It might not have affected you, but it certainly affected a lot of people because I remember Oribos going from a busy hub to a very thin one. That was just before I took my own little break during season 2. Many WOW content creators stopped playing the game as well. It really was the straw that broke the camels back for many.
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As much as I love Dragonflight I’m not sure if it would keep my attention once something else comes out.
Me and my friends are currently looking at Throne and Liberty and will prob jump to that when it comes out soon.
It also had to effect the quality of the game. Many of those caught up in the scandal were Blizz vets with years of development experience.
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Well. I know that where I used to have 25 Btag friends, I now only see 3 on regularly so there’s that. Most of them also tend to tell me the same problem they have, and it’s a problem that if I repeated it would be actioned under the claim of being “trolling”.
Blizzard wants feedback, but then rages at the feedback given.
Ghostcrawler did this too.
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Is DF losing players? Im being able to find groups way easier now than I did in Shadowlands.
The game is now marketed based on hype by design. They sell more units that way. They are trying to get in a large number of the sort of cyclical subscriber who buys a game, plays for a few weeks, then moves on to the next release.
But they are making little effort to understand what will retain as many of their players as possible. And so the people who bought the game expecting to play throughout the expansion leave after they find out the game’s not fun, or what they got wasn’t what they expected to be getting.
It’s not the fault of players who bought based on trust or loyalty when they find they’ve ended up with a game they don’t want to play. And it’s horrible for Blizzard when those players who leave are long-term players who never would have dreamed of leaving until it happened.
The thing is that the most valuable players are not purchasers who log in a few times and then leave. They are players who keep paying monthly throughout the expansion. And the thing about prepurchasing is that when people buy on faith, and it feels that their faith was misplaced, they may decide to wait and see before buying from now on. They may find another game to play that feels more fun and less manipulative.
It seems they were surprised that hype and promises didn’t give them the biggest first day sales ever. I guess their assumption that all they had to do was tell players what they want to hear and they’ll come flooding back was incorrect.
I understand that a lot of players are having fun. If that’s you, you are their target audience. They’ve decided to let go of a great many players and ignore them, figuring casuals and solo players are too stupid to leave. Or can easily be converted into hardcore mythic raiders and key pushers.
Good luck with that.
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Crafting system has potential, just implemented poorly and ruined by allowing early exploiters to keep their advantage with no punishment.
Regular content patches that add new dungeons and new story zones (think throne of thunder or isle of queldanas) that allow progressive story unlocks via daily/weeklies building to an objective)
There’s no good reason that a game that’s supported by a monthly fee couldn’t have a few new dungeons every 3-4 months.
DF isn’t even raid or die. It’s purely M+ or die at this point.
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I would say this is also a fundamental problem, blizz is arrogant and refuses to listen to the playerbase. They always think they know better - this is that ‘rockstar designer’ culture that got them in trouble in the first place. It doesn’t matter how bad the numbers are or how many people inform them that something sucks, they don’t care, they’d rather see the game shut down permanently than admit they were wrong.
How many copies of SL did Steve Danuser buy, exactly? 
Yeah I see absolutely no reason to buy the expansion just to deal with that, I would really much rather prefer to play through the content organically and learn that way but people expect me to study youtube videos and watch streams to take all the fun and mystery out of a dungeon and Blizz thinks that it’s totally fine for the PvE community to be total garbage. No thanks.
This hurts as a roleplayer too because I have to contend with people who have no taste trying to pretend they like this stuff or insist I have to consider it canon just because the corporation released it. Shadowlands is genuinely one of the most moronic stories I have ever seen in a MMO.
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Because WoW is the same as Pokémon as this point:
It’s old and stale, and everyone knows what to expect.
The same formula, with little changes.
If you’ve played any of the last 3 (of either game), you’ve played them all, at least in their current iterations. So little changes between each game.
Gaming as a whole is suffering from recycling the same ideas again and again, and only gets a pass because people keep buying them.
Just look at Overwatch 2. That doesn’t even justify a sequel.
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Yep. Keep in mind also I was playing on Zuljin which is a full server. It’s no wonder Blizzard made the changes they did because the game would have died had they not. I only came back because I saw that a lot of issues I had with the game were being addressed. But it’s going to take two or three successful expansions to wash away the bad taste of the previous expansions.
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But they had to remove the divide its the only way alliance players can raid and do keys
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Yeah, the only reason I’m even playing is because the talent system has finally made classes good again instead of having everything that makes my class fun/viable tied to yet another stupid endless AP grind, so I can go do the old content that’s actually fun/interesting and not have to worry about dealing with another awful expansion or have my arm twisted into doing these garbage WQs.
That would honestly be a vast improvement.
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Not really, no.
If someone isn’t Raiding their gimping themselves. The best Trinkets for the most part come from the Raid and more shots at Tier are huge.
I think Blizz did a decent job of balancing the two out this time but outside of those activities there’s not much prog to be had.
I think Warfronts and the expeditions themselves weren’t a bad idea, the implementation just needed some work. But Blizz keeps doing this where they give up on ideas instead of trying to iterate and improve on them, it’s utterly bizarre. And then other things they refuse to admit fault: WQs being something you’re forced to do for rep to unlock flying is why people hated them. As a concept they weren’t bad either, I wouldn’t have minded them if half of them weren’t quests I already did repeated or annoying minigames that I have to do if I want flying or an Allied Race. No reason why they couldn’t have tied rep to a tabard grind or let people do the activities they actually like (PvP, crafting, etc.) for that.
It’s like they’re terminally allergic to humility. Just a simple “oh yeah we messed up here” would be fatal to them to admit. Utterly bizarre behavior.
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IDK. I think chunks of the new lore is pretty bad too. The Centaur in particular had me eye rolling already from what I picked up in a singular interview that discussed them.
Did you know that they have no relation to the ones we have already met in Kalimdor? These ones were locked up for 10k years and the Kalimdor ones have only existed for a little over 1k. The simple fact that both of these ‘totally different species’ are hunter/gathers, have leaders dubbed Khans, and religious rituals involving the revering of the souls of former heroes/leaders makes the new one feel like an expanded version old one and that is ‘totally a coincidence.’
Stuff like this just makes me doubt the current writing team’s ability to do anything unique, interesting, or with the ability to respect older lore.
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The problem isn’t that WoW is too old. Mr. Game and Watch is older than Silicon & Synapse, Inc (Blizzard’s old name, 1991) by a solid few decades.
The problem is Blizzard picked a side. And while I hate the side Blizzard picked, that’s ultimately the side that won, per an interview I conducted.
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Could be a multiple of factors, no covid, bad taste after Shadowlands. I’ll just use this anecdotal from people I know personally, they find the game boring, grindy, increasingly toxic and unfriendly to new players, and there are better games in the market to play.
Its just difficult to quanitify the exact reason, Blizzards missbehavior with their scandal is probably the biggest one I can think of.
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I think for a lot of people, Shadowlands burned a lot of bridges and it’s kind of hard to rebuild that bridge once it’s gone.
I like Dragonflight, at least the leveling, but Shadowlands was just awful, and I really never recovered the enjoyment I had for WoW since. So yeah, I’ve been spending a lot of time in FFXIV again.
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I agree the leveling is a lot better.