Corruptions were quite fun but making them time-gated and tied to extreme rng for getting them in the beginning was really fun also heh.
Remember that time Rextroy reached 2400 in 2s with nothing but Twilight Devastation? Good times.
It depends on what the problem with the system is.
And in this case there are quite a few, but most of them come down to the fundamental gameplay design of the items themselves in almost all of these cases, and that is why I feel it is appropriate to blame him for a lot of this.
End-game zones, for a long time, has been easy, mandatory content. He made little to no attempts to provide something more challenging - and when he did it often served as a repetitive hindrance to get to a pre-marked location rather than a place to explore. Whose fault was that? It was the end-game systems designerās fault, of course, whoever that was.
Shadowlands dungeons? There are quite few this time around. Is it fun to constantly run the same dungeons with scaling difficulty as compared to exploring larger dungeons with set difficulties and potentially repeated assets rather than repeated locations? I donāt think so. Whose fault was that? Well, encounter designers were probably working with the idea that it should be āM+ compatibleā, which put a lot of restrictions on it. Who came up with M+ and who developed it into a competitive game mode? Well, he certainly shares some of that blame.
Azerite gear is just plain not fun, nor is Azerite itself. Rather than repeating the points yet again, I will simply link to one of WoWās original game designers tearing it apart top-to-bottom:
Whose fault was this? Well, whoever it was, this guy was strongly involved. Shards of Domination - weāve all discussed that at length on this forum, but fundamentally it was another unnecessary system that took the emphasis away from our characters as a whole and placed it in the hands of the raid itself, not to mention a gruelling grind in Korthia. It was awful.
One thing Kevin does not mention, but many others do, is what his systems did to PvP until he explicitly started disabling them in it. Twilight Devastation was true to its name as it literally devastated PvP, RNG one-shotting people constantly. In the absence of that, Azerite traits, including some of the ones he worked on, would make resto shamans passively heal so much they were literally unkillable even if the player was AFK, and a lot of the time the total output of a character was more in Azerite trait RNG procs than the actual player. That is to say, when I played my feral I would do more damage with random procs than with my class abilities. Justā¦ completely ridiculous.
And all of this was added to the game often without consulting artists for readability, and this pattern continues to this day of stuff being added to the game that you cannot see unless youāre willing to sift through dozens of buff and debuff icons with no particular highlighting feature. Speaking of which, given the same of stuff this guy was working on, why didnāt we get PvP tooltips and a diminishing returns aura category (similar to the weapon enchant one)? Itās a glaring omission as it is an essential peace of information. Speaking of which, wtf is Holinka doing? Designing maps instead of systems I suppose?
When looking back on BfA, thereās amazing amounts of content and poor systems design. It is a theme throughout. BfA contains the largest amount of zones of any expansion ever made save for Cataclysm, which was kindda cheating. No less than 10 zones, and each of them extremely large and detailed - save one, which was just detailed but not large, in the form of Mechagon. It had the work put into it - it was entirely and 100% failed by its systems design.
Bring the player, not the class was actually a good idea. Now that we have the other way around, itās āBring dps warrior, priest, mage, DH, brewmaster monk and holy paladin with a heck ton of locksā which honestly, does not feel good.
That being said, knowing how much heās hated by the wow community, Iām amazed many players are willing to try out riotās MMORPG, which is literally his baby.
A good amount of content cannot make up for wrongly designed systems. That quite reminds me of my work, weāre developping a heck ton of features that are actually not intuitive to go through or are basically way to complex for the purpose weāre trying to achieve.
Even if I disliked AP farm, at least, the artifact weapon was pretty much straight forward, the more AP Iād get, the more traits Iād get and that was aboot it. Now, in SL, renow are like traits we can enable but we also have to switch between them while switching some traits in āholeā slots.
Yes and no. It wasnāt executed very well. It was mainly executed by just giving out so many new abilities it was crazy - but thatās not necessarily what the game needed, and it did cause some very unnecessary homogenisation and restricted the design space for combat encounters in very unfortunate ways.
WoD fundamentally fixed this problem but introduced some of its own, namely it merged the swifty macros into one ability and then added new abilities to combine with them, which is just the height of absurdity, and it still haunts us.
But Iām not even talking about that. I am talking about what he did to the social systems. He is the author of LFD and LFR. He is the author of CRZ. He is the author of multiple raid difficulties and having to farm the same thing over and over again. He reigned over the largest drop in start-of-expansion raid content, he is the one responsible for nobody progressing through raids and dungeons, thus making PvE seasonal. He did a heckuvalot of damage to the social systems, to duels, he moved many interactions out of the world into the UI for convenience, and in so doing removed many gathering spots, most notably for PvPāers, and tried introducing new ones, and failing miserably at it by the way, all the time.
Greg Street is a man who forgot WoWās most essential design pillars more often than not - and he knows it and has publicly expressed regret.
It indeed cannot. You can make the biggest game ever made - if the systems suck nobodyās gonna play any of it anyway.
In fact, a bad tutorial and levelling experience, or something similar, can kill a game even if it has great systems.
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It isnt given my other part of the sentence that you conveniently ignored.
Anyone that had any relation with the borrowed power systems should be kicked out of Blizzard.
Glad he is gone.
finally some good news about WOW, lets pray that Steve ātalentless hackā Danuser follow suit.
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At the same time, 10 man raiding required that to happen. Otherwise, it would have sucked. Heck, I liked more buffs in cata/mop/wod than what we have had since BFA.
I feel like Legion pushed that more than what WOD did. Heck, they even moved a lot of activie abilities into passive traits.
Thatās probably an unpopular opinion but I think multiple difficulties raiding is good. If they were to remove one, they sould be removing LFR but that aināt happening. And here is my argument : If they were to remove either NM or MM, then they would have to turn HC into current Mythic. How is that going to play ? Well, the AOTC community would be despleased and rightfully so because they would no longer get their curve. If they were to remove NM, then thatād be killing of NM raiding, which fits some players that donāt have the skill ceilling to get into HC.
Thatās not an issue at all imho.
And thatās why I think borrowed powers are the roots of modern wow issues. And hopefully, they will get rid of those.
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