They have several examples of what “works” from past expansion data sets, many posts on the forums agreeing almost unanimously that glyphs and WoD’s transmog restrictions were a good thing people want back, etc. We cannot help it if they ignore data…
11 Likes
Ya, it’s a negative feedback loop. Short term gains for a long term bleed.
Continually having to meet numbers with a product that has a lifetime customer retention rate of between 0-2%
3 Likes
What is the purpose of intentionally making gold bars not shareable after 3 months? What moving parts of the game was it harming to all of us players when it was fine for 3 months?
34 Likes
Too much of the game is designed to slow you down, to impede you whenever possible, and to stretch out your gameplay as long as possible. Like I get it, it’s a business and they’re trying to maximize time played, but there needs to be a balance between the carrot and the stick. Some of these recent changes are just so inconsiderate of the player’s time.
13 Likes
They don’t. They have the actual data.
They see what every player is doing every time they log in, and they compile that data into trends they are likely discussing and presenting as evidence of success or failure of systems when contemplating future changes.
Talk means little to them at this point, sadly.
Especially because everyone keeps insulting their intelligence and ability to design the game they are willingly playing.
I can’t imagine there is a way to respect a community that does that so often, so loudly.
So this is a multiplayer game, right? We’re supposed to - nay, encouraged to - party up and work together? And the Maw is supposed to be a place that’s especially dangerous and encourages people to work together?
So why then did they change a daily quest there (and the moth one too) to get party members competing with each other over the same clickables? It’s not the only quest that now works like this, because the state of WQs in Shadowlands is extremely inconsistent with respect to how they handle parties, but holy cats.
8 Likes
How about the idea that there was no purpose?
Do you think they also made it so Invisibility Potions broke so many different ways?
This, to me, looks like a bug.
Nothing would have changed that would make them suddenly want to make these quests work differently.
If they wanted them that way, they would have made them that way a long time ago.
A patch is not required to change something like that.
Think the question with these changes is, why make the changed now and how does it not work for the game when it worked fine for months.
The goal of the systems is to support a fun game. Not the game exists to support the systems. Negative changes to the game for the systems sake is really looking at things backwards.
22 Likes
There is actually, there is a saying: “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time."-John Lydgate. It’s simple really, if roughly 75% of people say MoP is the best expansion they experienced, and the same agree that WotLK was also good (which seems to be the general consensus on the forums) then go with what MoP/WotLK did right… someone’s gonna complain, the difference is whether you have the 25% grumbling or the 75%…
The more you explain how good Blizzards metrics are and how much better they know than us, the more baffled I become at how they still make these horrible changes.
19 Likes
Or its just a bug, like all the other stuff that has been bugged since the patch came out.
Given the catastrophic loss of subs this early into a new expansion, it seems the developers are more out of touch with the players than ever before. They literally either don’t seem to know what the majority players want, or they simply do not care.
31 Likes
It seems a lot of people consider covenience, dumbing down, high speed and so on enjoyable, and anything which tries to make things more involving and less on tracks is seen as bad.
Flying is a clear example since it does remove content and player interaction for the sake of convenience and “efficiency”, yet there’s always a revolution when Blizzard tries to amend or delay this mistake of the past which has been damaging their content creation for ages.
The question is, do people actually find skipping content and player interactions enjoyable, or are the content and the playerbase so awful now that many want to skip all of it and remain in their little bubbles?
The Maw is a clear example of content which exists to annoy you. The whole time you’re there, there’s always some nonsense going on just to piss you off. Garbage falling from the sky to nuke and root you when you’re trying to PvP or pick up something, tiny zones that are tightly packed with mobs which have absurd aggro range, stealth detection and a plethora of CC skills, the eye counter which arbitrarily limits your play time and so on.
I was all for keeping mounts out of the Maw with the hopes that it would become an interesting PvP zone, but that never happened. The majority of people merely try to zoom through their dailies/weeklies and avoid PvP.
Now Blizzard introduced a “welfare” Maw mount for people who can’t clear TC, which I see as throwing in the towel and just allowing everybody to skip this awful content in an easier manner.
But why was such content created in the first place, why would you want players to not engage in your creation?
6 Likes
Of all the complaint threads to make a post denying “contempt for the playerbase,” this is definitely not the complaint to do it.
A developer either doesn’t care that they’re fostering irritation between their players in this situation, which is absolutely showing “contempt” for the playerbase, or they don’t know that rendering quest items unshared would have that effect, in which case they are very incompetent.
It’s a minor issue, probably the gaming equivalent to stealing a parking spot from someone who has been waiting for it to open. But it’s certainly contemptuous of players.
27 Likes
For most cases, its important to think in their terms.
They develop the game neutrally.
They can not take into account what you specifically want, because another player will want the opposite.
Instead, they make the game the way they think works best based on the data they have.
If the data they have shows that there is something to make the Maw dailies not give shared loot, then that’s that.
But I doubt it.
This looks like a bug to me.
extreme Walter Sobchak voice Do you see what happens, Larry? This is what happens, Larry. This is what happens when you put a humorless lawyer in charge of WoW.
19 Likes
Well if it’s not it would be best to say it was.
Obviously being a bug or unintended change is possible but it seem sort of a stretch as to what ancillary system change caused it or why they were messing with a working quest to get such a specific bug.
2 Likes
When a vast majority of players doesn’t want to do your content, you have made the wrong content. Also, flying doesn’t “skip content.” It makes doing the content more enjoyable to the majority of players.
16 Likes
Only the player feels that way, is my point.
Not everything is always going to benefit the player, so its best to stop acting like it should.
If they did make this decision for a reason, its a good one.
But I doubt they even MADE this decision.
I believe it was a bug, like so many other things that happened with this patch.
It was clearly rushed out in many ways.
Just because you have data, doesn’t mean it’s the right data to use for a particular question.
13 Likes