Steve Jobs were right, and this is happening with WoW

Community General Discussion
22

You dont understand it,
These guys, the old ones, had their soul in the game, and you could see it on their work too.
The game felt alive, and was wonderful, they did not work cause they needed the feed their families, no no no, but from passion and enjoyment,
Metzen IS literaly Thrall…

They left cause they could not make the game as they wanted, it was Activision who started drawing resources out, taking their %bonuses from the sellings, and yes they actually got % bonus from the sells,
But now the devs only work for the same money, ofc they dont realy trying to make it better, and they don’t care that much anymore.

This soullessness and "and taking their (power) and rewards and their freedom made them leave Blizz.
And even if it could have been painful, maybe I would have done the same as dev.

23

Great questions.

Firstly, Blizzard openly donated to a communist organisation and told us all that if we wouldn’t join them at it then we’re awful people. Not sure I can find the video but it’s the one where they announce the Shadowlands Collector’s Edition and it’s near the end.

Leftist ideology in no way precludes recreational competition. I’ve never heard even the most radical leftwinger claim that we should get rid of that, although I have seen participation trophies which are definitely a thing in WoW.

However, it does preclude rewarding players differently based on their effort.

Now, obviously you’re gonna point out that we do get different item levels - and that’s true, but to what end? What does a higher item level actually let me do?

Well, it lets me do the thing I’m already doing with bigger numbers. That’s it. Past a certain very low point I can explore absolutely everything, and frankly the real reward of WoW is the adventure and locales. Higher level play doesn’t actually get rewarded. This kind of “throw all rewards at lowest common denominator” is typical because it creates equity.

But the real problems are to be found in the social and economic systems. They have created these extremely anonymous big-city systems and they don’t understand map layout and size. They don’t respond to societal issues like extreme faction imbalance, because they don’t understand how to solve them. They say so openly.

They keep invented extremely complicated planned systems in order to cover for really simple systematic errors that stem from ignoring the adventurous side of the game and free market economics.

They put in a lot of effort to make sure everybody is doing the same thing. They apportion the material rewards and introduce a really awful eggtimer problem in the process.

They mismanage their cities in terms of layout and create some really strange problems with player locations.

They water out cultural differences and try to make race and gender a much smaller and less defining part of your character.

It is difficult to explain. You kindda have to go to the four core design pillars and then compare how they fail at delivering them with typical radical leftism. I’m sure if I go too much into detail I’ll get the banhammer, but if you want you can send me an in-game mail with contact info and we can talk about it further.

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I think I fundementally agree with you on the issues, ie the world and city design, but I absolutely fail to see what that has to do with left-wing ideology? Maybe i’m failing to see what you point out about it, so I may take you up on that mail contact for curiosity.

25

Fair enough. Typical leftist policies and results:

Total equity (in their dreams xD)
A global community (great but don’t forget about the local one!)
Class struggle - this time between races and cultures and gender
Upper limits on earnings typically imposed by progressive tax rates
Economically collapsing cities - typically large ones
LGBT (I support this, too, but many right wingers don’t and it’s exploded in WoW)

Etc.

Compare to the above list. Do you see it?

I guess it’s not really that important to understand the connection, but it’s a connection I see and it worries me because if it’s true that’ll make this much more difficult to solve.

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People wont understand your point because mainly they are opiniated by content makers. Which explains how they always give same conflicting ideas every time. I dont see that the game has changed drastically as people claim. Yes, with the world quests introduction, Blizzard makes the first launch around it. Frankly, including myself, many players dont like being forced to do insignificant and pointless repetitive daily stuff that is also unsatisfyingly easy to do, be it rares, treasures, elites or bosses they present no challenge at all. For sure, in MMO game there will be grind, but World of Warcraft had alternatives to the grind; even though it didnt matter much, you still had a small choice. They just took out this alternative methods recently and forced the same things on everyone, moreover on each of your character (this is an overkill). For example, I would have loved the concept of covenant sanctum anima pool being account wide, so you could put more characters in that covenant just to have enough anima distribution between your characters.

For the social aspect of the game, it is more saddening to me than the way they design expansions. I know for a fact that, main reason is the mythic plus dungeons ever since its inclusion since pandaria time trialed dungeons. People used to level characters for fun, now mostly you face with mythic plus meta system slaves that level characters and kick people from groups, dont talk, have no idea/fun about the game except the numbers. These are who the returning and newcomer players face unfortunately. They cause players to be hesitant to talk thinking entire playerbase is like that, which is wrong even in those crowded realms. I dont believe other Asian games present better playerbase from what I have seen either. Playerbase is same everywhere, its just about how much power the game puts on the individuals. That is why Blizzard removed all the loot options, and now they have to fix this meta slavery toxicity in the game, however they wanna do it, better be soon.

Ever since e-sports and twitch become popular, you cant prevent meta builds, I get that. But I do not like the workaround idea of Blizzard making things either super grindy with boring stuff or time gated with no background, such as the campaign quests now making you wait a week without a logical reason put in them (you could at least add on the quest text that “useless NPCs are tired for now”). I just hope Blizzard pays more attention to the majority of players. I like how they put the nemesis of Ve’nari with a set of dialogs as a survey option from players and we deliver its head to Ve’nari (I assume represents the CEO)?? :joy: Anyways, when they want, there are tons of ways to get player feedback and opinions in a massive MMO game…

27

Exactly, it’s been years the game has switched from a game for gamers to a game for suits. Yeah, corporate has to make money, no one is denying that. And people don’t have any issue with that as long as the game is entertaining and fun and designed with quality in mind. People are exhausted and are leaving because the game is no longer a game, it’s a milk cow and it’s more obvious as time passes.

  • New currencies and systems every patch, basically restarting a new expansion every patch, with a truckload of grind and uninteresting timesinks.
  • New game modes that are made “mandatory” for decent character progression (Torghast), with cheap and reused assets with random generation so it feels constantly new while in reality you don’t even pay attention to it because you want to be done with it as soon as possible.
  • PVE and PVP boosting being rampant in the game because it sells tokens.
  • Ridiculous quantities of mats to farm in order to create you own gear or level your own patterns, so you end up grinding or buying them from the AH, or botting. Realistically, else you’ll be grinding the golds to buy the gear already crafted while you wish your profession would’ve been useful, else you buy a token. In the end you buy a token because when you need 3 different legendaries in order to be able to play in raids, M+ and PvP you don’t have the time to grind out 400k along with the timegat-ed/-ing currencies.
  • F2P inspired limits and systems : energy conduit, sweet bonuses for the “First Queue of The Day” and then ridiculous rewards so you end up queuing everyday, limited-per-week resources in order to unlock perks for a repeatable boring content, so basically it’s when you don’t need it anymore that it gets easy af.
  • No catchup system. An extensible cap through the season isn’t a catchup system and is needed at this point, the game would literally be even more empty if you wouldn’t be able to cap after a couple of weeks of not playing.
  • Rehashed systems, assets and overall game design since Legion. SL is Legion 3.0, which already was a watered down MMO adaptation of Diablo 3. On the other hand it’s hard to blame them since almost all of the progression systems they created “from scratch” for the last three expansions were absolutely awful. The only thing that seem to hold this piece of scrap of a game are the D3-inherited systems (modifiers of all kind, M+, heavily cooldown oriented gameplay) and what they’ve been doing right for the last +/- 16 years (raids, reward collectibles).

Blizzard perfectly know what they’re doing and they know players are leaving by thousands. I think at this point they would rather see their own game die saying that those who were their customers once are idiots than accept that they threw their own game down the drain with bad design on top of bad design.

2 Likes
28

retail is just bad dud

1 Like
29

This is definitely tiresome. We didn’t need soul cinders; just inflate soul ash so that now we get 10k per Torghast run L9 or over, and we need 30k to craft a t5. Also works as its own catch up, since an alt or returning player will instantly get a t4 after one run at L9.

I didn’t mind the idea of a random dungeon… but the implementation is bothersome. We went many months with people easily climbing 5 floors then getting 1-shot by the end boss, through absolutely no fault of their own, simply because the RNG didn’t favour them.

In 9.1 it is now possible to kill a boss with a thousand papercuts if necessary, which is better, but no substitute for the game being aware that it has handed you mostly {dps/survivability} powers and custom building a boss that fits. Do you have loads of dps and no health? Then the boss should be a tank who hits like a wet noodle. Do you have loads of health and damage reduction, but no dps? Then the boss should be a glass cannon.

It is the final missing step that would make Torghast interesting and allow us to embrace the idea that every run is different. Right now, there are only fast runs and slow runs.

On the whole, I really wish they’d stop inventing new systems every patch/expansion, and iterate on the popular ones from before. WoD PvP gearing was apparently very popular; why haven’t we iterated on it? MoP PvE upgrades were apparently very popular? Why haven’t we iterated on that either?

1 Like
30

Naw, it’s not junior game designers at Blizzard that are the problem. The problem is that sales and marketing people are running Activision, and they dictate what Blizzard creates. They are forcing the game designers to implement a bunch of features that increase player activity (although only in the short term) and sales in the Blizzard shop (tokens, mounts, etc.). In the long term, those types of features hurt the game, but that’s something the sales and marketing people don’t understand, because they don’t understand anything about gaming.

Although the WoW team could use some leadership changes (Ion for example), the real problem is at the very top.

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