It’s just the way the conversation goes Valteryl. What’s happening with the court case leads to a conversation about the overall health of Blizzard and the game. Things can’t be seen in isolation.
The hard truth is if the game was in a great state then people would be more willing to keep playing. But when they’re only hanging on with loyalty to the game and Blizzard, this will finish a lot off. There was a lot of dissatisfaction with the game before, as you’ve pointed out. So it’s the cumulative effect and it’s all linked to how we respond.
Once Blizzard get their day in court and everyone who has any culpability with the allegations are fired, they should have both Ion and Danuser step down from their respective roles. Ion excels at raid designing, not as game director.
And Danuser, well, fantasy writing isn’t up his alley. I would never call for him to be fired but he is not the right person for the job.
Quite frankly the company could always be much worse. We’d love to see improvements for sure but this whole ordeal could just as much foster a different climate in the company that won’t necessarily give us a good product… Still, it’d be good if no harassers was there and a few heads were sent to the wolves (court).
For all I know, in the wake of this ordeal Actiblizzard could just as much do more monetization to extract more money from the smaller pool of active players, not listen to our suggestions for a better experience and continue engaging in this narrative that’s ruining everything we’ve known.
And no, I don’t feel like I have to be positive about it or that I should curb my cynicism, this is a company that has for a solid 3 years been doing their very best to dissapoint at every turn, refused every small victory, is out of touch and tone deaf.
Wdym Cata and MoP were good expansions. Even wod despite its cardinal sin of having no content, was solid because the content that was there was really, really good. BRF is to date hailed as the best raid to this day. Pvp has never been as popular.
Blizzard can do good and it’s not a fool’s errand to demand that from them.
Did we play the same PVP, I had longer queues for even trashcan than I had anything prior, people even hail MoP 5.4 pvp as the holy grail of pvp design and class balance.
Anyway your calls to get people fired amidst all the stuff going on is in very poor taste boush.
But it was end of Wrath and beginning of Cata, when Blizzard started to introduce insane amount of accessibility to the game: LFD, LFR, infinite respecs, character boosts were introduced in MoP, in WoD they introduced token that forced people to leave the game and seek out older versions of the same game back to 12 years ago (at the time).
You can’t sit with a straight face and tell me that all shop mechanics “enhance” the RPG element of the game lol. It fact, it removes RPG from MMORPG.
Yes, Brian Holinka even confirmed that rated pvp + bg’s were as popular as the equivalent pve content back then, responding to an argument that stated that PVP was a minority activity in WoW. And it’s no surprise, WoD had the best gearing system to date and Ashran was extremely good source of solid catchup gear for fresh max levels.
I didn’t ask.
None of these are or were a problem. Lfd is also a Wotlk invention, not Cata.
Partly true. But now, classic is here and it’s been a great success for Blizzard (so far).
I don’t ever remember saying that they do, so thankfully i do not need to defend that PoV. But the cash shop and services have been available since burning crusade and wotlk.
Also i do not genuinely know what you mean by rpg elements since they seem to change from one person to another.
Cata was not a good expac, it was disliked all the way through, from the start because of difficult dungeons to the immediate cut content, to Dragon Soul being one of the most underwhelming last raids ever (Ny’alotha is a contender but at least Ny’alotha had the visuals instead of a rehash of Dragonblight), to Deathwing being the most underwhelming last boss ever, to the story of everything being terrible including the start of super-memey quests etcetera.
MoP was a different shift in WoW, somehow the golden nugget that only got unearthed the expansion after, because during its release everyone hated it due to the Asian theme ‘not fitting in WoW’. I’d be surprised if you also didn’t rage about ‘pandas’ and ‘Asian culture’ in your ‘western WoW!!!’.
Legion was the last good expac no matter how much you hated it because of the introduction of Artefact power lol. WoD had good raids, but even the final raid was kind of middling.
On top of you just being wrong, you’re just exhibiting your usual terrible takes, and honestly
Nobody asked for your opinion either, so now you’ll get ours, enjoy.
Just in general a very weird and awful angle to go for among sexual harassment, discrimination and abuse claims, really, but idk why I’m expecting better of you.
Have you even been playing classic lol? How can you call it a success when company promises one thing, but delivers another? Most major content creators left 2 weeks after TBC went live, more are leaving now. How is it a success to fail in relaunching a 14 y.o game?
you also clearly cannot read, citing only things you wish out of context.
V room temperature iq approach with which i don’t even want to bother arguing lol, if you want to die on a hill defending GOOD OL DAYS that weren’t even good - go for it, but that changes nothing that retail has been suffering from it for over a decade
kind of a wacko thing to assume about someone without any actual cause to do so
i get that bullying buosh is like a local sport for some posters but be real
kind of a wacko thing to also wade into a topic about harassment, sexism etc and be like ‘uMM now fire all the employees who worked on things i dislike about the game!!!’
I agree entirely that Boush is being a bit of a tool, but it’d be best to ignore his tepid takes when they aren’t relevant to the matter of the allegations made against Blizzard / etc.
Eh, as much as I disagree with a lot of the things Boush says, it’s still useful to read to see how people who tend to think differently too you approach things and see where overlap is. It’s healthy. (In my eyes)
Compared to Wotlk, undoubtedly Cata had a rough start. But Cata is also the expansion that gave us the first (albeit extremely scuffed) version of flex raiding which was then made better every subsequent expansion, transmog (which continues to be one of the best systems they ever added), and it was also a fresh leaf in WoW’s story as all the OG villains from Wc3 were gone and done. Since I never raided, I never really cared that much for DS ending, but overall the expansion was extremely popular, especially since it had one of the longest content droughts during it’s last patch. Also you can look at sub numbers to see that it did just fine- Not as good as Wotlk for sure, but it was still a solid expansion.
…Why would I have a problem with pandaren? Or asian culture? I even play a pandaren warrior, what a crazy take.
MoP also had an extremely rough start if you remember, but grew into really the most beloved expansion this game ever had, surpassing even Wotlk in terms of pure game design. Reforging, professions being meaningful, both pvp and pve were solid, isle of thunder was -mega- popular and dailies were good because they were more for cosmetics and mounts than any actual gear gain.
Legion was even if you wanna go by pure sub numbers worse than WoD. It started off better, but the subs fell much harder than those of WoD’s. Wod had a steady sub loss, Legion started the trend where people played a patch for a month and then dropped it because it became not worth it to waste your time in it. That’s not my words by the way, Ion confirmed as much in the BFA alpha interview that they want to create content that keeps people interested for longer periods of time, not just when it’s hot.
Legion was the antichrist expansion because it:
Killed glyphs and thus a massive amount of class-specific customization options
Killed pvp (Legion s.1 has the lowest participation numbers of any arena season to date).
Turned classes into gimmicks (survival hunter, demonology warlock and combat rogue still rolling in their graves), so much so that Blizzard has spent the last two subsequent expansions trying to fix it (by their own admission).
Introduced arbitrary, neverending grinds such as AP
And worst of all, the borrowed power. Legendaries. Artifact weapons + argus stones
In isolation, these problems don’t seem so bad but they are really a thing that pushed WoW down into a hole it’s yet to crawl from. The expansion destroyed systems that were tested, popular and improved upon for many years (pvp, glyphs) and introduced systems that insane amounts of resources would be wasted upon, only to be trashed (artifact weapons, artifact power, legendaries, stones).
Every single reason BFA sucked was because they tried the same model, only in smaller scale, and it backfired so bad that the main feature of the expansion (azerite armor) was announced by Ion 2 months prior to release to be unfinished.
Azerite armor, Essences, Corruption, Azerite power, Warfronts and Island expenditions are all prime examples of how out of touch you have to be with the playerbase to think that they were actually enjoyable and solid forms of content. Even Horrific visions, for which they had the only succesful thing about Legion aside from m+, the mage tower, as a perfect template, somehow got messed up by tieting character progression to it.
And guess what we have now? Torghast. Covenants. Dominion shards. The cycle repeats itself, the loop closes. A wheel reimagined every single expansion, instead of one that is improved and cultivated every single expansion.
I understand people liked Legion in isolation. I had fun moments in it too, believe or not. But an antichrist expansion it was, all the same. And we haven’t even talked about the sub numbers yet, we don’t even need to see them they’re at record low.
Agreed, nothing wrong with a healthy discussion. He hasn’t been rude to anyone and while I disagree on firing people, his main issue about trying to improve the game going forward and trying to make Blizz/WoW a better place are perfectly fine. Don’t see why people can’t have a grown up chat about these things.
Might be that people put too much emphasis on trying to support/attack posters they do/don’t like, and enough on what they’re actually saying.
ragnaros was a repeat boss from vanilla, deathwing and cho’gal were from wc1 and 2. nefarian and onyxia back from vanilla wow as well
throne of the four winds is probably the only original one in the list in terms or raid bosses which we know is pretty much the focus of wow’s story. if it’s not raid related it’s not important
edit: in fairness they did add in the chad wrathion in cata
I’m not sure how useful individual claims are to the wider problem solving of the nuclear waste elephant’s foot of issues at actiblizzard right now.
I’m no lawyer and observe corporate culture with extreme cynicism at the best of times but I sort of suspect that claims that female employees were passed up on promotions despite “deserving” it better than their lazy male counterparts is a very subjective claim baked into a larger misconduct and sexual harassment cake.
I just don’t know. The investigation has its obvious points but in that, the corporate defence has a real weakness to exploit to in turn discredit other allegations as the fiction of disgruntled employees looking to harm a company not catering to their ambitions.