They want details. OK
I’ll start…
Too much RNG - One of the great aspects of wow used to be once they progressed the game towards the badge system which helped to counter bad rng/luck by allowing you to farm up for gear instead of running on the wheel and hoping a pellet would fall into your hands. It created goals to work towards. You know how many of X you needed to do in order to reach your goal. It made the worst parts of the grinding more bearable.
What we have now is that wheel for both pve’ers and pvp’ers with pve’ers having the luxury of breaking down azerite gear for badges. Pvp’ers are stuck hoping their chest doesn’t give duplicate rewards from weeks prior which are either broken down for mats or pve badges. And due to the lack of pvp gear, this path leads to much longer periods of farming the rng to get the upgrades. If the gear is non-azerite, you’re screwed and waiting until next week. The way for pvp’ers to get around this is to be shoved into an aspect of the game they don’t really want to do. M+ and raiding.
For the pve’ers, they are still in the same boat of having none of the bad rng protection that badges brought outside of azerite armor. And now without ML, and the restrictions on trading, the hamster wheel feels even more daunting.
Too much rep gating - In the past, if there was a rep grind that seemed long, you could run dungeons that rewarded rep for that faction and/or equip the rep tabard. This helped to address lack of quests and to add other pathways to gain rep. We all took a step back to waiting for more quests to become available so we can do what we want inside of blizzard’s determined timeline. This was a move in the wrong direction.
Which leads to:
Too much timegating -
"You guys are consuming the content too fast in the couple of hours you would finish it and then complain about no content. So they have to space it!"
That is often the response we see whenever we have a problem with the drip-feeding of content that is released during patch cycles. Such as when we were waiting for the Broken Shore questline to finally unlock flying that took weeks in itself.
Class design(lack of) - We’ve had 3 expansions of pruning and with each the classes have become worse than before. Some classes/specs were released broken and were told to wait until a later patch which has now been kicked down the road to 9.0. Some feel incomplete. And with those incomplete classes/specs are what should be core abilities put into the talent trees(looking at you Warlock).
Iconic aspects of certain classes have been removed from the class or the spec(Shaman totems, rogue poisons, warrior stances, etc) for the sake of “class fantasy.” The only class fantasy served was that we were left fantasizing about how it USED to be.
And with each round of pruning came the same response of, “we hear you. we don’t want to keep removing things.” Only to be followed up with even more pruning.
If blizzard was capable of providing expansions worth of content in each patch, it wouldn’t matter that much when the vehicle in which you experience the content is UNFUN and/or broken.
This issue should be top priority. If your car is out of gas, you aren’t going to kick the tires and give it a paint job to fix it. You can try but it won’t work. The classes are pruned and gutted and are running on empty. Return them to glory.
Pathfinder - We were told that the whole purpose was to make sure we experience the world that the art team created as if we weren’t before. Before pathfinder, we leveled up on the ground. We experienced the world. And when we completed the leveling, we could reward ourselves flying for that work. The cost was relatively expensive for the average player. It was another goal to look forward to other than just, "Now I can que/group up for dugeons/raids and grind for gear until the next patch so you can do that again."
With each expansion, pathfinder has grown more and more deep and the wait has been longer and longer it seems. You couple this with bad class design and you have recipe for logoffs/unsubs. It’s not interesting. It is not fun. This is just a game, not labor. There’s no need to turn everything into a laborious endeavor.
Which leads to:
Dazing, bad pathing, and tedious obstacles - You know what I’m talking about.
- You need to run up to that quest hub and you zig-zag up 10 different levels to reach it when it makes no sense for the path to be that way.
- Or you have roads leading through packs of mobs that will excessively daze you unless you are a tank or have an absorb.
- Or water next to water next to water JUST deep enough to make sure you have to swim it(this was rectified with the strider mount which has now been gutted). The mount equipment replacement seems to be a means to remove/gate water walking in the future.
- The layers of terrain with objectives strangely buried to where it is an objective in itself just to find the right spot.
All of these things seem to all have a common denominator. Time inflation. It’s not interesting. It’s not fun. It’s just more tedious labor.
Which leads to:
Removal of fun or conveniences - Each new patch brings new nerfs to old items/abilities that were primarily just used for fun purposes OR items players spent time farming before due to convenience(example: Water strider). It makes the effort put into getting these items worthless which in turn makes the items themselves inevitably worthless. Why farm for something you know is going to be made nearly obsolete later? We need more reasons to farm and invest our time, not less.
(From a pvp perspective)
The removal of blacklist and the design of the bg’s themselves - Being unable to blacklist battlegrounds makes for a pretty bad experience when you see that loading screen of that dreaded bg. The one you want to blacklist. Most of the time it’s better for your playing experience to just take the debuff and reque later due to the dislike of the bg and the boring class design. If you were to take a poll, I wouldn’t be surprised if we found out that pvp’ers dislike most of the regular bg’s. So instead of levels of fun bg’s, we have levels of bearable to unbearable bg’s. When you couple this with the gearing system(lack of) in pvp now, and class design issues, it again is NOT FUN.
And whoever thought it was a good idea to bring Ashran back without allowing us to blacklist, please move them.
Glitches and bugs - I am looking at you, combat bug. Take a look at the bug forum. There are so many topics being created daily. I don’t remember it being so bad until recently. And most of the bugs were reported in Beta/PTR or have existed for a long time and just overlooked. WoW in the past would delay a patch if it wasn’t ready. The idea now is to release it asap and just fix as it goes along.
Lag, disconnects, and random hiccups - The lag and etc in BFA seems to be worse than ever. This was also evident on high pop realms when it was taking FOREVER to withdraw/deposit from the gbanks and even the auction house. While this was fixed, it took you OVER A YEAR to fix it. We may seem demanding but we can be patient. But not THAT patient.
Laziness in gear design - So many, so so many reskins. While minor to some, this laziness has removed a large part of farming that we would do for transmogs. Why go and do that dungeon for that piece 50 ilvls lower with the same skin of the mog you already have? Obsolete content became obsolete very fast.
Clipping of the gear through the character models is also another issue(although admittedly minor, it is still common).
Mount reskins fall into this category, as well. Good mounts go to the shop and the rest are ugly reskins that aren’t worth farming for. Someone wasted their time designing them for sure. Unless you’re a completionist/collector, why bother? They should be interesting and not lazy reskins.
While I couldn’t include EVERY single thought I personally have and I tried to limit the rambling on my biggest complaints, I feel I have given a decent enough list of “feedback” for those that feel we must provide it to them. What are your complaints?
EDIT: Forgot about CRZ and sharding.
P.S. When I go to mount my class mount and it gets interrupted either due to combat or my own choice, can you please make it also interrupt the audio? The continuous screeching that carries on even after interrupt is annoying.