Dear Blizzard,
Your business plan sucks.
I play WoW nearly a decade and it’s just an personal issue for me that you stop killing my fun by playing the game and you now reached a point where I feel like I have to do something.
First please excuse my language because my mother tongue isn’t English.
First you are a company, your aim is to make money. Totally right here – that’s how the world works.
When I look at you stocks 1. October 2018 83,39 USD, now 30.11.2018 52,56 USD that’s loss off nearly 40% so obviously something went wrong.
Basic business:
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Make an desire (really needed or artificial need doesn’t matter)
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Keep your customers in the hamster wheel (you’re partly good at this point)
The problem by only focusing point 2. Is that sooner or later the people get bored or a competitor takes your place. This results in losing customers, leading to less money. This results in less resources for developers so the quality of your product is decreasing so you lose more customers and so on.
Your strategic goal should be that you make your customers desire your product.
To 2.:
Beside the content patches, you keep it rolling by buffing/nerfing class dps and pvp availability – it works. This makes every time another class shine and people rerolling investing more time.
To 1. :
Human nature:
Every action or desire humans have can be drilled down to 3 things: might, performance and relationship. This are also the 3 things people motivate, nobody is just driven by on of this, it’s always a mixture but one of this 3 is superior.
Examples and basic sales psychology:
Manager: can be might or because he want to be the best in something (performance)
Athlete: want to be the best in something (performance) or wanted to get celebrated by the crowd (might)
Social worker: relationship (helping people)
This are also the three things that make people want to play your game and you can easily provide all this to the people. Everyone wants to achieve something because it’s just a good feel when we achieve something.
When you want to go on an adventure, as example, when you want to climb on a really high mountain you start hiking through the forest for hours. Then the forest gets more and more reduced to the point where you barely see trees and then you walk through fields and big rocks. As long as you go you feel more tired, you are may be running out of water and food. Some parts of your body hurt but you are going on and on and finally, you reach the top. You will feel strong and proud looking through all the little mountains around like standing on the top of the world. You can really feel the achievement. You feel unbeatable. Free.
Now back to World of Warcraft:
You had this high mountains: Raids and rated PvP
I will never forget fighting through the ice crown citadel and then standing in front of the lich king. Finally. But it was not the end.
The nights of trying and trying to defeat him… the tears… the laughs… and then…. When everything was working perfectly nobody fails and a little bit of luck we did it. It was 4 am in the morning and I jumped of me seat and was celebrating, as I would be the king of the world.
The struggle was real!!!
Back to the mountains: You think you will feel the same when there is an elevator to the top of the mountain? LFR? You make the lazy people stand on the top of the mountain looking down next to the people which worked off their butt to reach the top.
You didn’t stopped there, you made the mountains smaller. Do you think the people which stood on a 8611 m high mountain feel the same as when they climb on a 2500 m high mountain? NO! People want to struggle because this makes things worth.
How do you get these feelings into WoW?
People want to work for things, getting gear thrown on you for each easy peasy quest, dungeon and LFR and then it maybe also looks nearly the same like the really good stuff it will not create any meaningful emotions.
You have to make people desire something. Standing in the capital city of the addon looking at a guy standing there in this great looking, shining armor and you know damn he defeated the biggest boss and you want to be as strong as him. With making the boss in 4 sizes and 4 different colored armor sets you create nothing because nobody will look up every armor colortyp to know on which difficulty this guy slayed the dragon. You simply don’t get the sense of: less is more!
Back to Wotlk as an example:
Leveling was a struggle, you can’t just pull groups of mops together burn them down and do this till 80. Back then you knew the only way to look down the mountain is to get in a solid group and try as long and hard as possible to be able to look down the mountain.
BfA:
getting 120 as fast as possible, gearing through PvP, WQ, Dungeons etc. (I tried it you are from ilvl 277 to 350 in 15 hours, just by doing the right stuff, no item buying), que LFR BOOOHM you are done with the content of the whole patch. Then you are bored, you are also bored because on your journey you hitted the same 4 buttons over and over and over again, with no possibility to change something or try something new.
Feels great….
Vanilla (and why it is on the players’s wish list):
Vanilla was great, an adventure for years. Leveling was hard. The classes had a lot of stuff to play around (more than 5 spells, real talent trees, meaningful armor…), you needed people to do quests, dungeons and so on. Some players will play it for nostalgia and because the game is really different to BFA but it will not save you.
Easy question for you:
What girl is more interesting for you? Your exgirlfriend or the hot girl next to you standing at the bar, watching you?
What the community wants, what I stand for and to start going the right way:
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Make the mountains great again. Bring back normal – heroic system, make it harder, so you also struggle in normal and delete LFR for ever.
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Make things hard to achieve and not only by time (you and your buddies move right & click right instead of “run it 500 times and you will get it” system)
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Give classes their identity back (not only different colors)
a. Bring back or invent more spells, have the balls to completely rework classes
b. Bring back uniqueness to the classes (e.g. not everybody needs a healing button)
c. Bring back old talent trees (we know mostly there was just one max dps build, but it was fun to play around with other builds which may be performed better in niche situations)
4. Get rid of the idiots lottery:
a. Bring back PvP currency and PvP cap – 1 item per week, except the big ones (only if you limit the PvE farming also a bit)
b. Dungeons, raids and world bosses have their possibility to drop an item with an % rate and X item level, bring back master loot
c. Get rid of that fu**ing iron-/titan forged (when I see one more hunter standing the whole instance in AoE, not one single kick and earing an iron forged item I will &%&$%&”$%”§&”$…) - sry hunters but you are always a good example
5. Make the mobs god damn stronger and leveling harder, feels bad as a healer when nobody needs you because everyone just press button x healing you for %. It’s a mmorpg so design it like this and not like Diablo.
6. Invest a little bit more time in the new armor designs (why everybody is transmogging?)
What you do great:
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I really like that armor doesn’t matter that much in PvP – you can go rated arena with 277 ilvl as a healer (class doesn’t care) and still win a lot of games and you can farm gear without braindead dungeon farming. Skill matters and thats a good thing.
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You implemented really beautiful spell animations, races, worlds, stories, videos, quests and mounts over the years so keep doing it, we all appreciate that but it is not enough to play WoW.
I am not one of this guys who is talking about how the world works but then when it comes to real actions refuse to do something. I cann’t cover everything here, I just tried to get you an idea why WoW is not on a good way since years and you seem a little bit helpless. So if you want detailed information how all this stuff works together and why it will work, contact me and I will give you details about numbers, mechanics, class specific issues and so on.
I made the experience that the most people need a little pressure, a push in the right direction to do something. So I invite every retired and active WoW player who read this to sign my petition for the “make WoW great again” with the request as soon as we have 100 000 signs to unsub WoW for 2 months. This will cause a financial pain to Blizzard and may be wake them up.
If this Post gets deleted I will keep posting it on other forums and write every date and forum name where this lines got deleted.
Petition: https://www.change.org/p/blizzard-make-world-of-warcraft-wow-great-again
To all Streamers and WoW Players:
Help me making this game great again, we had so much fun with it, we shouldn’t watch how it get destroyed and do nothing.
Best Regards
MakeWoWgreatagain