I just think that it’s a bit weird that they’re changing all these things, toning down the sexualisation of the game and yet continue to ignore the cybering freakshows in Goldshire on EU and US RP realms; they’ve purged it before, what’s the excuse?
Surely, if you argue these things are being changed or edited to make the game more welcoming and friendly; to stir up a better community, you’d begin excising that tumour too? It may be me being incredible cynical, but this “ripcord” seems to be more PR than actual substance for the most part.
This is something they really should be doing yeah. It’s weirder now than ever how hush hush they instead are about it with bans & deleting posts discussing it. Rather than dealing with it itself.
Because ultimately, methinks that despite being caught with their hand in the cookie jar, Acti-blizz won’t change and that the people making the game are actually genuinely out of touch with the player base. Old guard or no.
Despite how diabolical this expansion has gone I predict that the next expansions beta feedback will be ignored as per, the story will continue to trample over the narratives that actually got us all invested in Warcraft in the first place, the game will only grow quieter. But it’ll have a nice, warm and welcoming mural to act as a facade.
I will eat my work hat and put it on YouTube if this isn’t the case.
I’ve dropped the political angle completely because 90% of the time it’s just bait, both from the people championing this form of the rabid sanitization of the game and those demonizing it.
What bothers me is that these are all surface level, zero effort changes that do not show even a hint of the company heading into the right direction. They remove the slightest hint of dumb dad jokes while let the notorious ERP scene on AD and Moonguard fester and even thrive while citing their own completely inept report system and rulesets as the go-to way of dealing with smut.
They make grandiose statements of how these changes are fueled by their desire to make the game better, then just admit that it’s solely because the development team find these embarrassing or triggering. What kind of development team looks at the shambles that’s current state WoW, do a deep dive into what’s basically obsolete content and go “Yeah, we have to fix this. Excise the naughty bits, leave the ethnic genocide in.”?
And this is from a company that produces entertainment products for customers. They aren’t pioneers in any particular genre or field any more, they are mass producing trash for a while now. Yet instead of giving us previews of what they are working on, how they might revitalize and rigorously rework their golden egg laying hen, they remove dick jokes and give us changes we had been begging for since the beta release of Shadowlands and absolutely nothing substantial. I find it all extremely disingenuous and insulting.
I mean, probably that different people are working on different things. If they had human people working on reports and whatnot (that also aren’t getting cubecrawled at), I’d think the reports would also be fruitful, but alas - you’re feeding tickets to robots.
I don’t think this is PR at all atm though, just devs wishing to change the game to be something more to their tastes.
Going on about how ‘the new woke SJW devs’ like Riptongue earlier is however excessively embarrassing because the old devs from 15 years ago were the problem. (This is a general statement, not aimed at you Aerilen xx)
Tired of these smoke and mirrors, of this deflection. It’s all this is, if they were really intent on removing “problematic” things in the game. There are the weirdly sexist and trite quests that Adelais mentioned.*
But that’s all this is, 2 minute changes someone can do between actual jobs to vaguely appease outrage.
*whether they should be removed is another topic entirely and I am too tired for that.
I think this generally is a situation that could be better fixed by not sticking to mostly radio silence. As you said, show previews, bring up discussions more with people and feedback. Show that they are working on it.
With nothing to go on except what is being datamined from WoWhead or from the ocassional WoWDev that only speaks personally, I understand that and why people are unhappy or speculating even if I don’t agree with alot of it.
Especially frustrating is that those in-charge of the bigger production, and the bigger flaws and design(the overarching story and core gameplay) are saying nothing.
You’re honestly not the only one. Like, I straight up adore WoW. I’ve been playing it since TBC, not to brag or anything. I wouldn’t have sunk almost 15 years worth of subscription, and box prices of expansions, and the uncounted hundreds of thousands of race/faction/name/server changes I’ve done, if I didn’t.
And we’re essentially watching uninvested developers vandalizing it all for the sake of their own thin skin, not for the benefit of the game. They’re not even replacing what’s being removed. It’s just removal.
For no logical reason beyond it makes the developers uncomfortable. Plenty of things make me uncomfortable, should I just go out there and start removing them? No, because that’s psychotic.
So when you say it’s tiring, I’m right there with you. Because when those developers leave, and they will leave because that’s the kind of people they are, we’ll be left with a broken, battered husk of a game that we loved once.
This is a situation where I, as a project manager, would have my team be dead silent on social media, whether they have their “my thoughts are my own” inane twitter tag or not (and a rather dishonest one at that at this point given how these changes align with what they’ve been parroting as individuals), work on actually making the game function better as a game and not just more palatable for whatever marginalized group, showcase it to the playerbase, then start removing the naughty puns as a side project.
I’m only seeing horrible prioritization and a vague attempt at making themselves harder targets for criticism.
they could be working on the game right now while also doing a side project (that’s in the process of being finished that’s being implemented quicker than game design/function changes because obviously, one takes less effort than the other)
all these talks about prioritization and whatnot is just so bewildering, several things can be worked on at the same time by different teams etc lol
Yeah and Blizzard has been pushing their WIP content to the forth the moment they had something presentable. I will freely talk about priorities and what they should be doing because I’ve been both their customer for almost three decades and I’ve also had the pleasure of seeing what’s going on under the hood at a large tech company when people take their jobs seriously as well as when they couldn’t care less.
Do you honestly believe that with their track record they are hiding something mindblowingly majestic under the hood? Because we have been getting the opposite instead, and losing God knows how many developers and figureheads is yet to produce an environment where things go ahead faster and better. This entire class act by the current WoW devs is what’s bewildering, not the people asking what they are smoking while making these changes and decisions.
For me, it isn’t weird that the game is being sanitized. There’s nothing detrimental about all of these things being changed and removed, it doesn’t make the game worse or better. If some people were uncomfortable about these parts of the game, then the changing of these parts of the game is justified.
Instead, it’s weird that resources are being spent on sanitizing the game when the current content of the game is in a dire state. At this rate, we’re looking at one content patch in the space of an entire year. Is there nothing that could have been done to expedite or improve 9.2, in the time that was spent combing the game for problematic elements and sanitizing them for 9.1.5?
I understand that the answer to that question might be “yes, there is nothing that they could have done for 9.2.” Sometimes in game development, there are stages of a project where only certain members of the team can contribute to the project. In that case, do the people behind these changes genuinely have nothing better to do with their time than make these changes? Is there nothing else that they could contribute to 9.1.5, or any other part of the game other than this, that is more worthwhile?
If the answer to that is “no,” then I guess I just don’t understand or agree with the WoW team’s priorities or resource management. What role did these people perform in developing WoW before they started focusing on these changes for 9.1.5? What parts of the game would they normally be focused on developing instead of this? Or are these just fresh interns brought in for the exclusive purpose of sanitizing the game?
I’m just scratching my head a little. Again, not objecting to the sanitization or even using that word in a negative sense. Just objecting to prioritizing sanitization over game development, when the game is such a diabolical state.
