Why Does Blizz Always Go Way Overboard to Solve 'Problems'?

Community General Discussion
1

It feels like Blizzard alway listens to player feedback and then takes their solution to the extreme - creating a problem on the other end of the scale.

Cata: Players said WOTLK dungeons were too easy, so we’ll make it impossible to complete a pug herioc.
MOP: Players didn’t have enough to do in Cata, so here are three million dailies.
WOD: Too many dailies in MOP? You get virtually no world content at max level.
Legion: Want world content? Everything you need is tied to world content. Better get lucky and get the right legendary drop.
BFA: No idea what happened here.
Shadowlands: Too much gear in BFA? Get ready for a gear drought unless you’re hardcore.

Why can’t Blizzard just learn from the previous expansion? Most of the time they resolve the problem by the last patch, only to start the whole process over again in the next expansion.

It’s so frustrating to go through this again and again.

54 Likes
3

I may be in the minority here, but I had no problems at all with Cata Heroics.
What was annoying with them was having to CC things. CC doesn’t so much slow down dungeons as it interrupts the flow of the dungeon’s pace while waiting for the mage to open their spellbook and find the polymorph spell, or the Hunter trap CD to come back up because they missed, or the Ret Paladin going lolwhospecs Repentance.

There are better ways to slow down a dungeon than to create hard CC targets, especially when you have to rely on random strangers to do the CC’ing.

Did you play Cata… at all?

There were Dailies all over the place. Twilight Highlands, Tol Barad, Uldum, and then you had the Molten Front, as well. Not to mention Archaeology for additional in the world exploration and grinding. Stupid Zin’rokh.

I’m sensing a pattern here. I suspect you only play the end of an Expansion. There were the Apexis Daily quests that were a single quest, but took roughly the same amount of time as a slew of dailies for similar reward and you could group up to do them as well.

You also had the Garrison Campaign that told you several stories with a major quest line each week, and your Inn quests that took you to dungeons for unique rewards.

WoD’s large failing was canceled content, not the content that was there.

Having daily quests removed from hubs and set numbers and thrown out all over the world was actually rather neat. Especially being able to see the rewards from the map right away without having to go anywhere or have a wowhead guide bookmarked to remember what faction I want rewards from. Major storyline and reward quests taking you all over the place, though, was not a new thing and has been a part of WoW since Vanilla.

Legendary drops were pretty awful at the start, though.

Decent content design, bad story integration, major regression on character abilities, and poor itemization choices for loot. This results in loot being terrible to receive no matter how much or how little you get of it. Just like Diablo 3.

The vault is a step in the right direction, but the WoW Devs really really need to realize that this is NOT Diablo. An MMO requires a steady, visible progression of character power and gear, and the current loot mechanics are not that.

Wrath really was the best expansion for Gear. You had the best gear drop randomly from raids. You had good gear drop from dungeons, and you earned Badges that could get you better than dungeon gear, but not as good as raid gear that were guaranteed should RNGesus take a disliking to you.

You could progress in PvE or PvP, and your abilities were your own and not tied to Gear. Borrowed power just plain sucks.

6 Likes
4

I think they tried to solve the imbalance of M+ being spammable and raids not being spammable but went way too far with it. Now the end of dungeon loot is usually just pre-enchanting mats.

I have a crazy wish that they went the other way with it and removed the weekly lockout on raids so they would be spammable too.

4 Likes
5

I would disagree. As a non-raider in WoD, it felt like I had no reason to go outside of my garrison, at all. People would just sit in their garrisons all day and use trade chat. That’s the feeling that got me to unsub halfway through, if not sooner.

4 Likes
6

Because they cut both major Faction hubs out of the expansion. The Horde was supposed to have a city in that fortress they storm shortly after setting up their Garrison, and the Alliance was supposed to have a city in Karabor.

The also cut the Auchindoun raid, and the entire Ogre Continent. The amount of content that was present was solid for the start of the expansion, but with the content cuts it stagnated and once you were done with Apexis farming and the Garrison Campaign quests there was no need to go anywhere.

This would have happened with any expansion, though. It would have been like cutting Ulduar from Wrath, and never implementing the Argent Tournament… nobody would have left Dalaran because at that point in the expansion most Guilds has Naxx, OS, and EoE on farm and people were exalted with the Dailies factions.

5 Likes
7

Feels like somehow they regret that WOTLK was so successful and are constantly chasing a way to make the game as fun as it was back then without having to actually make it fun.

6 Likes
8

Let me get the list out.

2 Likes
9

And don’t forget, WOD only had 1 content patch. 1. And all it did was add a pretty but mostly empty zone, a few dailies, and one more raid.

WOTLK had more content by the end of its first patch than all of WOD.

3 Likes
10

Because blizzard is actually loath to listen to player feedback. The devs are the superstars of the show and we’re the groupies they don’t need to listen to us. So when they finally do they slam our ideas down t the most extreme manner to “show us whos boss” by showing us how bad our ideas were. Except that the implementation was bad not the idea and the implementation is always on them.

14 Likes
11

Cataclysm: The heroics at the start of the expansion were almost impossible unless you had a dedicated guild group. They were later nerfed, but still remained incredibly difficult in group finder groups.

MOP: The difference in dailies was that the MOP ones offered compelling reasons to do them. Much of the gear was locked behind the reps and they offered excellent rewards. There was almost no reason to do Cata dailies. They rewarded nothing to progress a character and had nothing compelling behind the reps.

WOD: The Apexis dailies offered no stories, no story progression, and if memory serves, very little in the way of gear or rewards. They were a huge step back from the previous dailies and almost no one was doing them after the first month.

Legion: My main problem was locking legendaries behind the dailies. I quite like the new structure though.

BFA: I’ll admit I liked this expansion, though 8.3 wasn’t amazing.

Shadowlands: I agree with you there.

12

One of the things I remember about Cataclysm is that I would log in, put myself into a queue for a dungeon. Go do a bunch of quests and an hour or two later log out without ever stepping foot into a dungeon.

1 Like
13

I remember 45-60 minutes queues at the best of times. And that was as a healer. It seemed like most healers and tanks went on strike that expansion.

1 Like
14

We call that the Blizzard Monkey Paw.

Why solve a problem when you can create three more?

4 Likes
15

Wouldn’t it be nice to just… yaknow… play however we want?

O wait, meaningful choices.

Tell me what to do Daddy Blizzard!

3 Likes
16

How come this is never followed up with, here is an example of how to make it fun?

17

Because they are solving THEIR problems, not ours. Like world quests. People were mostly doing just the fast “Kill Mr. XYZ” world quests. Instead of realizing that the people prefer to get WQ’s over with quickly, they removed those completely in order to force us to take longer to complete WQ’s. If taking longer to complete WQ’s was fun, we would have opted to do the long ones in BFA.
They are solving THEIR problems, not ours.

12 Likes
18

It was exactly the same last expansion, though. End-of-dungeon M+ loot in BfA was just vendor trash. Why have people forgotten this so quickly? I don’t get it.

A better solution is to increase the M+ reward quality but slap a weekly lockout on every M+ dungeon.

19

WHY DOES BLIZZ ALWAYS GO WAY OVERBOARD TO SOLVE ‘PROBLEMS’?

Because not a single blizzard employee has a Websters and has looked up the word ‘moderation’.
And likely never will.
they prefer the politicianesque method of going to the extremes ends of every issue to make themselves seem useful when they push limits to the point of making players quit, so they can seem like the good guy savior when they finally dial things back to where they SHOULD have been the first time where anyone with any cognitive skills whatsoever could have easily foreseen.

The pointless loot-a-rang changes and keyclone software ban come to mind in pondering ‘extreme’ knee jerk reaction that has done nothing to stop or even slow bots down, as evidenced by the explosion of bot hate threads since they made these asinine changes.

5 Likes
20

What difference does it make? They don’t read the forums and they don’t care about our opinions. Also we aren’t paid to make the game fun.

2 Likes
21

Your description of the badge gear makes it sound like it is the exact same quality as SL covenant/honor gear.

Except the currency is anima and renown instead of badges.