It is a, mostly, universally agreed upon problem that loot is too restrictive.
It is a, mostly, universally agreed upon problem that Covenant abilities being locked behind cosmetics sucks.
It is a, mostly, universally agreed upon problem that Tyrannical is still massively overtuned.
It is a, mostly, universally agreed upon problem that large sections of the game are over tuned.
These are not difficult things to change. These are not things that have massive amounts of people championing. These are not things that are even controversial.
They are all, objectively, things that would make the gameplay more enjoyable for the most amount of people.
Instead we have a massive bleed of players in all levels of content and massive drop offs, and yeah that data does exist. It’s not speculation
I don’t agree with ANY of those four things, so not is it not “universally agreed” upon.
That’s the issue.
Just because the hundred or so people on the forums all want the game to be as easy as possible, does not mean Blizzard should listen to them.
Compared to what game? Compared to a perfect MMO, that only exists in your imagination? Sure, every real-world MMO is “deeply flawed” compared to that impossible ideal.
In the real world, perfection does not exist. If you choose to focus on the imperfections, you can find them in any MMO, any game, any product, anything.
okay, the OP started with one type of question, and to be fair your post did kind of fan the flames of an already touchy subject.
There are many, many problems the game has been facing for a long time. In the last few years they have worsened. I’ve heard my sons’ and many, many friends who played this game from it’s inception perspectives and why, in turns, they one by one quit. I’ve read these boards, and I’ve played.
It isn’t just negativity on these and other forums - there really are many smart people with diverse opinions I’ve noticed since reading regularly. These very same people have been asked up front from the dev’s what they want more of in the game - I remember this last year at some point - and not one thing was implemented.
Not only that, promises of an alt friendly SL, and no huge chore list would happen. That turned out to be straight up lies.
I don’t know a lot about the in’s and out’s of the gear with raiding, dungeons, pvp - I do know it’s not what was advertised to these people, that the game is designed for time sink more than fun. That is irrefutable as despite our differences everyone agrees on this single point.
I played happily enough; nice stress buster and made me think, until this expansion. I liked challenging myself, I didn’t care about gear that much, just enough to get by was fine until last expac I found myself having to buy armor on AH to compete decently in pve.
SL happened and it became crystal clear. Many players had legit reasons to b upset. And me? For the first time the fun is not as it once was - “this one daily takes a few minutes longer” is patently untrue. The untruths flying around by dev’s and the big shot caller’s this time is making me sit up and notice. Especially to lies.
That first part isn’t necessarily true though, and kind of demonstrates a situation that MMO games kind of naturally fall into.
If a TV show is initially popular enough to result in people socializing around the TV show, then people will often stick with the TV show even when it becomes bad, because they still want to be current on it when talking with others about it (and they hope it will somehow manage to right itself in the end).
This is why, for instance, virtually everyone who watched Game of Thrones kept watching Game of Thrones till the very end of its last season (even when the massive undead invasion episode was a total bust that mostly just left people wondering how to turn the “brightness” setting up on their screens).
A lot of the audience of the TV show “Lost” stuck with it, no matter how obvious it became that the writers had never actually planned how to answer half the “mysteries” they seeded. To this day, people still even watch “Walking Dead”, and whenever you look on a thread about it, half the people watching it are like, “This show is terrible. Why am I still watching this show?!”
This is a straw man. I never compared WoW to any other game. It’s still deeply deeply flawed.
Those are two different subjects. No game is going to be perfect. In my opinion WoW is lacking in activities outside of raid and dungeons when it can be so much more. Races akin to GW2, in game refinement of pet battle systems or other side activities.
But that isn’t something I’ll criticize because it is, my issues and personal opinions.
A 32-36% (EA and US) loss in participation, larger by far than any other season since 7.2, isn’t so much a personal opinion.
Nor is it a personal opinion that the game is bleeding Americans at a much higher rate.
But haven’t you heard? They are going to give it to us in 9.1 (after a likely 6+ week renown timegate)! That’s like way earlier than they did before right? I mean our overseers would never do anything detrimental to hurt us. We love Blizzard and thank them for their benevolence.
My apologies, text is hard to read. Is this general mockery or do you believe I’m a Blizzard shill? Honest question here, I don’t want to respond incorrectly.
Oh no, it is certainly refutable.
Its a game. Its supposed to be fun, start to finish, including the parts you believe are “timesinks.”
If you believe otherwise, that is nothing but pessimism speaking.
I have never once logged on and didn’t have fun.
The days that might occur, I don’t log on, end of discussion.
All this talk about “lies” and “untruths” just tells me you need a break.
This is not something anyone who enjoys a hobby should ever be saying about it.
The day a single one of those words come out of my mouth, is the day I stop playing this game.
Because the shot-callers and designers are talentless hacks riding on the success of people who either left or were fired for not also being hacks years ago.
They know they are a total embarrassment, or they are actually insane enough to think they’re good at their job - and are just riding out this mess they have created. All they had to do was not ruin the game after MoP, but no.
Bobby Kotick (ActiBlizz CEO in a message to shareholders years ago) - “The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.”
And here we are years later with a game unashamedly being designed around boosting quarterly statements.
But it’s pretty disingenuous to say those numbers are equal. Especially when, months into an expansion, Blizzard is still nerfing abilities and bosses by 10%. hell 70% in some cases.
They come. The changes people are asking for will come eventually. It’s just slow, because Blizzard is stubborn. They do this “every” expansion. They do it to the point where problems with class balance is brought up in “beta” and it goes live and months later it gets fixed because they had a vision.
There is a point where Blizzard as developers should stick to their guns.
There is also a point where their guns are playing part in one of the largest drops in participation seen in years.
This doesn’t stop WoW from being a fun game. Up until the last month or so, I was on almost nightly. I’m still on most every night. It is a fun game.
But that doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore the problems that pretty blatantly exist.
just more grind for the same dev cost while hopefully retaining a similar amount of players or even increasing player retention
all the friction, all the manual grouping, all the timegating - just a hardcore focus on increasing grind and finding our max tolerance for grind without losing too many players
reason: more grind means the player has more /timeplayed not just a longer sub and /timeplayed directly correlates to increased cash shop buys of gold as a metric
What makes you think that when Servers close and Private servers show up (and don’t say they won’t because we all know they all will),which offer better content, or undoes many of Blizzard’s boneheaded ideas; some of the stock market people won’t point to the downward spiral as intentional fiscal malfeasance as well?
Wouldn’t be a bad idea for the investors to sue and make waves now for willful negligence tbh, because WoW is still completely viable if you get rid of the loose trash and the individuals that are trying to end it. Because this is like letting a mansion have crappy tenants that trash it and ruin the value, just so you can buy it cheap.
