I think Blizzard’s obsession with e-sports might have attracted the wrong crowd, and we all know it is an obsession when they pushed for something as incredibly simplistic and RNG focused as hearthstone as an “e-sport”.
The thing is WoW current direction is returning back to it’s RPG design roots, what does that mean? It focuses more on RPG elements and the dev team is clearly happy to try out new cool stuff with crazy effects, something that will ALWAYS cause huge balance issues, but at the end of the day this is an mmoRPG, not an e-sport where everything is made perfectly same and safe so skill is the only deciding factor.
In RPGs on the other hand we have many choices, builds, systems, passives to the point when we combine that it is literally impossible to ever achieve perfect or even really good balance, by their design RPGs are not balanced and like Ion said RPGs will always have a form of non skill factor affecting your performance so clearly not the game for people who only care about skill and competition, it is quite literally being ultra competitive in a non competitive game which implies they are not very skilled to compete in actually competitive games.
A very important point I try to repeat and Ion does the same, is the fact that character building, the stat side of RP in RPG is the ability to find your own builds which you gravitate to and try to improve them and be better at a specific thing, specific strengths and weaknesses. That character building is a hallmark of RPGs, it is what I enjoy most in these games, to open all the ability, talent, system trees and think of all the possible combinations and dedicate myself to one.
Sadly WoW seems to have attracted the gogogo esport tryhards who falsely act as if WoW is an ultra competitive game and dont give a damn about choices or character building, all they care about is to switch to the most optimal build for the boss to kill it asap. Thankfully Blizzard has noticed that and slowly is locking power choices so people cant change and be optimal for everything.
Now if these people leave I believe blizzard would be happy to continue this great direction which will make shadowlands a success because more RPG fans will actually return and stick with it now that the game has a few decent RPG elements.
game.
