My view on WoW (as a software engineer)

Community General Discussion
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So this topic comes as a result of the latest changes that blizz made on pvp gearing in shadowlands (time gating & low ilvl) which I obviously think that it is a bad decision and I am gonna explain why from a software development / user experience point of view.

In the last 10 to 20 years software engineers all around the world started using a standard working methodology called “Agile”. To make things simpler this methodology is so useful because it basically implies that the way you develop a product is incremental and you constantly ask for feedback and adapt the product in order to appropiately match the user needs.

And here is where I think that blizzard fails big time. I believe that blizzard proved to not be capable to translate the user feedback into actual implementation and where it managed to do so it took too much time and was not implemented properly.

Let’s take the pvp scaling for example, they required 2+ years in order to remove it, that is not agile at all. Guys I’m telling you, being a multi dollar company and having the tools that they have at hand it should absolutelty not take that much time to respond to some feedback and remove a feature (not even implement it).

Let’s take titan forging, they got a lot of negative feedback on that, and what did they do->add corruption to items which is in some ways very similar and again they got negative feedback on that. Why did that happen? Because they failed at gathering user feedback and adapting to it fast enough. That is simply not acceptable for their resources.

Pvp gearing, the community cried for a pvp vendor with proper pvp items that fairly matches the pve counterpart…and they keep failing on doing that.

There would be many more ideas but it would mean that I would have to explain some software development concepts and the topic would become way too complex.

Bottom line, blizzard has the resources, has the money, has the tools. The only reason for this poor development/implementation is BAD product management.

Ah, and another thing that is very important is COMMUNICATION. If Blizzard really take their decisions based on user feedback/research they should come in front of us and tell us “look we implemented this system because during our exploration and user research we found out this information from 1 million players” and everyone will be cool with that, because we ll understand that the decision is community driven. Saying “oh, yeah, we added covenants because we think this feature is cool” is not acceptable in software development on any level. The motivation behind the implementation of a feature can not be “we think is cool”, that s a school project, not a multi dollar company.

As a player that loves the warcraft universe I can only hope things will get better.

As a software engineer I can see only darkness before me.

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what do you expect. All that the Blizzard people on this and the US forum are doing is engaging in funny or meme posts about cats and how cool certain transmog is.

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It has nothing to do with development methodologies at all.

In MMO development the customer is rarely right. If you read the feedback on the forums,for example tonight, you dont see constructive feedback you see players that want their class to be top, or an easier life. Tonight’s threads are about PvP gearing. Players wants faster ways to obtain gear.

This has nothing to do with developing methodology but how you react to player feedback.

This is my interpretation of it:
PvP gearing: so from what i can see the higher gear is gated by Renown and this slows down gearing. If you’re a binge player this is bad BUT for the overall health of the game it’s good. If players got geared in a week then most would not play after they are fully geared. PvP should be it’s own reward, you would think so, but for most it’s not. See Legion template gear feedback

The scaling was kept in because they decided not too. WoW is a big complex game and if you change one thing it’s wrecks everything else. If you remove scaling then you also need to find another way to stop other players one shotting other players. In this case the level squish helps this somewhat; smaller power curve

With regards to balance Blizzard have been on the record that they dont like to make changes because it upsets players who double down on certain gearing or classes for the tier. Personally I disagree with that.

I dont know what kind of software developer you are but if your customer says I need this as it will make this or that quicker, easier then of course you would do that. But in a multiplayer game getting something easier means you affect other’s game play negatively.

They do quite a bit but people dont pay attention to that.

They did exactly that with Death Knights back in Wrath and it was a disaster. It was incredibly OP and why wouldn’t it be. It was literally a hero class.

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Players do not want fasting gearing, they want entry-level pvp gear not to be timegated. It tooks 7 weeks to unlock pvp gear that is on par with a +6 mythic gear that can be obtained day 1.

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Activision thinks he knows best and they value their numbers more then anything , well they are wrong , numbers keep decreasing .

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Strictly speaking you can’t gear up in one day in a +6 unless you are very lucky and spam keys.

Isn’t a +6 about the same ilevel as a normal raid?

What I’m trying to say it has always been easier to get PvP gear than it has PvE gear. PvE you need to hope you get loot and hope you get the stats you want. PvP you get currency and pick what stats you want. Some gating at least means it’s not as easy to get.

Bear in mind even PvE players will still have low gear and will be time gated by various means. Do you want your PvP filled with PvE players just there for gear?

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Nowadays everyone considers themselves an expert in everything that Blizzard could do better. I think WoW is fine and everything is fine.

Something people tend to forget is that it’s Blizzard choice to listen to feedback or not. It’s their game, they have the last word.

“I’m a Software Engineer” doesn’t add any credibility either. I’m a Software Engineer myself and disagree with all of your points. Not that it matters…

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That is why I said that I would have to explain a lot of things so everyone who is not involved in software development to understand this. Let me try to explain it.

I’m not saying that blizzard should implement what peoples are saying on the forums.

There are two types of user research:
Quantitative research
Qualitative research

Both are equally important. In proper software development we never implement what the user or the client SAYS, we have our tools for doing research and based on the research we implement things

The way this works is not by asking what the user wants. It works by looking at what the user does. We take decisions based on what he does not based on he says as users tend to project themselves into an ideal self and that is the reason we do not take their words for granted.

We also have proper tools in order to do this type of research.These Forums act a lot as very chaotical focus group which is a part of user research, bot not the most important one.Blizzard knows this (I hope they know this) and should be more transparent with what they are doing in order for us to understand if it makes any sense to invest time in this game.

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I wouldn’t go that far. Convent abilities was stupid mistake. There will always be a better one.

I think that’s just a misunderstanding of the term feedback. They think if they listen then you have to act. Not just a Wow issue but society in general.

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Ok, you disagree with agile. What kind of waterfallish software developer are you?

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you are implying that agile and waterfall are the only two possible approaches to software development. Nontheless, I’m not here to talk about my work.

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bullsh*t. All we want is just not beeing timegated for no real reason. its not about “fast” its just that we want it how it was back before legion. Play the game get reward. and not wait 8 weeks…here is a rewards.

atleast be honest

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I’m sorry if I made it sound like that - of course one can disagree with some of the decisions. But, if the past 15 years have shown something is that “it will be fine” overall

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so losing like 10 million players is fine to you?

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mkay dude, say what you want. One thing regarding blizz having the last word, no dude, that’s false. In the end the users have the last word when they ll stop using your product. From that statement I can see that you are probably a teenager doing school projects.

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Can you really blame people for eventually getting bored of WoW no matter what they do?

Every product has a certain life cycle, and it doesn’t matter what Blizzard does, people will eventually move on to other games. WoW can’t last forever but I don’t feel like we’re near the end yet.

The “product life cycle”

https://www.rompagroup.com/bestanden/Afbeeldingen/w550-3957-1/BOL-MOL-EOL.jpg

WoW’s sub history:

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That would be a valid arguement if WoW would be a stagnating thing. You cannot compare WoW to the IPhone 7, you have to compare it to IPhones as a whole.
The same base that is always changing.

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explain to me why like 90% of people that I played with and quit are not playing classic.

the product life cycle is something that you cant really use here because we get a new product every 2 years. If it would be just one game that doesnt get expansions you could use that cycle. but not for WoW because we basically have a new produt with every new expansion

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cool. doesnt even look similar at all. you just fooled yourself here

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Yeah, that’s what Blizzard does. They told us when they made Classic how much telemetry they capture these days compared to Vanilla. I’ve always said on this form when people bash things that Blizzard log everything.

Blizzard have never gone into the numbers and never will. They do give us small tid bits. For instance when they introduced Raid Finder they told us roughly what proportion of the player base did actual raiding and how it was not worth it to spend those resources so they needed Raid Finder so that more people would experience the content.

There’s also the element of surprise, very important for a game. While I wouldn’t say WoW’s narrative is as strong as FF14 they do need to keep it under wraps so it means there needs to be some level of secrecy. Would we have wanted to know what Sylvanas was ultimately up to back in Legion. What would have happened if we knew that N’Zoth was the ultimate boss of the expansion. I’m sure it would put people off.