they used every last ounce of Blizzard Polish on Tracer’s booty
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Because they know that what’s best for the game isn’t always what most people want.
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Except many of these “mistakes” that players have progressed in, such as flight and the water strider, are only “mistakes” to a dev team that wants to build a world filled with obstacles between players and content, rather than a world filled with content.
When it was assumed players would be flying at max level, you only find convoluted terrain design in a handful of areas, like Storm Peaks, because those areas were meant to be flown over. The rest of the terrain has clearly marked roads or wide swathes of open content, because there was no benefit in making travel tedious; we’d be flying over it in a short while, anyway.
It’s only since WoD and the advent of flight being a “problem” that we’ve seen the terrain design switch to convoluted paths around mountains and low-visibility zones packed with obstacles. The very types of highly cluttered, highly vertical terrain that were once designed to be navigated with flying, are now commonplace, and being used as a means of slowing players down.
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This is far from the truth.
The company long ago was that but currently meeting deadlines and having good statistics is driving the decisions.
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I agree with Flowermilk. Also, they are making the game for their “vision” which they don’t really care to share with us for the most part. If it’s outside that vision, they don’t really care.
Just look at that stupid necklace. Pretty much 100% of the feedback from the PTR was negative - they ignored it all. Same with the portal issue. And other things in the past.
![:cookie:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/cookie.png?v=6" ":cookie:")
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But that’s my point. Travel. Portals. Flying. Pathfinder. None of that directly impact long term play. All that nonsense “We can fly 'cuz Blizz wants us logged in longer” is just that: nonsense. Demonstrable nonsense. Like you said, they don’t care if you play 10, 20, 60 minutes a day, every other day, once a week, whatever.
What they do care about is being engaging enough to keep the $15/mo flowing.
Does lack of flying/portals/etc. drive some folks away? Sure. But obviously not enough to where Blizzard decided that they can’t do this or the players will strike.
All these arguments about how Blizz keeps doing XXX and is “obviously” losing money because of JUST THIS ONE THING, don’t hold water.
And what drives some players away attracts others. They always have to be on the bubble trying to make it all work.
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Honestly, at this point, I am guessing their metric has changed from subs ($15/mo X X#of players) to Players x $spent on everything).
So, just like retail, they are looking at an Average ticket price!
Players used to spend $15/mo, now they spend $X/mo. And with less players, there is a need for a higher AVG Ticket!
That’s how it works… And you are right, who cares how much players use the game, as long as they buy other services.
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What changes do you feel are pushing the higher average ticket?
Services, mounts/pets, and gold!
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I think a lot of it has to do with a too many cooks spoil the broth scenario. The teams making the game have grown so big and bloated that each team ends up an echo chamber that can’t communicate effectively with every other team, or the player base.
Add on top of that the rumored entirely separate development team working on alternate xpacs and their corporate overlords demanding one thing while one group of players demand another, and another group of players demand the exact opposite and all that just gets compounded exponentially.
The whole thing has just gotten too big and too convoluted and it’s all starting to crack and fall apart.
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What some say on the forums and do in game are completely different. If 5% of the player base complain about GCD, but 80% play multiple classes/specs with GCD then witch one do you use to make your decision? ( thats just a example %, not based on any facts )
Of corse making money is part of the plan for blizzard and shareholders. But we cant hide behind that idea everytime we disagree in the forums. Most of the time i imagine game play out ways any feedback thread.
I think what we have to realize is that even though the GD is a small percentage of vocal players, it is representative. For every player complaining in GD about a change, there are 2-3 in game who feel the same way and won’t say anything (and those are the ones you lose for good, because they will unsub without letting anyone know why). Can’t dialogue with people who aren’t going to say anything.
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There is what…1 new mount every 8 months? That doesn’t seem like a lot of pushing. 2 total mounts since BFA released?
How are services being pushed now more than they were in the past? Name change, server change, etc?
Small detail but the devs don’t do anything that doesn’t fit into the overarching strategy. The question should be…what really is Ion’s objective. I suspect he is also not operating in a bubble. At some point there is a suit applying pressure to make metrics move in a direction they see as valuable.
To understand current game design you gotta climb up the ladder a bit.
To also be fair though, building the game around whatever metrics they’re focused on doesn’t mean they can’t do it in a compelling manner. Azerite was a mistake regardless.
You start looking at some of these changes with engagement in mind, and while a little tin foil hatty, they do start to make more sense.
Take the portal room. One thing that’s not mentioned is while it used to be portal in to an instant portal to Boralus, it’s now a 15 second run.
Big deal you might say. But if you look at some motley fool releases they are reporting engagement in a hours per week type of metric and not a unique users per week.
So if million active players make that trip on average 3 times a week, that’s 90 seconds for 3 round trips times a million. So 90 million seconds. Or 25 thousand hours per week of extra time played.
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Design by spreadsheet.
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Also where else are they going to get feedback, then? People repeatedly claim that these forums, Twitter, MMO Champion, Reddit, etc don’t represent the majority of players. Okay, but the devs ask for feedback all the time here and elsewhere. Should they just stop doing that and ignore all feedback they get because it’s not from “the majority of players”, because the majority of players don’t leave feedback? It just seems silly. They have to get feedback from somewhere, and BfA has shown us how well just completely ignoring it has gone.
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There are more services now than ever before, yeah? More products in the store? and most of all, gold!
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What services were added? Pretty sure those have stagnated for a long time.
And 1 mount every 6 months isn’t a huge deal when I can easily buy them with in game gold. And they are often cheaper than in game mounts.
I guess I just don’t see this massive push.
Exactly! Anyone in marketing would be thrilled with 3-10% customer satisfaction survey participation.
That’s the GD! Again, because it is representative.
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