And they don’t need to. The game started as a passion project of a small indie game company. Now they’re corporate and the people hired are just doing their jobs. They know how to design, code, and write but there’s no passion to what WoW is anymore.
The system of grinding reps for flying is a perfect example of that. So is the cash shop/microtrans. The removal of class tier sets. Heart of Azeroth. World Quests. The list goes on and on.
I never once said its not important.
I never said it wasn’t representative of a lot of people.
Grumbles is grumbling, when one of the nicest people I’ve ever seen on the forums calls a major part of an expansion stupid, you might want to listen.
Semper Fi! ![:us:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/us.png?v=6" ":us:")
This comment should have been it’s own thread.
I was just thinking that the portal room was them trying to disguise the falling population but is just a part of why there is a falling population. Now I’m seeing how this is at the core if everything everyone has been complaining about.
I don’t know that you can say this at all.
For example, if you never want to never buy an automobile again, go to a fan forum that supports that make. If you read those posts, you’ll wonder why anyone, anywhere, buys a car at all with all of the horror stories laid out in full color.
As a “representative” set, the manufacturer makes nothing but lemons and works over time to cheat the buyer and consumer at every turn.
As always, there’s some deluded spokes-bot cheering the vendor on, but who listens to them anyway?
So, no, the only representative sample of the game is how much folks are playing and spending on it. This is a direct measurement of player “happiness” as a general value. Along with this they have to adjust for demographics, the economy, trends in entertainment, etc. etc.
Not only was the game different in the past, the world was different too. All of these account for game performance and player satisfaction.
The game content and experience alone are not exclusively responsible for the net subscriber rates. Lots of things factor in to this, and, no doubt, the analysts at Blizzard try to quantify and measure those factors so as to control (in order to boost success of the game, for assorted values of “success”) as much as they can.
So, anyway, I would not necessarily use the pulse of the forum as a measurement of anything, save for the pulse of the forums.
Ya, it really did sum it up nicely. You listen to how the old guard described the culture of blizzard before blizzard north went away and it is incredibly obvious we have a very different blizzard today.
That’s just not true. What you are saying is to throw decades of proven business strategy out the window for video games because the industry is a snowflake. Customer complaints(legitimate ones) are incredibly important to businesses.
After watching the blizz con last year, i had a bad feeling when some developers stated, they were looking forward to mobile gaming and such.
It felt like they actually enjoy those things and thus do the same thing they did with the early stages of wow.
It might just be a case of changed interest which misses the mark. Like, they did their thing and it did not work, so now they try to listen in, but don’t understand what the masses want and shoot blindly in all directions.
It’s sad.
Imo, there is a huge need for either a complete overhaul of WoW or a brand new mmorpg base on new tech with new ideas and not following the theme park idea. Maybe even dip in the sandbox world and allow for free character classes and fun game play in life skills (looking at black desert here).
We all grow up and change. I can only emphasize the possibilites of what we saw in the movie “Ready Player One” minus the VR (for now). Free classes, free jobs, huge world, economy …
Just one gnomes opinion
You misunderstand. They didn’t say that grinding Azerite for endgame progression was a failure, they said that having to unlock traits you already had when you get an upgrade felt bad because it turned upgrades into not upgrades. 8.2 is “fixing” that by not increasing the required Azerite Level beyond 50 (which most people should be at or near by that time)
Congrats, the big unlock is basically a freebie and you only have to grind for passive benefits on top of that.
I do. For assorted values of “fun”. Some of these twisty paths are gorgeous, and Drustvar has nothing on High Mountain (High Mountain was amazing).
Do I like FINDING those paths? No. I never cared much for searching a lone torch in the snow, or that little more worn patch of ground to indicate a path.
But once I know them, they don’t bother me a bit. They’ve made, and continue to make, the World a really neat place to run around in. I’ve fallen in to my fair share of pits filled with Blood Trolls, but I still really like the swamps of Zuldazar.
(And BfA also has nothing on Legions over use of trip hazards and other things that we were constantly being hung up on. BfA is easy sailing.)
Blizzard knows best+ MAU. Those 2 factors are 99% of every decision Blizzard makes.
People seem to forget that when playing AD&D, the DM as well as the players are “playing” the game. Both have to interact and respect each others wishes or they stop playing together. In a good campaign, both the DM and players have fun.
In WoW, it looks to me like the WoW Devs forget they should be in this game with us and NOT against us.
If the developers actually believe they are in this game with us (the players), whoever hired these devs did a poor job of screening. The devs may understand the Xs and Os of programming, they completely lack the ability to understand the emotional side of the players. Emotions exist. So does having to deal with the consequences of that.
Its the human side thats missing in WoW now.
Blizzard is fashioned after a very old “artist” business model that states “we make this and you can enjoy it the way we make it, but it is ours.” A successful business values and wants their customer to give feedback and they follow those customer trends to create their product. A customer, and not an artist, focused business says “Hey we have this product, do you like how this works or looks, how can we make it better?” and they implement good changes.
NEVER has a blizzard dev acted this way in all honesty. From ignoring alpha, beta and live feedback they get confused why everyone does not fall in love with it, because the “artist” loves it. A mature artist loves feedback and can implement changes, blizzard hates to make changes to their “artists” content, and takes them forever to do it once they face outrage (like the new portal system, why does it take so long to give us a CoT portal? - a customer focused company would have apologized and made the change live the next day.)
Blizzard needs to hire people that are customer focused instead of artists focused. And they need someone in charge of developers that are customer focused and able to stand up to the personal preferences of a dev for the greater good for the customer.
This is a major mental and attitude switch that has to start at the top and until they hire someone with a passion for customers, we will get a very outdated artist focus.
Henry Ford said (when the only color of the Model-T came in black) “my customers can have any color car they want, as long as it is black.” That is the artist view of business and one that is deeply ingrained at blizzard.
It does touch on an important point. The design feels manipulative in nature. Not fun or rewarding. Great… That 400 iLvl warfront is up, guess I have to do that now even though I can’t stand the thing.
And the communication feels like PR designed to try and convince us it’s a good game.
I didn’t say there weren’t important, but that doesn’t mean they’re representative. There’s always someone out with with a one star review of a five star product. The bulk of the complaints are opinion and feel based, vs out right bugs. And if you continue to play the game, then, how important is that bad review?
There’s this perception that the company is making decisions to lose money. That they would rather lose billions of dollars than compromise their vision, but nobody of course has any access to those real numbers, nobody that can share them here. Which suggests that either the company is, truly, utterly, totally incompetent (since they “continue the same mistakes”), that the Board is oblivious to it (and thus also complicit with the overall loss and value and return on investment), that the Shareholders aren’t paying attention (since it’s Their Money™ to begin with) since they haven’t burned the Board to the ground, or…OR perhaps things aren’t so dire. Maybe Shamans being low man on the totem pole this expansion isn’t the death of WoW. Nor Pathfinder. Nor Portals, Perhaps the stuff folks complain about on here aren’t as impactful as the slap-in-the-face loaded commentary suggests?
Maybe trying to be all things to all people is hard in a system as vast and complicated as WoW, and the design teams are doing things in good faith towards everyone: the game, the players, and stake holders.
Since there hasn’t been one change I’ve see that would would really compel anyone to extend their sub if they didn’t want to, all of the cries about metrics ring hollow to me.
The single mechanic that keeps (“forces”) many players coming back in the weekly time gate on different content (raids, mythics, etc.). And we’ve had that since day one. And if you’re on that weekly cycle, keeping up with a couple of emissaries while not mounted is hardly a crushing burden to simply showing up at raid time in the first place.
Customer complains are representative of a lot of people. I dont know why so many people on this forum think otherwise. Also, on a 1-10 scale most businesses only consider 9-10’s good or desirable, anything under that is considered an undesirable review or assessment.
No, the primary perception is that they live in a bubble…because they do.
No, but death by a thousand cuts is a real thing. The rest is just a monumental defense of the WoW team and giving them excuses for them doing a subpar job. You can defend it if you like, there are always those people who 5 star what most consider average at best, that’s your prerogative, but I would just say I think you have bad taste or at least are easily pleased.
The problem now is it might be irreconcilable.
It may be that the devs want to build a slot machine that keeps is logged so it can drive us to the in game store to buy cute little pets we can show to our fellow addicted friends.
And the players want a solid MMORPG.
I never said WoW was a 5 star product, that statement was simply illustrative.
I don’t have to defend the dev team. The dev team needs to defend the dev team. But they don’t need to defend against me, they’re not accountable to me. They’re accountable to management, the board, and the shareholders. I have indirect impact on it as manifest through my paying (or not) a subscriber fee.
The dev team cast their lot when BfA was released. Beyond the oncoming changes to the Necklace, the fundamentals of the expansion are entrenched, and have been since launch.
Since they’re already neck deep in the work for 9.x, (perhaps it will be “World of Warcraft – The Culling” after a large chunk of the dev team is fired by management), we don’t even know how many mistakes learned will carry forward simply out of raw momentum.
We’ll have to wait and see.
What we do know, is that the WoW ship turns very slowly.
That’s pure arrogance, each player and their complaints represent themselves and themselves alone.
You speak for yourself, you don’t speak for me, you don’t speak for anyone else in this thread.
Have you ever been a dungeon master? I never allowed flying. Or if I did, it was hard on rails. Or only allowing instant travel to the start of a dungeon or back to the inn. If I got tired or bored, I would wipe the party and go home.