This should scare you. It should scare all of us. Ion still having a job amidst constantly shrinking player subs shows you that his overseers (the board, I’m assuming) only care about making money, which Blizz is.
This means that this is what Ion cares most about. He had a problem (declining playerbase) and his fix was not to address major issues as to why players were leaving, it was the cash shop and microtrans.
Not at all. Right now I have no choice but to be on the ground when I don’t want to be. When flying is available YOU will STILL have the choice to use a ground mount over a flying mount.
Twitter, reddit, in game, data collection tools, email, facebook, other social media websites, at conventions like Blizzcon. Today there are a lot of ways to get feedback to Blizzard.
WoW has never been better, haters mad
That’s a really easy way out. Companies have to reinvent themselves all the time, improve their products. The game industry isnt a unique snowflake, if they want to maintain popularity of a product they need to maintain its quality or at least the consumer demand, I dont think they have done that. Granted some of the decline can be blamed on ow old it is, but there are tons of company products out there that still do a good job. Magic the Gathering has had to have gone through a tone of iteration changes. Granted they are struggling now, but you could easily attribute that to incompetence more then anything else.
Seems like you dont want to place any onus on the new staff driving the ship. The chinese chase combined with significant staff changes around the same time(2012ish) I think shows a pretty obvious trend, and that how this company is built vs how it WAS built and combined the HR they have in place, it is a shadow of what blizzard used to be.
The fact that blizzard of today is still near completely stuck with blizzard of olds foundation games/titles suggests it isnt simply “WoW is old”.
And are all of these other places in direct contrast to the Forums in their feedback?
That was 7 years ago
Only Blizzard has the answer to that.
Yup. Blizzard is a big company and wow was massively successful. If you want to figure out problems with a game/company you cant just look at where you are, but where the problems started.
The culture at blizzard changed and what we have now is the result of those changes 7 years ago.
In general? Yes.
They listen to feedback if it’s loud enough, but generally only AFTER they make a change to the live game, because they don’t trust us to know what we want until after we’ve tried it their way.
On one hand, they’re not wrong. WoW is a big community. The forums are a tiny fraction of that community, and even if it were somehow a majority, the average player doesn’t think things through all the way, they just see a thing and think “I like thing” or “I don’t like thing”. Sometimes that bigger picture does matter.
On the other hand, sometimes, especially if it’s an overwhelming response, “I don’t like thing” is important enough to base a decision off of.
I think Blizzard gets stuck in a designer’s mindset too often when it comes to these. “Ok we get that you might not like this, but it’ll make x play out so much better!”. It’s that kind of thinking that got us the GCD change. They think it adds more strategy and gives us choices because we can’t mash it all at once, but the reality is, for 99% of players, all that changed was that their rotation got slower, which in general means the rotation got more boring.
They’ve reverted a lot (but not all) of it after the fact. Situations like those are where they need to just accept that people don’t like something, even if they have some bigger vision for why they’re doing it.
Bad change. Obviously despised. Took way too long to only partially revert it. They should have fixed individual specs that stacked too many CDs, not made a global change.
I actually don’t disagree with limiting the availability of world portals. It takes away from Mage’s niche and makes the world smaller. THAT SAID, Blizzard does a poor job of explaining it (and other things) with an in-universe reason, and on the design side of things, the world has to have more to do in it than run to old instances for transmog for limiting transportation to feel like anything but a pointless hindrance.
They did this with Legion then just ignored the fact that they wrote themselves into a corner to do a faction conflict story. Blizzard’s writing is inconsistent and lazy, always has been. I don’t feel they went against anyone’s wishes with their storytelling, I just think they do a bad job of it in general.
Generally pretty decent in a PvE setting tbh. People tend to complain based on their spec’s placement on a list, even if the actual % difference in performance is tiny. It’s PvP where I tend to hear more complaints though, and I don’t have enough experience or data to determine if it’s unfounded or not there.
Yep. We have a PvE vendor now. They can’t use the “people get confused finding the vendor” excuse. I totally get not wanting the entire gearing process to be predetermined shopping list, but some amount of BLP in the form of a currency vendor would be much appreciated and I think they need to listen to people on that one.
Similarly to the portal issue, I don’t disagree with limiting flight. For the same reasons. I think the game is better without it and the world is more immersive without it. HOWEVER, people were used to flight for years, so trying to remove it in WoD was a big mistake. Too late. The idea of Pathfinder is a good compromise, however Blizzard takes it a step too far by arbitrarily gating the relevant unlock behind a mid-xpack patch. It should be available from the start, once the achievement is finished, at least.
Game design in general works out when the developers design a game that they want to play.
I have a hard time believing that any of the decision makers actually spend much time these days playing the game that they put together, or that they would find it fun if they did. There is no earthly way that a game developer would think it was great fun to run up the winding mountain paths to get to the Drustvar world boss for the tenth time.
The game is currently designed around the game that they want the players to be playing, and that in a nutshell is the source of most of the disconnect between the developers and the playerbase. They’re looking at it backwards - designing the game to influence player behavior towards the key metrics that they want to hit, primarily #engagement and time played that looks nice on shareholder reports. Secondarily, they’re hoping that the timegates, grindgates and added seconds and minutes to anything that anyone wants to do will somehow slow people down enough that they won’t unsubscribe between content updates.
If they just made a game that they actually found fun to play for longer than a test spin for ten minutes at a time, without feeling like they needed to completely upend the entire design of how the game is played every single expansion and just focused on content creation instead of system creation and rebalancing class rollbacks, they would both retain subscribers and save money.
And i think this gets us back in a more general way to what the problems is. The wrong people are in charge and charged with fulfilling the wrong goals.
It’s really may be the Steve Jobs product people vs marketing and sales issue. The toner heads have taken control.
Well. I would argue that they don’t know why they make the choices that they make. They’re not MMO veterans, they’re WOW veterans (possibly).
The people that originally created WOW could capitalize on a breadth of knowledge and experience, but ultimately reverence for the mmoRPG genre. Character progression was king, not gear/RNG dopamine. The lore was something they respected and, believe it or not, beloved by the dev team from launch through at least Wrath.
The new team doesn’t have the same kind of background, history, or eye towards what makes a good MMORPG, which is why everything feels hollow. Classes are hollow, and not to be relied upon from one expansion to the next. Lore is a bucket to draw from but there’s no reverence for it.
If it wasn’t for the amazing art/design/music team, WOW would probably be in a very different place now; but, those things will only carry it so far when the vehicle that the player uses to experience these things, the character, neither progresses, nor has any interesting agency in the world.
I largely agree. I would bet most of their design decisions are metric’d out. Tone at the top and all that.
I understand many will never spend anytime giving feedback. And yes many that do feel the same on many of these subjects. I just was pointing out that what we do in game probably matters more.
I remember when the sale for transfers came out on time with the change in the amount of characters per server. Many complained about the money grab, i think i did as well, but i also paid for a couple. So did many others that complained. Thats the point. And holds true on many other subjects talked about on the forums and other media.
Sometimes changes have to go live so they can collect data. Because there are plenty of players in GD who will complain about a change simply because it’s a change and makes things different. Sometimes when players experience a change they find out it’s not so bad. Sometimes it turns out to be bad and with the game data to back it up, changes get made.
There’s another problem in GD, some people seem to think changes to code can happen over night, that’s not how game development works though.
Yeah. But man, for some reason I loved, loved, loved Suramar the first time I played through it. I was legitimately engaged. It’s possible that the story ran closely to Eversong, and that’s why; however, I remember being wowed when the leyline Tree started to take shape.
Overall, Legion fell flat for me in a lot of ways, classes especially, but I sure enjoyed Suramar. (The first time.)
It’s too bad. They’ve shown that they can hit a home run when they need/want to. The stories in StormSong and Drustvar have a ton of potential (IMO). Everything just fizzles out it seems like.
Because they’ve been trying to 'casualize" WoW and they realized an alarming number of players weren’t using macros for their CDs. This change was made purely to assist “clickers” who move their mouse around and click every ability on the action bar instead of pressing buttons. It’s also the reason many rotations have been simplified. Now clickers have that extra GCD to move their mouse over to their next ability after they pop their CDs. ![:roll_eyes:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/roll_eyes.png?v=6" ":roll_eyes:")
To slow the game down because they want you to waste more time to make their time-played metrics look good. All that time wasted traveling everywhere on land and playing the loot lottery adds up. It’s the same reason they made the horrible neck grind to deter raid loggers. Now they too have to waste time logging in frequently and running to their WQ’s to get AP or else they’ll fall behind.
To encourage FoTM players to reroll and waste even more time leveling and gearing up their alts. Another method Blizzard uses to boost their time-played metrics. If they actually put effort into class balance, those FoTM players would just stick with their mains and not waste several days of /played time to get their fresh alts to neck level 50 in one sitting immediately after hitting 120. I’m sure all those FoTM players spamming islands for AP on their fresh alts makes islands look like a success in Blizzard’s eyes.
They are either trying to convince Horde players to faction change by forcing them to experience the abomination of a plot they’ve written, or they are preparing to dissolve the two factions due to the dwindling player base. Of course I doubt any kind of plot would convince Horde to go Alliance since they mostly play for the larger population and not the plot.
Everything, from the combat to the class design, feels more and more like a clicky-Diablo-esque-episodic comic book, as opposed to the sweeping, high-fantasy, lore-rich, player-agency-centric story-driven MMO that they launched so long ago. It’s probably mostly because the core team (in my other post) doesn’t get WOW for the most part.
They admitted to azerite traits and the system being a big failure of bfa.
Then they proceed to put in more azerite levels and locking their use behind those levels as well as having to unlock 3 ranks (4 for cosmetic) separately for EVERY SINGLE character. The essences are arguably just as bad as the azerite system. I’ve given my feedback on the PTR, this is going to flop hard unless they do what they did with legion. Frontload all the traits/character power and make the eternal grind for a tiny amount. The artifact weapons in later legion had all the traits unlocked quickly. You could then choose to continue to farm AP for a small buff to concordance.