Like it was designed with the intention of making everything take more time than being more fun?
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Maybe because Activision-Blizzard is a business, and the longer people play the game the more money the business makes?
That, and playtime is a metric that shareholders look at.
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Have something specific you are referring to or is this just whining for upvotes?
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Because thats how they measure the health of the game now. Sub numbers used to be that way but now its time played metric and its not a good thing.
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Because they design for that, MAU’s and Time-Played Metrics, to please stockholders.
Edit: Sorry, forgot Mr, Hazzikostas says they Never use those words during development.
Because they Design for Immersion and Exploration, to show players how to have fun properly.
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What a ridiculous concept
Blizz makes money regardless of how much time you play
You could buy a sub and play 0 minutes and they would make the same amount
They space out content so people don’t no life it in the first 72 hours
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Well it does not take a rocket scientist to see this…rng ontop if the rng for armor drops from raids or bosses in dungeons…i know some one in my guild that did 28 mythic plus Shrine and still did not get his bis drop done in about 2 days
Pathfinder altho its been around awile it is a time sink…
Would you like me to go on…
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Yeah, like rng gearing has never existed in wow. Not ever until BfA.
Pathfinder is fine.
All that aside, I wasn’t asking you, I was asking the OP, but hey - if you need to squawk little parrot, by all means; climb on my shoulder and squawk.
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Not at this level, but meh you do you…
Did not give an opinion on it if it was good or bad…just that it is a time sink
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I love the idea that Blizzard is just perpetually independently wealthy despite having literally about a decade of bad decision making coming back to haunt them at every possible turn.
Like they’ll never have to tune into the customers’ needs or expectations, and they can just keep living however they want.
Let’s see which of us can maintain that lifestyle longer, eh Blizz?
War of attrition is fine by me.
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And, you’re supporting them building around metrics instead of (not in addition to) making the game fun? I’ve seen it all now.
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…No? He asked a question, and I answered it.
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Because it is (?).
Money.
This is consistent with any new game coming out. The only exception may be the single player games, and some of those make me scratch my head.
Battlefield and Call of Duty added those Battle Royale unlocks, loot boxes, etc. It is quite evident that the video game industry is a target of revenue building.
The question always that comes from the higher ups is how can we make the most money with the least amount of effort.
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Because thats exactly how it was designed.
More time means, longer subs which means, more money.
Money over quality.
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Greed.
That’s because they’re literally pathetic.
(They’ve consumed along their path until the path… “et” them.)
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Because it was.
The current team doesn’t design the game for fun like the old team did. The current team designs the game to keep you logged in. I think many of us still play because it’s an old habit.
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Activision-Blizzard looks at playtime averaged across all IPs for its investors, it is far from the metric that they really use. No matter what WoW’s average /played is, the effect it has across all Activision IPs is minuscule.
The primary investor metric is the MAU, Monthly Active Users, this is reported on a studio by studio basis. Any time sink feature in WoW isn’t really a big investor conspiracy, but instead a deliberate choice of the dev team.
Though, large ones that span a month or more is much more likely to be deliberate for investors as anything to get you logged in at least once per month shows up on the MAUs.
The older versions of the game had no issue retaining players. The ease of the bulk of the content and the rate which people acquire gear now is the reason the game is time gated to death.
When they embrace their MMO roots again and start designing a slow progression game again and stop worrying about catering to Joe 20 min a week player, then the game will get better.
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