Blizzard did nothing wrong ( BFA open world , pvp )

That’s what I mean when I say they went overboard on the quality of life. You know how some will always argue to add this and that to the game as “quality of life”, and that something means getting more rewards quicker and playing the game less?

WoD is THE example of why quality of life should never mean playing the game less. In WoD you never have to go out and waste time running around farming ore or fishing or whatever.

Quality of life are things like the inventory search bar, your M+ key getting highlighted in your bag when you click the thingy. Flying, automatic emissaries, smaller zones, shared enemy tags/resource nodes are not “quality of life”, they’re all things that have an effect on how you play the whole game. They’re not necessarily bad, but they’re game design and balancing things, not “qol”. And when Blizz confuses game design with “qol” you get WoD.

Bfa was awesome but too overwhelming for most , they reduced it to near 0 content and its too empty now :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Confused it with templates for a moment
Scaling makes no sense in WoW, this game isn’t a MOBA, gear should matter
That said the gear gap between geared casual and geared elite has to be made smaller because right now it’s way to big of a gap
WoD was great with that, which only had a powergap of 10 ilvls on a total of (iirc) 740 ilvls (1.35%ish ilvl difference) and now with 26 ilvl on a total of 226 ilvls (11.5% ilvl difference)
The ilvl difference now compared to then has multiplied by (11.5/1.35=) 8.5 times

I think the thing that gets stuck when talking about content is the thinking that it is finite. SL underdelivered on the longevity but I think the issue was more that Blizzard didnt plan to have 9.1 be so delayed.

Doubt you’d be playing it for long when all you could do in the open world after a month were the apexis dailies. Then 6.1 brought us nothing but selfie camera and Twitter integration. Then 6.2 brought us more apexis dailies. There’s a reason why the expansion was unpopular. It was a raid or die expansion.

Also Trashran sucked and was laggy af with RNG chest which had a small weekly chance to drop the BiS PvP trinket so you had to do it. And no one even fought there but both sides avoided each other and did side events and Blizzard had to force them to fight with various nerfs and changes to the events.

The only thing that was good was that you could gear up your alts super easy in both PvP and PvE and didn’t have to grind garbage borrowed powers.

The world missing is probably one of the biggest reason the game is so empty, but this has been a thing ever since WoD and it seems they want to keep everything instanced.

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The content drought isn’t an indictment of the quality of the systems and content that was already in place. True, I would’ve probably quit during 6.1 if it brought nothing new. But I would quit any game I am done with. I have technically quit WoW until 9.1 comes out. Me being done with Bloodborne and playing something else doesn’t mean Bloodborne is bad.

From what many people are saying, WoD wasn’t that bad. I am stressing that - it just put too much quality of life in the game. I will forever use this expansion as a beating stick to anyone who wants quality of life as a means of playing the game less.

Not this time tho. Blizz decided to stick to their guns with Covenants but the alpha/beta for SL was the best we had in years (and perhaps ever) in term of communication & changes based on feedback.

They usually simply release the content & call it a day, especially in BFA where they did it so late that no feedback was taken into account for azerite.

In SL tho we got tons of interviews & they actually released stuff early so we could give feedback soon enough.

Want a good example ? Conduits. They were released like legion’s relics, a consummable gem with scaling ilvl. You could even stack the same effect up to 3 times which made some soulbinds far too powerful.

If conduit energy is an issue, could you imagine having to grind conduits from high level content everytime you change one ? For every soulbind ?

That came from community feedback being taken into account, not Blizz giving us a decent design from the get go.

Ion claimed there would be there in 9.2, for now we have the “domination shards” sets for 9.1

Well tier sets are definitely borrowed power so you just did as a matter of fact.

Surprise surprise, different people have different expectations & thus ask for different things.

Competitive players want less mandatory, “boring” open world content.

PvPers want more resources invested in PvP instead of the current focus on raids & open world.

M+ players want new dungeons instead of spending two years on the same launch dungeons while raiders get new content every tier.

The list is long & just prove that feedback can’t just blindly be followed, because no matter how outlandish a suggestion is there’s little doubt that someone asked for it at some point.

Some players like corruption because they could mix& match the effects and push as far as they wanted with the negative affixes.

Some players liked legion Legos acquisition because it led them to try new content & kept old raids slightly relevant.

Some liked azerite because it meant they could customise their pseudo tier sets.

These features were mostly disliked by the playerbase, but never universally.

Replace this word with complain, and a lot more people will listen to you.

Words like cry are used to demean and belittle those with opposing opinions and they will never change anyone’s mind.

In the end it’s still Blizzards responsibility to make a game that’s attractive to both casuals and hardcore players. They have 15+ years of experience to pull from so they should be able to balance it.

Another problem is the entitled casual players who think they should be able to complete absolutely all content in the game. They are the reason why we cannot have engaging content like the Mage Towers because they complain it’s too hard.

I mean that’s a contradiction, right?
Covenants were the most talked about feature in the entire alpha/beta cycle. They didn’t “stick to their guns” they overruled what players were telling them because they assumed they knew best.

There was tons of feedback on Azerite armor prior to it even being released because the players knew it had to be involved and interesting. It was anything but interesting.

Conduit energy is better than the first iteration, granted. But conduit energy had months of feedback and left unchanged. To this day they’re still saying Conduit energy is fine and here to stay.

Things the community focused on during alpha & beta:
Torghast (people loved it)
Covenants (people had balance concerns)
Conduits
Weekly vault
The maw
Class design
Legendary items
Borrowed power

What did our feedback achomplish?
Torghast was changed for the worse
Covenants were left unchanged
Conduits were changed but still bad
Weekly vault is still a nightmare
The maw is a lackluster wasteland
Class design is more complicated, some were great, some were bad.
Legendary items are meh and a bit of a grind.
Borrowed power is still oh so present.

We may have well not even tested the game.

careful with that request mate we got a rogue who rather have the current system
226 gear voice comms and premades farming wins in unrated pvp vs leader-less pugs

Nice dodge, :+1: but “borrowed power” commonly means systems of borrowed power, like Essences and Corruptions and Soulbinds and Confuits and Covenant abilities as opposed to simple static tier set bonuses, and you know that as well as I do. :stuck_out_tongue:

Ah, now we’re singing from the same hymn-sheet! But if you say, as Furyeclipser did, that “Everything that is wrong with SL is 100% community feedback”, and then count every request made by every player (even the crazy ones) as “community feedback”, and allow the devs wide power of interpretation, then you have to be right, because anything they do has to be connected to something someone said sometime, but you are not saying anything, sinc there is nothing that could not be community feedback. :slight_smile:

Not in this case.

Not listening to feedback imply that Blizz never read the forums back in the alpha/beta and just blindly did their thing, which they didn’t.

“Pull the ripcord” became a thing after iirc Ion said something along the lines of “we hear you, but we think we can make this work. If we don’t then we’ll remove the lock” in an interview.

They did apply a lot of feedback on the covenant abilities themselves for instance in an attempt “to make it work”.

There are of course still issues 8 months after launch either because Blizz can’t or because they don’t want to fix it but I’m fairly confident that’s the first alpha/beta testing where we had that much back and forth between Devs and players.

The game would’ve been in a much worse state without all the iterative changes they did based on feedback imo. Doesn’t mean thzt they fixed everything or did everything the vocal playerbased asked of them but it would be dishonest imo to claim that they pulled another BFA on us.

I don’t think you understood what I meant there. AFAIK there was barely any iterative changes done on azerite etc back in BFA because Blizz released the systems extremely late in the beta & they didn’t had time to properly work on it. They later admitted that mishandling in Q&As iirc

In SL they instead released the systems first & much earlier, with a longer alpha/beta test & actually interacting with the playerbase. It was also the 1st xpack since BC that was delayed.

That’s what I wanted to highlight. BFA beta was a disaster in comparison.

The energy exists because Blizz believe it solves a problem that needs to be fixed, while being mostly harmless for most players.

Imho they would be right to do so for only one reason : If swapping conduits between encounters trivialise the content & Blizz in return balance the game around that, which would legitimise the behaviour. Otherwise swapping conduits is pretty harmless & the system is mostly useless.

Once again, as long as Blizz doesn’t legitimise it then it shouldn’t need to be in the game imo. Anyway back to the topic :

I have no doubt that some players argued that a 2h run of weekly mandatory content was too much, altho I absolutely loved the first format. It’s not a “us VS blizz” here imo

A lot of pain points were fixed, broken & useless abilities were changed, soulbinds were balanced & severely nerfed and the cost of swapping covenants was reduced to two weekly quests.

That’s by no mean perfect and they didn’t pull the ripcord like many asked of them but there were definitely a lot of changes done to covenants.

Still deliver what was promised, I remember people being pretty enthusiastic about having 3 picks instead of one… Still a massive RNG fest tho

Definitely one of the biggest failures of 9.0, both failed to hit the mark & intense source of frustration as it was mandatory for progression.

I honestly don’t remember if anything was changed in that zone

Still can’t believe dungeon drops are this low when you get an almost 100% drop rate from other sources. Biggest issue in the entire system imo, you shouldn’t have to run the same dungeon 20 times to get the recipe.

Anyway I think I made my point clear : there are issues, there are changes that were requested that Blizz refused to implement and there are changes that were definitely not requested yet implemented to fix something else. But overall it’s not another case of “Well we released the content and it’s too late to change anything, so be it”. Feedback was perhaps not blindly followed but it was mostly heard and either refused or applied.

In many ways SL is the product of an amalgamation of player feedback.

“Meaningful RPG choice”, “class wide abilities”, “depruning”, “linear storylines”, “level squish to 60”, “loot is loot” etc to appeal to classic & old players.

“Weekly vault for everyone with 3 choices per content”, “You’re optimal with two weekly quests in term of system progression”, “heavily reduced RNG”, “learning Lego & conduits” etc in order to not reproduce the issues of the two previous xpacks…

I know I was pretty satisfied with it :blush:

You gotta admit that it was a nice follow-up

Then I would have to be blind as there’s another angle to this debate and that’s Blizz’s own goals and agenda, and not everything can be blamed on our conflicting expectations.

Yet that would be equally dishonest to see the playerbase as a like-minded entity which selflessly fight for our beloved game… Or whatever degree of dishonesty between that and complete disinterest.

I do honestly believe that most of our issues come from Blizz trying to appeal to as many gameplays & fragment of the playerbase as possible, so while fury went on an hyperbole there’s some degree of truth in his statement.

It’s more than a few crazy people arguing in favour of foolish features imo, the successive designs in WoW led to a far too wide variety of expectations & you can’t win against that.

(Reading the forums & Reddit it sometimes feel like the only think PvP players can agree with is that PvP is in the worst state it has ever been)

Hell, even the covenant lock received a lot (marginally less than those against but still a lot) of support back when we argued about it in the alpha/beta. Yet the stats from the API & RIO tend to show that most players never followed with the theme & just picked the best proving that this support was instead much more limited than initially thought. (>90% iirc ? That said there’s a chance that many casuals never featured in these stats as they were focused on raiders & m+ players iirc)

This is the best summery of Blizzard I’ve ever seen. Everything is always one extreme to the other.

They really did not go overboard with quality of life. In fact they took away from it. WOD was where they were going to take flying away completely but due to the backlash and cancellation of subs, they added it back in the form of pathfinder, something no one asked for. Flying should be something we get automatically or simply by paying a vendor to get a flight license, as we used to do in past expansions pre WOD.

The issue with WOD is that players wanted players housing and Blizzard executed 100% wrong. They based the entire expansion around the garrisons, which is not what the playerbase wanted. Player housing that is optional, has customizations, allows one to craft furniture and other items for it, is what players wanted. Or something similar to FFXIV and/or Elder Scrolls player housing. So they spend all this time trying to correct a mistake with garrisons that they created, which resulted in time running out and WOD getting shelved for Legion.

The same goes for covenants. Players were excited about the idea of covenants, because we were promised a choice and that covenants would be in the mode of say a mini faction. SL launches and the covenants are your entire experience mostly in SL. The expansion is almost completely designed around it. The result is that some covenants are better for some specs and classes and has lead to unbalancing even more than before. Plus they are not alt friendly and unless you have 4 characters, you miss out on the mogs, mounts, toys, pets, etc in each one.

Look at Torghast, it was promised as one of the big features of SL and it has turned out to be a dud. Players want more solo content and Torghast was supposed to be that solo content, but when it launched it was utterly broken with impossible bosses and mobs that no one could hardly kill. So Blizzard nerfed Torghast and have added additional anima powers. But what is the incentive to doing Torghast? Nothing, apart from soul ash or maybe a quest here or htere to rescue some of the faction leaders and to get mission table followers.

So in 9.1, Bizzard once again decides to fix a problem they created, by adding a timer with Torghast and adding cosmestics, when no one asked for a timer, but we did ask for rewards which should have been available from the beginning.

There seems to be a sense of “we must control the players” mentality at Blizzard. They promise choices but then tightly control such choices it is as if they do not think we can think for ourselves or know how or what to do with the game at times.

legion was horrible

I totally agree. Whatever they do someone would be whining on the forums about it. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Trying to please everyone is just not possible.

You don’t need flying if you don’t need to get out of your garrison. Yes, they did go overboard with the quality of life in WoD and this is the main complaint I hear about the expansion - not that garrisons were bad but that they were too good and you didn’t need to leave your garrison at all. That is the endgame of quality of life - you just log in, do nothing and get a reward.

This is why I will argue until I am blue in the face that the WoW community has no idea what “quality of life” means. They thing design changes that make it so you have to play the game less are “quality of life changes”. This is objectively wrong and WoD is the evidence.

Main point of flying in WoD was fast leveling of alts through treasures.