Yes. The lack of evidence and high volume of baseless assumption and speculation to fit a certain narrative makes it fit exactly within the realm of conspiracy theories.
Activision are the evil government. Bobby Kotick is the smoking man.
The men in black suits are responsible for all the dirty work.
WoW is the crime scene, and we’re Fox Mulder and Agent Scully, and the truth is out there – right?
Queue the friggin’ music:
Ironically the only youtuber/streamer I can still tolerate is… Asmongold.
If this guy sits there one more night naked I’m gonna come over there and smack him over his tin foil hat. And I don’t care if Twitch or who ever bans me.
Joking aside, the guy just works very hard to get all the information needed to make his point and he is very entertaining. Keep it up.
The problem with that assumption is the implicit implication that Blizzard make more profit by making people UNhappy. How does that work, exactly?
I mean, I’m ready to pile on to criticism of many things in the game, but I don’t see how any of the decisions I believe made the game worse, except for Tokens and Gold Missions, make any extra money for Blizzard, or save any.
And making people unhappy means less purchases (maybe not, looking at the numbers), less subs, and less people to sell shop stuff and services to.
So no, I don’t think they’re deliberately making people unhappy to raise profits.
Really? I find this dude to be an absolute moron.
I did NOT say they are deliberately making people unhappy. I said something else. I said they don’t care much. About this particular game, because they wrote it down already, because their big plans are elsewhere and this game is basically just something that they can still try to milk for some limited time. And hey, they will try to make it interesting for the remaining few who are asked to keep paying money, but they won’t put too much effort into that.
I understand where you are coming from, but there is no contradiction. Nobody is saying that in the long run Blizzard are going to make more money - they might lose long term, yes. However, it’s even more difficult than that, and they might actually win.
What’s more profitable - making an honest game as well as you can, however much effort that takes, or making a pretense at the game and putting enough of easy to do for you but difficult to “complete” for the players activities (like flavorless but long grinds) there to try and get the most money for least effort? Because you are investing into different games anyway and that’s your long term? Nobody knows. There are too many factors to tell.
Sadly all the new stuff they delayed. Raid? 22nd, 29th for 1st LFR wing for usual people here who don’t wanna pug normal. Alied race that they have been hyping up for almost over 2 years? 8.1.5. They have nothing, the invasions are just WQ with and endboss which are copypasted from Legion. They made sure to nerf the xp though for <120 chars doing these ‘brand new’ invasions…
Basicly untill the 22nd of January nothing changes and some desperatly needed spec redisigns weren’t finished ontop of it for the ones affected by it. Just keep grinding islands and WQ, look we added currency to invasions and islands.
I see what you’re saying, but their actions are not consistent with it.
If they wanted to put WoW in a holding pattern or maintenance mode, they would not have
These are all decisions that have increased their costs and complications of putting out an expansion.
Whatever the problem is, it’s not that they’re sitting back and doing nothing.
I disagree and I could write pages, but I won’t, because it is rather pointless.
In a nutshell, you are making a mistake by thinking that you know how gradually reducing the amount of resources spent on the game looks like (please forgive me here, but I don’t have a lot of time and so am being blunt) and thinking that it must be looking different from what we see in WoW. I do know what it looks like and I can tell you first hand - what we see in WoW is absolutely consistent with it. When you spend less resources on the game, you don’t suddenly do everything worse - no, you continue to be doing things well, but you do less of them. And you start reusing more. And you start preferring things that are cheaper to implement. And there are some areas where you don’t scale back because you don’t currently have anything else - for these particular departments - to do, repurposing takes time. Etc, etc, etc.
You say if they were to scale back, they wouldn’t have “ramped up art budget so much”. The reality is - and again, take it from someone who is in the industry - the art budget was NOT ramped up. The art is shinier NOT because they spend more resources on it. That’s merely the product of progress in tools and experience. Times march forward, we can do things that look way better than before and do that way faster then before. And the second and more important thing is - the de-resourcing is not uniform. Some things get de-resourced faster than others. With a different game and a different company we might have continued to have great additions to gameplay but no new art. In this particular situation we have art staying the course and everything else deteriorating first. That’s it.
Added: actually, I returned to write this small note and ask you to forget all of the above. Proper coverage of the topic requires hours that I don’t have. This short reply above that I wrote doesn’t do the topic justice, and all it does probably just alienates you (or anyone else who bothers to read). I am only leaving the short reply above undeleted because it feels wrong to delete something I said. But in a bigger picture, let’s just forget I wrote anything.
but my tailoring still sux 
Well, we’re clearly not going to convince each other, and neither one of us has internal departmental budget figures, so by all means let’s leave it there.
I was writing a long response. Thanks for saving me the trouble! ![:smiley:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")
BFA is basically a stripped down version of Legion. Why is it stripped down? Because people complained heavily about things in Legion. An example of this is:
Legion Mission Table: complaints were about people earning gold and rep from the mission table, in fact this was a complaint in WOD, where it was first introduced. People also complained about how long it took to get all of the level ups for the mission table. The result in BFA is that the mission table is stripped down, you can earn the upgrades in a couple of weeks and it is irrelevant.
PVP WQ’s in Legion: some people complained that it was not fair that people could earn honor via world quests. They felt that honor should only be earned in battlegrounds and arenas. The result in BFA is the removal of PVP WQ’s and warmode.
Artifact Weapon Grind: People complained about having to do the class hall campaign and grind AP for the weapons. The result is that we have the artifact system, which is still a grind, but no class hall.
WQ’s in Legion: People complained about these and how it was random the rewards they would receive. The result in BFA is that we still have them, but less of them and you know exactly what you will get once you complete them, before you complete that day’s emissary.
I could go on and on, but in some part, people need to be careful what they wish for or complain about because you may get your wish and not like it.
Is BFA perfect? No, not by a long shot, but it really is a combination of all the criticism that went on and on for months about Legion, so here you go. Of course if there is a next expansion it probably will be grindy, full of a ton of content, and that will result in more complaints.
But that narrative doesn’t fit with reality.
For example, here’s the size of the WoW team in 2004 and 2017 next to each other:
https://imgur.com/PtHuoeJ
And here’s the Overwatch team for comparison:
https://imgur.com/a/LDbwimn
And here’s what Game Director Tom Chilton said in 2014:
“We’ve moved from about a 140-person team to 220 to 225-person team. A 50% growth in the size of the team definitely meant we had to spend quite a lot of time teaching a lot of people how to make World of Warcraft .”
https://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/a594062/team-expansion-behind-slow-world-of-warcraft-updates-says-blizzard/
On the development side there’s never been a reduction in the resources devoted to World of Warcraft. I mean, fact of the matter is that Blizzard have actually accomplished that long-term goal of releasing new expansions approximately every 2 years now, and they’ve largely managed to achieve that by ramping up their development production. It doesn’t take *2½ years to make a new expansion anymore, and the last raid tier doesn’t drag on for 12+ months either.
Edit: *Correction.
It never took 3 and 1/2 years. It always took 2 years, +/- 1-2 months.
Vanilla released in the US on November 23, 2004; TBC on January 16, 2007. Thats slightly less than two years and two months to TBC release. If we go by EU release date, Vanilla’s was February 11, 2005, so not even two years for us Europeans before TBC release.
Wrath then launched on November 13, 2008. That’s 1 year and 10 months after TBC release. Cataclysm released December 7, 2010, which is 2 years and 1 months after Wrath. MoP released September 25, 2012, which is 1 year and 10 months after Cataclysm, WoD released November 13, 2014, or 2 years and 1 month after MoP, and Legion released August 30, 2016, which puts it 1 year and 10 months after WoD.
As a matter of fact, the fastest expansion cycle to date was TBC to Wrath, equal to the one from WoD to Legion. So what are you talking about?
Agree with him. Dross patch.
Look, as far as I’m concerned, those things that were complained of in Legion were legitimate concerns. The answer is what is bad in all this. For example, you say the Legion mission table was stripped down. Sure it was, but that is somehow a bad thing? If it is, then we might as well get WoD garrisons back, they had a much more complete version of the mission table than Legion did, so shouldn’t we go to that as the benchmark, and say that Legion was also in fact WoD stripped of stuff? Otherwise, this point really makes no sense. In my opinion, mission tables are simply a damaging system, designed exclusively to score points in some excel destined for some soulless bureaucrat exec that wants to assess “player engagement” in the same way they assess transport efficiency between gas stations or the distribution of poultry between the outlets of a supermarket chain.
PvP WQs in Legion were an insult to any actual PvP player. What is the point to actually go through the trouble of playing actual PvP if Jimmy the carebear can just go and PvE some mobs and get PvP transmogs for it? Warmode is simply better, I really have no doubt on this point. It’s the one feature BfA has that actually is great.
Artifact Weapon Grind was indeed complained of in Legion, but BfA’s solution to it was more Artifact grind, when any reasonable person that would have noted the complaints would have thought “hey, I guess the players don’t like an infinite system backed by another system that invalidates almost everything you did 3 weeks ago. Maybe we should ditch the skinner box”. But no, because it is yet another engagement meter ploy, so they just had to keep it, when in truth, if they would design proper classes and proper content, players would be engaged for the simple reason that they are actually having fun playing the game!
WQs, I’m sorry but I don’t follow. We have just as many as in Legion, and they are just as tedious and boring. The difference is that in Legion they had a chance to award the utmost BiS items in the game, legendaries, which was a profoundly unfair and bad way of distributing them if you ask me, given how easy and boring that content was. BfA WQs only distribute Azerite pieces up to ilvl 370, which are not BiS, which makes them less rewarding, which in consequence makes them less played and more complained at, showcasing that dailies were ever only filler content, not prime content that people actually do because it’s fun, but because they have to if they want X or Y reward, and happily ditch when the rewards aren’t great.
If they wanted to do it properly, they could have ditched the problematic systems altogether, focus on creating fun to play classes, try to not make dungeons so filled with trash that only the most hardcore mythic plussers enjoy them, replace the random upgrades with a predictable gear upgrading system that rewards all content (such as Valor points), ditch extra power like azerite gear that has to drop or you are screwed and replace it with for example a talent system contained within the heart of azeroth (with no AP farming or alternatively with AP farming with a weekly cap), introduce a new expansion wide legendary or even famed artifact item accessible to all (obtainable through raiding, any pvp and dungeons, including through LFR, random BGs and LFD heroic dungeons) or to most (normal mode and upwards, with alternative ways of gaining through m+ and rated pvp), depending on whether or not they wanted to nudge people to move to harder content, put some more clear cut objectives in island expeditions like an end boss or something (and the pvp ones to be determined through actual pvp), include the possiblity of failure in warfronts, make pvp versions of warfronts as well as heroic warfronts, and this expansion would have simply been so much better. Because it actually has a ton of content, but it is simply not fun doing almost any of it.
Gee, a Blizz fan heel-licker disagrees with a negative review on WoW and calls it biased…
What a surprise!
The 3 is an error on my part, I’ll correct it. Thanks. Blame mac keyboard.
No problem. But the whole statement is just not true, as WoW expansion cycle always was within the margin of error for the same timeframe: 2 years.
He is after MvP .