A game is a product like any other good. It’s made to be sold. Subscription-based MMO is a product that you pay for in longer term than “here and now”, so it’s even more important to keep your customers happy. The players, AKA the customers, tell you they want something, it’s reasonable to find out what exactly they want, why, and how to achieve it so they pay for your game and everyone’s happy. But there are two kinds of business in the world.
Good business asks their customers what they would like and why, so they are happy and pay for the goods.
Bad business ignores their customers’ expectations and is very surprised when they leave.
Good business tries to find out why customers didn’t like something. Do they want it improved, changed in some way, or they prefer something else? The important thing is to find out and then supply what the customers want.
Bad business tries to feed the customers what they don’t like, pretends to listen and then do their own thing anyway, doesn’t care to find out why customers don’t like the goods or straight-out ignore it.
Good business has no need to hide their subscription numbers - they’re proud of demand for their goods and if for some reason the numbers decrease, they try to find out what’s wrong and remedy it.
Bad business shows their sub numbers when they’re rising and hides them when they’re bad and then pretends they’re still great so no action is taken to find out why they’re bad and fix it.
And a thing that allows some bad businesses to keep going is their monopoly on something essential or popular. Something they might have had started before they declined to bad companies
Yeah, there are two ways to win a competition if your goods are bad and just won’t sell, the customer service is rude and unhelpful, and your business’ rep is so bad, even the EA has more positive image.
Try to make better goods that are in higher demand, like a normal business.
Or try to burn the opponent’s shop, like mafia or Soviet Union.
Like ActiBlizz is trying (metaphorically) every time they release expansion, it’s just accidental that they always try to outrush something else. Like SWTOR. Or Xmas. Or this year Cyberpunk. Or a stupid deadline that they themselves in their folly made too short. And every time they try, they get small gains short term, and big losses long term. Stupid, stupid corp.
The only one I remembered the name of from the list of stuff that will be released in November. You know, just after Shadowlands goes live. Just google “november 2020 game releases” and there are whole lists of stuff. Guarantee ActiBlizz is trying to overshadow at least one of them.
Well yes. but Not everyone really has reached a Point they feel like they need to quit.
im not a fan of Power locking on convenants… but am i going to honestly be that affected? No
the BiS choice will go up on the matter, u just have to pick it and say YOLO.
we know tghe “Meaningful choice” is BS, and i find it unlikely we’ll see the meta permanantly flitter between 2 of the convenants continously… so the whole “go back to a convenant” may never need utilising to begin with.
I get that, but at least personally I think that the WoW expansions these days are releasing in a state that does does not warrant playing them much until X.2 and after.
FTFY. If they want me to pay for the game, I expect it to be finished, polished product, not the untested, rushed beta. If I wanted to be a beta tester, I’d apply for that position, and I’d expect to get paid, not to pay.
That’s because Blizzard keeps thinking they know best and that their vision will ultimately work despite negative feedback during development, until they find out in Live their vision fails to deliver and have to patch things up.
Maybe this time their vision will deliver, maybe yet again it will not.
considerign they’re taking the most boring approach to the system i dont think their faiths high.
Instead of really emphasising convenants… they’re nerfing them all int othe floor to Reduce the overall DPS Gains made from the system all together to reduce its relevency. they just want it to exist.
Being a pandaren will likely be a higher DPS Increase by the time they’re done.
No, the vocal part is happy IF they get their way.
But there’s a lot more players besides those vocal ones.
So no, not everyone would be happy.
I don’t agree with your assessment on good and bad businesses.
The customer is NOT always right. Certainly not gamers; many of them are narrowminded, set in the ways and rigid to a fault. Many opinions they have are not shared by other gamers.
Most parts of games are very subjective. You are probably unhappy with their decision; so be it. You can’t always get what you want.
Besides; Blizzard HAS listened on numerous issues and changed things accordingly.
The vocal players getting their way on several things, but just not one particular single issue and them then lashing out saying Blizzard never listens, just goes to show what a bunch of children they actually are.
Most of the time they “listen” with a huge delay after the damage is done (at the end of an expansion or expansions later like many shadow priests can attest to), at least for the very core design of the expansions. The times where they listened in a timely fashion are a rarity with a few happening to be recent ones (Torments, Consumable conduits and Zombies).
“Never” is an absolute word that should not be used lightly indeed. Just like “everyone”
A few… They’ve been listening all throughout alpha and beta testing. They seem to have learned from the past. They just fundamentally disagree with how ‘the meta minded’ players view covenant abilities.
I am on Blizzard’s side with this one. I think ‘meta’ is a cancer to gaming. It’s taking away creativity, player exploration/discovery, freedom and whatnot.
Yes the meta is bad.
But their means of combating it are questionable.
If ones wants to prevent people from feeling they need to have X to do Y content competitively (use competitively here as in competing for securing and keeping a spot) then they need to make all the options equally competitive, for every spec and class.
They have a bad history with balancing… but who knows maybe this time they will take it seriously instead of just turning everything upside down on each raid tier.
I love being proved wrong on things I worry about.
What is taking away creativity, player exploration/discovery, freedom and whatnot, is being stuck in 1 covenant by game design. You just here described my whole problem with the covenants.
