My grading system is based on effort and the experience it provides. I get it, it can look nice and sound nice, but if it’s a bad experience or functionally not working; I’m not going to rate it high.
Wow has had a serious competition it had serious competition since 2012. It’s a 16-17 yr old game. It should have 16-17 years of consistent improvement on almost everything I stated above. People are stuck in this mindset that products that are worked on for over a decade by specialists are somehow old and out of date, especially with gaming, because they no idea what goes on, and the optics take control.
When you have a 16 yr old game, you are the market leader. Blizzard should have the talent, the knowledge, the player base, the funding, a smooth content pipeline, access to the newest tools, the best servers, more community managers, more developers, a better work/life balance for staff (more people less impact one person makes, therefore, they become less important to the project as a whole meaning they can take time off, for example, its how corporations remove the corporate feel), a proud history and less work to do than your completion to produce the same result as you have 16yrs of work to stand on and an existing code to improve on.
Where are the 16 years of philosophical development? This game has a little foundation. It’s incredibly experimental for no reason. I think I know the reason though they see games like FF14, Ashes, Gw2 et al. and think “insert the word” if those games go live, they will harm us because we haven’t done our housekeeping, so they mutilate their own game as an attempt to say look how innovative when no has innovation has occurred. Which comes off that the company doesn’t believe the product is good enough.
Covenants, order halls, garrisons are not new ideas, and that’s why you probably get annoyed by them implementing these systems in the way that they do. (I get annoyed by looking at them). However, these systems have been designed and worked on by 100,000s of people for over two decades in multiple different genres and countries.
You only see simple versions or two three variations not due to how unimaginative people are, but these are the ones that are industry standard and best practice. In other words, they are objectively good and create the best experience for the majority because humans have more in common than not, especially with what they like v dislike. That’s why most emotional issues or actions happen when someone is at the extreme. People can be objectively measured we are animals who are not that special.
Blizzard hopefully knows because the junior designers would be trained by the senior who been trained by theirs and that knowledge would have been passed down. It’s what differentiates a studio what makes people fall in love with them. So it has an “insert game studio” game.
Most of what I complain about and the potential problems I can see in-game the solutions because they were problems Blizzard fixed in the past through simpler means they wrote the book on gearing and crossing that divide. I saw that and instantly could see the Blizzard DNA in FF14 and other MMOs. So my biggest frustration as someone who gave 4-5 years of their life becoming a game designer and more playing genre why are you doing this? Why do you feel the need to do this? You wrote the book stop ripping the pages out.
When people above did the mental gymnastics, how can he have such insight because you’re a new player? 3 months isn’t enough. It might not be enough for you because you’re probably in the honeymoon phase I’m not. I came to see how the largest MMO did things because running for 16 years is extremely impressive.
It seems a lot of the issues in-game are not because of the player base but a highly experimental process of giving you what you already had. In other words, it’s just poor form, and that doesn’t help when you have a PTR because it makes you look foolish since the players can see and report on 20% of your thought process, and it comes off as insecure development at best and malicious at worst when done wrong.
If you have heard this before from previous people in the game or industry, you might want to think the issue might actually be there because if an outsider can come in and see it in two seconds, then I wonder what someone with 16 years can see.