Quoting for emphasis. The issue with Blizzard and feedback is not (singularly) whether they take it into account, it’s that they reel in where they can on inconsequential (or otherwise clearly profit harming) decisions but never make big change in the places it matters because Blizzard has only one objective and it is not player satisfaction.
There’s a history of Blizzard calling their players wrong, making poor design decisons on purpose, missing memos, and more I’m sure I’m missing. When Blizzard sets out per expansion, what we see is what we get and no amount of feedback can fix that. The effective hope is that they take the feedback into account next time.
And then they don’t. And it gets panned in the alpha / beta phase, and they scramble and throw numbers at the problem to try and “balance” it into a position where people are inevitably told to suck it up and maybe next time we’ll have it for sure even though all the feedback before and after was that no one wanted it.
And then they do it again. We’re at, like, three in a row for that specifically even.
8 Likes
Well… for me, the biggest grievance this time around was Covenant abilities. I held some naïve hope that whole issue would be resolved (despite feeling very slighted) with the .1 patch, only to then learn they’re doubling down on the concept with Covenant-specific legendaries.
I also felt a lot of the passion evaporate with the prepatch of BFA. It really hurt to see such fundamental changes with the factions – the Horde in particular, who pretty much received the characterization of “pure and utter evil.” And I understand some folks like that… but I sure wasn’t one of 'em. It felt like it lacked the nuance I’d been craving, emphasizing the core ideological differences between the factions without making either blatantly… well, evil. The story just wasn’t what I expected. But the landscapes were nice.
I wish I could give more input, but I am quite disillusioned. RP has really been keeping me going for years, but that well’s finally ran dry; my sub runs out tonight. I feel pretty sad about it and keep looking through the forums and old screenshots, but the magic has faded. I’m hoping it’s just burnout, but something feels very different. I see fewer and fewer of my longtime friends logging in and I just do not click with the modern story/content whatsoever.
Over the years, I just feel the game strays further and further away from what made me fall in love with it. But of course I know my experience is my own and I truly hope those sticking around find just as much joy in it. This server in particular has such a wonderful community and, if I stay gone, I’m truly going to miss it. It’s hard to say specifically what would restore that confidence, but I know it’d be a drastic and highly unlikely change.
I have to admit that the endgame grind is a significant part of why I’ve quit, at least for the time being. It’s too much to keep up with. And I say that as someone who usually has at least an hour a day to play. If I did all my world quests/anima grind I didn’t have time for dungeons, and if I did that I didn’t have time for RP and on and on it goes. Got exhausting.
1 Like
I don’t think anything short of a complete independent buyout of Blizzard away from Activision would make me come back. And, let’s be honest, they are more likely to have the entire company bought out by Tencent before that happens.
I think the comparison of Blizzard trying to be auteurs is pretty apt. They were top for so long that they have this “We know best” mentality, but that doesn’t really hold weight in today’s gaming environment. There are just too many games and too much competition, and PC gaming isn’t some weird stepchild to consoles anymore. Twitch and YouTube have turned it into a massively large industry beyond what it was even ten years ago.
There are some game changes that would help that others have gone over. Better moderation, player housing, etc. But, from the top-down, the company has shown it’s too interested in its metrics and beancounters rather than making a good game or welcoming environment. Something like moderation has payoffs that are too intangible for them, and the company is already filled with a lot of really weird Orange County Gamebros to want to actively move in the directions the game needs.
I’ll stick with the game where the devs do monthly updates, cosplay as their favorite characters on stream, and do live readings of their patch notes each release as part of their tradition.
7 Likes