PvP Warfronts - Alterac Valley?

Community General Discussion
24

I wasn’t aware of that. :upside_down_face:

But it’s pragmatism.

The wish-list players have for WoW is much longer than Blizzard can keep up with.

So when you have to choose what Bob the developer should work on, then you are inevitably also choosing all the things he shouldn’t work on.

Because if we say that Bob should spend his hours at work trying to make Warfronts cooler, then we are indirectly also saying that we don’t want Bob to work on Nazjatar or Mechagon, or Wintergrasp, or Arathi Basin remake, or whatever.

And that prioritization of things is the key discussion of every topic.

We can all make infinitely long wish-lists – that’s easy.
What’s difficult is to actually order that wish-list in terms of what’s most important.

And I would argue that whilst many would love a re-design or overhaul or development investment put into Warfronts, I’m not sure if that’s the thing that’s on top of everyone’s wish-list.

25

If you keep believing that, you are clueless. The BFA has the most reused assets than any other expansion. The greed of the people above push the developers to make the game as cheap as possible and as efficient as possible.
BLIZZARD CAN MAKE A GREAT GAME! They are not allowed to do that. They are not allowed to experiment, they are not allowed to pour too many resourse into their content. What they are allowed to do is to throw the most basic cookie cutter concept with a prolong time gating, lots of distractions for the casuals and a bunch of pretty store mounts ( I love the Vulpera one, I will never buy it out of principle. If it was in the game, I would spend countless hours trying to get it!).

GET MORE BOBS, instead of firing 8% of your staff after THE BEST YEAR of the company!

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26

How is that a matter of belief? :thinking:

It’s a simple acknowledgement that Blizzard are able to produce a quantity of WoW that amounts to X.

If you want to wedge more development for Warfronts into that production, then something else obviously has to be postponed or delayed.

If Blizzard has 300 developers, then they can choose to put all 300 to work on making Nazjatar as cool as possible. Or they can choose to only put 100 developers to work on it, and then the other 200 developers can work on other things like Warfronts or Raids or whatever.
Or they can put 50 developers to work on it, 50 developers on Raids, 50 developers on Class Balance, and 150 developers on the next expansion.
Or they can put all 300 developers to work on overhauling the questing experience in Outland and forget about everything else.

If you want developers to work on improving Warfronts, then you have to also acknowledge the fact that that choice implies that there’s something else they won’t be working on then.
And do you still want improved Warfronts then, over something else?

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t say you want improved Warfronts and more and improved of everything else as well. It doesn’t work that way.

27

You just get more developers, it is that simple. Blizzard have the resourses to do so, but that would mean less profit and that is a no no for the overlords.

It does, not with corporate Overlords, but it does work exactly like that. Path of Excile have done exactly that - improving their old content while also making and developing new one. Beastiary League was an absolute dumbster years ago, now it is a good feature, while the game kept evolving over it. You just need the people to do it, which Blizzard instead of hiring are firing after their most successfull year.

28

We can end this discussion with: Good games are not profitable ones. Bad, mass appealing, exploitive games are! Guess which one WoW is.

29

And they are. The size of the WoW team has only grown over the years, more than tripled in size since its early days.

But that still doesn’t detract from the fact that players will always have a wish-list longer than Blizzard can keep up with. And it takes time to produce things. That’s not a Blizzard limitation, that’s just…life.

I don’t disagree with the desire for more development effort being spent on Warfronts. But if push comes to shove, I would rather have Blizzard devote those development resources to other things instead, like new zones or raids or quests.

30

Dude, I can fix the class balance within a month. I can literally take the warcraft logs charts, make spreadsheets of every ability and every class and how much it is or it isn’t performing and do the appropriate fixes in a single patch.
Instead we are dealing with unplayable specs for an entire tier!
Blizzard DO NOT have people working on the game! They have people working on exploitative projects like the ingame store and are throwing a butload of resourses into pretty mounts and apperantly soon to be toys. We have a mobile pet battle game in development.
It is not just warfronts, it is the entire game! Mytrax had an orb bug that made the player inside it untargetable for the entire tier.
Fetid was devouring an none existant blobs, already killed by the raid.
Ghuun after 150 nerfs was still the most obnixous boss ever created.
Infested was falling under the flour of the dungeon and pulling half of it for the entire season.
Reaping gets stuck somewhere and holds your party in combat.

These are bugs that should be fixed instantly, not with a patch, but a hotfix. Instead we are getting “hotfixes” like “you can no longer destroy your Mythic keys” and “you need x profession to wear x item” - literal quality of life downgrades!
Explain that, Sherlock! Why is the game getting progressively worse if Blizzard’s development team is constantly growing? Why is the class balance at its worse after an expansion where it was at its best? Why are bugs not being fixed for the duration of a tier? Why is the content so devoted of soul and why is the game getting shadow hot fixes and systems, that are clearly only made to hold delay player’s progress?

31

Let’s have it then.

:roll_eyes:

32

Are you going to wait for a month to respond to my question as well?

33

Why the game is getting progressively worse (arguable!) despite the development team getting bigger? Because contrary to belief, more chefs in the kitchen isn’t always the recipe for a Michelin-star dinner.
There’s no correlation between the amount of developers and the quality of the end product is what I’m trying to say. Just the quantity or size of it.

Now back to you. Do you plan to share some of your knowledge on class balance at some point? I mean, we’ve been waiting for 15 years for someone to fix class balance, so it’d be really nice if you could just…you know…do that, if it’s so easy for you. :neutral_face:

34

So in general, you want Battlegrounds with objectives :smiley:

35

You literally just said they don’t have enough developers for all of the “wish list”.

Just the basics - Nerf to Shadow Priests and Affliction warlocks, slight nerf to destruction as well.
Nerf Explosive potential, buff base damage of Demo to match the nerf.
Nerf to Blade flury, Buff sub’s overall damage.
Buff base damage of elemental shamans, nerf Ignitious Potential.
Nerf to Flash freeze, buff Frost and Fire’s mage base and scaling damage, slight buff to Arcane’s base damage.
Rework SV back to range, give more mobility to MM or slightly buff its damage.
Buff both Frost and Unholy’s damage.
Buff both Arms and Furry’s damage.
Slightly buff WW’s damage.

As for tanks, only GA Druid is in the gutter.
Healers are overall fine. Shaman can use a slight buff and Paladins can use a bit more raid healing, just so you don’t have to feel gimped by having more than 1 paladin in the healing team, not enough to be flatout better than any other healer.

36

Yep.
The amount of stuff.
New raids, dungeons, quests, battlegrounds, arenas, mounts, pets, transmogs, etc…
If you want more of that, then you need more people to make it.
But that doesn’t guarantee a higher quality. It just guarantees a higher quantity.
So the quantity concern is easily dealt with by just hiring more developers.
The quality concern is a bit harder to address.

Humility is not the word that comes to mind, but I appreciate the list.

37

I think a month is resonable amount of time for a single person to make the spreadsheets and do the simulations for a detailed numerical balance.

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38

That seems like a very simplistic view on what class balance in WoW entails, but that’s a discussion far from the notion of PvP Warfronts. :yum:

39

Well Alterac was the suggestion because I am rather sick and tired of the BG being raced through without actually doing the tactics!

Would an update to Lore not be possible? Could the war not come to Alterac in a nostalgia-laden new front to the War?

The whole dynamic of “war” is that there is conflict. When a Faction-based MMO dkes a Faction conflict, there needs to be genuine interaction between the factions. Having a Faction “war” were both playable factions seem to be sectioned off into their own sterile, isolated bubble kind of ruins the whole thing. We take it in turns playing a restricted, predetermined scenario with no overarching affect on the overall war.

There is no progression to the War. What one side does, the other side immediately reverses or equals. Then the story just “shunts” to a new point. Other MMOs are able to have both Factions succeed while still having victory and defeats balancing out and keeping the War flowing.

This too. Even with the annoying “carnival ride” style of play for Warfronts with them railroaded, constricted and packing player input, there is also the stark differences to how the Warfronts were marketed…

40

Class balance = number balance, yes it is that simple, you just need to asess which spells are overperforming and whicn are underperforming. As for gameplay, I have ideas, but with the current Blizzard philosophy of “no more trial and error”, I doubt we will ever see any revolutionary class changes.

41

We already had that with Arathi highlands, it’s one of the reasons aside from the lore that it probably won’t happen, as for lorewise. It’s not about the resources there with azurite being important, and when it comes to a strategic position, it’s not the best. I’d expect Gilneas to be more likely to become a warfront. Un-used, of significant strategic and racial importance.
But I’d still be happy if we’d get an Alterac warfront, it just doesn’t seem likely.

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42

As a matter of principle I agree. All I’m saying, and I don’t think you would have a reasonable challenge to this, is that they seemed to disappoint a bit much lately. It’s not just the WoW forums, but (almost) everywhere where people discuss the game, the mood is more negative than usual. Even the lead dev noticed that, given how he said he is puzzled by the bad response to BfA in that interview with that German website. Maybe the prioritization is at least a bit faulty lately.

43

I think the struggle with class balance has always been where to apply it.
If WoW just consisted of Patchwerk encounters, then your spreadsheet-number-balance-approach would work fine. But WoW is so much more than that. And that’s what makes it tricky. And on top of that it’s also a question of who to apply it to. Are you balancing around a theoretical number or a practical application? Are you assuming that the player is skilled enough to master any rotation in any encounter? And is it balanced if not all rotations are equally hard to master despite being capable of the same performance?
I don’t think it is as simple as you imply. If it was, then it wouldn’t be such a point of struggle across the gaming industry as a whole – not just in WoW.

I think it’s a lot to do with expectation meeting reality.
Legion was a huge improvement over WoD, so maybe the expectation was that BfA would be an equally big improvement over Legion (certainly when features like Warfronts were presented it was easy to dream away). But reality is probably that Blizzard just tried to maintain the high quality set by Legion. In many ways Legion is maybe the highest expression of WoW, and it’s difficult to really push the game much further than what it currently is – despite how much bored or dissatisfied players may demand it.