A good article and true in many aspects.
The sad thing is that the WoW development team shouldn’t need an intervention to know how to improve the game for the players.
They have made great games before and know how to do it.
Remember “Gameplay First” not MAU first.
All the timegating, the Repeatable daily quests and focusing on the 5% of the end game playerbase drove most of the People away from the game.
My friend list used to be full before 
.
That article could have just been a summary from the forums on any given day.
It’s true, but hardly new or insightful.
This is why Microsoft taking over isn’t a bad thing. They can afford to take a longer term view instead of relentlessly and myopically focusing on this quarters performance at the expense of long term goals.
Current blizz is too entrenched in its ways.
Back in classic you would waste 2 hours in deadmines with a group of people you knew back from levelling just for the fun of the challenge.
Now, you can barely tolerate 30 mins of trash beating in your 300th run of the necrotic wave.
What has changed?
Ilvl
You can’t lock fun behind equipment or the game becomes an Asian mmo
This simple idea you can’t get across to the Devs as all of the feedback channels are clogged up with comments on wow token, class balance and other secondary things
I don’t think WoW will grow again. And I don’t think it will change much either.
It’s solidifying itself as a game that exists for its core userbase, and it will cater to that userbase more and more as time goes.
That’s the same with similar older games in the MMO genre. They carry on by doubling-down on the devoted veterans who spurs the games toward rather conservative design philosophies.
WoW is no different from the rest. It’s just arriving a bit late to the party.
Maybe in the short term, like the next expansion release, Blizzard will try to see if they can still invigorate the interest of tens of millions of players to embark on a new journey in WoW – if only for a short while.
But that’ll be the last time, giving way to Blizzard’s new portfolio of games.
WoW caters to so many different types of gameplay, is it even realistic to think we can have a design philosophy that works really well for most players?
BfA got a tremendous amount of criticism on the forums. Many announced that it would kill WoW and that sub numbers had fallen off a cliff. And what happened when SL launched? It was the most successful launch in the history of video games:
[World of Warcraft: Shadowlands becomes fastest-selling PC game of all-time - Dot Esports](https://dotesports.com/streaming/news/world-of-warcraft-shadowlands-becomes-fastest-selling-pc-game-of-all-time)
So obviously BfA didn’t kill WoW at all.
And I remember at the time of launch, many reviews were saying SL was fantastic and plenty of folk were thinking the expack would save the game. Yet here we are again with the forums saying the game is broken and dying.
What I see is a good game that could be better, but no-one can agree on what the destination looks like or how we can get there. Everyone has their pet peeves, their desirable changes or things they want to stay the same. Everyone acts as though they’re speaking for the community and the good of the game, when actually we are all just standing on our personal soap box, be it Ion, the censorious devs, the forum posters or whoever. We live in a period where the squeaky wheel gets the oil and, if anything, Blizz has pivoted towards that philosophy. That is not a good way to run any project. If things carry on the way they are, WoW will be a game designed by a focus group of the most determinedly opinionated players.
However, if I trust anyone to fix the game I guess MS has a better chance than most. To come back from the disasters that were Vista and W8 shows they know how to deal with the situation WoW finds itself in.
Wow needs major change, something like a leap of faith from the dev team. Idk if they have the courage to try something like that instead of slowly milking the cow
dailies afte a while are boring
mythics+ after some level become hard to run with pugs (if not in a core guild)
raids after lfr and some hc runs become long in queues and involve lots of disbands before reaching the boss you want to kill just wasting your time and mood
pvp after you gather some gear becomes boring and not fun as game has long queues and puts you against premades groups with 5 healers while your group has none,what can you kill there?
RNG after some kills on every boss becomes terribly hostile giving you nothing or same slot item insted the 3 other you expect to see declaring the wow spirit “please pay next month sub to come and try again”…os its not fun anymore
crafted gear stops at a level not leting you craft at least one peice with high end ilvl…
same missions on missions table…so quests items…so dailies rewards… game leaves you only a way to gear more mythics+ and raids hc or more… So if you dont belong on a hard core guild you cant have them due to long queue tiems and pug disbanding and frustration you get to get a single boss kill and game rng giving you just some gold
so wow after a point is designed to be interesting to hard core players organized in groups passing lots of hours inside dungeons mythics+, riads HC/mythic and gathering raid mats… for most ppl becomes a non rewarding repetition
but who cares? blizz have shown in many cases they dont care at all
If they’d just give up on this idea that WoW has to be a competitive game that alone would fix a lot of issues already. It can still be competitive (community driven) but it shouldn’t influence the game as much as it does today which has led to a bunch of unfixable problems unless they give it up.
Personally I think they pin ideas on a board then throw a dart at them and develop that, at least that’s what it feels like. It’s the only way to explain some stupid things that have happened.
Having read the above comments, I for sure must agree, that wow dev team seems to incorrectly identify top 5% as game’s corebase, whereas only some of these people have been from the start and actually many of them stay in the game only for a couple of expansions, because wow does not have enough content for them, it’s just not grindy enough.
As a result, everything is being done for a minority of players, many of which will quit anyway.
Meanwhile, the real corebase is all but gone probably since Legion or wod. the paramount task is to get this core back.
Is it doable? I am not hopeful
This is just a forum post thats been extended way more than necesary
True, but it’s likely to be listened or noticed more by Blizz/MS as it’s more of a mainstream news outlet that specializes in MS tech and gaming news.
The point is it’s not just us “whiney players” saying this stuff now.
I wish Blizzard’s design decisions were conservative, but they’re anything but.
If Blizzard had conservative design sensibilities they wouldn’t do dailies for power gains, they wouldn’t have constantly upped the numbers, they wouldn’t constantly have let go of old content by making the content so trivial and so bereft of rewards that nobody does it, they wouldn’t have put so many always-open portals everywhere, they would’ve done ANYTHING to maintain the town-effect and kept servers and factions separate and fiercely protected the game from realm urbanisation, and they DEFINITELY would not have allowed buying gold.
Their design sensibilities are not about keeping their old players here, to the point where the old playerbase literally came back and asked if they could have the game as it used to be - the playerbase had to force Blizzard to make a conservative move!
World of Warcraft’s problem is that all of its innovations are mostly bad and hollow and generally end up in a huge graveyard of bad systems. They are focused on addictive behaviours, timegating, and all the rest of the things that writer in the OP’s article wrote. I don’t know who that writer is, but I know he knows what he’s talking about.
My angle was more to say that the design structure the WoW team has for a WoW expansion – which is fairly established by now – is not going to radically change in the coming years in the pursuit of a big renaissance for the game.
They’re going to stick to the tried and true for the present day.
They have new games coming out that are made to exist in a future market for the newer generations.
But sure, I too would have designed WoW differently throughout the years if I were in charge – especially with the ability of hindsight.
all the wow devs who made this game great are long gone and that is the problem
That shouldn’t be a problem.
Any company of Blizzard’s size is going to have departures on a constant and regular basis. Expecting everyone to be tied down to the same job for 17 years is completely unreasonable. That’s not how it is anywhere.
You hire new people. You have mentor programs. Workshops. Talent development. And so on.
And Blizzard does that and has that too.
The recent scandal has probably caused a certain exodus of talent that’s hard to immediately make up for, but prior to that Blizzard shouldn’t have had any issues in that regard.
Having high-profile employees leave the company is unfortunate, but internally the organizational structure should have their positions covered. It’s standard procedure in any big company (and smaller as well I guess) to ensure that important roles are covered by multiple people so the company doesn’t grind to a halt if someone important gets sick or whatever.
I think it’s mostly a perceived issue by the players, because they only know a handful or a dozen Blizzard developers – the high-profile ones they’ve seen at Blizzcon and such. The “rockstars” of the company. So people think the entire company rests on these people’s shoulders. But that’s only because they don’t know much of the other hundreds upon hundreds of developers that also work at Blizzard.
If they don’t stop this WoW will die.
And the worst part about all of this is that a lot of the things they’re doing are things the community asked for.
I never did that. Hell nah.
I don’t do that either.
I’m not a fan of repeat dungeon running.
That’s not it. For me anyway.
I’ve had plenty of fun in this game with ilvl in it.
The pure and simple reason imo is just: Fun.
The more recent content they’ve made simply wasn’t fun (or not fun ‘enough’).
That’s all there is to it imo. If stuff is fun to do, people will tolerate minor annoyances much more readily.
I don’t even think they have ideas to pin on the board at this stage.