Why is the game so unbalanced at higher levels? Why are there so many glaring and obvious issues that the community discovers day 1 and it takes several days to fix? Why does tuning feel so strange? Why does the meta exist and is preserved instead of iterated on? Why are there classes who are constantly bad and others constantly babysat and reworked?
You might be tempted to think: corporate greed, bad developers, evil management, no point in balancing/designing for the 1%, design philosophy and other perfectly reasonable takes/responses etc.
However, as with all tinfoil hat theories, I will attempt to provide 1 simple answer that conveniently addresses all these obvious and frustrating issues:
The people who decide how the game will be balanced, do not play the game, those classes or at a high enough level to understand the nuances of their own game. In short: blizzard does not play its own game well enough to understand how to balance it. The devs might play, but definitely not the decision makers. How do we know they are not playing at a level where the issues are painfully obvious?
If you are a professional in the gaming industry, you are probably working 8+h/day and likely have a family or other responsibilities. Even if you were a wow player, you would only have a limited time to play. I doubt you would have time to waste 1-2h in the group finder looking for a +12, looking up stuff on wowhead, learning strats on youtube, reading about new tech/exploits on reddit etc.
Even if these people were somehow pushing 12s with your buddies (from work even), you would likely only have time to play one class. What the hell would you know about the experience of others short of what âthe dataâ says at work? Itâs not like thereâs any point spending time on social media when you have an entire department for that.
Even if these people were a multiclass god who spent their time at work and away from work looking at the game from the inside (work) and the outside (social media) while somehow balancing family life/other responsibilities, it would not be humanly possible for all the decision makers to be playing ever single spec out there and it shows.
Even if we assume the design decision making team is actually playing in their own competitive group at work and pugging at home and somehow amongst all of them and multiclassing madness they somehow manage to cover all the different class/spec hero talent combinations in the game, they would still see the obvious disparity and âfeels badâ type of situations present in their game.
No matter how I look at it, even with the most best intentions possible interpretation, it simply does not look like these people play their own game. If they knew how bad it felt and left it as it is, then they are simply evil.
To be honest this was also my impression with the tuning of some spells and the presence of a few bugs.
Only thing I can think of is that the devs/QA was so overwhelmed they simply didnât have time to even test some of the builds, and were basically hoping weâd just pick the cookie cutter talents.
So many reasonable answers =^.^= I am looking for other conspiracy theories over here. If I wanted reasonable answers, I would just read blue posts and watch their official videos.
Theyâve intentionally turned WoW into a mess to lower our expectations so they can âreviveâ the game with the next expansion -which by industry standards will be considered mediocre at best-.
So what youâre actually saying is that the players who play this game at a âhigh enough levelâ have no job, live off their momsy in the basement or have some sweaty teens watch their streams, have no life, and stink because taking a shower does deviate from their goal to be great in a game that isnât balanced on the level they play?
I donât see why one has to play at a certain level to be able to balance something.
Perhaps, perhaps, the design GOALS are just not as you want them to be.
It has to be a lack of QA testing, or any other variety of factors. I donât expect the programmers themselves to slave away playing at the highest tier possible to hyper-balance each class, however, I do expect them to hire people capable of doing that in order to make sure no glaring issues pop up.
I donât think every class has to be equal in capability to one another, but I do find it extremely discouraging when there is such a large gap between them, especially when blatant bugs exist that are widely known disproportionately improve the performance of one spec/class over the other.
or most/all of them just got straight fired, and now the own chatgpt Ai is trying to fix everything before the patch goes live. the Ai is still learning!
Regarding balancing, the only way to test it correctly is to play on such levels. It requires time & knowledge. Knowledge is for sure something they have, time on the other hand is for sure not something they can give away at the moment. The schedule is tight as *insert whatever picture comes to mind!
Also the apparent discussions with referent people seems to be a problem. Class design should be internal only, nobody from the outside should influence the design team, it doesnât seems to be the case (see latest nerf revert of Holy Pal).
Last point, this desire to put raid over anything else is an outdated design. Even more when most players are now adult with a 9 to 5 and no envy to spend the evening in the same raid. A serious review is needed regarding the desire for End Game, RWF seems to bring a bit of publicity, but at what cost?
Might be time to split the RWF from live servers. Same for other competitions, if you aim for pro competition, you need to cater to them in a way that will for sure impact the other players. So why not just let them copy/paste their characters on a dedicated server for them, and let them do their own soup of this.
I quite like the idea of compartmentalizing the playerbase in such a way, similar to how pvp and pve balancing are made separately. Unsure of how well such a change would go with the playerbase however. Some people might not like the idea of switching servers in order to play their own thing, but Iâm not sure.
I love how they make things purposefully more difficult for themselves knowing full well what a headache balancing is to begin. Didnt bother putting in any class flavour or introduction quests to make the hero talents even remotely meaningful just here you go some new effects that will make or break your spec.
