From GCD. To portals. To writing themselves into a corner, to class balance, to PvP vendors, to flying, and so. much. more
It seems almost every decision they make is stuff that the majority of the player base is against. Is this a case of “Blizzard knows best” or what?
Its a case of proof that not everyone is good at or even qualified for the job they hold.
It’s proof that they’re either not listening to feedback, because people definitely voiced their dislike for those changes before they went live. Or they are paying attention, and they just don’t care that most people voiced their dislike for those changes and went ahead with them anyway.
Either way, it’s not a good sign, and is making a lot of people lose faith in the developers and the game. How can we trust them in the future if our feedback just continuously goes into the trash and is ignored?
They are chasing metrics for share holders.
They do listen. They just see the feedback, laugh, and throw it in the trash.
It’s the result of a development philosophy that’s built around developer control, as that makes it easier to meet their primary objective of keeping the shareholders happy. Player freedom might make the players happy, but we’re not the ones signing the paychecks.
It’s honestly just crazy how blatant it is now. You can watch it happen in real time.
They made a thread about how they’re going to remove some portals when making the new portal room, and specifically asked for feedback about what people thought about it. They got thousands of replies from people saying not to remove those portals, why they shouldn’t remove those portals, why it would make the game worse for them (like running old content for mounts, pets, transmog, etc).
They completely ignored all of it, and made a new thread saying they were going through with it anyway. It’s just like, why did you even bother asking for feedback then if you were just going to ignore it anyway? It’s just so crazy to me how bad it is now. I’ve never seen such mountains of feedback just blatantly ignored by the WoW devs, the one constant was that if people complained long enough and loud enough about something, the devs would do something about it eventually. Now they’re just straight up like “nah we don’t care, we’re going to do whatever we want, deal with it”.
Considering they admitted their systems don’t work together in BFA and the story and systems seem fragmented and unrelated at times, it seems like the big picture, like the entire experience as a whole was not laid out properly.
I agree. It’s completely aggravating.
They make the decisions they make because of the overall vision that they want to game to be.
If they listened to the players, every raid would be Baradin Hold, with the entrance next to the inn in the main city (by the mission table with all gold missions) - and you had to fly to it (though that too would have it’s own outcry).
Meanwhile, the developers are interested in the World, and how it feels, and how it presents itself on top of how much DPS a Shadow Priest does.
Their vision isn’t working out. The lore of this expansion has been complete garbage, their systems from the GCD to azerite armor is mediocre. They REMOVED portals because it “makes the world feel bigger”. They gimp and time gate the hell out of flying because reasons. There is a line between fan service and listening to feedback, but what I’m asking for is just listening to feedback.
I would respect their vision more if they made permanent systems that improved the entire game.
This is why they had a record financial year, yet “let go” of 800 employee’s. You hire on the cheap, you get what you pay for.
I have absolutely no problem with the devs having an overall vision for how they want the game to be. After all, that’s their job, and I’m certainly not going to pretend like I can do their job just as well or for them.
But if there is a large amount of negative feedback about a change they’ve made, I just wish they were willing to actually listen and consider why people are not enjoying that specific thing. They don’t have to fit the game to all player feedback, just the feedback about specific things like time gating flying for so long, or locking new races behind a huge time gated rep grind. Those are easy fixes that players have repeatedly complained about and offered reasonable solutions to make most people happy. And yet, they still continue to be ignored.
IMHO The fatal flaw is they think flight was a mistake. They didn’t look at the player response to taking it away and think, “hum, the players really like this, maybe we should design the world with flight in mind instead of this linear on rails stuff.”
My guess is despite what has been said in Q&A’s, they are designing around some sort of engagement metric. The probably call it something different internally like “slowing the player down.” But they quit reporting subs in 2015 and started talking about engagement. If that’s what the big bosses likes to talk about, that’s what makes them happy. Even if it’s frown when engagement goes down and a smile and off hand remark when it goes up people will get the message. That’s game they need to be playing to advance their career and over the years that will trickle down through the levels of management and become the culture.
The “Made in Kul Taris” quest chain that unlocks one of the race mounts is a great example. Just came out recently and on almost every step it’s required to fly at least half way across the continent. There’s even one quest that requires three long flights by itself. Two to five minutes of travel, 10 seconds quest. And one quest where they some how managed to make the worst escort quest in history. Escort quests shouldn’t even be in the tool bag, they’re almost universally hated. But somehow they managed to make them even worse. An escort where you’re forced to walk even slower than normal and instead of you escorting and protecting someone, they are protecting you. So walk slow and watch an NPC fight.
So, a quest chain where the majority of the content is one big waste of time. Probably 30 minutes worth of riding on the back of a bird. Either they’re chasing engagement or it’s incompetence.
They have a vision… much like a TV show that creates a solid foundation for a few seasons, only to find that the changes they have made takes the show off the rails, and consequently off the air.
WoW has outlasted most shows by a long shot, but the web is too complicated at this point for it to make a whole lot of sense.
The QoL changes are meant to keep people interested, but for each player that is fine with it, there are others who are not.
Right.
The longest period of time that I play in a string is raid night – when we play 2 hours. Today I did an emissary that was about to expire in Nazmir in 10m. From Boralus. Without Waterwalking, running around the turtle, and I could have easily just left for the day then. These were scattered quests, kill/collect quests (vs just kill the rare). You know, the “long annoying ones”.
With flying, maybe I would have done the emissary in 8m.
I’ll probably log in tonight to finish this Crucible quest line, knock out the next two emissaries, and then I should be good to go until raid night on Wed.
So, honestly, whatever they’re doing to stretch metrics, it’s not working on me. I don’t even think I logged in this weekend.
Hmm I do agree that there have been really weird decisions and some really bad ones… But I think people overreact a lot too…
They could do 100 things right and 2 things wrong and no-body would even notice what they did right and instead rage at what they did wrong. Fixing mistakes that are tied to the systems of the game is also pretty difficult, specially when people have already progressed and earned rewards from that system.
I do agree that in less convoluted topics like class tuning they could be a lot quicker to react so no excuse for those to be so slow to happen.
You may want to rethink this…
They don’t really care that you don’t log in and play for hours… you are subbed, paying (in one way or another). Whether you use the game or not isn’t really their main concern.
